Antiwar News

War Resisters Inject Truth Into Military Recruitment

2011-07-27T17:49:00.001-07:00

War Resisters Inject Truth Into Military Recruitment

http://www.truth-out.org/war-resisters-inject-truth-military-recruitment/1311181786

Wednesday 20 July 2011
by: Eleanor J. Bader

The setting changes but the scene does not: Men and women in crisply
pressed uniforms enter public high schools across the country and
cajole the teenagers they meet into signing on the dotted line to
serve Uncle Sam.

Thanks to Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002,
recruiters from the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and
Navy have the same access to secondary school students as college
recruiters or potential employers. This, in concert with mandatory
Selective Service registration for all 18-year-old males and the
Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery [ASVAB] exam that is given
to nearly three-quarters of a million high school juniors and seniors
each year, has prompted many domestic peace activists to organize
opposition to the militarization of youth. They advocate
"truth-in-recruiting," arguing that lofty promises made at the time
of enlistment -- extensive travel, scholarships or an easy route to
U.S. citizenship -- often fail to materialize once service begins.

What's more, these peace activists say that they are paying
particular attention to female recruits, warning them of potential
pitfalls: The risks associated with wartime service even in
"non-combat" positions, as well as the too-common experience of
sexual harassment and assault by unit supervisors and peers.

Little-Known Facts

The War Resisters League, an 88-year-old national group with more
than 25 chapters across the U.S., targets students and, when
possible, tables at schools to provide little-known facts about the
military: One in four soldiers gets a less than honorable discharge,
making them ineligible for college money; nearly one-third of females
seeking health care from the Veteran's Administration report
experiencing a rape or attempted rape while conscripted.

"Up until the economic recession began, the military had a hard time
finding recruits," says Kimber Heinz, National Organizing Director of
the War Resisters League. "But now the military is not only meeting
its quota, it's a de facto jobs program and you have recruiters
preying on students who can no longer afford college or find work."

One of its brochures, Know Before You Go, offers this information for
those thinking of signing up: "The military contract states, 'Laws
and regulations that govern military personnel may change without
notice. Such changes may affect pay, benefits, and responsibilities
as a member of the Armed Forces regardless of the provisions of the
enlistment document.'" In other words, beware: Even though a recruit
has signed a contract, the terms can be modified at the military's discretion.

"We let people know that if we're at war a recruit can be stop-lossed
and might end up on multiple tours," Heinz continues. "The recruit
has no control over this. We always remind people that the military
is the only job where if the worker quits, he or she goes to jail."
The organization also provides data on what it means to be a
conscientious objector and outlines the penalties for failing to
register for Selective Service.

Other truth-in-recruiting messages are also hammered. For one,
despite promises to the contrary, Heinz reports that skills learned
in the military are rarely transferable to the civilian world. "We
make it clear that many, many people come out of the military
traumatized or disabled," Heinz continues. "We ask people to think
about what it means to be an occupier of someone else's land and we
try to get people to consider whether they'll be able to live with
killing someone or seeing someone killed."

It's a heavy message, and it is repeated by more than 75 local
organizations throughout the 50 states.

Joanne Sheehan is an adult advisor to YouthPeace, a student-led
social justice group at the Norwich Free Academy, a public, regional
high school in eastern Connecticut. Since 1998 YouthPeace has raised
issues including military recruitment and Islamophobia with the student body.

Students Can Opt-Out

For the past seven years, members have also coordinated an annual
opt-out campaign to inform students that the law allows them to
request that their contact information be withheld from recruiters.
"Schools typically send student names, addresses, and phone numbers
to the military in October, so we have about a month once school
starts to publicize the opt-out provision," Sheehan says. "A few
years ago we pushed the superintendent to put information about
opting-out in the first paragraph of a letter that is sent to parents
at the beginning of the year. We want to be sure they understand that
their children don't need to provide data to recruiters, that it's
something they can opt-out of."

In some schools recruiters have free rein in the hallways

The peace groups also broach a broader anti-militarist agenda, even
in places like San Diego with a heavy military presence and 110,000
military employees. There, the school board recently voted to ban
students enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps
[J-ROTC] from taking in-school marksmanship classes. "Fifteen of the
18 high schools in San Diego have ROTC. One of them, Lincoln, was
temporarily closed for rehabbing and when we saw the plan for the
renovation, we saw that it included a firing range. We brought this
to the community's attention and formed the Education Not Arms
Coalition," says Rick Jahnkow, coordinator of Youth and Non-Military
Opportunities, known as Project YANO.

The consensus, Jahnkow says, was to focus on ending gun classes
rather than campaigning against ROTC more generally because group
participants felt an anti-ROTC campaign would fail. Education Not
Arms pointed to the pervasive gun violence already plaguing the
Lincoln area and denounced planned cutbacks in Advanced Placement
classes needed by college-bound pupils. The efforts paid off: The
school board ended all in-school gun training.

Boosted by this victory, Project YANO and Education Not Arms next
turned their attention to school-based recruiters. In late 2010 San
Diego activists succeeded in restricting recruiters to two school
visits per year, similar to policies in New York City, Chicago,
Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland. As a result,
recruiters must schedule specific times to meet with potential
conscripts and cannot disrupt "normal school activities."

"In some schools the recruiters eat lunch with the kids, hang out and
chill in the parking lot, and have free rein in the hallways," says
Pat Elder of Maryland's PeaceAction Montgomery. "In most places, what
they get to do depends on the principal. I've seen schools where male
recruiters are always around, playing one-on-one basketball with kids
who don't have fathers."

This scenario led New York City's Youth Activists-Youth Allies
Network to monitor recruiters to ensure that they obey the
regulations that circumscribe their access to individual students.

YA-YA Network staff -- all but one of whom are between 15 and 19 --
also lead workshops about U.S. foreign policy and the costs of war
and militarism. "Several years ago I asked participants what their
peers thought about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," says YA-YA
advisor Amy Wagner. "The wars were not very present for them. I
talked about how during the Vietnam War when you turned on your TV
you always heard the number of dead soldiers. They thought about this
and concluded that facts were being hidden from them on purpose. They
did a lot of research and the result was a short video now up on
YouTube, called The War Will Not Be Televised.

Terms can be modified at the military's discretion

The YA-YA Network is presently focused on making sure that schools
abide by regulations that mandate that a school staff person be
appointed to provide guidance on military recruitment in each high
school. "We first want to investigate and see if this is being done,"
Wagner says. "If not, why not. If it is, we want to know where these
people are getting their info and who's training them. We want to
give students the information they are entitled to so that they fully
understand their range of options."

Indeed, it is this idea of options that propels organizing against
militarism. Take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test,
a four-hour recruiting tool used in nearly 12,000 high schools
nationwide. To date, Maryland is the only state to require schools to
select a provision that stops student scores from being sent directly
to recruiters.

"Look, if you take even moderate Democrats and sit them down and ask
them who they think should give student data to the military -- mom
and dad or the Pentagon – they'll all support parental decision
making," says Pat Elder of PeaceAction Montgomery.

They want students to understand that becoming a soldier is not
necessarily the best way to show personal strength or valor. "A lot
of people want to be tough and powerful, so they enlist," says the
War Resisters League's Kimber Heinz. "They ultimately learn that
enlisting is not a good way to test how strong they are."
--

Eleanor J. Bader

Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance writer, teacher and feminist activist
from Brooklyn, New York. She writes for The Brooklyn Rail,
ontheissuesmagazine.com, RHrealitycheck.org and other progressive
blogs and publications.

Don't Exaggerate the Death of the Antiwar Movement

2011-07-27T15:57:00.001-07:00

Don't Exaggerate the Death of the Antiwar Movement

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/21-2

by Medea Benjamin
Published on Thursday, July 21, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

In an article in Salon.com, Todd Gitlin writes a convincing obituary
for an antiwar movement killed by a thousand blows: crushed by Bush's
pigheadedness, dumped in the media's black hole, rendered invisible
by a volunteer army and drones, overshadowed by more urgent financial
crises, chastened by the "unpleasantness" of adversaries from Taliban
to al-Qaida to Gadhafi. He leaves out some other daggers to the heart
of the movement: grass-roots election campaigns that lured away
millions of activists; betrayals by the president and groups like
MoveOn who used and abused the antiwar sentiment; craven
congressional reps who violate the will of their constituents by
continuing to fund war; powerful lobbyists for the war industry who
wield enormous power in Washington; and the utter exhaustion that
sets in after 10 years of standing up to the largest military complex
the world has ever seen.

Despite all these challenges, however, the reports of the death of
the antiwar movement are greatly exaggerated. Sure, there are no
longer millions marching in the streets -- but there aren't millions
marching in American streets for any cause these days. Lacking the
staying power of Tahrir Square, our weekend rallies failed to effect
policy and left people disillusioned -- and bored. That's why
creative and media-savvy activism 2.0 tactics -- like flash mobs,
Twitter culture jams and YouTube videos -- have emerged that engage
with the younger generation.

And that's why the movement has transformed as well. Rather than
marching in circles and chanting slogans to ourselves, we're reaching
deep into our communities to make connections between the economic
crises our neighborhoods face and the wars that rob us of scarce resources.

Take a look at the recent Bring Our War Dollars Home campaign spurred
by CODEPINK, a campaign that gave a new burst of energy to the
movement. We encouraged activists around the country to build local
coalitions to push the passage of a resolution to stop funding wars
and invest those monies into rebuilding America. From big cities like
Los Angeles and Baltimore to towns like Ithaca, N.Y., and Worcester,
Mass., coalitions of peace, labor, environmental, feminist and
religious groups wrote letters, made calls, visited and otherwise
cajoled their city officials. After dozens of victories, in June we
took the resolution to the national U.S. Conference of Mayors,
representing 1,200 American cities. Despite some hackneyed efforts to
brand the resolution as being "against the troops," it passed
overwhelmingly and has become a useful tool against congressional
members who continue to vote more money for war.

While many exasperated activists have given up on lobbying Congress,
some antiwar groups like PeaceAction and Progressive Democrats of
America continue to plug away, with a degree of success. In May, for
example, they pushed for the McGovern-Jones amendment to accelerate
the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. While the amendment failed
215-204, the 178 Democrats and 26 Republicans voting yes made this
the closest that any vote has come to repudiating our nation's
Afghanistan strategy in 10 years.

Another sign of life in the peace movement is the massive outcry it
generated over the inhumane treatment of alleged WikiLeaks
whistle-blower Bradley Manning. The uproar forced the U.S. military
to improve Manning's pre-trial conditions, moving him from the harsh
military brig in Quantico, Va., to more humane facilities in
Leavenworth, Kan. Activists also raised funds, in record time, for
Manning's legal fees and orchestrated creative visibility campaigns,
from Bradley contingents in increasingly commercialized, "apolitical"
gay pride parades to a skit performed at a high-dollar San Francisco
fundraiser with President Obama.

Interfaith, anti-nuke, antiwar activists across the country are
working together to oppose the use of the unmanned drones responsible
for the civilian deaths in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia,
Afghanistan and Iraq. On Oct. 9, several hundred Catholic Workers,
CODEPINK members and friends are expected to protest at Creech Air
Force Base, home of the deadly Reaper drones.

After witnessing Israel's brutal assault of Gaza in 2008, many peace
activists also joined the movement for human right and justice in
Israel and Palestine, engaging in campaigns to boycott and divest
from the occupation, organizing boats and caravans to break through
the crippling blockade of Gaza, providing support to non-violent
actions against home demolitions and the "apartheid wall" in the West
Bank, and challenging the stranglehold that pro-Israel lobbies have
on U.S. policy.

Finally, we have been busy trying to insert the anti-war message in
the broader movements for social and economic justice. While our
message is sometimes rebuffed or marginalized in activities closely
linked to the Democratic Party, at every major rally for jobs, civil
rights or corporate responsibility, you'll find anti-war activists.

As Todd Gitlin knows well, movements ebb and flow. We are certainly
not at our zenith, but we are still breathing. The Arab Spring has
given us new inspiration, and as the 10th anniversary of the
senseless war in Afghanistan approaches in October, you can expect to
see the antiwar movement not just breathing, but kicking into high
gear with an open-ended mobilization in D.C. starting on Oct. 7 and
artistic actions throughout the country under the banner of 10 Years
and Counting. We invite Todd and others who have been writing about
our demise to come join us.

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global
Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace
(www.codepinkalert.org). She is author of Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A
Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.

Thank You for Your Service=?UTF-8?B?Pw==?=

2011-07-23T09:54:00.001-07:00

Thank You for Your Service?

by Laurence M. Vance, lewrockwell.com
July 19th 2011

It is without question that Americans are in love with the military. Even worse, though, is that their love is unqualified, unconditional, unrelenting, and unending.

I have seen signs praising the troops in front of all manner of businesses, including self-storage units, bike shops, and dog grooming.

Many businesses offer discounts to military personnel not available to doctors, nurses, and others who save lives instead of destroy them.

Special preference is usually given to veterans seeking employment, and not just for government jobs.

Many churches not only recognize veterans and active-duty military on the Sunday before holidays, they have special military appreciation days as well.

Even many of those who oppose an interventionist U.S. foreign policy and do not support foreign wars hold the military in high esteem.

All of these things are true no matter which country the military bombs, invades, or occupies. They are true no matter why the military does these things. They are true no matter what happens while the military does these things. They are true no matter which political party is in power.

The love affair that Americans have with the military – the reverence, the idolatry, the adoration, yea, the worship – was never on display like it was at the post office the other day.

While at the counter shipping some packages, a U.S. soldier, clearly of Vietnamese origin in name and appearance, dressed in his fatigues, was shipping something at the counter next to me. The postal clerk was beaming when he told the soldier how his daughter had been an MP in Iraq. Three times in as many minutes I heard the clerk tell the soldier – with a gleam in his eye and a solemn look on his face – "Thank you for your service." The clerk even shook the soldier’s hand before he left.

I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing, and I am no stranger to accounts of military fetishes in action.

Aside from me not thanking that soldier for his service – verbally or otherwise – I immediately thought of four things.

One, what service did this soldier actually render to the United States? If merely drawing a paycheck from the government is rendering service, then we ought to thank every government bureaucrat for his service, including TSA goons. Did this soldier actually do anything to defend the United States, secure its borders, guard its shores, patrol its coasts, or enforce a no-fly zone over U.S. skies? How can someone blindly say "thank you for your service" when he doesn’t know what service was rendered?

Two, is there anything that U.S. soldiers could do to bring the military into disfavor? I can’t think of anything. Atrocities are dismissed as collateral damage in a moment of passion in the heat of battle by just a few bad apples. Unjust wars, we are told, are solely the fault of politicians not the soldiers that do the actual fighting. Paul Tibbets and his crew are seen as heroes for dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Before he died, Tibbets even said that he had no second thoughts and would do it again. I suspect that if the United States dropped an atomic bomb tomorrow on Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing everyone and everything, and declaring the war on terror over and won, a majority of Americans would applaud the Air Force crew that dropped the bomb and give them a ticker-tape parade.

Three, why is it that Americans only thank American military personnel for their service? Shouldn’t foreign military personnel be thanked for service to their country? What American military worshippers really believe is that foreign military personnel should only be thanked for service to their government when their government acts in the interests of the United States. Foreign soldiers are looked upon as heroic if they refuse to obey a military order to shoot or kill at the behest of their government as long as such an order is seen as not in the interests of the United States. U.S. soldiers, however, are always expected to obey orders, even if it means going to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Libya under false pretenses.

And four, what is a Vietnamese man – who most certainly has relatives, or friends or neighbors of relatives, that were killed or injured by U.S. bombs and bullets during the Vietnam War – doing joining the U.S. military where he can be sent to shoot and bomb foreigners like the U.S. military did to his people?

And aside from these four things, I’m afraid I must also say: Sorry, soldiers, I don’t thank you for your service.

I don’t thank you for your service in fighting foreign wars.I don’t thank you for your service in fighting without a congressional declaration of war.I don’t thank you for your service in bombing and destroying Iraq and Afghanistan.I don’t thank you for your service in killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.I don’t thank you for your service in expanding the war on terror to Pakistan and Yemen.I don’t thank you for your service in occupying over 150 countries around the world.I don’t thank you for your service in garrisoning the planet with over 1,000 military bases.I don’t thank you for your service in defending our freedoms when you do nothing of the kind.I don’t thank you for your service as part of the president’s personal attack force to bomb, invade, occupy, and otherwise bring death and destruction to any country he deems necessary.

Thank you for your service? I don’t think so.

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, The Revolution that Wasn't, and Rethinking the Good War. His latest book is The Quatercentenary of the King James Bible. Visit his website.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Original Page: http://lewrockwell.com/vance/vance250.html

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“Our” Troops vs. Our Eco-System

2011-07-23T09:50:00.001-07:00

“Our” Troops vs. Our Eco-System

by mickeyz, fairsharecommonheritage.org
July 18th 2011

Mickey Z.

Since I’ve already told you about the importance of repetition, let me recite some numbers I’ve shouted out a few hundred times or so:

80% of the world’s forests are gone90% of the large fish in the ocean are gone80% of the planet’s rivers can no longer sustain sustain life200,000 acres of rain forest are destroyed each day200 animal and plant species go extinct every 24 hours

If these statistics make you (at least) squirm, you might be interested to know something I’ve also repeated till I’m hoarse: The US Department of Defense (DoD)—the interventionist institution formerly known as the War Department—is the biggest polluter on Planet Earth, for example, releasing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined.

To add insult to injury, the world’s worst polluter—the entity wrecking havoc upon the landbase that makes all life possible—also gobbles up 54% of US taxpayer dollars. But it takes more than obscene amounts of money to keep this criminal enterprise afloat. It also takes more than the volunteers willing to be paid to wage illegal, immoral, and eco-system destroying wars. The DoD will be able to maintain its crime spree as long as most of us continue to unconditionally support (sic) those troops.

As long as the yellow ribbons fly, our shared heritage/future is doomed.

For some, the phrase “support our troops” is merely a euphemism for: support the policies that put the troops there in the first place. For others—sadly, including many activists—the mantra is a safe way to avoid taking an unqualified, uncompromising stand against this war (and all war). Many who identify themselves as “anti-war” still vigorously defend the troops…no questions asked.

The excuse-making typically falls into two broad categories. The first being: “Our troops are just following orders.”

If you activate the google function on your interwebs machines, you’ll easily find many reasons why this concept has no legal basis. For example, Principle IV of Nuremberg Tribunal (1950) states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

(Besides this, I hope I don’t have to explain that “only following orders” also has no moral footing.)

The second common excuse: “It’s a poverty draft. The poor have to enlist because they any economic options.” America is certainly an unjust economic society and this would be a compelling argument…if it were true. However, studies found that wartime recruits since 1999 are “on average a bit wealthier, much more likely to have graduated from high school, and more rural than their civilian peers.” It seems youths “from wealthy American ZIP codes are volunteering in ever higher numbers” while “enlistees from the poorest fifth of American neighborhoods fell nearly a full percentage point over the last two years, to 13.7 percent. In 1999, that number was exactly 18 percent.”

Did some of the soldiers enlist primarily for economic reasons? Sure. Did others sign up for a chance to shoot some “ragheads”? Probably. After factoring out these two relatively small groups and rejecting the illegal, immoral, and reactionary “only following orders” defense, I ask this of anti-war, pro-green activists: Exactly how are the men and women who willingly signed up to be paid to wage war immune from any and all scrutiny and/or blame?

They are also not immune from profound irony.

While most American citizens—even if they’re anti-war—are manipulated, harassed, coerced, and guilted into hanging yellow ribbons, from Shays Rebellion in 1787 to Coxey’s Army to the Bonus Army to the Gulf War Syndrome, generation after generation of US military personnel has suffered a distinct lack of support from their own government (and the corporations that own it). “Our troops” are just as controlled and exploited as the US citizens that worship them.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the number of suicides among people serving in the armed forces has jumped more than 25% since 2005. In 2010 alone, 454 service members killed themselves in combat zones.

Life doesn’t get easier for those who make it home. About one-third of the adult homeless population is veterans and, according to the VA, is 95% male.

The majority of homeless vets are…

singlecome from urban areassuffer from mental illness, alcohol and/or substance abuse, or co-occurring disorders

People of all ethnicities may sign up to defend (sic) the land of the free (sic) but 56% of all homeless vets are African American or Hispanic (despite only accounting for 12.8 percent and 15.4 percent of the US population respectively).

More VA stats:

107,000 veterans are homeless on any given nightOver the course of a year, approximately twice that many experience homelessnessOnly 8% of the general population can claim veteran status, but nearly 20% of the homeless population is made up of veterans

Another 1.5 million veterans, says the VA, are considered at risk of homelessness due to “poverty and lack of support networks.”

Yes, you read that correctly: “lack of support networks.”

Yellow ribbons, flag-waving, repressive laws, peer pressure, and loud chants of “USA” don’t qualify as support. Rather, this is self-policed obedience manipulated by a corporate-dominated state. As long as so many of us conform, our tax dollars will be stolen to fund endless foreign wars and interventions launched by the most egregious polluter on Planet Earth…and the lost souls volunteering for this global terror campaign will learn too late that no one gives a shit about them.

Support? Our eco-system needs it most. What our citizens could use is some assistance rediscovering the capacities of critical and independent thought.

One more thing: Let’s stop with the “our troops” charade. You and I may foot the bill, but “we” have no say in how that money is spent. If those truly were “my” men and women, I’d bring them right home and put them to work doing something useful…like turning the Long Island Expressway into the world’s longest organic farm.

Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.

Original Page: http://www.fairsharecommonheritage.org/2011/07/18/our-troops-vs-our-eco-system/

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Remote control murder: Afghan drones operated from Nevada and Virginia

2011-07-17T19:18:00.001-07:00

Remote control murder: Afghan drones operated from Nevada and Virginia

by Julie Hyl, wsws.org
July 15th 2011

Last week’s admission that Britain’s Royal Air Force killed four civilians and injured two others in Afghanistan has highlighted the growing resort to remote-controlled “drones” as weapons of choice by the major powers.

The Guardian reported that the incident took place on March 25 when a UK Reaper drone struck two trucks on the ground in the Now Zad district of north Helmand. Supposedly directed at a Taliban commander, an investigation by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed that “civilians were discovered in the vehicles following the airstrike during a battle damage assessment”.

Britain’s military were quick to insist that it was the first instance in which an RAF drone had caused civilian deaths. A Whitehall source told the newspaper, “It was extremely unfortunate that the civilians were killed”.

The article noted grimly, “The families of the civilian victims will be entitled to compensation if they report to a British base and can prove their identity”.

Given that drone attacks are known to incinerate their victims, destroying them beyond recognition, this statement is particularly cynical.

The usual description of drones as “unmanned” is a misnomer. A separate article in the same newspaper explained that the March 25 attack was the responsibility of 39 Squadron, based at the Creech air force base near Las Vegas, Nevada.

Described as an “elite unit formed in some haste during 2007”, the RAF unit works out of three metal “pods” resembling a cockpit, using “Playstation-style” technology to track down and launch murderous, sneak attacks on people several thousand miles away in Afghanistan.

Two RAF pilots, seated side by side and surrounded by a bank of TV screens delivering virtual real-time surveillance, “fly” and fire at targets.

“The aircraft can fire four Hellfire missiles and two 500 pound laser-guided bombs from five miles away; the target would have no idea a Reaper was overhead”, the Guardian reported.

“Once they have been briefed about a mission, the pilots rely on an array of systems to run the aircraft; the decisions they make in Nevada travel by fibre-optic cable to Europe, where they are beamed up to a satellite and then back down to Afghanistan. There is a two second delay”.

Drone use has risen sharply since 2001. The UK government has had three Reaper drones in Afghanistan, and also reportedly rents 450 Hermes drones from Israel on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. It is intended that, by 2030, some 30 percent of the RAF’s capacity will be comprised of drones.

It is the United States, however, that leads in the use of technology targeting people for assassination from thousands of miles away.

US drones are operated by the CIA from close to its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and by the military from airbases in Texas, Nevada and elsewhere. They can operate 24/7.

Aviation Week July 6 noted, “There is an unofficial but lethal drone war taking place over Pakistan, Yemen and Libya that has expanded the area of operation for US forces beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, with no real acknowledgement from the government that anything extraordinary is happening. The undeclared conflict on these three fronts might be the first Drone War, and warfare has never seen anything like it”.

In Pakistan, an estimated 2,500 people have been killed in US drone attacks since 2004. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that in the week leading up to June 10 this year, more than 50 people had died as a result of such strikes. The attacks “show a return to levels last seen in mid March, prior to Osama bin Laden’s killing”, it said.

The Obama administration has ordered more than 200 such attacks since coming into office. Pakistan reported that US drone attacks had killed at least 42 people on Monday and Tuesday this week in the North and South Waziristan areas, bordering Afghanistan.

In late April, Obama authorized the use of drones in Libya as it escalated its intervention into the civil war with the aim of regime change. At the end of June, the US launched its first drone attack in Somalia, with the aim of assassinating Islamic militants. Several “fighters” were reportedly injured in the attack.

US author and journalist James Bamford said, “Death warrants for targets are signed by mid-level bureaucrats, and soccer moms and dads double as joystick killers. They operate in comfort and safety, half the Earth away from their targets and close enough for many to run home for lunch between kills”.

Bamford said that there are more than 5,000 robotic vehicles and drones deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 50 of which can fly at the same time.

A global scramble for drone technology is underway. A 2011 study by the Teal Group forecast that global spending on “unmanned” aircraft capacity would double to $94 billion by 2021. Over that time, the US intends to double its own drone capacity by 2021—up from 340, currently, to 650. Israel is the second-largest manufacturer in the world, and regularly utilises the technology in its one-sided war against Palestinian militants.

Other countries are increasingly acquiring the technology. China has launched its own development programme, as has India. Pakistan is said to be seeking to obtain armed drones from China.

France and Britain are cooperating to develop a new unmanned system, in a partnership between Dassault and BAE Systems. The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), the pan-European defence corporation, has developed its own drone, the Talarion.

The Aviation Weekly report indicated the ramifications of the increased use of drones. It commented, “The notion that having access to armed, unmanned platforms may make it easier for the order to be given to fly lethal missions, and therefore permit politicians to take nations to war sooner, or without the planning and deliberation that is essential to engaging in conflict, is one that the UK Defence Ministry has considered. The ministry’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre released a report titled ‘The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems’ in March, which states ‘…the recent extensive use of unmanned aircraft over Pakistan and Yemen may already herald a new era. That these activities are exclusively carried out by unmanned aircraft, even though very capable manned aircraft are available, and that the use of ground troops in harm’s way has been avoided, suggests that the use of force is totally a function of an unmanned capability”.

The implications extend not only to overseas dissidents, or others who have become the targets of the major powers “overseas”.

In June, it was reported that the 5,000 MQ-9 Reaper drone will soon start flying training missions over the Adirondacks, northeast New York.

Pilots from the New York Air National Guard’s 174th Fighter Wing, are to fly the Reaper via satellite from bases at Fort Drum and Hancock Field air base in Syracuse. The latter has been the base for drone missions over Afghanistan since December 2009.

The drones will be unarmed and undetectable, it was reported. According to the Watertown Daily Times, “‘It will not be used to spy on residents, because federal law prohibits that use,’ Col. Charles Dorsey, vice commander of fighter wing, told members of the Fort Drum Regional Liaison Organization…”.

“For training purposes only, the aircraft crews, based out of Hancock Field, will train using random objects, such as structures and vehicles, from afar”.

The US Customs and Border Protection agency currently flies seven MQ-9 drones along southern and northern borders. It intends to regularly fly them over northern New York by 2016.

Original Page: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jul2011/dron-j15.shtml

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Afghanistan: 'Deadliest six months' for civilians

2011-07-17T19:15:00.001-07:00

Afghanistan: 'Deadliest six months' for civilians

bbc.co.uk | Jul 14th 2011

The first six months of 2011 were the deadliest for civilians in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001, a UN report has found.

The country saw 1,462 civilian deaths in January to June, a 15% increase on the same period last year.

Most of the deaths were caused by roadside bombs and anti-government forces such as the Taliban.

While the total number of people killed by pro-government action fell by 9%, more people died in Nato air strikes.

The report comes days before Nato is due to begin the process of handing over responsibility of some provinces to Afghan security forces.

Complex attacks

"The rising tide of violence and bloodshed in the first half of 2011 brought injury and death to Afghan civilians at levels without recorded precedent in the current armed conflict," the report said.

More than 80% of those deaths have been blamed on anti-government militants including the Taliban, with roadside bombs and IED [improved explosive devices] the single biggest killer.

There has also been an increase in the number of deaths caused by suicide attacks. The reports also warned that while the number of suicide attacks was largely unchanged, the number of casualties they caused caused had gone up 53%.

Such attacks were now "more complex", said the UN, and often involved "multiple bombers in spectacular attacks that kill many Afghan civilians".

Pro-government forces were responsible for 14% of the total number of civilians killed.

Nato air strikes were once again the leading cause of these casualties, leaving 79 Afghans dead in the period in question.

More than half of those deaths have been attributed to the use of Apache ground attack helicopters.

The BBC's Jonathan Beale in Kabul says that despite claims from Western leaders of progress and improving security in Afghanistan, these figures show increasing violence in the everyday lives of Afghans.

Original Page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14149692

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Brian Willson, peace protester, hand-cycles into Bay Area

2011-07-17T19:04:00.001-07:00

Brian Willson, peace protester, hand-cycles into Bay Area

by Kevin Fagan, sfgate.com
July 14th 2011 7:06 PM

By Kevin Fagan

Longtime peace protester Brian Willson has a new autobiography to push -- "Blood on the Tracks" -- and he's taken himself on the road for a book tour -- on three wheels.

Hand-cranked tricycle wheels, that is. Willson is doing his tour by hand-cycling his way from his home in Portland, Ore., to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Willson, 70, lost both legs in 1987 when a munitions train barreled over him during a protest at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. He and other anti-war demonstrators were trying to block the train from delivering bombs headed for Central America when the protest went horribly awry -- the train didn't stop.

Only Willson got run over, and in the years following the accident he got fitted with prosthetic legs so artfully made that he can walk for miles at a time without pain. Bicycling, however, is a bit trickier, since the movements go around in different ways that quickly begin to hurt his leg stumps if he hits any kind of hilly terrain.

Thus the hand-cycle. So far, he's clocked almost 700 miles on his journey, which will have him in San Rafael Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the First Methodist Church, 9 Ross Valley Drive. Sunday, he will be in San Francisco at 12:30 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 1187 Franklin St.

Urging peace over war is still a big part of his message, but so is downsizing our lives so that we in America aren't so dependent on oil and machines. Willson lives in a solar-powered house and tries to be an example, as a national icon of the peace movement, by keeping his life simple -- as in hand-cycling rather than driving on this book tour.

Check out our Shaky Hand video for his attitude as he cranks in the lead of this little caravan, as longtime peace protest pal David Hartsough joins him for a stretch of the trip and Portland cycling pal Joel Finkelstein brings up the rear with supplies. We saw nary a frown when we followed Willson around for awhile this week.

"Life's not bad," he said with a grin. He looked the sentiment.

E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.

Original Page: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=93213

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Peace activist rides to protesters' battleground

2011-07-17T18:59:00.001-07:00

Peace activist rides to protesters' battleground

martinezgazette.com | Jul 14th 2011

To this day, Brian Willson questions why he so obediently – as an officer in the U.S. Air Force from 1966 to 1970 — went “9,000 miles from home to participate in destroying people and villages who I knew nothing about.”

Willson, the veteran and peace activist who lost both of his legs below the knee after being run over by a military train at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in 1987, returned to the site of his maiming this week en route to a speaking engagement at Walnut Creek’s Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center.

Willson is currently traveling on a book tour, but since he renounced flying due to the destructive environmental impact of commercial jetliners, he cycles to his appointments on a hand-cranked bicycle, using his arms to propel himself.

He said he hasn’t flown in 11 years, naming the present TSA screening processes and the concurrent assault on civil liberties as a factor in his decision.

Since June 25, he has cycled 800 miles from his home in Portland, Oregon. He will go as far south as Capitola and return to his home via the Coast Starlight Amtrak train, he said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.

A supporter, Joel Finkelstein, has accompanied the 70-year-old Willson on this trip, toting behind his bike a trailer carrying tents and sleeping bags. When the duo hit Santa Rosa, they were joined by Willson’s longtime friend and fellow peace activist David Hartsough.

PM Press recently released Willson’s third book, Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson. Daniel Ellsberg, the former U.S. military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers, wrote the introduction to Willson’s book.

In an interview at the Sebastopol home of friends, Willson discussed his life journey since that fateful September day he was protesting the shipment of arms to Central America.

Nearly 25 years later, Willson continues to participate in anti-war demonstrations around the country and has broadened his focus to encompass environmental issues.

In Martinez, however, Willson is still best known for the confrontation that sparked a massive protest four days later, when an estimated 10,000 people came out in Concord to protest the Navy’s decision to treat the veterans blocking the trains as domestic terrorists. At the September 5, 1987 protest, well-known peace activists such as Joan Baez, Jesse Jackson, Alice Walker and Daniel Ellsberg joined in to bring national attention to U.S. involvement in Central America and express outrage over the train versus veteran clash.

“I saw my friend, Brian Willson, run over by a Navy train pulling two boxcars of explosives at Concord Naval Weapons Station (CNWS), the major military transshipment point for weapons on the West Coast,” said fellow activist Ken Butigan in an essay published by the Pledge of Resistance organization, describing how 2000 people had protested at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in June of 1987 and Willson had been part of a group determined to use non-violence to stop the arms shipments.

“The train plowed directly into Brian, dragging him twenty-five feet, tearing off his lower right leg, mangling his left ankle (both legs were later amputated), fracturing his skull. The train never slowed down until it stopped inside the restricted area,” 100 feet from the point of impact.

“The Navy train crew and their superiors knew in advance of our nonviolent three-member veterans’ blockade and had a clear, 650-foot view as the train approached us at high noon on a bright sunny day. Though expecting to be arrested and jailed by the nearby armed U.S. Marines and local police, we never imagined the conscious and criminal acceleration of the loaded train to more than three times its posted five-mile-an-hour legal speed limit,” Willson recalls on his website, www.brianwillson.com.

The former base is now shuttered and the City of Concord is in the process of redeveloping the area for commercial, residential and open space use.

“I had to go to Vietnam to get awakened,” Willson said this week. Asked why he wanted to return to the Concord Naval Weapons Station this week, Willson replied, “We’re going to remember and be glad we’re still alive.”

Those interested in attending one of Willson Bay Area engagements can find times, dates and locations at www.bloodonthetracks.info.

Original Page: http://www.martinezgazette.com/news/story/i2853/2011/07/14/peace-activist-rides-protesters-battleground

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The strange silencing of liberal America

2011-07-13T15:23:00.000-07:00

The strange silencing of liberal America

newstatesman.com | Jul 7th 2011

How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot's horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant's rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.

Six months later, a PBS official told me: "This wasn't censorship. We're into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry."

In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word "ban" was rarely used, and those responsible would invariably insist they believed in free speech.

The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, believes in free speech. The foundation's website says it is "dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity". Authors, film-makers and poets make their way to a sanctum of liberalism bankrolled by the billionaire Patrick Lannan in the tradition of Rockefeller and Ford.

The foundation also awards "grants" to America's liberal media, such as Free Speech TV, the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of the magazine Mother Jones), the Nation Institute and the TV and radio programme Democracy Now!. In Britain, it has been a supporter of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am one of the judges. In 2008, Patrick Lannan backed Barack Obama's presidential campaign. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he is "devoted" to Obama.

World of not-knowing

On 15 June, I was due in Santa Fe, having been invited to share a platform with the distinguished American journalist David Barsamian. The foundation was also to host the US premiere of my new film, The War You Don't See, which investigates the false image-making of warmakers, especially Obama.

I was about to leave for Santa Fe when I received an email from the Lannan Foundation official organising my visit. The tone was incredulous. "Something has come up," she wrote. Patrick Lannan had called her and ordered all my events to be cancelled. "I have no idea what this is all about," she wrote.

Baffled, I asked that the premiere of my film be allowed to go ahead, as the US distribution largely depended on it. She repeated that "all" my events were cancelled, "and this includes the screening of your film". On the Lannan Foundation website, "cancelled" appeared across a picture of me. There was no explanation. None of my phone calls was returned, nor subsequent emails answered. A Kafka world of not-knowing descended.

The silence lasted a week until, under pressure from local media, the foundation put out a terse statement that too few tickets had been sold to make my visit "viable", and that "the Foundation regrets that the reason for the cancellation was not explained to Mr Pilger or to the public at the time the decision was made". Doubts were cast by a robust editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The paper, which has long played a prominent role in promoting Lannan Foundation events, disclosed that my visit had been cancelled before the main advertising and previews were published. A full-page interview with me had to be pulled hurriedly. "Pilger and Barsamian could have expected closer to a packed 820-seat Lensic [arts centre]."

The manager of The Screen, the Santa Fe cinema that had been rented for the premiere, was called late at night and told to kill all his online promotion for my film. He was given no explanation, but took it on himself to reschedule the film for 23 June. It was a sell-out, with many people turned away. The idea that there was no public interest was demonstrably not true.

Symptom of suppression

Theories? There are many, but nothing is proven. For me, it is all reminiscent of long shadows cast during the cold war. "Something is going to surface," said Barsamian. "They can't keep the lid on this."

My 15 June talk was to have been about the collusion of American liberalism in a permanent state of war and in the demise of cherished freedoms, such as the right to call governments to account. In the US, as in Britain, serious dissent -- free speech -- has been substantially criminalised. Obama the black liberal, the PC exemplar, the marketing dream, is as much a warmonger as George W Bush. His score is six wars. Never in US presidential history has the White House prosecuted so many whistleblowers, yet this truth-telling, this exercise of true citizenship, is at the heart of America's constitutional First Amendment. Obama's greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US, including the anti-war movement.

The reaction to the cancellation has been illuminating. The brave, such as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, were appalled and said so. Similarly, many ordinary Americans called in to radio stations and have written to me, recognising a symptom of far greater suppression. But some exalted liberal voices have been affronted that I dared whisper the word censorship about such a beacon of "cultural freedom". The embarrassment of those who wish to point both ways is palpable. Others have pulled down the shutters and said nothing. Given their patron's ruthless show of power, it is understandable. For them, the Russian dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote: "When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."

Original Page: http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2011/07/pilger-foundation-obama-film

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Granny Peace Brigade has generated five years of anti-war activism

2011-07-05T00:13:00.001-07:00

Granny Peace Brigade has generated five years of anti-war activism

weeklypress.com

Whoever coined the phrase "youth is wasted on the young" never met the members of Philadelphia’s Granny Peace Brigade. A group of spry seniors ranging in age from their mid-sixties to their mid- nineties, the women who comprise the Granny Peace Brigade engage in social activism with the kind of idealism typically reserved for the very young.

But that blend of idealism proves fitting when taking into consideration the Granny Peace Brigade’s main objection: protecting this country’s youth from becoming subscripted into the U.S. military and its involvement in Iraq and Afganahastan. "So many kids lose their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan for no reason," explained Granny Jean Haskell. That’s why the Grannies have successfully launched an Opt Out Program in the city’s public schools. Before the program took-off a few years ago, the Granny’s took issue with the fact that public schools gave the military its students contact information for recruitment purposes. Students do however have the option of telling school officials that they do not want their information passed along to the military through the Opt Out Program. But when the Granny’s approached Philadelphia School System Officials about participating in the Opt Out Program, they realized that the program might not be enough to protect kids from military enrollment.

When students not going to college after high school would express interest in the military to their guidance counselors, the counselors "would simply tell them to talk to the school’s military recruiters, who used soda and movies as away to lure them into joining," said Haskell, citing an example of reasons why the Granny Peace Brigade needed to expand its involvement in the Opt Out program.

The Granny’s based this decision on the fact that many high school guidance counselors do not inform non-college bound high school students that they had other options besides the military, said Haskell. In order to correct this problem, the Grannies attended a citywide convention for public school guidance counselors, explained Granny Joan Kosloff. Retired Philadelphia School District teacher Paula Paul delivered a compelling presentation at that convention regarding the need to present students with more career information, said Kosloff, explaining that it led to cooperation between the Granny Peace Brigade and Philadelphia School District.

Today, information about the Opt Out Program can be found on the Philadelphia School District’s website in eighteen different languages, said Haskell. Moreover, the Grannies have assembled packets to give to guidance counselors covering all of the other training programs non-college bound students can enter after graduation. "Many of these programs are free or are offered at a very small cost," explained Haskell, adding that a lot of students simply don’t realize that they can receive training to secure jobs as "cooks, nurses’ aides or tradesmen."

Despite the Grannies’ many accomplishments since its founding on June 28th, 2006—that’s when a group of Grannies were arrested for protesting at a military recruitment center—the organization needs more community involvement to get its message across.

There was a recent op-ed article in the Inquirer asking what happened to the country’s anti-war activism, said Haskell, explaining that the Grannies responded with a letter highlighting their level of commitment to the anti-war movement. According Haskell, it’s not that the Grannies don’t lead marches and demonstrations, "it’s that the mainstream media basically ignores us."

For that reason, the Grannies plan to celebrate the organization’s 5th anniversary as a way to both celebrate the groups achievements as well as to draw more attention to its cause. And for Haskell, people should become involved in the anti-war movement, particularly given the fact that more and more people "are talking about how to bring war dollars home."

And according to Kosloff, the website National Priorities calculates how the money spent on the military could really benefit other agencies, such as the Department of Education.

The Granny Peace Brigade’s 5th year anniversary will be celebrated on Thursday, June 30th, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Rittenhouse Square, 18th and Walnut Streets. The anniversary celebration will include: music puppets, fortune cookies, photos of the Brigade’s activist history, knitting stump socks, petitions urging legislators to "Bring the War Dollars Home," and information about the Opt Out Program, which enables high school students to choose not to have their contact information sent to military recruiters. For more information on the Granny Peace Brigade, go to: www.grannypeacebrigade.org. For more information on National Priorities: http://nationalpriorities.org.

Original Page: http://weeklypress.com/granny-peace-brigade-has-generated-five-years-of-antiwar-activism-p2570-1.htm

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AVAW Response to Obama's "Withdrawal"

2011-07-02T03:14:00.001-07:00

AVAW Response to Obama's "Withdrawal"

ivaw.org | Jun 27th 2011 5:24 PM

By brockmcintosh [at] gmail [dot] com (Brock McIntosh), Co-founder of Afghanistan Veterans Against the War Committee

Last Wednesday night, President Obama announced what has been most accurately described as a “surge reversal”; to call it a “withdrawal” is somewhat misleading. Roughly 10,000 troops will be removed from Afghanistan this year while another roughly 20,000 will be withdrawn by the end of summer 2012, reducing troop levels to the pre-surge levels of autumn 2009: 70,000 soldiers. This number is still greater than the number of soldiers who were deployed in Afghanistan when President Obama first took office in January, 2009.

A vestige of triumph lay at the background of the speech. The President declared:

"Al Qaeda is under more pressure than at any time since 9/11… Together with the Pakistanis, we have taken out more than half of al Qaeda's leadership. And thanks to our intelligence professionals and Special Forces, we killed Osama bin Laden, the only leader that al Qaeda had ever known. This was a victory for all who have served since 9/11."

President Obama conceded that it was intelligence professionals and Special Operations Forces that led us to Osama bin Laden, and not the occupation of Afghanistan, which may have hindered that end. It was a half-truth to give credit to the Pakistanis in helping with the operation, as evidence that the Government of Pakistan harbored Islamic extremists continues to surface. Although it has publicly attacked such groups in the past, the Pakistani government was not informed of the operation that ultimately killed bin Laden, so it was indeed a breach of sovereignty.

It was also highly misleading to call Osama bin Laden the “only leader that al Qaeda had ever known.” This statement was merely a justification to the American public that the hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars that led to bin Laden’s death were worth it. Although politically referred to as a cult-like terrorist organization, experts recognize the group as an insurgent organization with multiple leaders and back-up plans for setbacks like this.

There was one setback, however, that al Qaeda was not prepared for: the so-called Arab Spring. The nonviolent, secular revolutions that have erupted across the Muslim World may be a force more powerful than the War on Terror to effectively end al Qaeda – a group that had previously grown and collected strategic victories because of American hegemony and militarization in the region. The Arab Spring is removing many of the autocratic dictators that the U.S. has supported under the guise of spreading democracy and securing the world. It was this relationship between the United States and the Muslim world that al Qaeda referenced as justification for September 11.

Afghanistan Veterans Against the War, a new committee of IVAW reflecting the recent addition of Afghanistan to our mission and Points of Unity, agrees with President Obama that it is time to focus on nation building here at home. Another drop of blood and another wasted dollar on the War on Terror only delays the rebuilding of America and the nation building to be done autonomously by the ordinary people around the world throwing off the yokes of imperialism and dictatorship.

Original Page: http://www.ivaw.org/blog/avaw-response-obamas-withdrawal

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The Business of America Is War

2011-06-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Business of America Is War

opednews.com | Jun 29th 2011

By Stephen Lendman

The Business of America is War - by Stephen Lendman

Noted trends analyst Gerald Celente said it, and it's true. In fact, America's business is war, more war, multiple wars, permanent wars, pillaging one nation after another for wealth, power, and dominance, while homeland needs go begging.

America never was and isn't now the "land of the free and home of the brave." In fact, it's become a "Let 'em eat cake" society.

Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said it, France's 1789-99 revolution was very real, delivering guillotine justice, not promised "Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite," a status now destroying what's left of American freedom, heading for the trash bin of history if not already there.

Earlier articles discussed Washington's wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen, as well as numerous proxy ones in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and at home against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and working households.

Combined, they represent a shocking contempt for rule of law justice, democratic values and humanity, notions now mere artifacts long ago abandoned to advance America's imperium.

As previous articles explained, out-of-control imperialism is heading America for tyranny and ruin. In her 1951 book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Hannah Arendt said it's "never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."

She called it dictatorship based on:

"(1) an elaborate ideology;

(2) a single mass party;

(3) terror;

(4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication;

(5) a monopoly of weapons; (and)

(6) a centrally controlled economy."

Duplicitously called a democracy, today's America nearly qualifies:

(1) Its ideology is concentrated wealth and power.

(2) It's governed by a two-party duopoly - the money or property party, excluding alternative choices.

(3) It's the world's leading purveyor of state terrorism, waging global wars against nations, groups or individuals, including targeted assassinations of its own citizens.

(4) Major media managed news gives it dominant (not monopoly) communication control, but efforts to subvert Internet discourse and debate may undermine its free and open content.

(5) Corporate-run society makes it centrally controlled for bottom line priorities, excluding other choices.

In her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," Arendt said crimes of state aren't committed by fanatics or sociopaths, just "terrifyingly normal" (people)....neither perverted or sadistic....who accepted the premises of their superiors and their state" to continue current and/or longstanding policies.

In his book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Ward Churchill agreed, explaining what he called the "technocrats of empire," functioning as "little Eichmanns," banally serving imperial interests, no matter how lawless or evil. They could say "no," of course, but go along to get along, including at the highest levels. For them, it's to share spoils, no matter the harm or human misery globally.

Churchill's many books and writings discussed 500 genocidal years against America's indigenous peoples, as well as its global imperial apparatus. Touching the right nerves persuasively, the University of Colorado disgracefully fired him in summer 2007, a pattern repeated elsewhere against other activist professors, notably targeting Israeli critics like Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Denis Rancourt, and Sami Al-Arian among others.

Al-Arian was also lawlessly arrested, tried, acquitted, imprisoned, brutalized, then freed, but remains under house arrest awaiting dismissal of spurious charges against him.

Imperial America's War Machine

The empire never sleeps or tolerates anti-war activism, threatening its quest for unchallengeable "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

September 11, 2001 served as pretext to consolidate power, destroy civil liberties and human rights, and wage permanent wars against invented enemies for global dominance over world markets, resources, and cheap labor - notably at home and throughout

Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia at the expense of democratic freedoms and social justice.

In its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Pentagon called it the "long war." Dick Cheney said wars won't end in our lifetime, and former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us."

In his 1990 address to a joint session of Congress, GHW Bush called it a "New World Order," preparing the public for Operation Desert Storm and years of war and occupation of Iraq, perhaps knowing Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other targeted states would follow.

Obama is America's latest warrior president, succeeding numerous past ones, including Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.

Today's stakes, however are far greater and riskier because of Pentagon grand plans, including militarizing space as a platform for future wars. A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:

click here

It discussed plans to position nuclear, other state-of-the-art weapons, and delivery systems to wage multiple wars from space anywhere on short notice. Under Obama, the policy remains in place. His May 2010 National Security Strategy:

"reserve(s) the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests." In other words, to wage preemptive wars, using first-strike nuclear and other destructive weapons "to keep the American people safe (and advance the nation's) values and ideals," pursuing unchallengeable global/space dominance, ruling by intimidation and war, making the world safe for capital.

During the Cold War, MAD (mutually assured destruction) held both sides at bay. Today's strategy includes "more flexible options (for) a wider range of contingencies (with weapons) to optimize performance." It means destroy an adversary's capabilities preemptively, then target others to eliminate all challenges to US dominance.

With America on a nuclear hair-trigger, it reinvented MAD in new form, threatening potential global nuclear winter, defined as "a long period of darkness and extreme cold that scientists predict would follow a full-scale nuclear war, a layer of dust and smoke in the atmosphere cover(ing) the earth and block(ing) the rays of the sun, (causing) most living organisms (to) perish."

Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott says "one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history (quickly). Once initiated, it would take one hour to trigger a swift, sudden end to life on this planet." Only nuclear disarmament and abolition of nuclear weapons can stop it, what's never discussed or considered.

On January 17, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address, saying:

"....we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

As he prepared to leave office, he could hardly imagine the difference 50 years would make, transforming fortress America into a colossus, waging permanent global wars, spending unconscionable amounts on militarism and threatening planetary survival in the process.

On April 17, 2010, Independent Institute analyst Robert Higgs said annual "defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amounts budgeted by the Department of Defense," presenting FY 2009 data, the most recent figures available.

The official $636.5 billion spent way understated a growing annual total even Higgs can't fully identify, given enormous black budgets and hidden add-ons, likely totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. What's known for FY 2009, however, in billions of dollars includes the following:

-- Department of Defense: $636.5

-- Department of Energy (nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup): $16.7

-- Department of State: $36.3

-- Department of Veterans Affairs: $95.5

-- Department of Homeland Security: $51.7

-- Department of the Treasury (for Military Retirement Fund): $54.9

-- Half of NASA's budget: $9.6

-- Net interest attributable to past-debt-financed defense outlays: $126.3

Total: $1,027.5 trillion

Moreover, the National Priorities Project's analysis of FY 2010 discretionary spending showed 62% spent for military-related purposes, including 4% for veterans' benefits.

For FY 2012, the House approved $690.1 billion, an 8.4% increase (though below the $725 FY 2011 budget, a temporary drop, likely compensated for with add-ons). The Senate will approve a similar amount. If the entire $1,027.5 trillion increases by the same amount, it raises known FY 2012 defense-related spending to $1,113.8 trillion.

In fact, with supplemental and hidden add-ons, as well as Pentagon, intelligence, and other unknown amounts, the grand total likely exceeds $1.5 trillion, a figure rising most years while popular needs go begging.

Higgs also cites the unreliability of official numbers. He believes it's more accurate to take the Pentagon's basic budget and double it because as much as 40% of it is black or hidden. Moreover, as Pentagon power grows, more spending accrues to congressional districts. As a result, Congress willingly goes along as jobs are allegedly created. In addition, generous campaign contributions follow - bribes to keep funding the war machine.

Congressional Affirmation of Permanent War

The current House bill, HR 1540 includes a worrisome/duplicitous Sec. 1034: Affirmation of Armed Conflict with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Associated Forces, affirming:

"(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;

(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);

(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization(s), and persons, who --

(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or

(B) have engaged in hostilities or have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and

(4) the President's authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force....includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities."

In September 2001, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." Still in force today, it began the "war on terror," giving George Bush carte blanche authority to wage global wars in violation of international and constitutional laws. A 2002 AUMF against Iraq followed.

The House (and likely the Senate) FY 2012 Defense Authorization bill affirms that authority, letting Obama as commander and chief, wage wars anywhere at his discretion. He's taking full advantage, duplicitous congressional posturing notwithstanding.

On June 24, in fact, House Republicans and 70 Democrats rejected support for Obama's Libya war, but defeated a measure to defund it. In other words, they authorized war at the same time symbolically rejecting it, exposing their gross hypocrisy.

America's Permanent War Agenda

In inflation adjusted dollars, annual defense spending more than doubled under George Bush and keeps rising under Obama despite growing budget cutting pressures, given a much greater national debt burden than reported.

Officially it's nearly $14.3 trillion (headed for an estimated $15.5 trillion by September 30), exceeding 100% of GDP at that time. Omitted, however, is another $7.6 trillion owed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government agencies, besides future trillion dollar or more amounts added annually.

It hardly matters, given the military/industrial complex's power to demand what it wants and get it. Today, in fact, it comprises:

-- defense, technology, energy, financial, private military contractor (PMCs), and other corporate interests;

-- Congress;

-- America's media;

-- prominent think tanks and other pressure groups;

-- various others benefitting from militarism; and

-- the Pentagon colossus, a frightening power unto itself, threatening humanity's survival.

The Defense Department's FY 2010 Base Structure Report shows how large it's become, even with important information omitted:

DOD is the world's largest landlord with over 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites, covering more than 28 million acres and over two billion square feet of space in America, its territories and overseas. In fact, these numbers way understate much higher totals as many Pentagon facilities are secret and/or unreported.

They include over 1,000 overseas bases in 150 or more countries, as well as additional secret ones shared with or leased from host countries. As of April 2009, Congressional Research Service data includes 1,402,000 total active duty US military personnel worldwide, 73,000 National Guard, and 208,000 Selected Reserves, for a 1,683,000 total.

Add to them America's private military contractor (PMC) army, corporate mercenaries profiting from US imperialism. They perform a wide range of functions from combat to consulting to logistics, virtually anything once done by the Pentagon. Moreover, America's intelligence agencies, State Department, Homeland Security, and other branches also use PMCs.

Overall, they're unregulated, unaccountable, and often out-of-control, involved in some of the most controversial aspects of war from over-billing to ritual slaughter of unarmed civilians. Yet they're not prosecuted, convicted or imprisoned, just rewarded with fat contracts costing far more for services military personnel once performed. Moreover, the more they're used, the greater they influence war making, sustaining their bottom line priorities at the expense of a free society and vital homeland needs.

America's New Military Industrial Complex

On March 1, 2003 Business 2.0 magazine writers Ian Mount, Matthew Maier and David Freedman headlined, "The New Military Industrial Complex" for digital age war, describing the Pentagon's "revolution in military affairs (RMA)," comprised of "faster, lighter, smarter" cutting-edge technology warfare. Readying for it, they're building an unchallengeable high-tech arsenal, more advanced now than then.

The old one remains and gets huge contracts for new and more traditional weapons. The result is an influential "iron triangle" of Congress, the Pentagon and defense industry. Besides major media support, conservative think tanks also like:

-- the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); its "Rebuilding America's Defenses" scheme promotes US global hegemony;

-- the Center for Security Policy (CSP) headed by super-hawk Frank Gaffney endorses a policy of "Peace through Strength" and perpetual wars for perpetual peace;

-- the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) composed of hard right leaders and members, "fighting terrorism and the ideologies that drive it;"

-- the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), focusing on defense issues, tied to the nuclear weapons industry; and

-- the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), emphasizing national security and "advancing (US) global interests;" specializing in crisis management, it's connected to the highest levels in government and the Pentagon.

The nation's 16 intelligence agencies, including CIA, NSA, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), FBI, Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence, DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and Department of State comprise another component destroying a free society. They comprise a multi-billion dollar funded, largely off-the-books, clandestine anti-democratic network. Interconnected with thousands of private contractors, they're tied to world governments and their intelligence services.

Moreover, they comprise a government/military/industrial/intelligence service/media/think tank colossus, waging global wars, bankrupting the nation, wrecking the remnants of a free society. Plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change, they also pursue the misguided notion that militarism sustains growth.

In fact, it erodes it by sacrificing industrial America, shifting production and other high-paying service operations abroad to focus on war making. As a result, essential homeland needs go begging, including healthcare, education, job creation, and the nation's infrastructure, crumbling from years of neglect.

In his farewell address, Eisenhower said:

"Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed."

In his November 2003 Harper's article titled, "The War Business," Chalmers Johnson said:

"(M)unitions and war profiteering have (become) the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough." Even Wall Street profits hugely. "To call these companies 'private,' though, is mere ideology. (Weapons and) munitions making in the United States today (and related industries profiting from them are) not really private enterprise. It is state socialism."

They also destroy constitutional freedoms, what George Washington in 1796 warned about, saying "overgrown military establishments (are) inauspicious to liberty." Johnson called it America's future, now more the present, saying, "When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it," sacrificing a free society for private interests reaping short-term gains.

In his book titled, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," Andrew Bacevich discussed America's "trinity," its global military presence, power projection, and intervention, creating a "permanent national security crisis....propell(ing) the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war." However, "(no) evidence exists - none - to suggest that US efforts advance the cause of global peace," just the opposite. As a result, "(o)ver the horizon, a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits."

It's coming perhaps when least expected. Nations that live by the sword, die by it. America is no exception, nor any other.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/ .

Author's Bio: I was born in 1934, am a retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.

Original Page: http://www.opednews.com/populum/print_friendly.php?p=The-Business-of-America-Is-by-Stephen-Lendman-110629-127.html&c=a

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The Empire of Lies

2011-06-07T00:02:00.001-07:00

The Empire of Lies

adbusters.org | Jun 6th 2011

Eight years on, we now have the proof that the US preemptive war on Iraq was based on lies. An Iraqi exile, Rafid al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA, has revealed that he fabricated the story of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the UK’s Guardian that he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.

For the careful reader – and I stress the word careful – several disturbing facts emerged from the Guardian’s report.

One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had traveled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for an attack on Iraq.

Another interesting disclosure was that despite the vital need to get straight all the facts about Curveball’s testimony – given the stakes involved in launching a preemptive strike against another sovereign state – the Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.

A third revelation was that the CIA’s head of operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from German intelligence that they considered Curveball’s testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.

Of course the news of Curveball’s confession has come too late – eight years too late, to be precise – to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow Western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.

That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news roundup in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.

But even the Guardian, which broke the story and is often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, as the headline asserted, but rather that the White House had exploited a fantasist for its own illegal and immoral ends.

There is something depressingly familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the West’s main liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites. That is because corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfill the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalized elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers.

In this way, we, the eager consumers of media, are also to blame. Just as Bush’s White House did not interview Curveball because they knew his account of Saddam’s WMD program was made up, so too do we not question the media fantasies we already know are false. The American dream would unravel under scrutiny; better to act like the White House and leave ourselves the option of “plausible deniability.”

Original Page: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/96/jonathan-cook.html

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On Memorial Day, America Should Honor Her Troops by Bringing Them Home

2011-06-02T21:23:00.001-07:00

On Memorial Day, America Should Honor Her Troops by Bringing Them Home

by John Nichols, commondreams.org
May 30th 2011

It is unfortunate but true that on this Memorial Day -- when we pause to honor those Americans who have fought the good fights against British colonialism, the sin of slavery and the menace of fascism -- U.S. troops are currently bogged down in a quagmire of George Bush's creation in Afghanistan and an continuing mission of Bush's creation in Iraq.

Appallingly, Barack Obama has maintained Bush's undeclared wars of occupation. And he has now steered the United States into another fight with Libya.

Everything about these undeclared and open-ended conflicts is at odds with the vision of the founders of the American experiment -- who generally shared James Madison's view that "permanent war" posed the greatest threat to liberty -- and the serious intent of wars against kings, slaveholders and fascists.

Soldiers fight wars because of a sense of duty. And the soldiers involved in America's current conflicts are good men and women. But these are not good fights.

Nor are their necessary fights for the U.S. military.

It is for this reason that veterans of these undeclared wars of whim have organized so well and wisely to end them, in groups such as Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, which is mounting a Memorial Day campaign to highlight the wrongheaded practice of deploying traumatized troops, and the currently organizing Afghanistan Veterans Against the War project.

There are arguments to be made, some of them sound, some of them not, that people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have reasons to be fighting. But the fights are their own -- not America's.

John Quincy Adams summed the sentiment up 190 years ago when, in an address to Congress, the then-Secretary of State declared that: "[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace."

"If the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity," explained Adams. "She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."

The cynicism of the previous administration, which was led by a president whose family pulled strings to keep him out of the Vietnam War and a vice president who dodged the draft five times during that conflict, was beyond contempt. But so, too, is the cynicism of many Democrats who, despite their disdain for the failed foreign policies of Bush and Cheney, continue to echo the empty rhetoric of the administration when it comes to the debate about how best to end the war.

The best way to "support the troops" who have been placed in harm's way in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is to bring them home.

Congress considered the prospect last week and more than 200 members of the House voted for a proposal to begin taking steps to exit Afghanistan. Unfortunately, a few more members opposed that necessary step.

The growing opposition to the misguided mission in Afghanistan, as well as the clear opposition to any expansion of the Libya mission, is the encouraging news of this Memorial Day.

America is growing weary of endless war.

Wars of whim, fought without proper congressional declaration and without exit strategies, are not fights for democracy.

Fights for democracy can only be considered successful when American democracy is open and vibrant enough to allow for a realistic discussion of the nation's circumstance. Those "my-country-right-or-wrong" politicians and pundits who would shut down dissent on Memorial Day, or any other day, make a mockery of the oath to defend a constitution that protects the right to speak truth to power and to assemble for the purpose of petitioning for the redress of grievances.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's Vietnam War-era counsel to Americans holds true this Memorial Day.

Americans who love their country and its promise must move beyond "the prophesying of smooth patriotism" toward "a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."

No honest reading of the history of America's founding, or of recent events, can led to a conclusion that the undeclared wars of the moment are justified.

Americans have fought and died in pursuit of what they -- and most Americans -- believed to be noble and necessary causes. It is right to celebrate their memory. But is right, as well, to recognize that not all wars are noble and necessary.

Making the distinction between wars that are unavoidable and wars that should have been avoided (and that can now be ended) honors all veterans and all soldiers, as does a recognition that it is time to begin establishing practices and policies that err on the side of making peace -- as opposed to endless conflict.

That's a message that Michael McPhearson, the former executive director of Veterans for Peace and a co-convener of United for Peace and Justice brings to the table this Memorial Day.

"To truly honor fallen soldiers requires self-reflection, questions and action," says the veteran who served as a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during the first Gulf War. "We must reflect on our part in their deaths. Are we allowing the blood of soldiers and civilians to be spilled in war because we are not willing to do the hard work of peace making? Hard work that may mean we must change our lifestyles, consume less and learn more about the world around us. Are we prepared to take any responsibility for our nation’s relationships with other countries? Are we willing to question our government's foreign policies and demand a change from domination to collaboration? Are we willing to take action to change ourselves so that our personal behavior and attitude reflects peace making rather than acceptance of war?"

Americans will have plenty of answers to those questions. But the first ought to be that, on this Memorial Day, the time has come to honor the troops by bringing them home.

Original Page: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/30-6

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On Memorial Day, a veteran questions the futility of war

2011-06-02T21:22:00.001-07:00

On Memorial Day, a veteran questions the futility of war

by Ross Fento, articles.boston.com
May 30th 2011

By Ross Fenton

A recent episode of the television show "NCIS" brought back memories of my post-Vietnam Army service. I was assigned to burial detail as part of the Honor Guard that fired the 21-gun salutes at dozens of funerals throughout New England. Most of these were for young men who had died violently in Vietnam. Most of the caskets where closed. As we stood to the side, sometimes on a knoll, giving the fallen our nation's final honor, I often trembled with emotion, watching as mothers, sisters and wives wailed. Some threw themselves onto the caskets, unwilling to let go of their loved ones.

Shortly after I was discharged, I returned to school and went on to protest the war as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. We were a small group, but had experienced the futility of a war waged halfway around the world. As time has passed, those memories have faded, as so many do. But the TV show, depicting a military burial from one of our ongoing wars, brought back memories of so much pain and suffering I had witnessed. It caused me to wonder: What had we learned these past four decades?

When I watch the news or read the paper and see that one more brother, father, sister or mother has died, I can picture their loved ones crying out in pain, knowing another life has been cut short in some unpronounceable village on the other side of the world. And for what? What have we accomplished? What have we learned from these deaths?

Original Page: http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-30/bostonglobe/29600029_1_casualties-war-military-burial

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The Heavy Cost of the Bush-Obama Murder Rampage

2011-06-02T16:27:00.001-07:00

The Heavy Cost of the Bush-Obama Murder Rampage

by Anthony Gregory, lewrockwell.com
June 1st 2011

In every election cycle, the politicians love to pretend there is a difference among them on the foreign policy questions. Yet on these issues of unsurpassed importance, we see the Democrats and Republicans are all part of the same bloodthirsty gang.

On the superficial level of presidential politics, Obama and Bush appeared light-years apart. They play opposites in the DC-approved official culture war between those who pretend to be genuine red-blooded Americans of the heartland and those who feign an understanding of the beleaguered urban minorities and oppressed underclass, when in truth both perfectly embody the same Wall Street-Pentagon-friendly power elite. This is most clearly seen in their virtually identical approach toward empire.

After 9/11, Bush could have used his Republican bonafides to stress not pacifism but at least the humble foreign policy he had promised. We shouldn’t be "an arrogant nation," he famously said in his October 11, 2000, debate with Al Gore. "[O]ne way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, we do it this way, so should you."

But instead, Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to expand the federal government more than had happened in decades, gut the Bill of Rights, and start two major wars to "democractize" Afghanistan and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million innocents, were slaughtered in his wars. He left America in low morale, bankrupted from his recklessness, bloodied from battle, with thousands of Americans having returned in flag-draped caskets.

Obama in 2008 gave even more lip service to foreign policy humility than did Bush in 2000, or at least was perceived this way, and somehow everyone believed it. He said Bush made a terrible mistake in invading Iraq. He said we could save a fortune and restore American honor by withdrawing.

Yet here we are, over two years into his presidency, and the mountain of corpses continues to rise. In Afghanistan, there were more civilian deaths last year than any time since the war began. In Pakistan, Obama has unleashed unspeakable terror with his drone attacks, deploying more than three times as many last year as Bush did in 2008. This killing spree has greatly exacerbated a refugee disaster, wherein a million or two have been displaced from their homes.

But of course, most Americans don’t care about the death of foreigners. Non-Americans are barely human. Yet even by purely U.S.-centric standards, the Obama model of war has amounted to a continuation of the Bush trajectory. My new Independent Institute policy report, What Price War? Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Costs of Conflict, goes into the numbers and cuts through the rhetorical fog of partisan nonsense.

Last year, 559 American troops died in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is ninety more than died in Bush’s last full year – 2008 – in office. Both 2009 and 2010 were far bloodier for Americans in Afghanistan than any year under Bush. In 2008, Bush’s deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 155 died there – fewer than half of the 317 who fell in 2009 and fewer than a third of the 499 who fell last year.

Even conservative Americans should be alarmed by this, and liberal peaceniks should be horrified that their man has apparently increased U.S. belligerence from its 2008 levels, by which point U.S. casualties were winding down from their peak during Bush’s most lethal years. All Americans have to be concerned with the financial cost too. Obama repeatedly promised to save money from the Iraq adventure and devote the savings to other priorities – which he has, more or less. Yet the U.S. was going to begin drawing down in Iraq anyway: Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement in 2008, setting a timetable for Iraq similar to what we’ve seen followed under Obama.

Overall, the heightened violence in Afghanistan has meant a war price tag rivaling the worst days of war criminal George W. Bush. Even adjusting for inflation, in 2006, Bush was spending about $133 billion on his two wars in 2011 dollars. Last year, the cost was up to $170 billion. Then we have the record-busting Pentagon budgets that the Democrats have given us.

Obama could have gotten away with a more modest policy than Bush, simply by continuing on the path set at the beginning of 2009. But he wanted to show that the Republicans had "neglected" Afghanistan and so he tripled the U.S. troop presence, from just over 30,000 soldiers at the end of the Bush era to the 100,000 or so that are there now. This puts aside the vast increase in contractors, as I discuss in the report.

Obama has also bombed Somalia and Yemen and started a fresh new major war with Libya, in violation of the War Powers Act, the Constitution, and all semblance of common sense. So far, according to Defense Secretary Gates, the cost has been over $750 million. This particular battle costs about $40 million a month in direct costs, but I’m sure the Republicans are still patting themselves on the back for saving $5 million a year by cutting federal funding for NPR.

All of this ignores the more hidden costs of war: The uncounted thousands of innocents blown to bits and otherwise slaughtered because Obama doesn’t want to appear "weak" in Afghanistan; the civil liberties violations that have only accelerated under this president; the many thousands of Americans injured and psychologically traumatized; the economic opportunities vanquished because of the trillions in resources devoted to and destroyed in these wars.

Concerning all the permanent fixtures of the American state – the trillions in entitlements, the national police power, the Fed and the armies of regulators – Obama has continued and expanded upon nearly everything we had under Bush, just as Bush ramped up what he inherited from Clinton and on and on going back decades. Nowhere is the tragic bipartisan continuity in U.S. policy starker than in the area of war. Yet as I note in my paper, there was no reason to expect otherwise: candidate Obama said Iraq was a mistake, but he praised the horrible surge and voted to continue funding the war, vowing the whole time to expand operations in Afghanistan.

Millions thought Obama would bring home the troops, wind down the wars, stop killing so many civilians, and save money while he was at it. Sadly, the murder rampage continues without interruption, only with a greater emphasis on picking on some nations rather than others and a different rhetorical cloak to obscure the evil of the slaughter. Hawks decry Obama as a pacifist who hates American power and doves often praise him for being more thoughtful than his reckless warmongering predecessor. The only real question is which dishonest characterization is the greater obscenity.

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

The Best of Anthony Gregory

Original Page: http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory215.html

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An Open Letter to the Troops: You=?UTF-8?B?wpJyZSBOb3QgRGU=?=fending Our Freedoms

2011-06-02T14:38:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to the Troops: You’re Not Defending Our Freedoms

by Jacob G. Hornberger, lewrockwell.com
June 1st 2011

Dear Troops:

Yesterday – Memorial Day – some people asserted, once again, that you are “defending our freedoms” overseas.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Those people are just repeating tired old mantras. The reality is that you are not defending our freedoms with your actions overseas. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Your actions overseas are placing our freedoms here at home in ever-greater jeopardy.

Consider your occupation of Iraq, a country that, as you know, never attacked the United States, making it the defender in the war and the United States the aggressor. Think about that: Every single person that the troops have killed, maimed, or tortured in Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

Yet, the countless victims of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have friends and relatives, many of whom have become filled with anger and rage and who now would stop at nothing to retaliate with terrorist attacks against Americans.

Pray tell: How does that constitute defending our freedoms?

It was no different prior to 9/11. At the end of the Persian Gulf War, the troops intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water and sewage facilities after a Pentagon study showed that this would help spread infectious illnesses among the Iraqi people.

It worked. For 11 years after that, the troops enforced the cruel and brutal sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. (See “America’s Peacetime Crimes against Iraq” by Anthony Gregory.) You’ll recall U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.”

By “it” she meant the attempted ouster of Saddam Hussein from power. You will recall that he was a dictator who was the U.S. government’s ally and partner during the 1980s, when the United States was furnishing him with those infamous WMDs that U.S. officials later used to excite the American people into supporting your invasion of Iraq.

The truth is that 9/11 furnished U.S. officials with the excuse to do what their sanctions (and the deaths of all those Iraqi children) had failed to accomplish: ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a U.S-approved regime.

That’s what your post-9/11 invasion of Iraq was all about – to achieve the regime change that the pre-9/11 deadly sanctions that killed all those children had failed to achieve.

No, not mushroom clouds, not freedom, not democracy, and certainly not defending our freedoms here at home. Just plain old regime change.

In the process, all that you – the troops – have done with your invasion and occupation of Iraq is produce even more enmity toward the United States by people in the Middle East, especially those Iraqis who have lost loved ones or friends in the process or simply watched their country be destroyed.

In principle, it’s no different with Afghanistan. I’d estimate that 99 percent of the people the troops have killed, maimed, or tortured in that country had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Why did you invade Afghanistan or, more precisely, why did President Bush order you to do so?

No, not because the Taliban participated in the 9/11 attacks and, no, not because the Taliban were even aware that the attacks were going to take place

President Bush ordered the troops to invade Afghanistan – and, of course, kill Afghan citizens in the process – because the Afghan government – the Taliban – refused to comply with his unconditional extradition demand. You will recall that the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to an independent tribunal to stand trial upon the receipt of evidence from the United States indicating his complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Bush responded to the Taliban’s offer by issuing his order to the troops to invade Afghanistan, kill Afghans, and occupy the country. In the process, U.S. officials installed one of the most crooked, corrupt, and dictatorial rulers it could find to govern the country, one who is so incompetent he cannot even hide the manifest fraud by which he has supposedly been elected to office.

In the process of installing and defending the Karzai regime, the troops have killed brides, grooms, children, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and countrymen, most of whom never attacked the United States on 9/11 or at any other time. They simply became “collateral damage” or “bad guys” for having the audacity to oppose the invasion and occupation of their country by a foreign regime. (It should be noted for the record that U.S. officials considered these types of “bad guys,” as well as Osama bin Laden and other fundamentalist Muslims, to be “good guys” when they were trying to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan.)

Was there another way to bring bin Laden to justice? Yes, the criminal-justice route, which was the route used after the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

That’s right. Same target, different date. In fact, the accused terrorists – Ramzi Yousef in 1993 and Osama bin Laden in 2001 – were ultimately located in the same country, Pakistan.

In Yousef’s case, he was arrested some three years after the attack, brought back to the United States, prosecuted, and convicted in federal district court. He’s now serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary.

No invasions, no bombings, no occupations, no killing of countless innocent people, no torture, no war on terrorism, and no anger and rage that such actions inevitably would have produced among the victims, their families, and friends.

In bin Laden’s case, we instead got a military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, where the troops have killed, maimed, tortured, and hurt countless people who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

How in the world have your invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq defended our freedoms here at home? Indeed, how have the assassinations and bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and who knows where else defended our freedoms?

All these things have accomplished is keeping foreigners angry at us, thereby subjecting us to the constant and ever-growing threat of terrorist retaliation here at home. As I have pointed out before, the U.S. military – that is, you, the troops – have become the biggest terrorist-producing machine in history. Every time you kill some Iraqi or Afghan citizen, even when accidental, ten more offer to take his place out of anger and rage.

That’s the same thing that was happening prior to 9/11. In fact, there were some, including those of us here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, who were warning prior to 9/11 that unless the U.S. Empire stopped what it was doing to people in the Middle East (including the deadly sanctions on Iraq, the support of Middle East dictators, the stationing of U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands, and the unconditional money and armaments to the Israeli regime), Americans would be increasingly subject to terrorist attacks. On 9/11, we were proven right, unfortunately. (See Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson.)

How does the constant threat of terrorist retaliation arising from your actions in Iraq and Afghanistan make us freer here at home, especially when you – the troops – are responsible for engendering the anger and rage that culminates in such threats, owing to what you are doing to people over there?

Consider also what the U.S. government does to our freedoms here at home as a direct consequence of the terrorist threat that you, the troops, are producing over there. It uses that threat of terrorism to infringe upon our freedoms here at home! You know what I mean – the fondling at the airports, the 10-year-old Patriot Act, the illegal spying on Americans, the indefinite detention, the torture, the kangaroo tribunals, Gitmo, and the entire war on terrorism – all necessary, they tell us, to keep us safe from the terrorists – that is, the people you all are producing with your actions over there.

In other words, if you all weren’t producing an endless stream of terrorists with your invasions, occupations, torture, assassinations, bombings, and Gitmo, the U.S. government – the entity you are working for – would no longer have that excuse for taking away our freedoms.

This past Sunday, the Washington Post carried an article about American wives who were recently greeting their husbands on their return from Afghanistan. Newlywed Anne Krolicki, 24, commented to her husband on the death of one of her friends’ husband: “It’s a pointless war,” she said.

That lady has her head on straight. She’s has a grip on reality, doesn’t deal in tired old mantras, and speaks the truth. Every U.S. soldier who dies in Iraq and Afghanistan dies for nothing, which was the same thing that some 58,000 men of my generation died for in Vietnam.

Please don’t write me to tell me that you all are good people or that you’re “patriots” for simply following whatever orders you are given. All that is irrelevant. What matters is what you are doing over there. And what you are doing is not defending our freedoms, you are jeopardizing them

Sincerely,

Jacob G. Hornberger
President
The Future of Freedom Foundation

Reprinted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Copyright © 2011 Future of Freedom Foundation

Original Page: http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger187.html

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Memorial Day Patriotism: Cannon Fodder for the Merchants of Death

2011-05-29T17:54:00.001-07:00

Memorial Day Patriotism: Cannon Fodder for the Merchants of Death

by Liam Fox, newsjunkiepost.com
May 29th 2011 12:34 PM

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.” – Albert Einstein

The American invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan can not be considered spreading freedom and liberty any more than kidnapping and repeated rape can be considered spreading love. Neither of these countries threatened or attacked America. The occupation and murder of Iraqi and Afghan citizens, or resistance fighters, is not an act of patriotism; it is a criminal act of aggression. Joining a military that you know will command you to commit these crimes does not absolve the individual.

Big business and politicians alike, banging the drums and waving flags, are leading the cheers as soldiers march to their deaths and they watch their profits and approval ratings sore. Presidential approval ratings explode when they invade a country or assassinate someone. Look at the ‘bump’ Obama got for assassinating Bin Laden. Oil and mining interests, along with private military contractors, are raking in the spoils of war while Americans send their children, their brothers and sisters, and their husbands and wives, off to battle to either die or be changed forever.

More than one in ten American soldiers lose a limb. More than six in ten suffer from PTSD or traumatic brain injury. If they survive their tour of duty, and subsequent stop-loss redeployments, they are more likely to end up struggling for assistance from their government, or marketing themselves as mercenaries to Erik Prince and his companies (Blackwater, Xe, Reflex Responses R2) of paid killers, than getting a quality education.Over 920,000 people, mostly civilians, have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 1,700,00 more have been injured.

For what? Because Iraq and Afghanistan are now so much better off than before the invasion? Ask an Afghani or Iraqi citizen, or an honest American soldier, they’ll tell you different. Can Americans now claim that they are safer? Quite the opposite, American aggression has resulted in a much greater risk by providing many with what may be considered a new righteous justification for harming America and American citizens. Is this national defense? Is this spreading freedom and democracy? Why is empire and blood-lust being allowed to masquerade as patriotism?

Have Americans become the modern Romans? Has the spectacle of the arena been safely moved to other peoples countries? Have the stone benches in the coliseum been traded for the comfort of a Barcalounger and a big-screen TV? Have we dehumanized victims to such a point that we can cheer their deaths, and honor the ‘heroes’ that slaughter them, despite their innocence? Is being something other than an American citizen a crime worthy of death?

Modern gladiators are paid a wage, promised an education, armed to the teeth, and sent out to kill on command. Those that try to defend themselves are called the enemy, and their attempts to save themselves used as justification for the violence committed against them. The American military is nothing more than the muscle behind Big-Oil, Big-Finance, Big-Business, Big-Pharma et al. National security gave way to economic expansionism and neocolonialism a long time ago.

The Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns are no less abhorrent than Vietnam, but the public reaction has changed. Americans have either become desensitized to the horrors they export, or have accepted this brutal substitution for patriotism that their politicians and media have sold them. Or, they truly are a country full of blood-thirsty misanthropes that place no value on the lives and nations they destroy as long as they remain fat and happy behind the wheel of an SUV.

Being paid to wear a uniform does not justify murder. Murdering people in other countries does not make a hero. Sacrificing your life, or limb, for an unjust war does not make you a hero either; it makes you a victim. Convincing the youth that the invasion of other countries that never threatened or attacked their own, and the murder of innocent civilians, and all that dare resist, somehow equals patriotism, destroys the the very fabric of society.

The crimes perpetrated by those in positions of power and influence have robed the members of the armed forces the right to be called patriots and heroes. Those that have served unwittingly are their victims, just as much as the ‘foreigners’ they’ve been instructed to kill. Those that serve knowingly can be afforded no absolution. To purposefully give control over ones actions to a murderous enterprise is to assume equal culpability. To volunteer to have someone instruct you to commit a wrongful act is precisely that, wrong.

The only ones that have benefited from from American aggression, and the crimes committed against all the peoples around the world, from Vietnam to Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, and on and on through America’s decades of endless wars, are the power-brokers and profiteers that picked the fights in the first place. To join a military that we all now know is involved in illegal wars and occupations is an act against humanity.

On this Memorial Day, remember the reality of America’s wars, not the romanticized fiction that the propaganda mills spew out. Remember all those that have lost their lives, not just your compatriots who died, or lost limbs, while trying to kill others. The information is out there. The facts are accessible. Soldiers are no longer misinformed, victimized, heroic, patriots… they are accessories. The denial of reality does not make the carnage acceptable. The blood cannot be wiped from your hands with the flag.

Original Page: http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/05/29/memorial-day-patriotism-cannon-fodder-for-the-merchants-of-death/

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Iraq veteran Eddie Falcon speaks out against the war

2011-05-28T10:09:00.001-07:00

Iraq veteran Eddie Falcon speaks out against the war

by KALW News, sfgate.com
May 25th 2011 5:14 PM

* * *

EDDIE FALCON: I was pretty young. I didn't think I understood, really, how things worked in the world.

SHANI AVIRAM: Eddie Falcon is an Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He enlisted when he was 18, after growing up east of Los Angeles, in a community plagued by drugs, gangs, and crime.

FALCON: I enlisted in the first place to get money for school and to get out of, you know, like harsh socio-economic situations that I was living in. So, what people call that is the "economic draft."

Growing up in West Covina and La Puente in the Southern California desert, he says he had only two paths to choose from.

FALCON: La Puente is a really crazy neighborhood to live in. There's a lot of gang violence around. It's a really tough area. And then over when I was living in the desert there was nothing to do there but drugs. So those were just, like, my two options: get addicted to drugs or keep running around with gangs.

In 2001, he enlisted in the Air Force with the goal of using the GI Bill to pay for college. But, he found that he didn't quite fit in. He was one of the few Mexican-Americans in a mostly white unit.

FALCON: A lot of people did say things like "beaner" or "spik" or something like that, but there's also really subtle things that you don't notice that I'm starting to notice now. They were always surprised at how smart I was. "I didn't expect you to know that" or "you're a smart Mexican." Like stupid s*** like that.

Falcon served as a Loadmaster Journeyman on a C-130 aircraft. His job was to load cargo and passengers - passengers who were sometimes prisoners.

FALCON: You would take all the seats out of the plane...

...in order to make room to lay the Iraqi detainees on the floor like cargo. According to Falcon, the procedure was to handcuff and blindfold the prisoners...

FALCON: ...and then you put them on the floor, and then you put them in rows of five and then strap them down to the floor with cargo straps. I mean, there's not really too much. They wanted you to do all this other stuff too. Like, inside the kit there's like these gloves so like ... because they wanted you to feel disgusted by them, by the people or something, and people will tell you that they'll piss or they'll s*** or stuff like that, so they want you to put like a tarp under them. I think the kit even comes with diapers. It's, like, really weird. It comes with a face mask and like all this stuff. I didn't use any of it and I never had any prisoners s*** or piss any where or spit at me or nothing like that. They were all really scared that they were there.

The "detainee runs," as Falcon calls them, left a lasting impact on him.

FALCON: When I was there in Iraq and did the prisoner runs, people were blindfolded and when I took the blindfolds off of them and they saw me, they actually thought I was Iraqi.

Falcon deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan. As the wars went on and violence escalated, he started questioning the military operation.

FALCON: It just didn't make sense to me that we were sending so many people there. And like so many people were dying and it just didn't seem justified for what happened. Like having to tie people down to the floor of the plane and take them to prisons and like getting shot at and running from rockets. That s*** gets old, you know?

In 2005, after he was discharged, Falcon enrolled at San Francisco City College. He started sharing his military stories with student groups to raise awareness of what's going on overseas. That's when he first met members of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

It's March 19, the 8th anniversary of the Iraq War, and ANSWER Coalition is holding its annual march. It's pouring rain, but the energy on the streets is high. Falcon has been coming every year since he left the military.

FALCON: One time I was out of town, I was in Europe, but I still was in Paris on a corner holding a "U.S. Out of Iraq" sign by myself.

Falcon is now the acting president of Iraq Veterans Against the Wars' Bay Area chapter.

Only a handful of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have come out to march today. They explain that many veterans feel discouraged by the government's lack of response to their issues. Others are still dealing with the psychological scars of war, like PTSD, and just want to put their war experiences behind them. But for Falcon, sharing his story - making connections with people - is a way of dealing with his past.

FALCON: Sharing my story with other people and I hear how other people's stories were in the military or whatever, and like it starts to bring out other things for me too, so I think it's good to keep talking and to keep sharing your stories with people because that's how you end up making connections and really analyzing things and finding out you got more in common with people than you thought

Some try to portray the anti-war movement as anti-American. But, Falcon says, protesting a war doesn't mean you hate your country.

FALCON: It's not that I don't like America. I love America. That's why I live here. I grew up here. I'm culturally American. We have really cool s***. Everybody likes our music, everybody likes our style. We're cool. I like us. And I'm willing to defend the people who are around me against any outsiders.

Falcon is currently a student at UC Berkeley using the GI Bill to pay for his education. Despite his views of the military and government policies, he isn't conflicted about using state money to pay for college.

FALCON: I think it makes even more sense. Whatever, people can say whatever they want. I feel like the government has taken away a lot of things away from me. It's taken away my youth, it's taken away my mental stability, the state has taken away members of my family. So I'll take some money from them to get by and do what I gotta do. I got no problem with that. It's the least that they can f***ing do for me is pay me to go to school after all the s*** that they put me through.

It has been six years since Falcon left the military, and he says he is still dealing with the aftermath of his service. That's why he is sharing his own story with as many people as he can.

FALCON: I want to talk to kids because kids are going into the military from high school. The people who really need my help or need to hear this are people who are going to go through the same struggle that I went through. Like, people over here, college students aren't going to go through the same things I went through. They're going to go through something different. So, I want to talk to kids that are going to be enlisted.

Falcon's voice of opposition might be rare among new veterans, but his need to heal is shared by many of them. Talking about his experiences has been Falcon's way of doing so.

For Mills College, I'm Shani Aviram

Shani Aviram is a student reporter at Mills College in Oakland.

Original Page: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/kalw/detail?entry_id=89749

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U.S. Wars Used to be Fought By Privates -- Now, Increasingly, They're Fough

2011-05-28T09:57:00.001-07:00

U.S. Wars Used to be Fought By Privates -- Now, Increasingly, They're Fought by Privateers

by Mark Thompson, battleland.blogs.time.com
May 27th 2011 10:24 AM

Privateers, strictly speaking, are private individuals who have been granted the power by a government to attack enemy ships in the government's name. Privateering was a key part of naval warfare from the 16th to 19th centuries. But a pair of Congressional Research Service reports, released Friday by the invaluable Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project, shows it's making a comeback:

Notes the report in the dry, technocratic language that is the CRS's style:

From December 2008 to March 2011, the number of U.S. troops and DOD contractor personnel in Afghanistan increased. However, the number of [private] security contractors [PCSs] increased at a much faster rate (414%) than total contractors (26%) or troop levels (207%)…

Adjusting for the difference in the number of PSC personnel compared to troops, a PSC employee working for DOD in Afghanistan is 2.75 times more likely to be killed in action than uniformed personnel.

According to DOD, as of March 2011, there were 18,971 private security contractor personnel in Afghanistan. This represents the highest recorded number of private security contractor personnel used by DOD in any conflict in the history of the United States.

This blows me away. We can't be honest enough to send the troops we need off to war, so we hire nearly 20,000 to wage it in our name. Even better: only 1 in 20 is an American, meaning the PSCs' higher death rate is a sorrow for citizens of other lands. Talk about a coalition of the willing.

Someday, we -- or, more likely, our grandchildren -- will reflect on this peculiarly pecuniary way of waging war with the shame we should feel today. Until then, we'll just keep on shelling out the big bucks to make it possible (come to think of it, our grandkids will also be paying those bills, seeing as we've been borrowing so much money lately):

Original Page: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/05/27/u-s-wars-used-to-be-fought-by-privates-now-increasingly-theyre-fought-by-privateers/#more-50418

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Protesters erect watchtower just outside post

2011-05-28T09:56:00.001-07:00

Protesters erect watchtower just outside post

kdhnews.com | May 27th 2011 By Anthony Scott
Killeen Daily Herald

Out of protest against the deployment of soldiers with mental injuries to war, Iraq Veterans Against the War teamed up with Under the Hood Outreach Center and Cafe to set up a watchtower outside Fort Hood's East Gate.

The protesters stood their ground all day Thursday, from start to finish of the post's entire duty day. As cars went by, some passengers honked and shouted.

"We built a tower and the tower's based on putting (III Corps and Fort Hood Commander Lt. Gen. Donald Campbell Jr.) accountable to all the suicides that are happening at Fort Hood and to all the soldiers not getting the proper (mental health) treatment that they need," said Kyle Wesolowski, an Iraq war veteran who recently left the Army with a conscientious objector discharge.

Wesolowski toured Iraq from 2008-09 with the 1st Cavalry Division and is now the manager at Under The Hood Cafe, an outreach center for soldiers.

"We're going to leave him accountable for all of these things now and until the future," he said. "Now we're trying to talk to (Campbell) to sit down with him. We've given him over 600 emails to be sent to him from our supporters from IVAW members alike."

Wesolowski said one of the things that needs to be done is let soldiers heal from mental health problems before deployment.

"A lot of soldiers are falling through the cracks," he said. "They're being redeployed to Iraq with many of these mental conditions."

The protest was part of Operation Recovery, an IVAW campaign to stop the deployment of traumatized troops.

Prior to the protest, the group went on post Wednesday morning to III Corps Headquarters and asked for a meeting with Campbell, said veteran and organizer Aaron Hughes.

"We were refused again," he said. "We're tired of being ignored."

Led by Wesolowski, a group of six of the veterans went to III Corps Headquarters and asked to meet with Campbell at the reception desk. The Army did not grant the request, said organizer Scott Kimball, a veteran who recounted the experience on the IVAW website.

Kimball said because they did not make contact with Campbell the group was putting him on watch.

The next day at the watch tower, Wesolowski led the crew of protesters by listing a number of complaints, including the fact that in 2009 more than 7,000 soldiers were on antidepressant or antipsychotic medication and military suicide rates increased 150 percent from 2001 to 2009.

Fort Hood also has the highest suicide rate of any Army post at 22 cases of suicide last year, nearly twice as many cases as any other post. Increased cases of military sexual trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury were also problems, he added.

"We believe they need to get the help they need," Wesolowski said. "To heal, and not be redeployed: That to me is an Army value. To respect every service member when they're in trouble."

Contact Anthony Scott at ascott@kdhnews.com or (254) 501-7568. Follow him on Twitter at KDHcity.

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Original Page: http://kdhnews.com/news/story.aspx?s=56219&sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4ddfb2b48b107a02,1

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Danger Room

2011-05-28T09:52:00.001-07:00

Danger Room

by Spencer Ackerman, m.wired.com
May 27th 2011

It’s never a good sign when you have to tell the men guarding your base not to murder civilians, torture detainees or desecrate corpses. But U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan are leaving nothing to chance.

The Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan put ten contracts for “perimeter security“ up for bid on Friday morning. Hired guards, mostly Afghans, will keep watch over anyone who approaches the elite commandos’ remote outposts. While the bases on which they’ll work range in size, from tiny “Village Support Platforms” staffed by a mere 12-man “A Team” to one near Kabul’s infamous Pol-e-Charkhi prison, there are uniform expectations for would-be guards. Some of them read more like baseline conditions for membership in civilized humanity.

So-called “Afghan Security Guards” are instructed, “Do not kill or torture detained personnel.” For good measure, if someone’s taken captive, “immediately turn over to U.S., Coalition or [Afghan forces].” Should they kill someone who poses a threat, there is to be “no booby-trapping, burning [or] mutilation” of their corpses.

Now, Afghan guarding U.S. bases don’t exactly have the best track record. A Senate report last fall found them getting into gun battles with one another for cash and doing favors for warlords and even Taliban. But indications that they’ve been murdering civilians, torturing captives and turning dead bodies into gruesome homemade bombs are few and far between. If those cases actually exist, it’s not stopped the task force from hiring Afghan guards from standing watch over their outposts.

While the rules bar Afghan guards from conducting “offensive ops,” they’re still instructed not to “attack protected persons or protected places,” like “mosques, hospitals, cemeteries and schools.” So apparently they’ll spend some time off base.

Which leads to the most crucial instructions of all. “Fight only combatants,” the contract rules insist. “Destroy no more than the mission requires. Returned fire with aimed fire. Must limit/eliminate collateral damage to innocent civilians.”

Afghan guards might be an enduring feature of U.S. bases. But as the basic instructions indicate, U.S. forces don’t exactly trust them. “Contractor personnel are not permitted to eat in U.S. government dining facilities,” the contract rules read. Only a few of them can work out at the base gyms.

If these are the kinds of instructions that even the most elite U.S. warriors have to provide their would-be local protectors, how wise is it to have men who need to be told not to commit murder watching their backs?

Photo: U.S. Air Force

See Also:

Original Page: http://m.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/rules-for-afghan-mercs-no-murder-torture-or-corpse-mutilation/?utm_source=co2hog

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Troop morale in Afghanistan plummets

2011-05-21T11:22:00.001-07:00

Hawaii News Now - KGMB and KHNL HomeTroop morale in Afghanistan plummets, report says

hawaiinewsnow.com | May 19th 2011 10:33 AM By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - As fighting and casualties in Afghanistan's war reached an all-time high, U.S. soldiers and Marines there reported plunging morale and the highest rates of mental health problems in five years.

The grim statistics in a new Army report released Thursday dramatize the psychological cost of a military campaign that U.S. commanders and officials say has reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency.

Military doctors said the findings from a battlefield survey taken last summer were no surprise given the dramatic increase in combat, which troops reported was at its most intense level since officials began doing mental health analyses in 2003.

"There are few stresses on the human psyche as extreme as the exposure to combat and seeing what war can do," Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, said at a Pentagon news conference.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of troops surveyed for the report said they had seen a buddy killed, roughly half of soldiers and 56 percent of Marines said they'd killed an enemy fighter, and about two-thirds of troops said that a roadside bomb - the No. 1 weapon of insurgents - had gone off within 55 yards of them.

Most of those statistics were significantly higher than what troops said they experienced in the previous year in Afghanistan as well as during the 2007 surge of extra troops into the Iraq war, the report said.

Some 20 percent of troops said they had suffered a psychological problem such as anxiety, severe stress or depression. Considering the intense levels of combat they are seeing, that number may actually be small, said Col. Paul Bliese, who led the last three survey teams to the battlefield, in 2007, 2009 and 2010.

"We would have expected to see a much larger increase in the mental health symptoms and a much larger decrease in morale ... based on these incredibly high rates of exposure" to traumatic combat events, Bliese said. The report's authors took the statistics as evidence that the force is resilient, a trait the military has been working to develop in troops.

The report is a snapshot of the health of the forces in Afghanistan last year, drawn by a mental health team that polled more than 900 soldiers, 335 Marines and 85 mental health workers on the battlefield in July and August, as troops surged into the country under the Obama administration's new strategy for fighting the insurgency.

President Barack Obama sent an additional 30,000 troops there last year to build the force to the current 100,000. Commanders and administration officials say the push has weakened the Taliban, and a limited troop withdrawal is planned by this July.

Troops said they were receiving better training in suicide prevention and other coping strategies and that mental health treatment was easier to get at the warfront.

"I do believe we're making progress," Schoomaker said.

But a particularly stubborn problem for the Army persisted: About 50 percent of soldiers said they believe getting professional help for their problems would make them appear weak. Defense officials have gone to great lengths over a number of years to encourage troops to get treatment, and Marines made some headway in reducing the perceived stigma, according to the report.

Americans "have not solved this problem in the civilian world," said Dr. Robert Heinssen, a research director at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The military says it boosted the mental health staff in the Afghanistan to 1 for every 646 soldiers last year, compared with 1 for every 1,123 in 2009.

"War affects everyone ... and most are able to deal with their experiences and move on to stable, productive lives," said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Key to coping with those experiences is available care, access to care and knowing that you are not alone."

Some of the report's highlights:

- Only 46.5 percent of soldiers said their morale was medium, high or very high last year, compared with 65.7 percent in 2005. For Marines, it was only 58.6 percent last year compared with 70.4 percent when they were surveyed in 2006 in Iraq. (The report compares numbers of the Marine to their time in Iraq because they were not in Afghanistan in significant numbers before the surge.)

- Nearly 80 percent of Marines and soldiers said they'd seen a member of their unit killed or wounded, compared with roughly half who said that in the earlier years.

- Nearly 1 in 5 soldiers and Marines reported psychological problems such as acute stress, depression or anxiety last year, compared with 1 in 10 among soldiers in 2005 and about 1 in 8 among Marines in 2006.

- The use of drugs for mental health or combat stress was lower among soldiers and Marines than among civilians in the same age group.

___

Online:

The report: http://www.armymedicine.army.mil/reports/mhat/mhat_vii/J_MHAT_7.pdf

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Original Page: http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/14676683/troop-morale-in-afghanistan-plummets-report-says?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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One Year in Jail, Bradley Manning is a Hero

2011-05-21T11:04:00.001-07:00

One Year in Jail, Bradley Manning is a Hero

by Peter Tatchell, commondreams.org
May 20th 2011

On 26 May, Private Bradley Manning will have been held in US military detention without trial for one year. He faces a battery of charges, including "aiding the enemy" – a crime punishable by execution under US law.

What was Manning's crime? As well as allegedly releasing classified diplomatic cables that exposed the hypocrisy of top US officials, it is alleged that he blew the whistle on war crimes and cover-ups by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. If this is true, the man is a hero. He is a defender of democracy and human rights. His actions are based on the principle that citizens have a right to know what the government is doing in their name.

Manning should not be in prison. The charges against him should be dropped. Instead, the US should put on trial those who killed innocent civilians and those who protected them.

Even many Americans agree that Bradley Manning is a true patriot, not a traitor. He reveres the founding ideals of the US – an open, honest government accountable to the people, which pursues its policies by lawful means that respect human rights. At great personal risk, he sought to expose grave crimes that were perpetrated and then hidden by the US government and military.

These are the characteristics of a man of conscience, motivated by altruism. Any misjudgements he made in his alleged release of certain documents are far outweighed by the positive good overall. Thanks to Manning, we, the people, know the truth.

"Cruel, inhuman and degrading"

Critics say that WikiLeaks was sometimes indiscriminate and even reckless in its release of certain documents. This may be true in a small number of cases. Regardless, these releases were done by WikiLeaks, not by Manning. He allegedly passed the information in good faith. He did not publish the documents. WikiLeaks did. Manning cannot be blamed for any shortcomings in the way WikiLeaks released the information.

For nine months, 23-year-old Manning was imprisoned in harsh, inhuman conditions at the Quantico marine corps base in Virginia.

He was subjected to long periods of solitary confinement and many extreme deprivations, which amounted to pre-conviction punishment. This mistreatment was condemned by more than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars.

The abuse of Manning constituted illegal "cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment", contrary to the UN Convention Against Torture and to the Eighth Amendment to the US constitution. It is arguable that President Obama should be indicted by the International Criminal Court. He bears direct personal and legal responsibility for the mistreatment of Manning. He knew about it, publicly endorsed it and did nothing to stop it.

After worldwide protests, Manning was recently transferred to a standard medium-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where his treatment has significantly improved.

He is being held on the, as yet, unproven allegation that he leaked classified US military and diplomatic documents that were subsequently released by WikiLeaks. These documents exposed US war crimes, as well as US foreign policy dishonesty and duplicity.

Covering up slaughter

Manning is a humanist and a man with a conscience. When he discovered human rights violations by the US armed forces and two-facedness by the US government, he was shocked and distressed. He became disillusioned with his country's foreign and military policy, believing it was betraying its professed democratic and humanitarian mission.

The abuse that first triggered Manning's disillusionment came when he was posted to Iraq in October 2009 as an intelligence analyst. He was appalled to discover US military collusion with the repression of dissent in Iraq; in particular "watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police . . . for printing 'anti-Iraqi' literature".

The offending literature exposed corruption in the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. When he complained that US forces should not be assisting in suppressing free speech and peaceful protest, he was told to keep quiet and that the US armed forces in Iraq should be doing more to silence opponents of the Maliki regime.

He was further outraged to discover top-secret video footage of a US Apache helicopter attack that gunned down 11 Iraqi civilians in 2007, including two Reuters journalists and men who had gone to the aid of the wounded. Two children were also gravely injured when the US helicopter opened fire on their van. The video records US soldiers laughing and joking at the killings, and also insulting the victims.

The video of the massacre can be seen here.

This slaughter had previously been the subject of a cover-up by the US armed forces, which claimed dishonestly that the helicopter had been engaged in combat operations against armed enemy forces.

It is only (allegedly) thanks to Bradley Manning that we now know the truth about this killing of innocent civilians – and about the killings of hundreds of other civilians in unreported and undocumented incidents.

Manning is a US citizen but also a British citizen through his Welsh mother. Since he has been in detention, he has received no British consular support. Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg, have failed to help him. They have never spoken publicly against his maltreatment nor, as far as we know, made any private appeals to the US government and military to halt the abuse that Manning suffered at Quantico.

So much for the coalition's professed commitment to human rights and civil liberties.

TAKE ACTION – What you can do:

1. Write to Bradley Manning. Send him your support: PFC Bradley Manning 89289. Fort Leavenworth Military Detention Centre, 830 Sabalu Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, KS 66027, USA.

2. Sign the petition in support of Bradley Manning.

Original Page: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/20-8

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The American War Machine Grinds on, with Little Care for the Innocent Dead It Leaves in Its Wake

2011-05-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

The American War Machine Grinds on, with Little Care for the Innocent Dead It Leaves in Its Wake

by David Swanson, alternet.org
May 16th 2011

The following is the text of a speech Swanson delivered on Saturday May 14 at the Athens Human Rights Festival in Athens, Ga.

U.S. newspapers sometimes print what they call the total death count from one or more of our wars, and all the dead who are listed are Americans. They aren't all the Americans. They don't include contractors or suicides or various other categories of dead Americans. They certainly don't include those who died for lack of basic needs while we dumped half of our public treasury into wars.

But they also don't include anyone from that 95% of humanity that's not from the United States. In our current wars, well over 95% of the dead, even in the short-term, are from the countries where the wars are fought. Some get labeled combatants and some civilians, but they're all left out of most body counts, and when they are counted they are counted low. Our government pretends not to count them at all, and only thanks to Wikileaks do we know otherwise, that the military has counted some of them.

This may be a step up from the Vietnam War, when the deaths of Vietnamese were officially celebrated. But it's not a step all the way to considering everyone human. The dead are still dead and unmourned. The official collection of ears in Vietnam has evolved into the unofficial collection of fingers in Afghanistan.This is not the progress we ultimately need.

Some humans seem to have no business existing, even before they die. Nearly five million Iraqis have been turned into refugees by our so-called liberation of their country. To acknowledge their existence doesn't fit our narrative. The global policeman doesn't chase people out of their homes or render whole pieces of the earth's surface uninhabitable. Are the women of Fallujah, told by doctors to stop having children because so many are born with horrible defects, human? Are they as human as the British royal couple or the U.S. president's family? Do we hear about them as much? Or at all?

I recently read the script of a play dramatizing the stories of some Iraqi refugees. By doing so, common understanding would hold that I went through a process of what's called humanizing people. Five million refugees is just a number. But the story of one of them who has had specific and somewhat familiar troubles, the loss of loved ones, the loss of self-respect, and a struggle to endure, a story full of detail including the person's name, appearance, voice, manners, and personality -- well, that humanizing story makes that person and the four million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and nine hundred and ninety-nine others more than a number. They have all now been humanized. Or so it is commonly believed.

I don't deny that such humanization works. But I question whether we must necessarily be so incredibly obtuse that it is necessary. Do we really doubt that any human lacks a specific human story until we hear it? While we should want to know the details of others' lives, do we have to know them before we can believe that those people are human and act accordingly? I'd like to propose a definition for human being that goes in the opposite direction: A human is anyone at all, but especially those you know the least about or know the most unpleasant things about. The person least like you is the most human, and you should work hardest to get that person human rights. After all, people you know well need not be described in such general terms as "she's a human being."

Our president recently began a war for the supposed benefit of the people of Libya, ceasing to arm and support Muammar Gadaffi and switching our government's support to his opponents. To gain Saudi Arabia's backing for this humanitarian war, our government told Saudi Arabia it had our blessing to move troops into Bahrain where they would attack civilians. Were the Libyans more human than the Bahrainis? What about the Libyans whom U.S. and NATO bombs are killing? Are they less human than other Libyans? Are the Libyans on our side of the war the most human, except for the ones employing child soldiers, and the racist murderers, and the ones who fought against the United States in Iraq, and the ones we may poison with depleted uranium, but especially Khalifa Hiftar, the rebel leader who has spent the past 20 years living in Virginia near CIA headquarters with no visible means of support? And what about Libyans who try to come to Europe, or who die of thirst and starvation on a ship while a U.S. aircraft carrier leaves them to their fate? Are they the least human Libyans? Reuters printed this headline this week: "Libya may be using migrants as weapon against EU- UN." Remember when the Pentagon viewed suicides at Guantanamo as acts of war? For Libyans and other Africans, just existing and being sent or sending oneself in the direction of Europe is an act of war. These humans are imagined into objects deployed like bullets from a gun. They disappear as human beings. And we learn nothing. If we'd known the Iraq War produced refugees, perhaps we'd have known the Libyan War would do the same. The UN Refugee Agency estimates 1,200 have died on boats fleeing the humanitarian war in Libya. Survivors say a U.S. aircraft carrier and other ships have left them to their fate.

Other humans are not erased, but rather demonized. Whole races and nations and religions of people are hated. While some back wars as humanitarian acts, others back the same wars as a way to kill evil beings. Before he dropped atomic bombs on Japan, before he became president or vice president, Harry Truman was a senator who stood up in the U.S. Senate and said that if the Germans were beating the Russians we should help the Russians, and if the Russians were beating the Germans we should help the Germans. That way, he said, more of the whole lot of them would die.

We think of the genocide committed by the Germans in their World War II camps as invented out of whole cloth. It actually built on the colonial and imperial policies and thoughts of Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, England, and the United States. Spanish murder and disease wiped out the inhabitants of the Canary Islands between 1478 and 1496, followed by the European elimination of humans from many parts of the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia. In 1829, all non-Europeans in Tasmania were concentrated in one area and hunted down. You know what the United States did to its native peoples. The term "concentration camp" had been invented by the Spanish in Cuba in 1896, used by Americans, and used by the British in the Boer War. In 1904, the Germans used it as they wiped out the Herero people of Southwest Africa.

The Nazis killed several million civilians in camps and became the model for all things evil, but the war they started killed some 70 million people worldwide, each and every one of them a human being, and each a victim of the very worst thing we've ever created: war, and this war like every war the result of years and decades of predictably dangerous decisions.

The Nazis are our model for evil, but we put their top living officials on trial in courts of law and declared, however hypocritically, that we would expect to be treated identically if charged with the same crimes in the years to come. Germany just convicted another former Nazi this week. The Nazis were evil, but human. The people our propaganda now demonizes as this month's Adolf Hitler or next month's Adolf Hitler are depicted as sub-human. Prisoners are bound and hooded and treated as animals, communicating the inability to reason with them, softening us up to accept their torture. If the President of Bahrain were demonized on our televisions for his nation's abuses of innocent people, a good many Americans would want to bomb Bahrain, despite the fact that most of the victims of our bombs would not be the demonized president. Of course, that scenario won't happen with Bahrain hosting a U.S. Naval fleet. But it happens all the time in nations that our nation's government wants to bomb, with bin Laden, Gadaffi, Hussein, Milosevic, Noriega, and many others.

We've been reduced to arguing that we should try alleged criminals in courts of law, rather than murdering them, for our own sake. We should do it to avoid lowering ourselves to what we understand as their level. We admit that they are subhuman monsters, but we prefer to give them trials because that is who we are. I don't think this is good enough. Nor do I think it takes full account of our own monstrous foreign policies. Every human is a human, even the cruel, sadistic, murderous ones. They have blood on their hands and legitimate grievances at the same time. They have caused widespread suffering, often with our government's support before it switched sides, and they have families and friends who love them at the same time. Simple-minded hatred impedes our understanding of the world and our ability to take actions that will make the world better. Rather than using crimes as excuses for wars or assassinations, we should consider adopting policies that make crime less likely and taking an approach to criminal punishment that looks at deterrence, prevention, restitution, and reconciliation, rather than immediate satisfaction of passions for vengeance regardless of the consequences.

Italy a couple of years back convicted a couple of dozen CIA agents in absentia of kidnapping a man in Italy to have him tortured in Egypt. They are all free and living in the United States. Terrorists convicted of attacks on Cuba live in Florida. Presidents Bush and Obama, who have overseen illegal wars abroad, are on the loose despite open confessions of crimes like assassination and torture. If an Italian or Cuban or Iraqi or Afghan or Pakistani death squad were to murder an American they considered a criminal, would Americans view that as law enforcement? Would our president declare that justice had been served?

We have one standard for five percent of humanity and a different one for the other 95 percent. And when we do consider the possible ramifications of having killed a likely mass murderer like bin Laden, we still fail to consider that what we did to him with bullets we do to others with missiles all the time. Our drone war in Pakistan has been denounced as illegal by the U.N. investigator on extrajudicial killings. Five days after killing bin Laden with a gun, the United States tried to kill U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with a drone. Awlaki is an American, but a Muslim; he speaks English, but he lives abroad. So, is he a human? He has not been charged with a crime. Neither had the two people who were killed in the failed attempt to kill him. Two days before that strike, U.S. drones killed 15 people in Pakistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that 957 civilians were killed by U.S. drones there in 2010.

Drone victims may not look like humans to the drone pilots sitting comfortably thousands of miles away in Nevada or Virginia. But we have soldiers at comfortable desk jobs dying of suicide. Suicide is the number one cause of death for U.S. military participants in our wars. It may be that while our policies don't recognize all humans as humans, those executing our policies do. It may be that our double standards aren't fooling even ourselves.

We've made one set of laws for our country and another for the rest of the world. We hear a lot in Washington about Israel's sovereign right to attack Iran if it sees fit, while the idea of an Iranian sovereign right to attack someone is treated with appropriate scorn. We've packed our prisons beyond what any other country has attempted, but our political criminal class has complete immunity, and the very first representative of the Wall Street gang that has recently stripped away so much of our nation's wealth, Raj Rajaratnam, was convicted this week and is appealing. A couple of weeks ago, I merely suggested to former Senator Alan Simpson that corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, and he flew into a rage denouncing a mythical poor man who bought four houses with nothing down. Threatening those with power leads to demonizing those without. This, too, is a problem of who counts as humans. But I'm not sure it's fooling anybody.

Are future generations whose world we are damaging as human as we are? Does the rest of the natural world get as much consideration as the humans? While we laugh at nations like Ecuador giving rights to the environment, we give rights, human rights, free speech rights (including the right to bribe electoral candidates) to corporations. Corporations have no flesh or blood at all, and we treat them better than we treat a lot of human beings, and other living things.

We have to drop racism and resist demonization. A horrible crime by a person or a small group of persons tells us nothing about a race or a religion or a nationality. We have to actively oppose fear and the manipulation it allows. We have to speak up for Muslims, for immigrants, for whistleblowers, for activists, for death row prisoners, for gays and lesbians, and for every human being who is treated as something less. This means we have to speak up, as well, for criminals, for murderers, for those we believe guilty of the most horrible crimes. They must have the right to a fair trial. They must not be placed into the box of non-humans called "enemy combatants." Murdering murderers -- not to mention using their crimes as an excuse for decades of war -- generates more hatred and more violence. Exposing and documenting, and then punishing, the crimes of murderers generates understanding, credibility, and respect.

Once we decide it's OK to abuse foreigners we don't know, it's a short step to the lawless killing of Americans who live abroad like Anwar al-Awlaki. Once we decide it's OK to strip Americans abroad of any rights, it's a short step to the lawless imprisonment and torture of an American whistleblower at home like Bradley Manning.

We have to start stepping in the other direction. Bradley Manning should be freed and honored. Anwar al-Awlaki should be given a fair trial if charged with a crime. And Dick Cheney should be given several fair trials as well.

Spanish prosecutor Baltasar Garzon is rightly honored for his efforts to enforce international laws. The internet is bringing the international pursuit of justice closer to us, and in fact humanizing humans at a pace our government can't keep up with. Our future comes out of a square in Cairo, not a drone command in Las Vegas. Today an international effort called the Stay Human Convoy leaves Tahrir Square to bring aid to the people of Gaza. Can we keep those people and ourselves part of the same humanity?

Eugene Debs showed his understanding of humanity when he said, "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

From here on out, let's have no more celebrations of anyone's death, but on that glorious day on which our government does not kill a single human being anywhere on earth, not with guns or drones or electric chairs, then let us sing and dance in the streets.

Read the rest of David Swanson's speech here.

Original Page: http://www.alternet.org/story/150967/the_american_war_machine_grinds_on%2C_with_little_care_for_the_innocent_dead_it_leaves_in_its_wake?page=entire

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U.S. Troops' Mental Health Continues to Erode

2011-05-21T01:49:00.001-07:00

U.S. Troops' Mental Health Continues to Erode

by Mark Thompson Thursday, battleland.blogs.time.com
May 19th 2011 9:41 AM

U.S. troops' minds are going to hell in a hand basket, according to the latest comprehensive survey of the mental health of U.S. soldiers and Marines waging war in Afghanistan.

"Psychologically, it is hard to imagine that these elevated levels of combat are not taking a toll on Soldiers," the study concludes. "Reports of acute stress symptoms among Soldiers surveyed in 2010 have significantly increased and reports of individual morale have significantly decreased relative to 2009."

The key findings in the study released Thursday morning are depressingly blunt. Here's a sampling of the conclusions from the 112-page report:

Among Army soldiers:

   -- Morale: Significant decline in reports of individual morale relative to 2009 and 2005.

    -- Psychological Problems: Acute stress rates significantly higher than rates from 2009 and 2005. Rates of combined psychological problem measure (acute stress, depression, or anxiety) significantly higher than 2005.

    -- Combat Exposures: Dramatic increase in combat exposure relative to 2009. Higher combat levels reported than in any previous MHAT to either OEF or OIF. [OEF is Operation Enduring Freedom -- the war in Afghanistan; OIF is Operation Iraqi Freedom -- the war in Iraq.]

    -- Multiple Deployments: More multiple deployers than in 2009. Soldiers on their third/fourth deployment report significantly more psychological problems and use of mental health medications than Soldiers on their first or second deployment.

Among Marines:

   -- Individual Morale: ...the percent of Marines reporting high or very high unit morale is significantly lower in 2010 than in 2006 or 2007.

    -- Psychological Problems: The rate of Marines reporting psychological problems (acute stress symptoms, depression or anxiety) is significantly higher in 2010 than in 2006 or 2007.

    -- Combat Exposures: Marines report dramatic increase in combat exposure relative to 2006 and 2007 in OIF.

    -- Sleep Problems: Significant increase in the percentage of Marines who report high or very high concern about not getting enough sleep. Sleep disruption primarily due to poor sleep environment (e.g., too hot, noisy, etc.).

    -- Multiple Deployments: Marines on three or more deployments report lower morale than those on first deployment. Multiple deploying Marines also show increased psychological problems.

All this bad news comes despite reported improvements in unit cohesion, leadership, and reduced barriers to getting mental-health care in theater.

Bottom line: the Pentagon's mental-health workers are fighting a valiant war for the minds of the nation's soldiers and Marines, but they continue to lose ground.

The Army-led seventh Mental Health Advisory Team surveyed combat soldiers and Marines (as opposed to those in support units) in both Afghanistan last summer to get an accurate picture of how they're faring, mentally, after nearly a decade of war. They surveyed 911 (a coincidence, I'm sure) and 335 Marines. It's a pretty impressive feat; in past conflicts such studies generally were conducted among soldiers after they returned home. It's known as "MHAT-7" around the Pentagon.

Other interesting findings:

-- 11.4% of soldiers were taking medication for sleep problems, up slightly from 2009's 9.6%. But 60% of those taking sleep meds also were drinking at least one highly-caffeinated energy drink a day. "It is difficult to determine if caffeine consumption is the cause or the effect," the study reported.

-- 3.7% of soldiers were taking medication for mental-health problems. That's up from 2.6% in 2009, an increase of 42%, although the report said the hike was "non-significant" and "well-within the National estimates for this demographic group."

-- IED blasts can cause PTSD. "Over 50% of the Soldiers reported being dismounted and within 50 meters of a blast at least once," the survey found. "This number is almost certainly an underestimate of the percent of Soldiers that will experience exposure to blast in a full 12 month tour."

-- In Iraq in 2006 -- the most violent period of that war -- 12.7% of Marines surveyed said they had killed an enemy combatant. Last year in Afghanistan, the number was 56.1%

The Army quoted many of the soldiers it surveyed. Grunts have griped since the days of the Roman Empire, of course. But after a decade of fighting, some of the recurring comments about poor command -- which can aggravate, if not trigger, mental-health ills -- are distressing. It certainly offers an unvarnished look inside a war that you can't get at a Pentagon briefing or Capitol Hill hearing. It's also more candid than reporters get when talking to troops; here, they are speaking, more or less, among themselves:

Leaving home station, we didn't have a clue what we were going to do here. Mission set has changed 6 times since in country ... be flexible, but not THAT flexible! We are mission jumping constantly.

Goals/standards are ridiculous ... you can't meet them if they keep changing. Doing the right thing here is wrong."

"There was no guidance from leadership on the goal of specific missions.

Role? I don't know if I am a platoon sergeant, squad leader, or team leader ... I still don't know my role and we are58 days out from coming home.

Info comes down, but we don't have a good understanding of it, but then we have to take it, try to make sense of it, and try to give It to our Joes. I know it doesn't make sense to them.

We had a large white board in the TOC [tactical operations center] for the purpose of writing down changes to the mission but the NCO wouldn't use it...instead he would keep the changes to himself.

You never get positive feedback, but you will get an -ss-chewing if you screw up ... They tell you what is not going to work.

There is no feedback at all from leadership.

Our platoon sergeant usually tells us that 'You guys are s--t bags for making me look bad.'

You want to throw 20 people into a 10 man tent and have us live like that for the past 9 months....REALLY.

Leadership was never NOT breathing down my neck...poor planning on many issues.

They use any sign of error to belittle you...focus is on failure to make themselves look better. Cruise control once we got here... it is nota problem until it is a catastrophe.

Nobody advocates for us. They never listen to the experts...they don't listen to the people that know. But I go toe-to-toe with them. I have to serve as the advocate. I get the blame though for everything that could go wrong.

Leadership is giving us Uunior enlisted] no support. They let themselves be walked all over.

They challenge us in unrealistic ways ... good idea fairy.

Leadership isn't teaching you how to fish, but instead they are just giving you a fish.

They are not engaged and have no concept about what is going on out there. They just don't get involved.

He [NCO] will send us to work while he stays back and watches TV.

They dictate methodology, don't innovate, and don't let others innovate either. Appearance means more than anything.

There is one solution and it's his solution.

It's their way or the highway.

They tell us to do it ourselves all the time...It's frustrating that when we do it ourselves they then come back and get mad at us because we didn't do it their way even though they didn't tell us how they wanted it done.

All my guys are hurt. No one cares. A guy with fractured foot is still going out on missions.

We survived a crash and all the NCO wanted to know was when we were going to be back to work.

Original Page: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/05/19/u-s-troops-mental-health-continues-to-erode/

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Armed Conflicts Claim Unprecedented Number of Civilians

2011-05-16T09:26:00.001-07:00

Armed Conflicts Claim Unprecedented Number of Civilians

by Thalif Dee, truthout.org
May 15th 2011

United Nations - Afghanistan, once described as the graveyard of empires, is ranked number one as the country with the most "significant rise" in civilian deaths last year, turning it into a veritable killing field, according to a new report by the London-based Minority Rights Group International (MRG).

The annual report, titled "Peoples Under Threat", says civilian killings in Afghanistan have increased every year in the last five years.

"And the continued weakness of the central government, internal disunity and systemic corruption contribute to the poor prognosis," the report notes.

According to the study released Thursday, this year's figure is expected to exceed the 3,000 civilians killed in 2010.

Mark Lattimer, MRG's executive director, told IPS the Taliban or other anti-government forces were responsible for 75 percent of these killings.

He said 440 civilian killings were ascribed to pro-government forces, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, including and U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces who are supportive of the government of President Hamid Karzai.

And over 170 of these civilians were killed in aerial attacks, he added.

Briefing the Security Council Tuesday, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos offered a higher figure for both civilian deaths and injuries. She said 7,000 civilians were killed and injured in Afghanistan last year, an increase of 19 percent over 2009.

Anti-government elements were reportedly responsible for over 5,000 of those deaths and injuries. Military operations by pro-government forces accounted for some 800 civilian casualties.

Improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks in civilian areas continue to cause large numbers of civilian deaths and injuries.

The Taliban's declaration last week of the start of a spring offensive "is of great concern", Amos told the Council.

The MRG study also singles out several other countries where civilian deaths have increased, including Cote d'Ivoire, Yemen, Kyrgyzstan and Libya.

Amos said she was appalled at the violence levelled against civilians in Bahrain, Yemen and more recently Syria, and at the loss of life and other human rights violations.

Other countries where civilians have borne the brunt of the attacks include Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Colombia, the Central African Republic and Sri Lanka, where 40,000 civilians "may have died in the final stages of the conflict" in May 2009.

"Some of these violations may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity," she said, pointing out that "international law requires that these allegations be properly investigated."

Asked how many of these civilians killings are under the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Lattimer of MRG noted that ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has opened an investigation into crimes committed in Libya, following referral of the situation by the Security Council in February.

"This may well lead to senior members of the government facing trial in The Hague," he told IPS.

Moreno-Ocampo has also undertaken preliminary investigations into killings in Cote d'Ivoire and Afghanistan.

Although Afghanistan has ratified the ICC statute, Lattimer said, it continues to be U.S. policy to resist any jurisdiction of the ICC over U.S. forces.

"Increasingly, we are seeing the ICC involved in more and more situations, and the threat of international criminal prosecution hanging over a wider set of leaders," he said.

But he pointed out that the chances of actual prosecutions also depend heavily on political factors, including which countries decide to ratify the ICC statute, and also which countries the Security Council is prepared to refer to the Court.

Amos told delegates the deliberate targeting of civilians or other flagrant disregard for well-being in violation of international humanitarian law during hostilities results in hundreds killed, injured, maimed and traumatised every week.

"This initial failure to respect the law is almost always the precursor to further violence, suffering and trauma inflicted upon civilians, including massive displacement within and across borders," she added.

Since her last briefing to the Security Council six months ago, Amos said, "We have witnessed an unprecedented series of crises in parts of the Middle East and parts of North and sub-Saharan Africa."

In its report, MRG says the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is unlikely to affect either the growth of local insurgencies or the ability of the Taliban to mount operations in Kabul and other major centres.

"And any further escalation of the conflict or major re-alignment of power in Kabul carries the risk of large-scale bloodshed in a country still split between the Pashtun-dominated south, heartland of the Taliban, and the largely Tajik-Uzbek strongholds of the former Northern Alliance," said Lattimer.

Meanwhile, Amos warned the Security Council that when it comes to protecting civilians in the conduct of hostilities, "The picture is stark and it will remain so in the absence of determined efforts by parties to conflict to comply with the law."

Clear and binding rules regulating the conduct of hostilities exist. It is the willingness of parties to conflict to respect and ensure respect for those rules including through the rigorous pursuit of accountability that is absent, she added.

Enhancing compliance with international law, particularly in the conduct of hostilities, is the first of the five core challenges identified in the last two reports of the U.N. secretary-general on the protection of civilians.

As those reports made clear, aside from the fundamental responsibility on the parties to conflict themselves, the Security Council too has a responsibility to promote compliance, she noted.

First, by using all available opportunities to condemn violations and to remind parties of, and demand compliance with, their obligations.

Second, by applying targeted sanctions against the leadership of parties that routinely violate their obligations to respect civilians.

And third, by promoting accountability, including by mandating commissions of inquiry to examine situations where concerns exist regarding serious violations, with a view to identifying the perpetrators and ensuring their prosecution at the national level, or referring the situation to the ICC.

Original Page: http://truthout.org/armed-conflicts-claim-unprecedented-number-civilians/1305482866

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Armed Conflicts Claim Unprecedented Number of Civilians

2011-05-13T20:49:00.001-07:00

Armed Conflicts Claim Unprecedented Number of Civilians

by Thalif Dee, commondreams.org
May 12th 2011

UNITED NATIONS - Afghanistan, once described as the graveyard of empires, is ranked number one as the country with the most "significant rise" in civilian deaths last year, turning it into a veritable killing field, according to a new report by the London-based Minority Rights Group International (MRG).

The annual report, titled "Peoples Under Threat", says civilian killings in Afghanistan have increased every year in the last five years.

"And the continued weakness of the central government, internal disunity and systemic corruption contribute to the poor prognosis," the report notes.

According to the study released Thursday, this year's figure is expected to exceed the 3,000 civilians killed in 2010.

Mark Lattimer, MRG's executive director, told IPS the Taliban or other anti-government forces were responsible for 75 percent of these killings.

He said 440 civilian killings were ascribed to pro-government forces, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, including and U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces who are supportive of the government of President Hamid Karzai.

And over 170 of these civilians were killed in aerial attacks, he added.

Briefing the Security Council Tuesday, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos offered a higher figure for both civilian deaths and injuries. She said 7,000 civilians were killed and injured in Afghanistan last year, an increase of 19 percent over 2009.

Anti-government elements were reportedly responsible for over 5,000 of those deaths and injuries. Military operations by pro-government forces accounted for some 800 civilian casualties.

Improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks in civilian areas continue to cause large numbers of civilian deaths and injuries.

The Taliban's declaration last week of the start of a spring offensive "is of great concern", Amos told the Council.

The MRG study also singles out several other countries where civilian deaths have increased, including Cote d'Ivoire, Yemen, Kyrgyzstan and Libya.

Amos said she was appalled at the violence levelled against civilians in Bahrain, Yemen and more recently Syria, and at the loss of life and other human rights violations.

Other countries where civilians have borne the brunt of the attacks include Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Colombia, the Central African Republic and Sri Lanka, where 40,000 civilians "may have died in the final stages of the conflict" in May 2009.

"Some of these violations may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity," she said, pointing out that "international law requires that these allegations be properly investigated."

Asked how many of these civilians killings are under the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Lattimer of MRG noted that ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has opened an investigation into crimes committed in Libya, following referral of the situation by the Security Council in February.

"This may well lead to senior members of the government facing trial in The Hague," he told IPS.

Moreno-Ocampo has also undertaken preliminary investigations into killings in Cote d'Ivoire and Afghanistan.

Although Afghanistan has ratified the ICC statute, Lattimer said, it continues to be U.S. policy to resist any jurisdiction of the ICC over U.S. forces.

"Increasingly, we are seeing the ICC involved in more and more situations, and the threat of international criminal prosecution hanging over a wider set of leaders," he said.

But he pointed out that the chances of actual prosecutions also depend heavily on political factors, including which countries decide to ratify the ICC statute, and also which countries the Security Council is prepared to refer to the Court.

Amos told delegates the deliberate targeting of civilians or other flagrant disregard for well-being in violation of international humanitarian law during hostilities results in hundreds killed, injured, maimed and traumatised every week.

"This initial failure to respect the law is almost always the precursor to further violence, suffering and trauma inflicted upon civilians, including massive displacement within and across borders," she added.

Since her last briefing to the Security Council six months ago, Amos said, "We have witnessed an unprecedented series of crises in parts of the Middle East and parts of North and sub-Saharan Africa."

In its report, MRG says the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is unlikely to affect either the growth of local insurgencies or the ability of the Taliban to mount operations in Kabul and other major centres.

"And any further escalation of the conflict or major re-alignment of power in Kabul carries the risk of large-scale bloodshed in a country still split between the Pashtun-dominated south, heartland of the Taliban, and the largely Tajik-Uzbek strongholds of the former Northern Alliance," said Lattimer.

Meanwhile, Amos warned the Security Council that when it comes to protecting civilians in the conduct of hostilities, "The picture is stark and it will remain so in the absence of determined efforts by parties to conflict to comply with the law."

Clear and binding rules regulating the conduct of hostilities exist. It is the willingness of parties to conflict to respect and ensure respect for those rules including through the rigorous pursuit of accountability that is absent, she added.

Enhancing compliance with international law, particularly in the conduct of hostilities, is the first of the five core challenges identified in the last two reports of the U.N. secretary-general on the protection of civilians.

As those reports made clear, aside from the fundamental responsibility on the parties to conflict themselves, the Security Council too has a responsibility to promote compliance, she noted.

First, by using all available opportunities to condemn violations and to remind parties of, and demand compliance with, their obligations.

Second, by applying targeted sanctions against the leadership of parties that routinely violate their obligations to respect civilians.

And third, by promoting accountability, including by mandating commissions of inquiry to examine situations where concerns exist regarding serious violations, with a view to identifying the perpetrators and ensuring their prosecution at the national level, or referring the situation to the ICC.

Original Page: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/12-6

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Defense Contractors Using Prison Labor to Build High-Tech Weapons Systems

2011-05-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

Defense Contractors Using Prison Labor to Build High-Tech Weapons Systems

by Mike Elk, alternet.org
April 28th 2011 Photo Credit: miss_millions

It is a little known fact of the attack on Libya that some of the components of the cruise missiles being launched into the country mayl have been made by prisoners in the United States. According to its website, UNICOR, which is the organization that represents Federal Prison Industries, “supplies numerous electronic components and service for guided missiles, including the Patriot Advanced Capability Missile (PAC-3)”.

In addition to constructing electronic components for missiles, prison labor in the United States is used to make electronic cables for defense items like “the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing (BA) F-15, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, Bell/Textron’s (TXT) Cobra helicopter, as well as electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems”.

Traditionally these types of defense jobs would have gone to highly paid, unionized workers. However the prison workers building parts for these missiles earn a starting wage of 23 cents an hour and can only make a maximum of $1.15 an hour. Nearly 1 in 100 adults are in jail in the United States and are exempt from our minimum wage laws, creating a sizable captive workforce that could undercut outside wage standards.

"It's no different than when our government allowed a United Steelworkers-represented factory of several hundred good jobs in Indiana called Magnequench to shut down," United Steelworkers Public Affairs Director Gary Hubbard told AlterNet. "This was the last high-tech magnetics production plant in the U.S. that made guidance components for missiles and smart bombs. The factory was sold to a Chinese state enterprise that moved all the machinery to China. And now we depend on prison labor to build our defense products?"

As the governments look to cut costs and trim deficits, they are giving more and more contracts for skilled work to prisons, whose workers often make 1/15th of the wages they would earn in the private sector. Whereas in the past prisoners made license plates and desks for state offices, they are now being trained for skilled work doing everything from assembling cable components for guided missiles to underwater repair welding. Even the much heralded green jobs aren’t immune to being outsourced to prison -- the solar panels being used to provide electricity for the State Department’s office in Washington, D.C. are constructed with prison labor.

States are increasingly expanding the type of products they use prison labor for to help cover the cost of keeping a person in prison -- nearly $29,000 per year. States spend a whopping $60 billion dollars per year to maintain prisons, one of every 15 state dollars is spent on prisons, and corrections spending is the second fastest-growing expenditure in state budgets. Prisons are popular in small town America because they often mean bringing several hundred jobs to economically depressed communities. Thus many are in favor using incarcerated labor to pay for prisons because they work as a means of economic development.

According to the New York Times, “Using inmate labor has created unusual alliances: liberal humanitarian groups that advocate more education and exercise in prisons find themselves supporting proposals from conservative budget hawks to get inmates jobs, often outdoors, where they can learn new skills. Having a job in prison has been linked in studies to decreased violence, improved morale and lowered recidivism." Michael P. Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, told the Times, “At the grossest financial level, it’s just savings. You can cut the government worker, save the salary and still maintain the service, and you’re providing a skill for when they leave.”

For many people, prison labor looks like an easy win-win. Workers get skills, the state is able to pay for more prisons as the prison population grows, and local towns are eager to get prisons for the jobs they bring. But is it really a win-win for all?

“At first, giving people in prison a job looks like a good idea. The prisoner gets the job skill and a few extra dollars, the state takes some payment to let it happen, and the industry gets the work done. But this is not a win-win situation” says prison expert and SEIU senior research analyst Eric Lotke. “It’s actually a lose-lose. The person in prison is paid far less than a real wage negotiated by free people in a free market economy. So free-market wages are undercut, driving wages down in the real economy. Meanwhile, business gets an incentive to lock people up for convict labor and the state loses its financial incentive to improve its criminal justice policies.“

In some cases, forced prison labor has resulted in inmates being brutalized rather than rehabilitated. Last year, Georgia inmates went on strike at six prisons for over a week. They complained that they were beaten if they refused to work prison jobs for little or sometimes no pay.

Prison experts like Lotke say that while such jobs can be valuable in a productive environment, there are different ways to do things. “You could pay workers union wages and incur it into an account for when they are released. This would give them an incentive to behave well while they are in prison and give them a financial base for when they get out of prison,” he said.

Lotke’s union, SEIU, which represents many government service workers whose jobs are threatened by slave wage prison labor, is looking at ways to invest in programs that will help create jobs. SEIU is working with state governments to dedicate resources away from prisons and into government services that keep people out of prison like education, after school programs and other services that create good jobs in underdeveloped communities.

“The prison industry is extraordinarily destabilizing because small towns want the jobs that prisons create. However, Its all backwards—a small town could get a highway or a university or a grant for a factory—any of these things could create jobs,“ says Lotke. “We could be investing in good jobs, creating the conditions where poor youth don’t turn to crime out of economic frustration. Instead we replicate the problem by throwing all this money at the prison system. When people realize what a waste of money, economic opportunity, and how ineffective it is to have so many people locked up, that is when we finally solve the criminal justice and jobs problem in this country”.

The effort by SEIU to move resources away from prisons is a bold one, as prison guard unions have traditionally lobbied heavily to expand the number of correctional facilities in places like California. But as public sector union workers lose their jobs and other services are cut to keep prisons open, more unions are realizing they have to do something or their jobs are going to be lost in a race to the bottom with America’s cheapest labor – incarcerated labor.

Original Page: http://www.alternet.org/story/150777/defense_contractors_using_prison_labor_to_build_high-tech_weapons_systems?page=entire

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Soldiers hospitalized for suicidal thoughts increased 7000 percent over pas

2011-05-09T12:19:00.001-07:00

Soldiers hospitalized for suicidal thoughts increased 7000 percent over past five years: study

by Nina Mandell, nydailynews.com
May 6th 2011 12:22 PM

The rate of soldiers hospitalized for having suicidal thoughts has soared a staggering 7,000% in the last five years, a new Pentagon report says.

The report, which covers the period from the fourth year troops were in Afghanistan and the third year they were in Iraq, is the latest troubling survey on potential suicides in the military.

* The Army reported last month there in March had been eight reported potential suicides involving soldiers who were not on active duty, and seven potential suicides among active duty soldiers.

* A study released in March found the suicide rate for female soldiers tripled while at war between 2004 and 2009 compared to soldiers who were not overseas.

* Five months ago, another survey found suicides had doubled among National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve soldiers from 65 in 2009 to 145 in 2010.

"Suicide is a symptom of a bigger problem," Gen. Pete Chiarelli, the army's top anti-suicide advocate told Time Magazine.

"It is rarely based on a single factor, but from work, health, finance and relationship problems."

The Pentagon says a new diagnostic code and greater awareness of the problem could be helping to drive the numbers higher.

The Defense Department has focused on improving suicide prevention among its troops who suffer from high rates of mental illness following their returns from war zones.

"Efforts to improve suicide prevention awareness, education and support that is readily available to all members of the Army family continue to be of paramount importance," said Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of the Army Health Promotion, Risk Reduction Task Force.

"Informed and engaged leaders at every level help foster a sense of responsibility in soldiers, Army civilians and family members."

"Leaders will reduce the stigma associated with seeking help by promoting positive behavioral health opportunities that include physical, emotional, social, family and spiritual well-being."

Original Page: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/05/06/2011-05-06_soldiers_hospitalized_for_suicidal_thoughts_increased_7000_percent_over_past_fiv.html

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Barbara Lee: End the War Now

2011-05-05T10:27:00.001-07:00

Barbara Lee: End the War Now

by Cynthia Gordy, theroot.com
May 4th 2011 6:01 PM

Congress's lone dissenting voter against the war in Afghanistan talks about the killing of bin Laden, and why she's a peace advocate but not a pacifist.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was the sole member of Congress to vote against the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, a decision all the more controversial against the backdrop of post-9/11 fear and pain. Nearly 10 years later, and in the wake of the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the progressive lawmaker tells The Root that she remains committed to ending the war -- and sees, in this moment, a critical opportunity to accelerate that mission.

Lee's appeal to bring U.S. troops home has been echoed by several other congressional Democrats, as well as much of the public. An April Pew Research Center poll found that only 44 percent of Americans want troops to stay in Afghanistan "until the situation has stabilized," compared with 50 percent who want a pullout as soon as possible. Among African Americans, the war has long been even more unpopular.

Taking a moment away from her renewed anti-war push on Capitol Hill, Lee spoke with The Root about military strategy, how the anti-war movement has developed beyond its hippie roots and why the death of Osama bin Laden has only made her more determined.

The Root: You released a statement on Monday, which said that you're hopeful we can start addressing "the root causes of terrorism around the world." What do you mean?

Barbara Lee: It's not complex. Many of the issues around terrorism have to do with -- and I'm not saying this addresses all of the root causes -- but when you're looking at poverty, hunger, the suppression of freedoms in countries, no education and young people with no future, then of course that's sowing the seeds for terrorism. I think our foreign policy has to recognize smart security. Congresswoman [Lynn] Woolsey has a bill, which I helped put together and of which I'm a co-sponsor, that puts forth a path recognizing that this is a very complex issue, and that military-first, boots-on-the-ground strategy is really not going to work.

TR: President Obama had always said that he would withdraw troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. Do you think a few more months is too long?

BL: July was the date, but we don't want to see just the surge numbers -- something like 30,000 troops -- come down. We want to see the beginning of the end. The Democratic National Committee unanimously voted for my resolution at its recent meeting, calling for a significant and sizable reduction this July. We think this moment presents an opening to begin that reduction. We're pushing forward with the White House to make good on that promise. It's very important that it include not only our forces but also our contractors. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the more hostility and anger we're going to get. There's no military solution, as I think most experts have indicated. We have to have a negotiated peace settlement, not to mention the resources.

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TR: So what do you want to see happen specifically?

BL: I understand it has to be practical -- it can't be tomorrow. The bill that I've introduced, and we're picking up a lot of co-sponsors, says, no more funding for combat operations. That's the distinction between an immediate cutoff of funds and doing this in a reasonable way.

TR: In your remarks after the killing of bin Laden, you also commended President Obama and the military for the operation. Do you see any contradiction between that and your stance against the war?

BL: No. What the president did was very focused, targeted and minimized collateral damage. My head is not in the sand and never has been. My vote right after the horrific events of 9/11 was against a blank check. That resolution allowed for the United States to go to war, but gave any president -- Bush then, Obama now, and any future president -- the authorization to use force and go to war in perpetuity. That is not an appropriate response for achieving global peace and security ...

When you look at what has taken place, with regard to Iraq and other wars, that authorization voted on by the Congress then still stands today. I'm trying to repeal that authorization, and I have legislation to do that. It's important to understand that we can't go to war on every issue that arises as it relates to our national security.

TR: Part of the mission in Afghanistan has been giving support and aid to Pakistan, where we send almost $1.3 billion annually. Given bin Laden's location in a Pakistan suburb, and suspicions that the Pakistani government knew his whereabouts, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for reviewing, and possibly cutting, aid to the country. Do you agree with that?

BL: I think we have to look at what has taken place. I was on the House Foreign Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee until the Republicans gained the majority, and I know quite a bit about what we've done in Pakistan. I think the irresponsible thing to do in a country such as Pakistan, which we know has nuclear weapons, would be to cut off military aid. We have to take a hard look at our aid to Pakistan -- and that may mean a restructuring of some of our financial mechanisms and the level of funding -- but we have to make sure our funds reach the people who need them the most.

I don't think we should become isolationists, for lack of a better word. We need to review it, and see what's working and what isn't working, but we definitely should not cut off aid and our relationship with Pakistan.

TR: The anti-war movement is often criticized as being based on '60s pacifist ideals -- and not understanding the reality of the times we live in. How do you respond to that critique?

BL: I think the anti-war movement has moved past that. We understand that terrorism is real, and we're not looking at the war through rose-colored glasses. I also know that you have to look at a smarter way to address the new, asymmetrical warfare -- because we're not in the Cold War era anymore. So, many of the Cold War-era weapons that are still in production should be cut out of the defense budget totally.

We're seeing many progressives now looking at a smarter security strategy, seeking global peace and security. That means we have to look at the causes of terrorism, and we have to have a response. We have to make sure that civil liberties are not eroded in light of security measures that must be taken in United States. We have to be very careful there's a balance between national security and civil liberties.

There are many nuances and new issues that have emerged now as it relates to foreign policy and national security. I'm a peace advocate. I'm not a pacifist. My dad was a 25-year military officer. But I also know that wars create more violence and less national security. For the most part, many of these recent wars have created a world that is more dangerous.

Cynthia Gordy is The Root's Washington reporter.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Links:
[1] http://www.theroot.com/user/35211
[2] http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=1233
[3] http://articles.cnn.com/2009-12-23/politics/afghanistan.poll_1_afghanistan-new-national-poll-cnn-poll?_s=PM:POLITICS
[4] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.CON.RES.392:
[5] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/26/afghanistan_n_828710.html
[6] http://www.facebook.com/theroot
[7] http://www.twitter.com/theroot247
[8] http://www.lee.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=296&sectiontree=38,75,296

Original Page: http://www.theroot.com/print/52157

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The killing of Osama bin Laden: Obama=?UTF-8?B?4oCZcyDigJxoaXN0b3I=?=ic moment ”

2011-05-04T14:49:00.001-07:00

The killing of Osama bin Laden: Obama’s “historic moment”

wsws.org | May 4th 2011

Of all the images that have emerged from the morally unclean events of Sunday night, the most politically significant and, one has reason to believe, enduring will prove to be the official photograph, released by the White House, of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other high officials of the United States government seated together in the situation room as they witnessed the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other human beings, including one woman.

Normally, the witnesses to an execution are not photographed. But the White House clearly wanted this “historic moment” captured for posterity. The eyes of all the participants in this ghoulish tableau—with the exception of a military officer who is working his computer—are apparently focused on a television screen. Obama, leaning forward, is stone faced as he stares ahead. Gates wears the sour expression of a man who is too well acquainted with such operations. Hillary Clinton’s right hand is raised over her mouth, a gesture that betrays the horror of what is unfolding before her eyes.

After bin Laden had been liquidated, the White House and the media moved quickly to orchestrate the celebration of what was, in fact, an extra-legal state killing. The president chose the East Room to inform the nation, late Sunday night, of bin Laden’s death.

Obama, so desperately anxious to associate himself with the killing, no doubt believes that this is the “defining” event of his presidency. But what does this conception—so enthusiastically endorsed by the media—say about the political and moral condition of the government of the United States?

The scenes that followed the announcement of bin Laden’s liquidation—or, to be more precise, those reported and encouraged by the media—have been ugly and degrading. The grunting of “USA! USA!”—a chant which was unknown in the United States until it was incited by the filthy chauvinism of sportscasters who disgraced the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles—has over the last quarter century assumed the character of a public ritual. Of course, very few people are involved in such displays of political backwardness. But they are featured and promoted by the media to intimidate the public, suppress critical thought, and encourage a sense of political and emotional isolation among all those who are not prepared to surrender their democratic principles and moral integrity.

By now, what words can one find to describe the mass media in the United States? The response to the killing of bin Laden exposes yet again the degree to which the distinction between news and propaganda has been virtually effaced. In an unintentionally revealing comment, as the networks awaited Obama’s speech, CNN’s principal anchor, Wolf Blitzer, informed his audience that the network had received a message from the White House complimenting CNN for its “responsible” coverage of the unfolding events. This compliment, which would be received with shame by a serious journalist, was reported by Blitzer with pride.

The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times carries a banner headline: “Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden.” The article that follows is not a news lead, but rather a work of bootlicking propaganda. We read: “For an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism for a string of intelligence failures over the past decade, Bin Laden’s killing brought a measure of redemption. For a military that has slogged through two, and now three vexing wars in Muslim countries, it provided an unalloyed success. And for a president whose national security leadership has come under question, it proved an affirming moment that will enter the history books.”

So much for a critical examination of the clear illegality of the incursion into Pakistan and the killing itself, let alone an investigation of the mass of unanswered questions and contradictions raised by the Obama administration’s version of events. In fact, by Tuesday night the initial claims that bin Laden had been killed rifle in hand were refuted by later reports that he was unarmed when he was shot to death.

The Times’ lead editorial is no less celebratory. It begins: “The news that Osama bin Laden has been tracked and killed by American forces filled us, and all Americans, with a great sense of relief.”

Aside from the Times’ unwarranted presumption that it speaks for “all Americans,” why should the killing of a man who has been in hiding for a decade and who was, as is almost universally acknowledged, incapable of significantly influencing, let alone directing events, produce “relief?” Why should the “relief” over his killing outweigh the profound concern that should be aroused by the far-reaching and long-lasting consequences and implications of the United States’ extra-legal killing of an individual? Not surprisingly, the Times fails to note that the murder of bin Laden occurred just one day after the United States and NATO killed the son and three grandchildren of Muammar Gaddafi in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Libyan leader.

The media proclaims over and over the “historic” significance of the killing of bin Laden. It has not been able, however, to explain precisely why this event is of such monumental significance. Neither Obama nor the media have sought to suggest that bin Laden’s death will bring an end to the wars and occupations in which the United States is engaged. Quite the opposite: the New York Times declared, in the same above-cited editorial, “Even as we now breathe a bit more easily, we must also remember that the fight against extremists is far from over.” In other words, the wars will continue. Another bogeyman will soon be found, or invented, to take the place of bin Laden.

The misuse of the term “historic” to describe Sunday’s killing is not merely an example of journalistic exaggeration. It expresses a delusional belief within the American ruling class that it can through acts of wanton violence determine the course of history.

But the movement of history is shaped by processes, economic and social, that are far more powerful than the American military.

The inexorable decay of American capitalism continues. During the last 20 years, despite the endless series of military engagements and wars, it has not been possible for the ruling class to restore the global economic position of the United States. During the week that preceded bin Laden’s killing, the US dollar fell to historic lows.

American capitalism remains mired in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. The national government teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. The states are starved of resources. The social infrastructure is breaking down. The greed, corruption and parasitism of the super-rich are provoking ever greater popular indignation. But the political system is incapable of responding to popular demands for social reform and economic relief.

As with so many of the previous events deemed “historic” by American presidents and the media—the capture of Saddam Hussein being among the more recent—this one too will be quickly overtaken by the unforeseen consequences of the reckless decisions from which it emerged. Obama’s “historic moment” will soon prove to be only another sordid episode in the political, economic and moral putrefaction of the American ruling class.

David North

Original Page: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/pers-m04.shtml

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The US Patriot Reflex

2011-05-04T14:34:00.001-07:00

m.guardian.co.uk

m.guardian.co.uk In one episode of The Simpsons the school bell rings, prompting the students to sprint for the door before the end of a history lesson. The teacher pleads with them to let him finish. "Wait a minute! " he says. "You didn't learn how World War II ended!" There's silence as the class waits expectantly. "We won!" shouts the teacher. Delighted, the class cheers, as one: "U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!" The patriotic impulse in American society is intense and pervasive. The kind of national fervour reserved elsewhere for occasional events like royal weddings, World Cup victories or major tragedies is a dormant reflex waiting for a trigger. The flags are always out; the pledge is recited every day in schools. The muscle that converts shared citizenship into a form of national genius is well-trained and prepared. By the early hours of Sunday morning, as hundreds poured into the streets to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden, it was flexed and ready to do battle. By lunchtime Jack Bauer, the terror-fighting star of the television series 24, was trending on Twitter. In the evening Comedy Central's leftwing dynamic duo took the baton. Jon Stewart declared: "We're back, baby," while Stephen Colbert called on al-Qaida to "suck on [his] giant American balls". The comment may have been half in jest, but the audience cheered in earnest. While many nations suffered from al-Qaida's terrorism and few in the world will mourn Bin Laden's death, the United States is the only place where it sparked spontaneous outpourings of raucous jubilation. The national unity that Barack Obama has sought to harness following the announcement is indeed eerily familiar. Albeit in joy rather than sorrow, it's the same kind of unity that followed 9/11. It is also the same kind of unity that rallies around flags, dismisses dissent and disdains reflection. And however comforting it may have been at the time, the consequences of that kind of unity has been disastrous. The reason Bin Laden's death was a source of such elation is in part because almost every other American response to 9/11 is regarded as a partial or total failure. Two thirds of the people believe that the Iraq invasion was not worth it, and the country is evenly divided on the issue of whether the invasion Afghanistan is a good idea. The public mostly supports keeping Guantánamo open – but nonetheless concedes that doing so will fuel anti-American sentiment. So the frustration of the last decade, during which the limits of America's military superiority were tested and found wanting, had their outlet in the murder of a single man at the hands of a crack team of US Navy Seals. Having effectively declared war on the world it is hardly a surprise that Bin Laden would come to this kind of end. This was not so much the exercise of American power as the performance of it. Coming eight years to the day after George W Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce "Mission accomplished" in Iraq, news of Bin Laden's death was yet another mediated milestone in this war on an abstract noun. Like the capture of Saddam Hussein, the murder of Bin Laden changes little. Al-Qaida was never a top-down organisation, and was in decline anyhow – and the principal reason for its waning fortunes is the uprisings in the Arab world, revolts that have mostly taken place against America's client states. But to suggest that "justice has been done", as President Obama did on Sunday night, seems perverse. This was not justice, it was an extra-judicial execution. If you shoot a man twice in the head you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed. Given the nature of the 9/11 attacks a popular desire for vengeance in the US is a perfectly understandable and legitimate emotional response. It is not, however, a foreign policy. And if vengeance is a comprehensible human emotion then empathy is no less so. Americans have a right to grieve and remember those who died on 9/11. But they have no monopoly on memory, grief or anger. Hundreds and thousands of innocent Afghanis, Iraqis and Pakistanis have been murdered as a result of America's response to 9/11. If it's righteous vengeance they're after, Americans would not be first in line. Fortunately it is not a competition, and there is enough misery to go around. But those who chant "We killed Bin Laden" cannot display their identification with American power so completely and then expect others to understand it as partial. The American military has done many things in this region. Killing Bin Laden is just one of them. If "they" killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad then "they" also bombed a large number of wedding parties in Afghanistan, "they" murdered 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha and "they" gang-raped a 14-year-old before murdering her, her six-year-old sister and their parents near Mahmudiyah. If "they" don't want to be associated with the atrocities then "they" need to find more to celebrate than an assassination. Vengeance is, in no small part, what got us here. It won't get us out.

Original Page: http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/03/bin-laden-death-us-patriot-reflex?cat=commentisfree&type=article

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In bin Laden killing, media -- as usual -- regurgitates false Government cl

2011-05-03T16:21:00.001-07:00

In bin Laden killing, media -- as usual -- regurgitates false Government claims

by Glenn Greenwal, mobile.salon.com
May 3rd 2011 5:04 AM

Virtually every major newspaper account of the killing of Osama bin Laden consists of faithful copying of White House claims. That's not surprising: it's the White House which is in exclusive possession of the facts, but what's also not surprising is that many of the claims that were disseminated yesterday turned out to be utterly false. And no matter how many times this happens -- from Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight against Iraqi captors to Pat Tillman's death at the hands of Evil Al Qaeda fighters -- it never changes: the narrative is set forever by first-day government falsehoods uncritically amplified by establishment media outlets, which endure no matter how definitively they are disproven in subsequent days.

Yesterday, it was widely reported that bin Laden "resisted" his capture and "engaged in a firefight" with U.S. forces (leaving most people, including me, to say that his killing was legally justified because he was using force). It was also repeatedly claimed that bin Laden used a women -- his wife -- has a human shield to protect himself, and that she was killed as a result. That image -- of a cowardly through violent-to-the-end bin Laden -- framed virtually every media narrative of the event all over the globe. And it came from many government officials, principally Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan.

Those claims have turned out to be utterly false. From TPM toda:

It was a fitting end for the America's most wanted man. As President Barack Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan told it, a cowardly Osama bin Laden used his own wife as a human shield in his final moments. Except that apparently wasn't what happened at all.

Hours later, other administration officials were clarifying Brennan's account. Turns out the woman that was killed on the compound wasn't bin Laden's wife. Bin Laden may have not even been using a human shield. And he might not have even been holding a gun.

Politico's Josh Gerstein adds: "The White House backed away Monday evening from key details in its narrative about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, including claims by senior U.S. officials that the Al Qaeda leader had a weapon and may have fired it during a gun battle with U.S. forces." Gerstein added: "a senior White House official said bin Laden was not armed when he was killed."

Whether bin Laden actually resisted his capture may not matter to many people; the White House also claimed that they would have captured him if they had the chance, and this fact seems to negate that claim as well. But what does matter is how dutifully American media outlets publish as "news reports" what are absolutely nothing other than official White House statements masquerading as an investigative article. And the fact that this process continuously produces highly and deliberately misleading accounts of the most significant news items -- falsehoods which endure no matter how decisively they are debunked in subsequent days -- doesn't have the slightest impact on the American media's eagerness to continue to serve this role.

* * * * *

Mona Eltahwy has an excellent column in The Guardian today headlined: "No dignity at Ground Zero. As a US Muslim I abhor the frat boy reaction."

Speaking of "frat boy reactions," Leon Panetta is excitingly speculating about which actors should portray him in the movie about the Hunt for bin Laden, helpfully suggesting Al Pacino. It's been a long time since Americans felt this good and strong about themselves -- nothing like putting bullets in someone's skull and dumping their corpse into an ocean to rejuvenate that can-do American sense of optimism.

Original Page: http://mobile.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/03/propaganda_bin_laden/index.html

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Beyond Retaliation

2011-05-03T16:19:00.001-07:00

Beyond Retaliation

by Kathy Kelly, commondreams.org
May 3rd 2011

This morning, a reporter called to talk about the news that the U.S. has killed Osama bin Laden. Referring to throngs of young people celebrating outside the White House, the reporter asked what Voices would say if we had a chance to speak with those young people.

We'd want to tell them about a group of people who, in November of 2001, walked from Washington, D.C. to New York City carrying a banner that said, "Our Grief is not a Cry for War." Several of the walkers were people who had lost their loved ones in the attacks on 9/11. When the walk ended, they formed a group called "Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" to continually represent the belief that our security is not founded in violence and revenge.

Often, during that walk, participants were asked what we'd suggest as an alternative to invading Afghanistan. One response was that the U.S. and other countries could enact a criminal investigation and rely on police work and intelligence to apprehend the perpetrators of the attack. As it turns out, the U.S. discovered where Osama bin Laden was through those means and not through warfare. How have the past ten years of aerial bombardments, night raids, death squads, assassinations and drone attacks in Afghanistan benefited the U.S. people? Did the carnage and bloodshed bring the U.S. closer to discovering the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden? Have we defeated terrorism or created greater, deeper hatred toward the U.S.?

In the past, President Obama has said that "we stand on the shoulders of giants like Dr. King, yet our future progress will depend on how we prepare our next generation of leaders" (Jan. 18, 2010). In a historic speech, "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence", King said: "We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate."

In that same speech, King called for a neighborliness that goes beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation. We think of that call in light of experiences of a 2010 Voices delegation that visited a rural village in the central highlands of Afghanistan. They sat with women who were close in age to the young people who were celebrating outside of the White House last night. Asked if they had ever heard of a time when a large passenger plane had crashed into a tall building in the United States, the young women were puzzled. They had never heard of 9/11.

They live in a country where 850 children die every day, a country which the UN has termed the worst country in the world into which a child can be born, where the average life expectancy is 42 years of age. The UN says that 7.4 million Afghans live with hunger and fear of starvation, while millions more rely on food help, and one in five children die before the age of five. Each week, the U.S. taxpayers spend two billion dollars to continue the war in Afghanistan.

Matt Daloisio, who co-coordinates the Witness Against Torture Campaign, sounded a note that we find far more authentic than triumphal celebration.

"10 years," Matt wrote. "Over 6000 US Soldiers killed. Trillions of Dollars wasted. Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Tens of thousands imprisoned. Torture as part of foreign policy. And we are supposed to celebrate the murder of one person? I am not excited. I am not happy. I remain profoundly sad."

Original Page: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/03-6

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Bring troops home

2011-04-29T12:09:00.001-07:00

Bring troops home

sbsun.com | Apr 26th 2011 8:18 AM There have been several incidents in several months where American troops were killed either by Afghanistan police trainees or Afghanistan soldiers who were being trained by American troops.

In the meantime, the Afghan people, in a recent poll, indicated that almost 90 percent of the population wanted to see American and U.N. soldiers leave Afghanistan. They referred to Americans as invaders.

Earlier this month it was reported that an early morning drone missile and helicopter attack by accident had killed and injured a large number of Afghanistan citizens, mostly women and children. The American Army commander personally apologized to the Afghanistan president.

When is this madness in Afghanistan and Iraq going to end? Our president when he was running for office made promises of bringing the troops home upon his election. This has not happened. Even though an election was completed in Iraq over six months ago, they still do not have a stable government in place.

This stupidity seems to continue because after eight years we don't have a remote idea of what victory in Afghanistan is going to look like. Even with all of the fighting, the numerical numbers of the Taliban seem to be increasing, not decreasing. What progress have we made in eight years?

Let's not stand on formality and try to be heroes, but rather face reality that we may have gotten ourselves into a mess we will not be able to resolve and cure.

In the meantime,

the more than a trillion dollars that we have spent on these useless wars could better be spent in an America that has hungry people and many millions of unemployed people trying to figure out a way to eat and obtain shelter for their families.

Let us get realistic and bring our troops home and do it now. Loyal Americans support our troops. We can show our support by making sure that our troops are safe, healthy and free from danger. We do not support our troops when we put them in harm's way and the people that they are seeking to help don't even appreciate the heroic work and sacrifice that our troops are making.

PHILIP KASSEL
San Bernardino

Original Page: http://www.sbsun.com/letters/ci_17935656

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Where is the antiwar movement=?UTF-8?B?PyAgLyAgIFdhZw==?=ing Nonviolence

2011-04-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

Where is the antiwar movement? / Waging Nonviolence

by Eric Stoner, wagingnonviolence.org
April 27th 2011

With the US now prosecuting three wars abroad, NPR asks why more people aren’t on the streets. In the article, Linton Weeks and the folks he interviews offer several possible reasons, including the lack of a draft, which helped mobilize the peace movement against the war in Vietnam, greater control over coverage of war in the mainstream media, and the fact that the “defense” industry is now such a large part of our economy.

Executive vice president of the CATO Institute David Boaz argues that the movement was deflated and has never recovered from the election of Barack Obama:

To buttress his assertions, Boaz cites a recently published study of anti-war protesters. The research was conducted by Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University. It concludes that the anti-war movement in America evaporated because Democrats — inspired to protest by their anti-Republican feelings — stopped protesting once the Democratic Party achieved success in Congress in 2006 and then in the White House in 2008.

One other factor that has made organizing against war more difficult, but isn’t mentioned in the article, is the dramatic decline in US casualties in war since Vietnam. In Vietnam, more than 58,000 Americans were killed. Thanks to the growing use of robotics, the privatization of war and improvements in medicine, among other reasons, in Iraq and Afghanistan just over 6,000 US soldiers have died – essentially one-tenth the US casualties in Vietnam.

These are the challenges that the antiwar movement faces. Given these changed circumstances, how can those opposed to the ongoing wars still motivate people to take action? In what ways can the peace movement make the true costs of war real to more Americans, who seem to be worried about everything but war?

And perhaps those aren’t even the right questions to be asking. Maybe it’s more a question of creating a new type of activism that is more appealing to folks who have never gotten involved before.

Original Page: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/04/where-is-the-antiwar-movement/

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EDITORIAL: The peacenik hypocrites

2011-04-24T19:00:00.001-07:00

EDITORIAL: The peacenik hypocrites

by THE WASHINGTON TIMES-The, washingtontimes.com
April 23rd 2011

American troops are dying in Afghanistan in record numbers, drone-launched mis-siles are killing more people in Pakistan, American aircraft are carrying out missions over Libya, terrorist detainees are facing military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, and WikiLeaker Pfc. Bradley Manning is allegedly being tortured. Despite all this grist, the antiwar movement in 2011 is a shadow of its Bush-era self. The obvious explanation for this is that there is a Democrat in the White House, and according to a new study, this simple answer is largely correct.

“The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization of the Antiwar Movement in the United States, 2007-2009,” by Michael T. Heaney of the University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University, appeared in the March 2011 edition of the journal Mobilization. The study was based on 5,398 surveys of demonstrators at antiwar protests over three years and numerous interviews with movement leaders. It’s one of the most comprehensive studies undertaken of the contemporary antiwar rabble.

The authors chronicle the collapse of the most visible and romanticized manifestation of antiwar sentiment: the public demonstration. Rallies of hundreds of thousands in 2007 dwindled to the hundreds by the end of 2009. The authors assert it is reasonable to conclude, “the threat to peace from the Obama administration, as perceived by the grassroots constituency of the antiwar movement, must have been very small.” Yet President Obama has a very different approach to war than Sen. Obama did. He effectively broke most of his pledges for peace. The dove turned hawk in mid-flight. “The antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity,” the authors write. “Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement dissipated.”

The difference is that Democrats abandoned the pacifist cause when one of their own decided to use force. Though such social movements routinely claim to be issue-based and nonpartisan, Democrats constituted 54 percent of the hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators in January 2007 and contributed the bulk of the financial support to the umbrella antiwar group United for Peace and Justice. By November 2009, however, with Barack Obama in the White House and (seemingly) firm Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the principled antiwar stance collided with political reality, and Democrats dwindled to 19 percent of mere hundreds of activists. The rump movement that remained was financially strapped, fragmented and radicalized.

“While Obama’s election was heralded as a victory for the antiwar movement,” the authors conclude, “Obama’s election, in fact, thwarted the ability of the movement to achieve critical mass.” Those who were the quickest to moralize when George W. Bush was president became masters of compromise under Mr. Obama. At best, they are opportunists, at worst outright hypocrites.

Dedicated peace activists are still out there. Witness the 35 people, including famed Vietnam War-era leaker Daniel Ellsberg, arrested in March outside Marine Corps Base Quantico demonstrating in support of Pfc. Manning. (Their commitment to the cause will be tested with the WikiLeaker taking up residence in the much less accessible Fort Leavenworth, Kan.) Or the Democratic donors who interrupted the president’s Thursday fundraiser with a protest song. Overall, though, those masses who abandoned the barricades after Mr. Obama’s election have demonstrated that they were merely squatters on the moral high ground, exploiting it for partisan gain. The next time these liberals spin a self-righteous narrative of principled opposition to a Republican president, it can be taken with a grain of salt.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Original Page: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/23/the-peacenik-hypocrites/

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Afghan feminist: ‘Kill team’ photos reveal truth of occupation

2011-04-15T22:59:00.001-07:00

Afghan feminist: ‘Kill team’ photos reveal truth of occupation

by Malalai Joya, greenleft.org.au
April 10th 2011

The disgusting and heartbreaking photos published in March by the media are finally bringing the grisly truth about the war in Afghanistan to a wider public.

All the PR about this war being about democracy and human rights melts into thin air with these pictures of US soldiers posing with the dead and mutilated bodies of innocent Afghan civilians.

I must report that Afghans do not believe this be a story of a few rogue soldiers. We that is part and parcel of the entire military occupation.

The photos are new, but the murder of innocents is not. Such crimes against civilians have sparked many protests in Afghanistan and have sharply raised anti-US sentiments among ordinary Afghans.

I am not surprised that the mainstream media in the United States has been reluctant to publish these images of the US “kill teams” who made sport out of murdering Afghans.

There is, after all, a concerted effort to keep the reality of Afghanistan out of sight in the US. General David Petraeus, now in charge of the US-led occupation, is said to place great importance on the “information war” for public opinion.

Based on this strategy, the Pentagon has tried hard to cover up these crimes.

Although a few soldiers seen in these photos are being prosecuted, I think this is another effort to hide larger human rights violations carried out by the US in Afghanistan.

The US must first prosecute those responsible for killing 65 women and children in Ghaziabad, Kunar, in mid-February, for killing 150 civilians in Kunduz province in October 2009, for killing over 140 civilians in Balabluk, Farah province, in May 2009, for killing 100 children and women in Azizabad, Heart, in September 2008 and many more such inhuman crimes for which the Pentagon only said “sorry”.

If the US was really honest, then top US officials from defence secretary Roberts Gates to Petraeus, under whose command all of these war crimes take place, would be put on trial.

Yet while the US and NATO are busy committing war crimes in Afghanistan, they attack Libya to punish Gaddafi for human rights violations!

For us, this is a joke when we see the US government whole-heartedly supporting forces much dirtier than Gaddafi’s in our country.

In March, my initial application for a US entry visa was turned down, and so my ongoing book tour in the United States was delayed as supporters demanded my right to enter the country.

The US government was pressured to relent and allow my visit to go ahead. Ultimately, it will also be unable to block the truth about the war in Afghanistan.

The “kill team” images will come as a shock to many in Europe and North America, but to Afghans it is nothing new. For the past decade, we have seen countless incidents of US and NATO forces killing innocent people like birds.

For instance, they recently killed nine children in Kunar Province who were out collecting firewood in the mountains. Another, out of countless massacres of innocent civilians, took place in mid-February of this year when US-led forces killed 65 innocent villagers, most of them women and children.

In this case, as in many others, NATO claimed that it had only killed insurgents, even though local authorities acknowledged the victims were civilians.

To keep the facts from coming out, it arrested two Al Jazeera journalists who tried to visit and report from the site of the massacre.

The US and NATO have tried hard to hide these civilians deaths by calling the dead terrorists or insurgents. Afghans regard such lies as an insult to their loved ones who have been brutally killed.

Successive US officials have said they would safeguard civilians and they would be more careful. In fact they are only more careful in their efforts to cover up their crimes and stop its publication in the media — therefore many horrific killings are never reported.

The US and NATO, along with the office of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, usually give statistics about civilian deaths that underestimate the numbers killed by the occupying forces.

The reality, however, is that civilian deaths are up since US President Barack Obama raised the number of US troops in Afghanistan. The president’s “surge” has only led to a surge of violence from all sides.

Believe it or not, the occupying armies have even tried to buy off the families of their victims, offering US$2000 for each member of a family killed.

Afghans lives are cheap for the US and NATO, but no matter how much they offer we don’t want their blood money.

Once you know this, you will understand more clearly why Afghans have turned against this occupation. The Karzai regime, which is full of the most infamous brutal warlords of the Northern Alliance, is more hated than ever.

It rules through intimidation, corruption and the help of the occupying armies. Afghans deserve much better than this.

However, this does not mean that more Afghans are supporting the reactionary so-called resistance of the Taliban, who also continue to kill innocent Afghans through suicide bombings.

We are seeing the growth, under very difficult conditions, of another resistance, led by students, women and the ordinary poor people of Afghanistan. They are taking to the streets to protest the massacre of civilians, and to demand an end to the war.

Demonstrations like this were recently held in Kabul, Marzar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, Kunar, Herat and elsewhere.

This resistance is inspired by the movements in other countries like Egypt and Tunisia — we want to see “people power” in Afghanistan as well.

And we need the support and solidarity of peace-loving people power in the countries occupying Afghanistan as well.

Many new voices are speaking up against this expensive and hypocritical war in Afghanistan. This includes some soldiers from the NATO armies.

When I last visited Britain, I had the honour of meeting Joe Glenton, a conscientious objector who spent months in jail for his resistance to the war in Afghanistan.

Of his time in prison, Glenton said: “In the current climate I consider it as a badge of honour to have served a prison sentence.”

While the world looks in horror at the “kill team” photos, Joe’s courage and humanity is an important reminder that the war in Afghanistan need not last forever.

[Reprinted from www.zmag.org. Malalai Joya is an Afghan feminist and anti-war activist.]

Original Page: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/47314

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A peacemaker=?UTF-8?B?4oCZcyBjYXNlIGFn?=ainst the U.S. Institute of Peace

2011-04-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

A peacemaker’s case against the U.S. Institute of Peace

by Colman McCarthy, washingtonpost.com
March 18th 2011

In June 1999, Anika Binnendijk, a star student in my daily 7:25 a.m. peace studies class at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, was given $5,000 by the U.S. Institute of Peace. In the agency’s national peace essay contest, an annual scholarship event in which more than 2,500 high school students compete, Anika, idealistic and a lucid writer, was the Maryland state winner — a $1,000 prize — and then placed second in the nationals. Top honors went to a girl from South Dakota.

All state winners came to Washington for a week of seminars. I was one of the speakers, my turn coming at a breakfast for the students on their final day in town. The institute has invited me back several times, and I have relished those visits, as well as the workshops I’ve done there for high school social studies teachers.

Last month, the austerity-minded House of Representatives voted to cut funding for the institute.

My question is: What took it so long?

As greatly as I admire the staff members at the institute and their professional commitment to increase peace and decrease violence, their work is necessarily little more than a balm on our delusional belief that our government places a high priority on peace. The institute’s record has been all gums and no teeth.

The overlords of Congress wouldn’t have it any other way. If they did, they would appropriate real money — meaningful money, in the billions. Instead, the institute’s budget has been among the most trivialized in Washington: At the current $43 million, it is one-hundredth of 1 percent of the Pentagon’s budget and less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the State Department’s. The current military and security budget, ever rising, is about $2.4 billion a day, a sum 10 times greater than the institute’s total budget for 27 years. In that time, the institute has yet to earn even a line in a State of the Union address.

The institute was established in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan took time out from arming his favorite juntas to reluctantly sign the legislation that created it. He then lectured its directors at their first meeting that “in the real world, peace through strength must be our motto.”

The institute has obediently followed those orders and avoided examination of the military policies of the U.S. government.

Now, the nation’s military is trapped in two wars it can’t win, can’t afford and can’t end. And, as if doomed to weakness from the start, the institute is stuck with its hopeless mission to “prevent and resolve violent international conflicts, promote post-conflict stability and development, and increase conflict management capacity, tools and intellectual capital worldwide.”

It has done some of that exceedingly well by sending skilled mediators into conflict zones worldwide. One of them, Alison Milofsky, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Slovakia, spoke to my high school classes last week and told of her work in defusing tribal and ethnic disputes in Africa.

From the beginning, the legislation Congress passed assured that the institute would be forbidden to engage in advocacy or dissent. Not a murmur, much less a foreign policy speech, has been heard about U.S. support of dictators in Bolivia, Chile, Iraq, Nicaragua and the Philippines, to cite the short list.

Not a public peep was heard to counter George W. Bush’s war advisers — the slam-dunkers and cakewalkers —who urged the president and Congress to dispatch troops to Afghanistan in 2001 and to Iraq in 2003. Protests are not voiced when civilians are killed by U.S. and NATO forces, recurrences that are all but routine. The institute takes no position on whether the nation’s military policies are bankrupting our economy or that it’s time to stop fighting fire with fire and fight it with the water of nonviolence.

Instead of speaking truth to power, whisper it in the institute’s hallways or on coffee breaks at conferences. Congress says don’t agitate, just cogitate. Don’t criticize, just theorize. Sit in the boat, don’t rock it. Favor world peace, but don’t oppose U.S. wars.

Without doubt, a fair number of mid- and upper-level people at the institute would like to speak out — to help bring the nation to its senses, well aware of a futile foreign policy of bringing adversaries to their knees. But they can’t. They know that Congress, the balm-demanders, probably would blast the institute as a haven of anti-war blame-America-firsters. With little choice, the institute behaves.

The chairman of the 10-member bipartisan board for the past seven years is J. Robinson West, a Bush appointee who served in the Reagan administration as an assistant secretary of the interior in charge of offshore oil policies and before that as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for international economic affairs. In 1984, he founded the PFC Energy company. Little in his professional background suggests either a competency in peacemaking or ties to the American peace movement. The vice chairman is George Moose, a former ambassador posted by the Reagan administration to Benin and Senegal.

With occasional exceptions — I have in mind Kerry Kennedy — presidential appointments to the institute’s board serve as a homogenized dumping ground for academics, corporate executives, Republican or Democratic party loyalists, and others of the well-paid and seemly mannered with no reputations as boundary-pushers. They have little hands-on experience in peace education or peace training, much less sweaty antiwar activism. They are more suited for patronage appointments to harmless presidential commissions, if their yens to be seen as players can’t be controlled.

Original Page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-peacemakers-case-against-the-us-institute-of-peace/2011/03/15/ABPznLs_story.html

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U.N. Reported Only a Fraction of Civilian Deaths from U.S. Raids

2011-04-07T21:54:00.001-07:00

U.N. Reported Only a Fraction of Civilian Deaths from U.S. Raids

by Gareth Porter and Shah Noori, commondreams.org
March 17th 2011

WASHINGTON/KABUL - The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.

The report also failed to apply the same humanitarian law standard for defining a civilian to its reporting on SOF raids that it applied to its accounting for Taliban assassinations.

The Mar. 9 report, produced by the Human Rights unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) jointly with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said a total of 80 civilians were killed in "search and seizure operations" by "Pro-Government Forces" in 2010.

But AIHRC Commissioner Nader Nadery told IPS the figure represented only the number of civilian deaths in night raids in the 13 incidents involving SOF units that the Commission had been able to investigate thoroughly.

Nadery said the AIHRC had received complaints from local people alleging civilian casualties in 60 additional incidents involving raids and other activities by Special Forces. "We did not include them in the report, because we were unable to collect the exact figures for casualties, which takes time," Nadery said.

The AIHRC is continuing to investigate those 60 events, according to Nadery, and will report on the results in the future.

The Mar. 9 report refers to "60 incidents of night raids that caused civilian casualties", but does not inform the reader that only a fraction of the total casualties alleged in those incidents were counted in the total.

At least one of the 13 incidents investigated by the AIHRC was an air strike called by an SOF unit. The 80 deaths from at most 12 incidents or less would suggest an average of at least seven civilians killed per incident. If the sample of night raids investigated is representative of the total of 60 incidents of SOF night raids about which civilian casualty complaints were generated, the total number of civilians killed would be around 420.

The UNAMA-AIHRC report shows a total 406 assassinations of civilians by "Anti-Government Elements" reported for 2010.

But the UNAMA-AIHRC report uses a strict humanitarian law definition of "civilian" in regard to victims of assassination by "Anti-Government Elements" which was not applied to victims of U.S. night raids. "If Afghan soldiers travelling from one place to another, on holiday, with no weapon and no uniform, are killed, we count them as civilians, and the same with policemen," Nadery told IPS.

Mayors and district chiefs, who participate in military planning with NATO military commanders, were also considered as civilian victims of assassination, according to Nadery.

A large proportion of those killed as "Taliban" in SOF night raids, however, would also qualify as civilians under this definition.

Matthew Hoh, formerly the senior U.S. foreign service officer in Zabul province before his 2009 resignation, was familiar with the target list for SOF kill or capture raids. He told IPS the list included Afghans holding every kind of non-combat function in the Taliban network, including propagandists and workers who make Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

UNAMA team leader Denise Lifton conceded that the report had made no effort to ascertain what positions had been occupied by those who had been killed in U.S. raids. "We have not looked at the functions, per se, of those [who are] accused of being Taliban and are killed," she said in an e-mail to IPS.

Night raids generally kill Taliban personnel in their own homes, and thus outside the context of a military operation. If the same humanitarian law criterion used in counting victims of Taliban assassinations were applied to the alleged Taliban targeted in SOF night raids, the victims of killings during those raids would have to be considered as civilian casualties.

U.S. Special Operations Forces acknowledge only 38 civilian casualties, including killed and wounded, as a result of night raids, as reported by Reuters Feb. 24.

Sunset Belinsky, a spokesperson for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), insisted in an e-mail to IPS that such raids are "intelligence driven", and that "there is a rigorous process involved in identifying targets".

But although Belinsky acknowledged to IPS last September that the total of 1,355 insurgents "captured" in the raids from May through July 2010 included "suspected insurgents", she was unable to provide any figures on how many of those 1,355 had later been released.

Belinsky did not respond directly to a request from IPS this week for the information on what proportion of insurgents captured in 2010 had turned out not to be insurgents. The continued refusal of ISAF, under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, to release that information suggests that it would reveal a very high proportion of the several thousand Afghans killed last year as "Taliban" were simply civilian supporters or victims of misidentification or a malicious intelligence tip.

The remarkably sharp rise in the number night raids carried out by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ISAF commander until June 2010 - and the even more spectacular increase in the raids under Petraeus - in 2010 raises serious questions about how the U.S. military could avoid a massive increase in the killing of individuals with non-military functions in the Taliban as well as people with only tangential or no connection to the insurgency.

According to a document from the Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks last July, In October 2009, the target list for SOF night raids, called the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL), included 2,058 names. That list provided the intelligence basis for a pace of some 90 raids per month in late 2009 – a huge increase from the 20 per month just six months earlier.

Significantly, at that moment, Gen. Petraeus was warning the White House against a strategy of relying on more SOF raids and a smaller conventional force footprint. "There's just a limit to how many precise targets you have at any one time…," Petraeus said, according to the account in Bob Woodward's book "Obama's Wars".

But from May through July 2010, according to ISAF figures, SOF units launched 3,000 night raids – a 50-fold increase over the rate of only a year earlier – in which they reported killing nearly 1,100 Taliban "leaders" and "rank and file".

A 10-fold increase in raids, which implied a similar increase in the size of the target list, could not have been carried out without a dramatic relaxation of the already very loose criteria for including someone on the JPEL, according to Matthew Hoh.

"Commanders are under pressure to find targets for these raids, because it has become a metric of success," Hoh told IPS. He likened that broadening of the targeting criteria to the CIA's getting much greater latitude on targeting of drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan in early 2008, expanding the target list from a handful of al Qaeda leaders to virtually anyone tangentially associated with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

Hoh said one result of the frantic effort to expand the target list is bound to be an increased use of intelligence tips from individuals or tribal enemies.

That appears to have been a factor in the killing of President Hamid Karzai's cousin, Yar Mohammad Karzai, in a night raid in the Karzai ancestral home in Kandahar province, Mar. 9. The raiders also took his son away with a black bag over his head.

Yar Mohmmad Karzai had told relatives repeatedly over the years that he feared that another cousin of the president's, Hashmat Karzai, who had headed a large security firm for years and then ran unsuccessfully for parliament, would seek to arrange for a U.S. attack against him by planting false information with the Americans.

Shah Noori reported from Kabul. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Original Page: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/17-3

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Can You Face the True Consequences of War=?UTF-8?B?PyBUaGUgSG9ycg==?=ors of Bagging Soldiers'

2011-04-01T19:32:00.001-07:00

Can You Face the True Consequences of War? The Horrors of Bagging Soldiers' Bodies in Iraq

by Chris Hedges, alternet.org
March 21st 2011 Photo Credit: AFP/File - Ali al-Saadi

Jess Goodell enlisted in the Marines immediately after she graduated from high school in 2001. She volunteered three years later to serve in the Marine Corps’ first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit, at Camp Al Taqaddum in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to collect and catalog the bodies and personal effects of dead Marines. She put the remains of young Marines in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for days, in a refrigerated unit known as a “reefer.” The work she did was called “processing.”

“We went through everything,” she said when I reached her by phone in Buffalo, N.Y., where she is about to become a student in a Ph.D. program in counseling at the University of Buffalo. “We would get everything that the body had on it when the Marine died. Everyone had a copy of The Rules of Engagement in their left breast pocket. You found notes that people had written to each other. You found lists. Lists were common, the things they wanted to do when they got home or food they wanted to eat. The most difficult was pictures. Everyone had a picture of their wife or their kids or their family. And then you had the younger kids who might be 18 years old and they had prom pictures or pictures next to what I imagine were their first cars. Everyone had a spoon in their flak jacket. There were pens and trash and wrappers and MRE food. All of it would get sent back [to the Marines’ homes].

“We all had the idea that at any point this could be us on the table,” she said. “I think Marines thought that we went over there to die. And so people wrote letters saying ‘If I die I want you to know I love you.’ ‘I want my car to go to my younger brother.’ Things like that. They carried those letters on their bodies. We had a Marine that we processed and going through his wallet he had a picture of a sonogram of a fetus his wife had sent him. And a lot of Marines had tattooed their vital information under an armpit. It was called a meat tag.”

The unit processed about half a dozen suicides. The suicide notes, she said, almost always cited hazing. Women, she said, were constantly harassed, especially sexually, but it often did not match the systematic punishment and humiliation meted out to men who were deemed to be inadequate Marines. She said that Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” The harassed Marines would be assigned to other individual Marines and become their slaves. They would be sent on punishing runs in which many of them vomited. They would be forced to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching down like a baseball catcher and then standing up again—followed by a series of other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.

“They make these Marines do what they call ‘bitch’ work,” Goodell said. “They are assigned to be someone else’s ‘bitch’ for the day. We had a guy in our platoon, not in Iraq but in California, and he was overweight. He was on remedial PT, which meant he went to extra physical training. When he came to work he was rotated. One day he was with this corporal or this sergeant. One day he was sent to me. I had him for an hour. I remember sending him outside and making him carry things. It was very common for them to dig a hole and fill it back up with sand or carry sandbags up to the top of a hill and then carry them down again.”

The unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves, usually by putting rifles under their chins and pulling the trigger.

“We had a Marine who was in a port-a-john when he blew his face off,” she said. “We had another Marine who shot himself through the neck. Often they would do it in the corner of a bunker or an abandoned building. We had a couple that did it in port-a-johns. We had to go in and peel and pull off chunks of flesh and brain tissue that had sprayed the walls. Those were the most frustrating bodies to get. On those bodies we were also on cleanup crew. It was gross. We sent the suicide notes home with the bodies.

“We had the paperwork to do fingerprinting, but we started getting bodies in which there weren’t any hands or we would get bodies that were just meat,” said Goodell, who in May will publish a memoir called “Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq.” The book title refers to the form that required those in the mortuary unit to shade in black the body parts that were missing from a corpse. “Very quickly it became irrelevant to have a fingerprinting page to fill out. By the time we would get a body it might have been a while and rigor mortis had already set in. Their hands were usually clenched as if they were still holding their rifle. We could not unbend the fingers easily.”

The unit was also sent to collect Marines killed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The members would arrive on the scene and don white plastic suits, gloves and face masks.

“One of the first convoys we went to was one where the Army had been traveling over a bridge and an IED had exploded,” she said. “It had literally shot a seven-ton truck over the side and down into a ravine. Marines were already going down into the ravine. We were just getting out of our vehicles. We were putting on our gloves and putting coverings over our boots. I was with a Marine named Pineda. I was coming around the Humvee and there was a spot on the ground that was a circle. I looked at it and thought something must have exploded here or near here. I went over to look at it. I looked in and saw a boot. Then I noticed the boot had a foot in it. I almost lost my lunch.

“In the seven-ton truck the [body of the] assistant driver, who was in the passenger seat, was trapped in the vehicle,” she said. “All of his body was in the vehicle. We had to crawl in there to get it out. It was charred. Pineda and I pulled the burnt upper torso from the truck. Then we removed a leg. Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting out hands together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso but you need to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was very common to have body bags that when you picked them up they would sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh. The contents did not resemble a human body.”

The members of the mortuary unit were shunned by the other Marines. The stench of dead flesh clung to their uniforms, hair, skin and fingers. Two members of the mortuary unit began to disintegrate psychologically. One began to take a box of Nyquil tablets every day and drink large quantities of cold medicine. He was eventually medevaced out of Iraq.

“Our cammies would be stained with blood or with brains,” she said. “When you scoop up the meat it often would get on the cuffs of our shirts. You could smell it, even after you took off your gloves. We weren’t washing our cammies everyday. Your cuff comes to your face when you eat. Physically we were stained with remains. We had a constant smell like rotten meat, which I guess is what it was since often the bodies had been in the sun and the heat for a long time. The flesh had gone bad. The skin on a body in the hot sun slides off. The skin detaches itself from the layer beneath and slides around on itself.

“Our platoon was to the Marines what the Marines are to much of America: We did things that had to be done but that no one wanted to know about,” she said. “The other Marines knew what we did, but they did not want to think it could happen to them. I had one female Marine in my tent who would talk to me. The rest would not give me the time of day. The Marines in Mortuary Affairs knew that any day could be our day. Other Marines, who have to go out on the convoys, who have to get up the next day, have to get on with life.”

Her unit once had to recover two Marines who had drowned in a lake. It appeared one had leapt in to save the other. The bodies, which were recovered after a couple of days by Navy divers, were grotesquely swollen. One of the Marines was so bloated and misshapened that the body was difficult to carry on a litter.

“His neck was as wide as his bloated head, and his stomach jutted out like a barrel,” she writes in the book. “His testicles were the size of cantaloupes. His face was white and puffy and thick. Not fat, but thick. It was unreal. He looked like a movie prop, with thick, gray, waxy skin and the thick purple lips. We couldn’t stop looking at these bodies because they were so out of proportion and so disfigured and because, still, they looked like us.”

It was hardest to look into the faces of the dead. She and the other members of the mortuary unit swiftly covered the faces when they worked on the bodies. They avoided looking at the eyes of the corpses.

Once, the unit had to process seven Marines killed in an explosion. Seven or eight body bags were delivered to the bunker.

“We had clean body bags set up so we could sort the flesh,” she said. “Sometimes things come in with nametags. Or sometimes one is Hispanic and you could tell who was Hispanic and who was the white guy. We tried separating flesh. It was ridiculous. We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We were trying to do the best we could sorting it out. We had the last body bag come in. We opened up the body bag and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us. We got used to a lot of it. But the heads worked the other way. They affected us more strongly as time passed. We saw on the heads the expressions of fright and horror. It made us wonder what we were doing here.”

She processed one Marine whose face was twisted at the moment of death by rage. The face of this Marine began to haunt her.

“I had this feeling that something awful had occurred,” she said. “The way he had come in and stiffened he had this look to his face that made my stomach curl. It looked angry. Often expressions on bodies would look fearful and hurt. The faces looked as though they had received death. But this face looked like he had given death.”

She and the other members of the unit became convinced they could feel and hear the souls of the dead Marines they had processed and housed in their reefers.

And then there was a body that was brought in one day that was not stiff.

“He was fully dressed in his cammies and his whole body was intact,” she said. “His hands were lying folded across his stomach.”

She and the others noticed that the Marine on the table was breathing lightly. The chest was going up and down. They frantically called their superiors to find out what to do. They were told to wait.

“Just wait? Wait for what?” she cried.

She remembers the doc saying: “There’s nothing we can do. Just wait.”

“People don’t wait for this sort of thing,” she protested. “What are we waiting for? What if this Marine was your brother, would we wait?”

They stood and watched as the man died. Goodell stormed out of the bunker.

“There was always a heaviness in the air,” she said. “It felt like I was being watched. We would feel hands on our shoulders or hands on our heads. Everyone had stories of sounds they heard or things they had felt. I was on watch at the bunker and I heard the back door open. I assumed it was one of the Marines coming in to use the Internet or the phone. I waited for them to come up. They would always come up. But no one came up. I got up and didn’t see anyone. I went back to my duty hut and I heard footsteps walk across the bunker. This kind of thing happened often.”

Her return to the United States was difficult, filled with retreats into isolation, substance abuse, deep depression and dysfunctional relationships. Slowly she pulled her life back together, finishing college and applying to graduate school so she can counsel trauma victims.

“Every single Marine I know goes to Iraq to help,” she said. “While I was there that is what I thought. That is why I volunteered. I thought I was going to help the Iraqis. I know better now. We did the dirty work. We were used by the government. The military knows that young, single men are dangerous. We breed it in Marines. We push the testosterone. We don’t want them to be educated. They are deprived of a lot and rewarded with very little. It keeps us at ground level. We cannot question anyone. We do what we are told.

“I am still in contact with most of the people I knew,” she said. “They are not coping. One lives in VA [Veterans Affairs], constantly seeing psychologists and psychiatrists. One was kicked out of the Marines for three DUIs. Another was kicked out of the Marines because he took cocaine. Those who have gotten out are living below the poverty level. And what people do to cope is re-enlist. When they re-enlist they do better. They function. I am the only one who went to school of the 18 Marines in Mortuary Affairs. But I am in counseling at the VA. I have been diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety, depression and substance abuse. What separates me from them is that I have a great support system and I found my salvation in my education.

“War is disgusting and horrific,” she said. “It never leaves the people who were involved in it. The damage is far greater than the lists of casualties or cost in dollars. It permeates lifestyles. It infects cultures and people and worldviews. The war is never over for us. The fighting stops. The troops get called back. But the war goes on for those damaged by war.”

Not long ago she received a text message from a Marine she had worked with in Mortuary Affairs after he tried to commit suicide.

“I’ve got $2,000 in the bank,” the message read. “Let’s meet in NYC and go out with a bang.”

Original Page: http://www.alternet.org/story/150322/can_you_face_the_true_consequences_of_war_the_horrors_of_bagging_soldiers%27_bodies_in_iraq?page=entire

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Half the Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated by VA receive mental health

2011-04-01T19:28:00.001-07:00

Half the Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated by VA receive mental health care

by Bob Brewin, nextgov.com
March 22nd 2011

Slightly more than half of all Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans treated by the Veterans Affairs Department received care for mental health problems, roughly four times the rate of the general population, according to statistics compiled by the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense based on data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The data show that among the 625,834 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans enrolled in the VA health care system as of December 2010, 313,670 were treated for mental health conditions.

Lee Igel, a psychologist and assistant professor at New York University, said the numbers were "staggering" when compared to the general population.

The National Institute of Mental Health reported in 2008, the latest data available, that 13.4 percent of adults in the United States received treatment for mental health problems.

Read the entire Broken Warriors series.Sonja Batten, assistant deputy chief patient care services officer for mental health at the Veterans Health Administration, agreed the data obtained by Veterans for Common Sense showed that a "significant number" of veterans from the current wars were receiving mental health care. She told Nextgov these were provisional diagnoses that could be revised downward by as much as one-third.

Data VA subsequently provided to Nextgov showed that the department cared for 386,497 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans in fiscal 2010, and out of that number, 161,794 -- or 41.9 percent -- received a primary diagnosis of a mental health condition, a rate three times higher than that of the general population. Data compiled by Veterans for Common Sense included Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated at VA facilities from 2002 through 2010, whereas the numbers VA provided Nextgov reflect 2010 data only.

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said VA is trying to downplay the mental health problems of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans.

The data Sullivan's group obtained under the FOIA request were categorized according to diagnostic codes used by VA clinicians, Sullivan said. The numbers showed that 122,175 veterans were diagnosed with depression, 102,767 with neurotic disorders and another 72,952 with a combination of depression, anxiety and mood swings. More than 78,000 were diagnosed with a variety of other conditions, including alcoholism and drug abuse.

The data also showed that 182,147, or 29 percent of all Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated by VA, sought care for post-traumatic stress disorder, Sullivan said. This is almost double the rate of PTSD for Vietnam War veterans, which is 15.2 percent, and more than double the rate of PTSD among Gulf War veterans, which is 12.1 percent, according to a fact sheet from VA's National Center for PTSD.

The data Veterans for Common Sense obtained from VA does not include any information on veterans who sought help from clinicians outside the Veterans Health Administration, Sullivan said. As such, he believes Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans' mental health problems actually are underreported.

Barbara Van Dahlen, founder and president of Give an Hour, a Bethesda, Md.-based nonprofit that arranges free counseling services with private practitioners for veterans, agreed. She said 67 percent of Vietnam veterans sought help outside VA, and expects many current veterans to do so, particularly in areas that do not have a VA hospital or clinic.

Tom Vande Burgt, an Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq and runs the Lest We Forget PTSD peer-support group in Charleston, W.Va., with his wife, Diane, also believes the data obtained by Veterans for Common Sense likely underreports mental health problems because many veterans do not fully understand their benefits.

In addition, Vande Burgt said many veterans do not seek mental health care, preferring to "hide out in the basement, playing video games until there is some sort of triggering event."

Effects of Multiple Deployments

VA's Batten, mental health professionals outside the department and veteran advocates all agree the large numbers of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans seeking mental health care reflects the cumulative effects of multiple deployments during the past decade. As deployments increase, "the population in need grows," she said.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said he is concerned that troop cuts recently proposed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates "will only increase the burden of deployment on an increasingly smaller force." Miller, in an e-mail statement, added that the Defense Department "must ensure that our soldiers have adequate dwell time between deployments and that we are not relying too heavily on a fewer number of troops."

Miller, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said Defense needs to demonstrate that "the number and length of deployments are not having an effect on the mental health of service members."

Diane Vande Burgt, echoing the views of mental health experts interviewed by , said, "There is no doubt in my mind that multiple deployments are the biggest reason for the high numbers. Stress levels are probably through the roof. When someone is overloaded on stress and gets no relief they begin to suffer both mentally and physically."

The fact that so many Afghanistan and Iraq veterans have sought help from VA for their mental health problems stands out as good news among otherwise grim statistics, experts and advocates agreed. Igel said the data show the current crop of veterans have overcome the stigma that felt by Vietnam veterans.

Miller agreed. "We're doing a much better job encouraging service members to come forward and seek treatment than at any other time in our nation's history, and that is one of many reasons for the high numbers. Some of our service members and veterans have experienced severe mental anguish, and I am thankful that they are seeking treatment," he said.

But Margaret Stone, co-founder and chairwoman of the Veterans Healing Initiative, which provides funding to treat veterans who suffer from substance abuse and PTSD in nongovernment facilities, said, "The stigma associated with mental health [and] substance abuse remains pervasive throughout the military and society and so we still see a lag time between the time a vet returns and when he or she ultimately receives care."

Miller said a number of factors could explain the increase in the number of recent veterans seeking mental health care from VA. "Better education on mental health and reducing stigma associated with asking for help are contributors. I also believe this increase can be attributed to outreach by VHA and increased access to VA health care enrollment.... Health care professionals are also better now at diagnosing mental health conditions both in the field and in VA and DoD medical facilities," he said.

The data on the mental health treatment of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans indicate that more resources are needed to treat these veterans, Stone said. In particular, she said VA must do a better job serving veterans who don't live or work near the department's hospitals and clinics.

Vande Burgt agreed, and noted National Guard and reserve troops have been hit hard by multiple deployments and are more likely to live in rural communities poorly served by VA.

Veterans Affairs should consider opening more rural clinics and contracting with outside services to reach underserved areas, she said.

Original Page: http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20110322_2917.php?oref=topnews

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Female soldiers' suicide rate triples when at war

2011-03-31T17:20:00.001-07:00

Female soldiers' suicide rate triples when at war

by Gregg Zoroy, usatoday.com

The suicide rate for female soldiers triples when they go to war, according to the first round of preliminary data from an Army study.

The findings, released to USA TODAY this week, show that the suicide rate rises from five per 100,000 to 15 per 100,000 among female soldiers at war. Scientists are not sure why but say they will look into whether women feel isolated in a male-dominated war zone or suffer greater anxieties about leaving behind children and other loved ones.

Even so, the suicide risk for female soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan is still lower than for men serving next to them, the $50 million study says.

Findings also show that marriage somehow helps inoculate male and female soldiers from killing themselves while they are overseas. Although these death rates among GI's who are single or divorced double when they go to war, the rate among married soldiers does not increase, according to the study.

Scientists say they hope these and other findings will help them tease out protective social patterns — such as, for example, that sense in a marriage of mattering to someone else — that can be encouraged or instilled in all soldiers to lower the risk of suicide.

"One of the big things we're interested in now is digging into this marriage thing and saying, 'What is it you get, by being married? And how could we put it in a bottle so we can give it to everybody, whether or not they're married?" says Ronald Kessler, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who is working on the project.

A goal of the five-year research effort, led by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), is to identify categories of soldiers most at risk for suicide. The Army suicide rate has more than doubled since 2004 from 10 per 100,000 to 22 per 100,000 among active-duty soldiers, surpassing the rate for civilians of the same age and gender.

Last year, when National Guard and reservists data are included, an average of 25 soldiers killed themselves each month. This first slice of data from the study, drawn from Army records on 389 active-duty suicides between 2004 and 2008, is only a small piece of a sweeping research effort that will eventually include tracking between 30,000 and 50,000 soldiers from basic training onward, says Philip Wang, NIMH deputy director. He said the project could rival in significant the historic Framingham Heart study initiated in 1948 which uncovered causes of heart disease. Results of the Army suicide study would be valuable in preventing these deaths in the civilian world, says Thomas Insel, NIMH director.

Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army vice chief of staff, says he will begin to notify commanders of these initial findings immediately.

"I want to get this out in the hands of my guys so they can start using it and drawing their own conclusions. We'll give them as much as we can whenever we get it, and not wait until it's peer-reviewed and ... published in The New England Journal of Medicine." Chiarelli says. "I'm going to keep beating up on the researchers to give me more and more and more."

Other findings:

•Suicide rates among men increase from 15 per 100,000 to 21 per 100,000 when they deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

• Soldiers of Asian descent have dramatically higher suicide rates than other racial groups. Their risk is double or triple that of other soldiers, and four times higher in the war zone.

Original Page: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-03-18-1Asuicides18_ST_N.htm

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The scars you can't see and the deaths that happen at home

2011-03-31T17:17:00.001-07:00

The scars you can't see and the deaths that happen at home

by Robby Diesu, thehill.com
March 17th 2011 11:51 AM

As we enter into the 8th year of war with Iraq and have already passed the 9th year mark with the war with Afghanistan, the costs of these wars are adding up. There is the economic cost, which has reached the trillion dollar mark at an estimated cost of 2.5 to 4.6 trillion dollars [1]. Yet, the human cost to our troops has been skyrocketing as well, and not just those dying in combat but those who have taken their own lives when they returned home.

We constantly hear the mantra of the psychological effects of fighting in the wars, and that they are taking an extreme toll on the troops. But this mantra brings the horrors of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), military sexual trauma, and traumatic brain injury to just numbers. The facts as just numbers don’t show the real pain to service members and their families. They only reduce that pain to a rating system just like the Veterans Affairs hospitals.

To understand the real pain is to hear the stories of the suicides and the attempted suicides of our service members.

Jeffrey Lucey is one of the thousands of service members who took their own lives after fighting in the war on Iraq. LCPL Lucey served with the USMC during the initial invasion of Iraq, and he returned home a different person. Although his visible scars were limited his hidden scars ran deep, and after being home for four months he hung himself in his parents' cellar on June 22, 2004.

For Jeffrey, the true cost of the war on Iraq was not taken in the sands of the desert but taken right here at home. Jeffrey’s parents turned their grief into action and now are active members of Military Families Speak Out, a group working to the end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to make sure our service members are taken care of when they return home. His death is another notch in the human life lost during these wars.

Another service member, who asked to remain anonymous, told the story of dealing with his own personal trauma as such. "Everywhere I went I worried, I was constantly checking out every person to make sure I knew... My anxiety was through the roof at all times. Everything brought me back".

Eventually the stress got to much for this service member and they attempted to take their own life. Their method of choice was a liter of vodka and a handful of precosets. When they attempted to get treatment from the Winn Army Community Hospital, they felt no help, and they were left out to the pasture by the system that was supposed to finally serve them.

Thankfully, the suicide attempted failed, but there are thousands who don't fail. It's estimated that for every soldier killed in action, another two kill themselves at home.

Yet, our worst offensive to our service members is the repeated deployment of those who suffer from trauma. One-third of all service members will experiences some level of trauma in their deployments overseas, and most will be sent back on a second, third or even fourth deployment. We are refusing to give those who we supposedly hold up on the highest pedestal, the right to heal. The right to treat their trauma may it be from MST, PTSD, or TBI, should be the right of every service member, instead we send them through the cycle again and again.

As the generals sit around and tell you how wonderfully the wars are going, think of who is doing the hard labor for these generals. Who is bearing the greatest risk? Military suicides are caused by fighting these wars, and until we stop fighting in these wars suicides rates will keep going up.

Our soldiers and veterans are not only dying out of country they are dying in our own country. We must work to get them all home so those who need help can get it. The scars of war are always deep, but they are not always visible.

[1] http://www.cfr.org/afghanistan/iraq-afghanistan-us-economy/p15404

Robby Diesu is a member of Civilian-Solider Alliance, a group of civilians who work with active-duty service members and veterans on Operation Recovery. The goal of Operation Recovery is to stop the deployment of traumatized troops.

Original Page: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/150447-the-scars-you-cant-see-and-deaths-that-happen-at-home

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Right/Left Antiwar Alliance

2011-03-27T19:02:00.001-07:00

The Book Has Been Written on the Right/Left Antiwar Alliance

http://original.antiwar.com/john-v-walsh/2011/02/22/the-book-has-been-written/

by John V. Walsh,
February 23, 2011

A year ago this week on Feb. 20, about 40 antiwar activists, writers,
and organizers, gathered in a basement conference room in Washington,
D.C., to launch an antiwar organization spanning the political
spectrum. As a first step we agreed to publish a book of essays by
meeting participants and others, now out with the title
ComeHomeAmerica.US. The organization has also launched a Web site.

That meeting was remarkably friendly, given that the editors of The
Nation and The American Conservative were contained within the same
four walls. The keynote was given by Ralph Nader, at the insistence
of the Right.

About 65 percent of Americans oppose the wars in the Middle East and
Central Asia. And yet this majority is unable to prevail. One reason
is that those who oppose war do not work together. In fact, we often
are at one another's throats even when we are in agreement. Some of
that is principled difference – all to the good. But some is simply
based on stereotypes of "the other," a recipe for failure.

As Eugene McCarthy often said, the war in Vietnam ground on because
antiwar Democrats put party above principle. And today we see many
who passionately opposed the war under Bush have vanished into the
woodwork with the rise of Obama. Certainly there is no call to
"Impeach Obama" although he is carrying out the same policies as
Bush. The same happened on the other side under Bush, albeit to a
lesser degree if we are to be honest. Those who would put partisan
interests above a principled antiwar stance will not find a
Right/Left alliance very congenial. But such Democrats and
Republicans, whether unthinking loyalists or crass careerists, hold
the antiwar movement back. Their absence is to be welcomed. It is
another powerful feature of a movement like Come Home America.

As the two War Parties are fond of proclaiming, politics should stop
at the water's edge. We should take up the same cry; our differences
over domestic policy should stop at the water's edge, and there we
should unite to oppose empire and war.

What do the Right and Left bring to the antiwar movement? At this
time, the Left brings greater numbers because the Cold War has led
the Right away from its traditional "isolationist," i.e.,
anti-interventionist, stance, to which it is only beginning to
return. But the Right brings something equally powerful to the
antiwar movement, and that is its vocabulary. The paleocons and
libertarians put their opposition to war in words that are widely
understood and accepted in conventional mainstream discourse. When
the paleos declare America should be first, that cry resonates far
and wide to a populace facing economic hardships. And when
libertarians declare that government is a threat to liberty, with
military being a large part of the government, that is something
Americans have been taught to understand and respect since their
grade-school years. The antiwar movement benefits enormously from
this conventional and traditional American vocabulary. It is not
readily assailed.

America's wars are a scourge unto millions of humans. From a moral
point of view, we in the metropolis of empire have a duty to stop the
bloodshed and suffering perpetrated by our elite. In this quest, dare
any of us turn away allies? Can we be so sure of our own views that
we will consort only with the like-minded even at the price of other
humans? How can we square that with our deepest instincts to preserve
life? Those who would refuse such alliances must look deep into
themselves to discover what justifies that.

The Come Home America movement has begun. Later this year a national
conference will be called that will hopefully attract hundreds of
participants. Meanwhile the book and the Web site beckon to all who
are interested.
--

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com.

Give Peaceful Resistance a Chance

2011-03-27T18:44:00.001-07:00

Give Peaceful Resistance a Chance

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/opinion/10chenoweth.html

By ERICA CHENOWETH
Published: March 9, 2011

Middletown, Conn.

THE rebellion in Libya stands out among the recent unrest in the
Middle East for its widespread violence: unlike the protesters in
Tunisia or Egypt, those in Libya quickly gave up pursuing nonviolent
change and became an armed rebellion.

And while the fighting in Libya is far from over, it's not too early
to ask a critical question: which is more effective as a force for
change, violent or nonviolent resistance? Unfortunately for the
Libyan rebels, research shows that nonviolent resistance is much more
likely to produce results, while violent resistance runs a greater
risk of backfiring.

Consider the Philippines. Although insurgencies attempted to
overthrow Ferdinand Marcos during the 1970s and 1980s, they failed to
attract broad support. When the regime did fall in 1986, it was at
the hands of the People Power movement, a nonviolent pro-democracy
campaign that boasted more than two million followers, including
laborers, youth activists and Catholic clergy.

Indeed, a study I recently conducted with Maria J. Stephan, now a
strategic planner at the State Department, compared the outcomes of
hundreds of violent insurgencies with those of major nonviolent
resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006; we found that over 50 percent
of the nonviolent movements succeeded, compared with about 25 percent
of the violent insurgencies.

Why? For one thing, people don't have to give up their jobs, leave
their families or agree to kill anyone to participate in a nonviolent
campaign. That means such movements tend to draw a wider range of
participants, which gives them more access to members of the regime,
including security forces and economic elites, who often sympathize
with or are even relatives of protesters.

What's more, oppressive regimes need the loyalty of their personnel
to carry out their orders. Violent resistance tends to reinforce that
loyalty, while civil resistance undermines it. When security forces
refuse orders to, say, fire on peaceful protesters, regimes must
accommodate the opposition or give up power precisely what happened
in Egypt.

This is why the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, took such great
pains to use armed thugs to try to provoke the Egyptian demonstrators
into using violence, after which he could have rallied the military
behind him.

But where Mr. Mubarak failed, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi succeeded: what
began as peaceful movement became, after a few days of brutal
crackdown by his corps of foreign militiamen, an armed but
disorganized rebel fighting force. A widely supported popular
revolution has been reduced to a smaller group of armed rebels
attempting to overthrow a brutal dictator. These rebels are at a
major disadvantage, and are unlikely to succeed without direct
foreign intervention.

If the other uprisings across the Middle East remain nonviolent,
however, we should be optimistic about the prospects for democracy
there. That's because, with a few exceptions most notably Iran
nonviolent revolutions tend to lead to democracy.

Although the change is not immediate, our data show that from 1900 to
2006, 35 percent to 40 percent of authoritarian regimes that faced
major nonviolent uprisings had become democracies five years after
the campaign ended, even if the campaigns failed to cause immediate
regime change. For the nonviolent campaigns that succeeded, the
figure increases to well over 50 percent.

The good guys don't always win, but their chances increase greatly
when they play their cards well. Nonviolent resistance is about
finding and exploiting points of leverage in one's own society. Every
dictatorship has vulnerabilities, and every society can find them.
--

Erica Chenoweth, an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan
University, is the co-author of the forthcoming "Why Civil Resistance
Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict."

Veterans, active-duty troops take action against endless war

2011-03-27T18:11:00.001-07:00

Veterans, active-duty troops take action against endless war

http://www.answercoalition.org/march-forward/statements/veterans-active-duty-troops.html

March Forward! members march, speak out, engage in civil resistance

March 23, 2011

On March 19, the 8th anniversary of the unprovoked war of aggression
against the people of Iraq, March Forward! members took action in the
streets across the country.

With the war in Iraq still a realitythe latest U.S. soldier was
killed there on March 20and the war in Afghanistan in its bloodiest
year yet, it is clear that the United States is in a state of
permanent war. Neither conflict has a possible end in sight. The
generals and politicians themselves admit that these are endless
occupations, with endless bloodshed. Hopes that winning a Democratic
majority, with an "anti-war" President, would somehow change the
course of the U.S. war machine proved to be empty.

Even as the marches began around the country to mark the 8th year of
war in Iraq, the United States government began bombing the people of
Libya, the most oil-rich country in all of Africa, beginning a new
U.S. war with no perceivable end.

There is a growing understanding among people in the U.S., including
veterans and active duty troops, that no change will come from
Washington. The actions of the White House and Congress, regardless
of whatever "progressive" lip service they give, are firmly with the
Oil Giants, the defense contractors, Wall Street and the banks. The
politicians will do what they have always done: what is best for the
super-rich. Unless, of course, they are forced to do otherwise; when
a mass movement of people make it impossible to continue on the
current course.

This is why, for the past several months, veterans in March Forward!
who have fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, worked tirelessly
to do the most important thing: build the anti-war movement. Members
passed out thousands of flyers, put up hundreds of posters, and
served as key march organizers from coast to coast.

In Los Angeles, a march of well over 4000 people was led by a strong
contingent of March Forward! veterans, including active-duty soldiers
and Marines who are refusing their orders to fight in Afghanistan and
Iraq. March Forward! supporter Ron Kovic, Vietnam veteran and author
of Born on the Fourth of July, joined this new generation of veterans
in the streets.

Kevin Baker, a recently discharged Army infantry sergeant who spent
28 months in Iraq, spoke to the crowd of thousands about a fellow
soldier, Derrick Kirkland, who killed himself on March 19 2010. A
year ago, he hanged himself in his barracks room after being
neglected and abused by the Army mental health system. Baker said,
"Those of us who mourned Kirkland's death, those of us who were sent
to die in these wars, we know that this government cares nothing
about us. We're just the cannon fodder in these wars for the rich.
Those experiences have woken us up, and we are fighting back, and we
will fight back until we stop these criminal wars!"

In Washington, D.C., several members of March Forward! were arrested
along with over a hundred other veterans in a dramatic act of civil
disobedience. This was the second mass veteran-led civil disobedience
at the White House in just four months, spearheaded by Veterans for
Peace, March Forward!, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ANSWER
Coalition and others.

Ryan Endicott, a former Marine infantryman who did a tour in Ramadi,
Iraq, was a featured speaker at the rally. Before he was arrested in
the civil disobedience, he said to a crowd of over 1000: "We know
firsthand that our enemy is not the people of Iraq, who for eight
years have been struggling to survive a brutal occupation. It is not
the people of Afghanistan who for over a decade have been struggling
to survive a brutal occupation. The biggest threat to the people of
the United States is not thousands of miles away, but hundreds of
yards away, right here in the White House, in the Pentagon, on Wall
Street. It's the bankers that take our homes, the CEOs that lay off
from our jobs only to take million dollar bonuses."

Members also rallied on March 20 at Quantico Marine Base demanding
freedom for Bradley Manning. Others help organize and took part in
demonstrations in San Francisco, Seattle, New Haven, Tampa and other cities.

With the multitude of issues facing veterans and service members
todayconstant deployment to two ridiculous wars, criminally
inadequate PTSD treatment, an unemployment rate of over 20 percent,
and moreit is growing ever more essential for us to join together
and build a movement for change. History teaches us that change never
comes from above, it never comes from the politicians; it comes from
a determined mass movement that operates outside of the political
establishment, that doesn't ask for change, but fights for change.
This is what we did on March 19, and what we will continue to do,
everyday, until we win. Join
us! http://www.answercoalition.org/march-forward/join.html

Puppet Masters

2011-03-27T13:59:00.001-07:00

Puppet Masters

sott.net | Mar 16th 2011 12:11 AM

Reagan's "morning in America" created "Red Dawn," and a Pentagon-fueled pop culture that trained the masses

Let's be completely clear: I did not consciously know I was a devout militarist in 1988 at the young, impressionable age of 12. When I ordered my G.I. Joe Snowcat tank to indiscriminately fire one of its six missiles at the Cobra soldiers who so often held my LEGO city hostage, I didn't think that if this were real, it would probably leave a smoldering pile of blood and limbs and innocent victims. All I thought was: Awesome!

When I rented Hollywood's first PG-13 rated production, 1984's Red Dawn, and I saw the teen heartthrobs protect America by racking up execution after execution, I didn't know the movie would also become the Guinness world-record holder for violent acts depicted per minute in a film. All I did was cheer.

And when I played Contra on my Nintendo NES, I wasn't questioning the premise of a game named after violent terrorist death squads in Nicaragua that were being funded by the Reagan administration's illegal CIA cash transfers from Iran. I was just punching in up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A, then happily mowing down anything and everything that moved.

"Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable," writes public relations expert Nancy Snow. "In an open society, such as the United States, the hidden and integrated nature of the propaganda best convinces people they are not being manipulated."

Exactly, and neither I nor my parents were supposed to think much about what the 1980s were teaching me and every other kid in our basements-turned-bunkers. But for a generation that grew up on Reading Rainbow, Memory, and Speak and Spell's "E.T." Fantasy Module (geranium has only one r!), games and entertainment were teaching tools, and the militarization of childhood that started in the 1980s made the little green men, cap guns, and Boy Scout retreats of old-time Americana look positively pacifist. With the Pentagon shaping movie screenplays, investing in video games, cooperating with toy marketers, and eventually working with baseball-card companies to publish Desert Storm trading cards, 1985's classic sci-fi novel Ender's Game seemed more prophecy than fantasy.

Reaganism abetted this dawn of the "the military-entertainment complex," as Wired magazine called it. The administration's hawkishess provided the political rationale for parental complicity, and the White House's deregulatory agenda helped television become the most influential -- and most invasive -- marketer of kids products, more and more of which were violent and military-themed.

Now, the investment is paying off, just in time for the current era's obsession with permanent war. Today's soldiers, for example, frequently reference their childhood devotion to G.I. Joe cartoons and action figures of the 1980s when explaining their decision to enlist. (An October 2008 article in The Believer found that "a national newspaper search for G.I. Joe references turned up 35 obituaries for soldiers killed in Iraq since the war began, in 2003. In each article, family members reminisced how the men had loved to play with the toy soldiers.") Similarly, during the Iraq invasion military brass named the search for Saddam Hussein Operation Red Dawn because officers said the John Milius film "was a patriotic, pro-American movie [that] all of us in the military have seen."

Considering this, do you truly think it was mere coincidence that George W. Bush's aides exquisitely re-created the final aircraft-carrier scene from "Top Gun" to commemorate their boss's declaration of Iraq victory? Or that Bush's "bring it on" taunt had nothing to do with an attempt to access fond memories of Milius one-liners from the 1980s? And can you really argue that it's just happenstance that the Pentagon today airs recruitment ads in movie theaters, ads that portray soldiers as bulletproof RoboCops and war as the bloodless arcade game from The Last Starfighter?

White House strategists and Pentagon propagandists use information and imagery as strategic weapons, and they are well aware that the most valuable of those weapons is cheery childhood nostalgia. They also know that in a country where almost half the population was born after 1979, some of the most compelling of those youthful memories come from the schlock that was originally stockpiled in the 1980s basement.

And a lot of it plays into the ideological agenda of the Pentagon. "Young men of recruiting age cited movies and television as their primary source of their impressions about the military, so [movies and television] are very important [to the Pentagon]," an army spokeswoman told PBS, citing the Defense Department's extensive surveys of youth attitudes. "It's an opportunity for [kids] to see what the possibilities are and to see what being a soldier would be like."

Red Dawn is a classic invasion flick, but with a deliberate twist for recruitment-age teens. It tells the story of youngsters from the fictional town of Calumet, Colorado, who call themselves the Wolverines and who go rogue by mounting a preposterous guerrilla resistance against a massive Soviet assault on the American homeland. To further sex up the adolescent appeal, Red Dawn cast '80s teen heartthrobs such as Thompson, Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell and, yes, Charlie Sheen, in the lead roles.

The film starts out with the bedrock provisos of militarist paranoia, including key pillars of eighties Vietnam-related revision:

-- Anti-gun-control extremism: One of the film's first scenes shows a Soviet thug pulling a gun from an American corpse as the camera pans across a pickup truck bearing an NRA bumper sticker that reads, "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers." Later, the Soviets are able to hunt down American resisters through the secret master list of gun owners that the U.S. government allegedly keeps (one of the longtime conspiracy theories among gun enthusiasts).

-- Retaliation/revenge on countries that defeat the United States: One of the kids' fathers is shown in a concentration-camp cage, yelling to his son to "Avenge me!" by killing as many enemies as possible. His scream could be the name of every back-to-Vietnam flick from the 1980s.

-- Backstabbing politicians: The film shows Calumet's mayor as a cowardly and conniving Soviet collaborator who does nothing while his constituents are rounded up and murdered. Additionally, the mayor's son (also student body president at Calumet High School) presses the Wolverines to surrender and later betrays them. Taken together, Red Dawn argues that politicians are all weak-kneed, corrupt, and traitorous.

-- United States as embattled underdog: In the same way adult politics, media, and entertainment in the eighties tried to recast the U.S. military as a yellow-ribbon-worthy under- dog helping supposed "freedom fighters" in Latin America, rescuing POWs from Vietcong, and liberating Kuwait from the supposed Iraq behemoth, Red Dawn's Wolverines are positioned as outgunned insurgents scratching their way to victory against the Russian colossus. "The message of 'Red Dawn,'" its director, Milius, said, "is to liberate the oppressed" -- the "oppressed" somehow being America, the most militarily dominant nation in human history.

Soon after fleeing to the woods for some good old-fashioned Unabomber-like survivalism (including drinking deer blood as a male-bonding exercise), the Wolverines come upon a fallen U.S. pilot who articulates a few more paranoias of eighties militarism:

-- Stealth terrorists are already among us: "The first wave of the (Soviet) attack came in disguise as commercial charter flights," says the pilot in an eerily prescient vision of a 9/11- like onslaught.

-- The need for a militarized southern border: "Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico, Cubans mostly," he continues.

-- Weak-kneed western allies justify the United States spending more on the military than all other nations combined: When the kids ask if Europe is going to help stop the Soviet invasion, the pilot says that Europe is "sittin' this one out -- all except England, and they won't last very long."

Recall that four years before this film was released, Ronald Reagan had given voice to many of these theories, saying "the Soviets and their friends are advancing" and chastising the Carter administration for "failing to see any threatening pattern." It was propaganda in its most literal form.

In 1997, after reports that Red Dawn was one of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's favorite films, MGM/United Artists vice president Peter Bart revealed to Variety that when his company first considered the movie's script, the studio's CEO "declared in no uncertain terms that he wanted to make the ultimate jingoistic movie." The studio subsequently recruited Reagan's recently departed secretary of state, retired general Alexander Haig, to serve on MGM's corporate board, "consult with ['Red Dawn's'] director and inculcate the appropriate ideological tint." Though the screenplay's first draft strived to lament the tragedies of war, Bart recounted how the studio "demanded to know why [it] should try to remake Lord of the Flies when it could instead try for Rambo."

Of course, the military had been working with Hollywood filmmakers since 1927, when it helped produce Wings, the winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Picture. Pentagon involvement varied through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, but it always had kids in its sights. In the 1950s, for example, the military worked with Lassie on shows that highlighted new military technology and produced "Mouse Reels" for The Mickey Mouse Club, one of which showed kids touring the first nuclear submarine. As investigative journalist David Robb discovered, a Pentagon memo noted at the time that child-focused media "is an excellent opportunity to introduce a whole new generation to the nuclear Navy."

The 1970s saw far fewer Pentagon-backed war films for a public that was fatigued from Vietnam and its aftermath on the evening news. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, as Reaganite militarism began ascending, the 1980s saw "a steady growth in the demand for access to military facilities and in the number of films, TV shows and home videos made about the military."

For that access, the military began exacting a price. The Pentagon's focus on juveniles created the heavy hand it was beginning to use to shape popular culture in the 1980s. Increasingly, for filmmakers to gain access to even the most basic military scenery, Pentagon gatekeepers began requiring major plot and dialogue changes so as to guarantee that the military was favorably portrayed. In a Variety story from 1994, the Pentagon's official Hollywood liaison, Phil Strub, put it bluntly: "The main criteria we use [for approval] is ... how could the proposed production benefit the military ... could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?"

According to Strub, Pentagon-Hollywood collusion hit "a milestone" with 1986's Top Gun, a triumphalist teen recruitment ad about the navy's "best of the best," who, of course, never even think to ask the most basic of the basic questions. The movie's glaringly incurious characters and story were no accident. The script was shaped by Pentagon brass in exchange for full access to all sorts of hardware -- the access itself a priceless taxpayer subsidy. According to Maclean's, Paramount Pictures paid just "$1.1 million for the use of warplanes and an aircraft carrier," far less than it would have cost the studio had it been compelled to finance the eye candy itself.

As if that carrot-stick dynamic weren't coercive enough to aspiring filmmakers, the Pentagon in the 1980s expanded the definition of "cooperation" to include collaboration on screenplays as scripts were being initially drafted. "It saves [writers] time from writing stupid stuff," said one official in explaining the new process.

Such a cavalier attitude coupled with the box-office success of the Pentagon-approved Top Gun convinced studios in the 1980s that agreeing to military demands and, hence, making ever more militaristic films was a guaranteed formula for success. Consequently, between the release of Top Gun and the beginning of the Gulf War, the Pentagon reported that the number of pictures made with its official assistance (and approval) quadrupled, and a large portion of these action-adventure productions (quickly synergized into video games, action figures, etc.) were for teenagers.

The short-term impact of the military-entertainment complex was enlistment surges correlating to specific eighties box-office hits. As just one (albeit huge) example, recruitment spiked 400 percent when Top Gun was released, leading the navy to set up recruitment tables at theaters upon realizing the movie's effect. Medium term, of course, is the Red Dawn effect. Contemporary missions are named after the film (and various other militarist fantasies from the eighties), tapping into the hardwired psyches of the "Wolverines who have grown up and gone to Iraq," as Milius recently called the eighties generation.

Then there are the standards that were set for the long haul. Today, the Pentagon offers Hollywood just as much enticement for militarism, and just as much punishment against antimilitarism, as ever. On top of the eighties militarism that is now endlessly recycled in the cable rerun-o-sphere, it's a safe bet that whichever Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay blockbuster is being fawned over by teen audiences is at least partially underwritten by the Pentagon, and as a condition of that support, these blockbusters typically agree to deliberately reiterate the morality of the military and war.

By contrast, as the director of The Hunt for Red October recounted, this new reality prompted studios in the eighties to start telling screenwriters and directors to "get the cooperation of the [military], or forget about making the picture." What greater control could the Pentagon ever have hoped for?

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose upcoming book "Back to Our Future" will be released in March 2011. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota

Original Page: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/225909-How-the-80s-programmed-us-for-war

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Bradley Manning's Father Speaks Out

2011-03-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

m.guardian.co.uk

m.guardian.co.uk | Mar 15th 2011 Bradley Manning's father has broken his silence to denounce the way the Pentagon is treating the US soldier suspected of being the source of the WikiLeaks embassy cables. Brian Manning said he had decided to speak out for the first time since his son was transferred to the military jail in Quantico marine base in Virginia, where he awaits court martial on charges of handing state secrets to an unauthorised party. Manning's father said he was moved into protesting because of the conditions under which his son is being detained. "It's shocking enough that I would come out of our silence as a family and say, 'No, you've crossed a line. This is wrong'," Manning said. He pointed out that his son had "not gone to trial or been convicted of anything." And he referred to the Guantánamo detention facility for terror suspects, saying: "They worry about people down in a base in Cuba, but here we have someone on our own soil under our own control, and they are treating him in this way". Brian Manning said that the decision to strip the prisoner naked at night was a form of humiliation. The Pentagon has now said that it allows Bradley Manning to wear a garment at night, which his lawyer described as a smock. Brian Manning made his remarks to the television programme Frontline. In the interview, he said that it was his encouragement that led to Bradley entering the army in the first place. Manning's father had been in the navy as an intelligence specialist, which was how he met Bradley's mother, Susan, when he was stationed at a US base near Haverfordwest in Wales. The family lived in Crescent, a small town in Oklahoma where Bradley was born on 17 December 1987. Brian Manning said his son joined the army "after I twisted his arm. He didn't want to join. But he needed structure in his life, he was aimless. I knew in my own life that joining the navy was the only thing that gave me structure, and everything's been fine since then." He defended his son over allegations that he was the source of the secret documents taken from US military databases and passed to WikiLeaks. "I don't know why he would do that, I really don't." But he added that "whoever released those documents, it was the wrong thing to do. You just don't go there."

Original Page: http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/15/bradley-manning-father-pentagon-treatment?cat=world&type=article

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Veterans for Peace calls LZ Lambeau a recruiting event

2011-03-27T13:35:00.001-07:00

Veterans for Peace calls LZ Lambeau a recruiting event

by Scott Williams, greenbaypressgazette.com
March 15th 2011

Anti-war activists are criticizing the LZ Lambeau event and planning a counter program in Green Bay this weekend.

A group called Veterans for Peace is conducting a series of workshops and discussions about military recruiting, combat stress and ongoing international conflicts.

Members of the group say that LZ Lambeau started out as a worthwhile tribute to Vietnam veterans, but has become a pro-war exhibition aimed at getting kids into the military.

"There will be no peace presence," critic Buzz Davis said. "The whole thing's been hijacked."

LZ Lambeau director Don Jones said he welcomes Veterans for Peace participation this weekend. There will be space at Lambeau Field for all veterans groups to distribute their literature, he said.

Jones, however, denied that the tribute and belated welcome home for Vietnam veterans has strayed from its original purpose. No military recruiters will be permitted on site, he said, and the focus will remain on honoring Vietnam-era veterans.

"It doesn't have anything to do with promoting war or anything else," he said.

The three-day event, which officially starts on Friday, is expected to draw tens of thousands of veterans for exhibits, memorials and ceremonies.

Veterans for Peace is presenting a documentary Friday afternoon at the Brown County Library, 515 Pine St., Green Bay, and other events Friday and Saturday at the Green Bay Labor Temple, 1570 Elizabeth St.

The counter programming is being billed, "Operation Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, Wage Peace not War."

Tony Vanderbloemen, president of the Greater Green Bay Labor Council, said he is a member of Veterans for Peace, but does not endorse their weekend activities and has no plans to participate. He said his council only agreed to lease space to the group.

"Personally, I'd rather forget the war," said Vanderbloemen, who served in the Navy during Vietnam.

Davis, a Stoughton resident who served in the Army, said his group has no plans to demonstrate at Lambeau Field, although he said some members might attend LZ Lambeau events.

The group has dropped plans to display 5,000 mock tombstones near Lambeau Field to symbolize the number of U.S. lives lost in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ronna Swift of Appleton, coordinator of the Fox Valley Peace Coalition, said her group likely will be represented by a carload of people who will travel to Green Bay.

Swift said she objected to LZ Lambeau organizers making "almost a party" out of what she said should be a somber occasion. She said she was pleased that Veterans for Peace were presenting the anti-war perspective.

"I don't see it as a protest at all," she said. "I see it as a healthy alternative for people."

Original Page: http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20100520/GPG0101/5200588/Veterans-Peace-calls-LZ-Lambeau-recruiting-event?odyssey=nav%7Chead

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War, what is it meant for=?UTF-8?B?Pw==?=

2011-03-20T21:40:00.001-07:00

War, what is it meant for?

by E-mail, latimes.com
March 12th 2011

Given the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is unsurprising that many Americans have grown skeptical about further intervention in conflicts abroad. Like the Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved long, costly and not terribly successful, and have left some Americans with a sense that their country has neither the resolve nor — despite its overwhelming military superiority — the power necessary to achieve its aims. Some go beyond that to say that the United States lacks the moral authority to be the world's policeman.

That impulse to hang back is not a bad one. Foreign military entanglements, especially those undertaken in the name of humanitarianism and democracy, shouldn't be entered into lightly. No country, the United States included, has the resources or the will to solve all the problems on Earth, where people are starving and suffering and killing one another on a regular basis. What's more, when it comes to crises like those roiling the Middle East today, there are complicating factors that make military intervention difficult: the difficulty of distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys, the tremendous responsibility that follows when the conflict ends and the rebuilding begins, and the fact that revolutionaries don't always want outside assistance.

For those and other reasons, this page has been reluctant to support military involvement in the upheaval in Libya, and we came out last week against a no-fly zone, arguing that it was more complicated than it sounded and could draw the U.S. into a war that is not its own. After all, if the U.S. is willing to shoot down planes over Libya, then it's hard to see the argument against sending in ground troops. If the U.S. decides to intervene on behalf of the rebels in Libya, then it's easy enough to do the same for those fighting the regimes in Yemen, Bahrain or Iran. That's how escalation works.

But that leaves unanswered the tougher, long-term question facing policymakers: When should a nation go to war? What circumstances justify U.S. military involvement and the potential loss of American lives as well as the lives of civilians in faraway countries? Self-defense in response to an invasion or attack seems like an obvious example of a justifiable war, but does that mean the U.S. is also justified in launching a preemptive war to stave off a looming threat? Should the U.S. or the world have acknowledged a responsibility to protect the civilians at risk of genocide in Rwanda in 1994 (or those in Darfur or Bosnia or Nazi Germany)? Does the United States have a moral obligation to help force out a repressive dictator if hundreds of thousands of protesters gather in the streets? And in Libya today, must the U.S. and the world stand idly by if Moammar Kadafi opts to retain power by slaughtering his own people?

There are many schools of thought on these questions. Foreign policy "realists," for example, argue that nations should go to war only when vital national interests or national security are threatened. Realists say that moral concerns should generally not play a substantial part in such decisions and that humanitarian interventions tend to backfire. A classic realist war is one fought in self-defense or in response to an attack such as 9/11.

"Just war" theorists, on the other hand, offer a different set of criteria for judging the rightness of going to war. Among other things, they argue that the goals must justify the death and destruction that will inevitably follow; that there must be more at stake than mere self-interest; that other means of achieving the same aim must first be exhausted, making military action the last resort; and that there must be a reasonable chance of success.

Here's a third way of thinking about what kinds of wars are justified: In 2006, the United Nations officially adopted a doctrine known as the "responsibility to protect." Under R2P, as it's known, the international community has the responsibility to protect populations from atrocities — including genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity — and if peaceful means are unsuccessful, the doctrine holds, the world is justified in taking other forms of "collective action" to stop those crimes.

This page sees a bit of wisdom in all three approaches. Too often, the debate over intervention careens between isolationists who oppose any war, hawks who relish the use of American force and realists who see no use for humanitarianism. Sound strategy lies between those ideological absolutes.

We tend to agree with Richard Haas, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, that there are "wars of necessity" — in which vital national interests are at stake — and "wars of choice," which are not inherently good or bad but which must be undertaken only if they can reasonably be expected to accomplish more than they will cost.

Obviously, there should be a much higher bar for wars of choice than for wars of necessity, and wars of choice should be waged with the broadest possible support from the international community. But though they should be rare, wars of choice for humanitarian purposes should not be ruled out. The world community does have an obligation to protect those in the most dire circumstances; genocide, for example, must not be tolerated on grounds of "national sovereignty" or merely because its victims are people of another color or culture in a distant part of the world.

In Libya, the decision is relatively easy. Disgusted as we are by Kadafi's brutal tactics, dismayed as we are by the death of Libyans fighting for a democratic alternative, this is not genocide or anything like it. The United States should offer what support it can, from delivering humanitarian aid to the rebels to blocking communications systems to toughening up the embargo. But Libya today doesn't meet the test for military intervention.

If military action doesn't become necessary in Libya, it surely will become necessary somewhere else, some other time. The United States needs to preserve the option of using force to right wrongs when necessary and justified, but it must also remember that violence begets violence and that the cost of war — even in a humanitarian cause — can be too high to pay.

Original Page: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-war-20110312,0,2450197.story

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The Peace Movement Today

2011-03-17T13:33:00.001-07:00

The Peace Movement Today

by Lawrence S. Wittner, hnn.us
March 7th 2011

Recently, when commentators have bothered to notice the American peace movement, they have pronounced it dead. But this is far from the case.

Admittedly, it is remarkably fragmented. Certainly, it contains no organization that plays a role comparable to NOW in the women's movement, the NAACP in the racial justice movement, or the AFL-CIO in the labor movement. Instead, the Fellowship of Reconciliation draws together religious pacifists, the War Resisters League enrolls secular pacifists, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom mobilizes women, Veterans for Peace appeals to veterans, and U.S. Labor Against the War rallies unionists. In addition, there is a multiplicity of small groups without specific social constituencies that are scattered about the nation.

By far the largest peace organization in the United States is Peace Action, which was born out of the merger of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in 1987. With about 100,000 dues-paying members, active affiliates throughout the country, and excellent relations with the Progressive Caucus in Congress, Peace Action has some clout. Even so, it represents only a fraction of the peace movement.

Given the movement's organizational fragmentation, coalitions tend to be weak and evanescent. Over the past decade, two rival coalitions—United for Peace and Justice (which drew together some of the more mainstream groups) and ANSWERS (which appealed to left sectarians)—sought for a time to work together, but ultimately found this impossible. Both coalitions are now collapsing, and a new venture, the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC), is trying to develop a united movement. But it remains uncertain that UNAC, which focuses on reviving mass antiwar demonstrations, has a broad enough appeal to do so.

Although the peace movement surged during the era of the George W. Bush administration, the claim that it has collapsed since that time is quite overdrawn. Yes, in recent years, peace coalitions have declined and antiwar demonstrations have dwindled in size. But these developments reflect, in part, the fact that many people, including peace activists, don't see much point at this time in constantly turning out for peace marches. After all, there are many other ways to oppose war and militarism. Also, the polls show clearly that most Americans now oppose current U.S. wars and military occupations. In fact, some peace groups, like Peace Action, actually experienced significant membership growth last year.

As part of its ongoing efforts, the peace movement takes on a multiplicity of projects—from opposing military recruitment in the schools to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But three issues, particularly, seem to be on its front burner today.

The first is ending the Afghanistan war. The latest round of U.S. military intervention in that land began in the first year of the Bush administration, and since then has shown no signs of abating. Indeed, the Obama administration recently increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. This lengthy war has resulted in substantial death and destruction among Afghans and significant casualty levels among foreign troops (including nearly 12,000 casualties among American soldiers). According to the highly-respected National Priorities Project, the cost to U.S. taxpayers has been roughly $382 billion thus far. Not surprisingly, polls show that 72 percent of Americans want an escalated timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Given these factors, plus the dubious benefits of the war, the peace movement and its congressional allies have an opportunity to force the president to negotiate a settlement of the conflict and withdraw all American forces before his announced target date of 2014.

Another area attracting peace movement attention is cutting military spending. Given the heavy emphasis upon reducing the federal deficit, a fierce scramble has begun over which programs should be slashed. In this context, it is hard to imagine that military spending—which currently accounts for 58 percent of federal discretionary spending and is slated for another increase under President Obama's proposed budget for FY 2012—will escape the budget cutters' axe. It certainly seems excessive. U.S. military spending accounts for nearly half of global military expenditures, and the number two spender is China, whose military budget is only one-sixth that of the United States. With well over $700 billion going annually to the Pentagon, ongoing U.S. wars, and U.S. nuclear weapons programs, Peace Action and elements of the peace movement are joining with supporters of public education, housing, healthcare, and other human services in a Move the Money campaign, designed to shift federal resources from military to social spending. Numerous mainstream groups are already on board with this campaign, including the United Auto Workers, the United Electrical Workers, and SEIU 1199 New England.

Finally, the peace movement continues to champion nuclear disarmament. Although the New START Treaty represented a step forward along these lines, it was only a modest one. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons remain in national arsenals, with thousands of them on alert, ready to wipe out the human race. Moreover, to secure enough Republican support to have the treaty ratified in the Senate, the Obama administration agreed to back a ten-year, $185 billion program of "modernization" for the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex and for U.S. nuclear weapons. Thus, despite the President's rhetorical support for nuclear abolition, it looks like the United States and other nations are on a very slow track to ridding the world of the nuclear menace. In this context, the peace movement has begun to push back, calling for rejection of nuclear "modernization" and the opening of negotiations for a treaty to provide for a nuclear weapons-free world. The demand to reduce the federal budget deficit should also strengthen the hand of the peace movement on this issue, for, if the U.S. government is really interested in abolishing nuclear weapons, why should it spend another $185 billion producing them?

In short, the American peace movement is alive and well. But it certainly faces some serious challenges.

Original Page: http://www.hnn.us/articles/137043.html

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U.S. slaughters Afghan civilians including children

2011-03-14T12:52:00.001-07:00

U.S. slaughters Afghan civilians including children

workers.org | Mar 12th 2011 10:44 AM

On March 1 in the village of Nanglam in Afghanistan, the people heard gunfire in the nearby mountains. They became worried when some of their children did not return home. The boys had been out collecting firewood since morning, and the villagers went to look for them.

“Finally we found the dead bodies,” said Ashabuddin, a shopkeeper from a nearby village whose nephew Khalid was among the missing. “Some of the dead bodies were really badly chopped up by the rockets,” he said. “The head of a child was missing. Others were missing limbs.”

“We tried to find the body pieces and put them together. As it was getting late, we brought down the bodies in a rope bed. We buried them in the village’s cemetery,” Ashabuddin added. “The children were all from poor families; otherwise, no one would send their sons up to the mountains despite the known threats.”

Khalid, 14, was the only male in the family, Ashabuddin said. “He was studying in sixth grade of the orphanage school and working because his father died four years ago due to a long-term sickness. His father was a day laborer. He has 13 sisters and two mothers. He was the sole breadwinner of the family. I don’t know what would happen to his family, to his sisters and mothers. They are all female and poor.” (New York Times, March 2)

In all, nine children ranging in age from 9 to 15 years old were massacred by U.S. helicopter gunships. A tenth boy, Hemad, aged 11, was wounded and only survived because he was hidden by branches from a tree which had been shattered by a rocket. “The helicopters,” said Hemad, “shot the boys one after another.” (New York Times)

Responses to this war crime were so furious that Gen. David H. Petraeus was forced to issue an apology, claiming that the killings were a case of “mistaken identity.” On March 2, over 200 people in Nanglam protested the boys’ deaths. Waving white flags, they shouted, “Death to America!” and “Death to Obama and his colleagues and associates!”

Mohammed Bismil, the 20-year-old brother of two boys killed in the strike told the Wall Street Journal that he didn’t care about Petraeus’ apology. “The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket propelled grenade] or a suicide vest to fight,” he said. (DailyMail, March 3)

A racist, genocidal campaign

The Kunar valley region of Afghanistan has long been a target of U.S. and NATO forces in the region. The province is informally known to the U.S. military occupying Afghanistan as “Enemy Central” and “Indian country.”

Since the 101st Airborne Division arrived in eastern Afghanistan in June of 2010, its troops have killed about 2,500 people, compared with about 1,500 in the same period the previous year, according to Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the top commander in eastern Afghanistan.

“That’s been our most kinetic area,” said Campbell. “We’ve dropped over 900 bombs since we’ve been here, and probably greater than 50 percent has been up there. We’ve fired over 30,000 artillery rounds, mortar rounds, and much of it has been up there. “(Washington Post Foreign Service, Feb. 20)

In February, Afghan government officials alleged that a U.S. military operation in the remote mountains in the same province killed 65 people, including 22 women and more than 30 children. In another incident, NATO forces killed an Afghan army officer and his entire family.

Meeting with Afghan government officials to discuss the incidents, NATO’s commander, Gen. David Petraeus, “insinuated that some Afghan parents deliberately burn their children’s hands and feet to present them as civilian casualties.” Petraeus has not responded to the widespread outrage his comment has produced. ( Guardian, Feb. 22)

The fact that a man of Petraeus’ stature feels he can publicly make such a racist comment shows that the U.S. and its allies have no respect for any Afghans, ordinary civilians or government officials alike. The imperialists are equally contemptuous of human life, even if it is children they are killing.

The U.S. must immediately withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and pay reparations for all the mayhem and slaughter they have caused. War criminals such as Gen. Petraeus should be put on trial and punished.

Original Page: http://www.workers.org/2011/world/afghanistan_0317/

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