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Thursday, March 18, 2010 06:02 GMT

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IRAQ: 'Disgraced Soldier' Fights Trauma With Documentary
By Zack Baddorf*
LONDON - A new documentary ‘Diary of a Disgraced Soldier’ follows the dismissal from the British army of an Iraq war veteran and his battle with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) linked to his videographing the brutalising of Iraqi youth by fellow servicemen.
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U.S.: Court-Martial for Soldier Who Wrote Angry Song about Stop-Loss
By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas - Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall was incarcerated by the U.S. Army in Georgia for recording a song that expresses his anger over the Army's stop-loss policy. Now he waits to be shipped to Iraq to face a court martial.
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U.S.: Suicide Rate Surged Among Veterans
By Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON - Suicides among United States military veterans ballooned by 26 percent from 2005 to 2007, according to new statistics released by the Veterans Affairs (VA) department.
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US: Whistleblower Psychiatrist Warns of Soldier on Soldier Violence
By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas - Kernan Manion, a psychiatrist who was hired last January to treat Marines returning from war who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other acute mental health problems borne from their deployments, fears more soldier-on-soldier violence without radical changes in the current soldier health care system.
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U.S.: Army Underreporting Suicides, Says GI Advocacy Group
By Dahr Jamail
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - According to a soldiers' advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base where an army psychiatrist has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage, the official suicide figures provided by the Army are "definitely" too low.
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POLITICS-US: Right Seizes on Ft. Hood Killings as "Islamic Terror"
By Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON - Senior military and Barack Obama administration officials have been on a full-court press to preempt an anti-Muslim backlash since the shooting spree by a Muslim soldier at Fort Hood, Texas, but right-wing pundits have wasted no time in characterising Major Nidal Malik Hasan's actions as an act of terrorism by a radical Islamic extremist.
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U.S.: "War Comes Home" with Ft. Hood Shootings
By Dahr Jamail
PHOENIX, Arizona - While investigators probe for a motive behind the mass shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas Thursday, in which an army psychiatrist is suspected of killing 13 people, military personnel at the base are in shock as the incident "brings the war home".
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BOOKS-US: Soldiers Who Just Say No
By Jon Letman
KAUAI, Hawaii - Six months into Barack Obama's presidency, the U.S. public's display of antiwar sentiment has faded to barely a whisper.
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Q&A: Military Losing GI Hearts and Minds
William Fisher interviews MARJORIE COHN and KATHLEEN GILBERD of the National Lawyers Guild
NEW YORK - The continuing occupation or Iraq and the growing war in Afghanistan are leaving permanent physical and emotional scars on a whole generation of U.S. soldiers. Not since Vietnam have so many GIs objected to a war, and never have military families spoken out so strongly for withdrawal.
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U.S.: "There's No Way I'm Going to Deploy to Afghanistan"
By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas - "It’s a matter of what I’m willing to live with," Specialist Victor Agosto of the U.S. Army, who is refusing orders to deploy to Afghanistan, explained to IPS. "I’m not willing to participate in this occupation, knowing it is completely wrong."
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U.S.-IRAQ: Massacre Puts War Trauma Under the Spotlight
By Aaron Glantz
SAN FRANCISCO - A U.S. soldier shot five of his colleagues dead at a base in Baghdad, Iraq Monday. The Pentagon says at least two other people were hurt in the shootings and the gunman is in custody.
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BOOKS-US: Wounded Veterans Treated as an Afterthought
By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas - "But the [George W.] Bush administration was never seriously interested in helping veterans. The sorry state of care for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans is not an accident. It's on purpose."
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POLITICS-US: Vets Health System in Need of Triage
Analysis by Aaron Glantz*
SAN FRANCISCO - Eighteen U.S. veterans kill themselves every day. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas. One in every three homeless men in the United States has put on a uniform and served his country. On any given night, the U.S. government estimates 200,000 veterans sleep on the street.
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Could there be a more desolate, chilly expression? The Winter Soldier was about the boiling, unwintery Vietnam war. A three-day gathering organised in 1971 in Detroit by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was used to publicise war crimes by the U.S. forces. It generated a documentary by the same name.

With Iraq, this expression was reborn. The Winter Soldier embodies the fight of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans against the war, and their efforts to provide testimony on what really happened during the invasions and after. Hundreds of veterans and soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars met last March for Winter Soldier hearings modeled after the 1971 conferences. While this story was totally ignored by the mainstream press, IPS was one of the very few media outlets to cover it.