Wounded veterans attend a May 22, 2013 Memorial Day ceremony at which they are given Segway personal transporters to improve their mobility and independence. Credit: Senator Claire McCaskill/cc by 2.0

By Prashanth Kamalakanthan
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 2013 (IPS)

In his final letter to his family, 30-year-old Iraq war veteran Daniel Somers wrote of having never returned from war. “In truth, I was nothing more than a prop,” reads the suicide note dated Jun. 10, 2013, six years after his final deployment. “In truth, I have already been absent for a long, long time.”

As the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan draws to a close, Washington will tout the absence of combat troops in that country. Looking toward a scheduled withdrawal date of 2014, President Barack Obama has proudly announced that “our troops are finally coming home.”The heroic vocabulary of patriotic sacrifice papers over a miserable human reality politicians wish to ignore and soldiers need to escape.

But in what state he cannot say. For as the soldiers start streaming back, they will have absences of their own. Many will be disfigured, missing parts of the bodies they left with. Others will return in boxes, gone altogether. For some, like Somers, it will take longer to understand what was lost.

“There are some things that a person simply cannot come back from,” he wrote in anguish.

Though it’s the harshest condemnation we seem to hear, the horrors of war are not really “unspeakable.” The English language gives us many words to express the wretched realities of modern warfare: rape, mutilation, massacre, psychosis. But there are those that make our wars, and there are those who live them.

Both choose not to utter these ugly truths for their separate reasons. The heroic vocabulary of patriotic sacrifice papers over a miserable human reality politicians wish to ignore and soldiers need to escape.

Between them are the witnesses who find the voice to speak.

Ann Jones, the scholar, journalist and photographer who for decades has reported from the world’s conflict zones, turns in her latest book to those dealing with the silences surrounding the United States’ longest war. They Were Soldiers is an unwaveringly human narrative about the soldiers who return from Afghanistan, whole or in pieces, and the communities that put them back together, or not. It is not, as she makes clear at the outset, about “the pointless wars.”

From the outside, wars start and stop; they are planned, waged and, eventually, ended. For the people inside them, the violence never ceases. As Jones — the daughter of a WWI veteran whose trauma haunted him six decades after the Armistice and herself diagnosed with PTSD after her time in Afghanistan – observes, “often it merely recedes from public to private life.”

And so in her book, she begins with the end. In its opening chapter, she considers the dead, those termed in public-relations-speak “the fallen,” of whom all that’s left are “remains.” Those words, Jones notes, are a way of deemphasising how in Afghanistan soldiers often are not found intact.

Families are sent “literally whatever remains” in this new kind of war defined by catastrophic explosions, mostly roadside bombs (IEDs), instead of gunfire. Mortuary specialists have the gruesome task of identifying people who have sometimes quite literally “fallen to pieces.”

At each point of the impersonal systems of war, Jones listens as the human beings who care for those grievously damaged in Afghanistan (or sometimes the damaged themselves) tell their stories.

She speaks with specialists in Mortuary Affairs, whose job it is to collect partial humans and return them to their families. Many remain haunted by “the smell of dead meat,” the images of mangled bodies lingering “because, still, they looked like us.”

With Jones we take a C-17 medical evacuation flight as she talks to shaken doctors and boyish recruits. We follow her as she accompanies the wounded off the battlefield, first to the U.S. medical hub in Landstuhl, Germany, then on to Walter Reed stateside.

We hear how parents, strong for their children at the bedside, step out into hallways and “hang onto each other,” weeping. We see grueling prosthetic rehabilitation sessions that “begin to resemble a circle in hell,” as former warriors sweat, groan, and collapse in pain and frustration, while their families slowly accustom themselves to their newly limbless children.

We are invited, with Jones, into the broken homes that receive the mentally marred, sitting with mothers and wives unable to recognise their former children. We are there.

A women’s studies scholar and a longtime advocate for women’s rights, Jones devotes much of her book to this oft-overlooked women’s burden of war: rehabilitating traumatised men groomed into violence.

She sets the useless mantra of military therapists (give the returned soldier “his space”) against jarring news clips recounting the stateside abuse of spouses and children, stories long since forgotten by all but local journalists.

Nineteen-year-old Jessica Hine’s fate — to be beaten and murdered with her child by her Marine boyfriend, then left as a corpse sitting on a couch for nearly two weeks while he watched TV beside her — crystallises the epidemic of post-combat military murder for Jones.

“There’s the metaphor: the soldier with his perfectly silent uncomplaining woman beside him, giving him his space while he enjoyed the national game.”

But even in describing such brutality, Jones manages sympathy for the human beings involved, both sufferers and perpetrators of the violence. Her book reminds us that we are all made victims by warfare: the soldiers, their families, the strange human species that lacerates itself instead of living cooperatively.

“War is not inevitable,” she writes, “Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention—an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind—and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one.”

In this way, They Were Soldiers is as much about the debasement of military institutions as it is about the dignity of the people caught inside them. War simply passes from one body to the next, vessels for violence damaged along the way.

Jones follows this path of destruction unflinchingly, accomplishing one of the most moving antiwar texts we have today. And, still, it is no screed against U.S. foreign policy — only an ode to those who suffer by it. When one sees war in such basic human terms as Jones has, one understands the starkness of the choice: war or humanity. No having both.

“Not suicide, but a mercy killing,” Daniel Somers wrote of his own death. It’s a statement at once piercingly sad and honest. War is an industry that makes humans its raw material, a public policy choice that ends lives and destroys the living.

Ann Jones cuts past the words, the concepts, the mythos — and puts us in the thick of it. In facing war’s inhumanity and grasping its cost up close, we may become, in the end, a little more human ourselves.

More than 400 homeless veterans from across northern California relaxed in comfort at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton.

The occasion – a “Stand Down”, where the homeless veterans were given access to good food, clean clothes, showers and beds.

A group of veterans stayed in camouflage canvas tents, met with employment counselors and even made their case to superior court judges, who prescribed modest penalties in exchange for dropping charges related to failed appearances on old warrants. Such warrants often started as unpaid traffic tickets, but the charges escalated as they were ignored.

“The good thing about the East Bay Stand Down is they can get the services they need,” said Army Reserve Capt. Tonya Pacheco, who helped handle logistics for the event.

“If they need counseling – whatever they need it’s available to them,” she said. “A lot of veterans will have the opportunity to turn their lives around.”

100,000 Homeless Vets

Nationally, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that on any given night more than 100,000 veterans are homeless, with double that number experiencing homelessness in the course of a year.

Conservatively, the National Council for Homeless Veterans estimates that one out of three homeless men sleeping in a doorway, alley or box in U.S. cities and rural communities has put on a uniform and served the country.

About half of homeless veterans served their country during the Vietnam years, and service providers say they are beginning to see disturbing numbers of veterans recently back from Iraq and Afghanistan living in their cars or couch surfing with family, friends or wherever they can crash.

According to the VA, 56 percent of homeless vets are African American, even though nearly 80 percent of U.S. military veterans are white.

As a blazing sun shone down on the fairgrounds, John Morgan sat under a large tent in the centre of the Stand Down, a computer thumb drive around his neck.

“I just got a resume made, and they gave me a flash drive,” Morgan said. “I needed to get that done ’cause I wanted to go back to work.”

A U.S. Army veteran, Morgan served as a medic in the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in the years following the Vietnam War. When he got out of the military in the early 1980s, the Vacaville native started snorting cocaine, then dealing it.

“I would work a job and save a lot of money. And then I would get a bundle of coke, and I would sell and I would use…. Inevitably, I would go into jail or get in some kind of thing with the police,” he said.

This year, Morgan caught a break. An official from the Department of Veterans Affairs visited him at San Luis Obispo State Prison and told him about the Homeless Veteran Rehabilitation Programme (HVRP), a supportive housing facility on the VA campus in Menlo Park.

“HVRP saved my life,” he said. Now he’s trying to make sure he has a way to support himself once he graduates from their program.

Morgan is comparably lucky to get a space at HVRP. According to the VA, for the more than 12,000 homeless veterans in Northern California, there are only about 400 transitional housing beds.

That’s why the Stand Downs are so important – for one weekend this year, every veteran who showed up got the help they needed.

*Aaron Glantz is an editor at New America Media, where this article first appeared, and author of two books on the Iraq war, “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans” (UC Press) and “How America Lost Iraq” (Tarcher/Penguin). He is also co-author with Iraq Veterans Against the War of “Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations” (Haymarket).

It’s been seven years since Fernando Suarez del Solar buried his son, Jesus. Seven years since Mar. 27, 2003, when just one week into the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lance Corporal Jesus Suarez del Solar stepped on a piece of unexploded ordnance and came home in a flag-draped coffin.

Lance Corporal Jesus Suarez del Solar and his family. Credit: Courtesy of the Suarez Family

When he died, Jesus left behind a wife and infant son, Erik, who even today doesn’t understand what happened to his father.

“He asks me, ‘Where is my dad?'” Fernando says, choking back tears. “‘Why is my dad not here?’ I try to explain that he is in another place, that he watches over and protects us. But my grandson just cries and says, ‘I need my dad, I want my dad,’ and I don’t have the intelligence to explain to him why his dad is not there.”

Jesus Suarez was 20 years old when he died. A native of Tijuana, Mexico, he immigrated to Southern California with his family in the late 1990s and joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school. When he died, he still hadn’t received U.S. citizenship.

“People don’t understand when one person dies, the whole family is destroyed,” Fernando says.

He says the passage of time has not diminished the loss. Instead, it has become more pronounced, even as the Iraq war has receded from the front page to the back page of the newspaper, from the lead story each night on network news to a short weekly segment, overtaken by health care, immigration, and the failing economy.

When Barack Obama was elected president, he lifted a controversial ban, allowing the media to film and photograph caskets of dead soldiers as they arrived at Dover Air Force base, but few media have published those images on a regular basis.

The remoteness of the war in Iraq “produces a feeling of isolation” among families who have lost loved ones in the war, says Ami Neiberger-Miller, spokesperson for TAPS, the Tragedy Assistance Programme for Survivors, a non-profit independent organisation of the military that provides grief support to families.

On Mar. 10, TAPS estimated that the 5,398 U.S military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan had left 3,779 children without a parent, while 2,669 spouses had been widowed.

The organisation reported that 10,796 parents had lost a child and 4,264 siblings had lost a brother or sister.

Ami Neiberger-Miller’s 22-year-old brother, U.S. Army Specialist Christopher Neiberger, was killed in August 2007 by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

“Grief rewrites your address book,” she says. Because most Americans find it difficult to talk about the loss of war, “They don’t ask [about dead loved ones] or [they] change the subject. I think my new baby looks a lot like my brother when he was a baby,” she says, “but I won’t tell other people that because it would make them uncomfortable.”

To help break through that isolation, TAPS offers peer-based emotional support to people who have lost loved ones in the war, pairing up survivors with others in similar circumstances. The organisation also offers a grief camp for children who have lost a parent to the war, helping form a sense of community so the children realise they are not alone.

Fernando Suarez del Solar has channeled grief over his son’s death into political activism. In December 2003, he traveled to Iraq as part of a peace delegation and visited the exact spot where his son died.

“I had the opportunity to meet with families in Iraq who lost two, three, four, five members at the same time,” he said. “These people opened their hearts and doors and gave us a beautiful welcome. It was important for me to show the Iraqi families that many American people do not support this occupation, and that like the Iraqi people who have lost their family, American people have lost members of their family in the war in Iraq.”

Since then, Fernando has paid hundreds of visits to middle and high school classrooms across Southern California where he’s urged students not to join the military. He’s stood at the front of dozens of anti-war marches and founded his own non-profit organisation, the Guerrera Azteca Project, dedicated to countering military recruitment targeting the Latino community.

But such activism has come at a tremendous personal and financial cost. He’s now estranged from Jesus’s mother and widow who believe Fernando’s activism disgraces his son’s memory. And because Fernando has poured his heart and soul into stopping the war, he’s been unable to advance economically. He works as an overnight cashier at a 7-Eleven outside San Diego.

“I’m tired,” he says. “But I need to continue.”

*Aaron Glantz is author of “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans” (UC Press). This story originally was originally published by New America Media: http://news.newamericamedia.org/.

By Zack Baddorf
LONDON, Feb 18 2010 (IPS)

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.

Disgraced Soldier. Credit: Martin Webster

On a rooftop during the riots, Webster was shooting video -not bullets.

What he captured on film sparked an international scandal. A group of his fellow British soldiers chased down four young Iraqis. The youths were then beaten, punched and kicked. A soldier kicked one of the prisoners between the legs. While filming the incident, Webster can be overheard laughing and saying, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You’re going to get it. Yes. Naughty little boys.”

In 2006, the video was leaked to the British tabloid press and broadcast around the world. Webster was arrested by military police, but all charges against him were dropped. He left the army soon after the event.

In ‘Diary of a Disgraced Soldier,’ that premiered in November, Webster talks about how that two-minute video “destroyed” his life. But he told IPS he does not regret filming his Iraq tour.

“I thought at times it was ruining my life,” Webster, a Cornwall native, said. “But actually it was making me wake up and realise who I was, what I was and basically made me realise the horrors of war and what people turn into in war, including myself. … I’m a better person for the process that I’ve gone through.”

Further, Webster said the video woke people up to the reality of war, which he describes as “madness.”

“I’m a soldier and I was designed to kill,” Webster, who also served two tours in Northern Ireland and another in Sierra Leone, told IPS. “The British government spent 12 years turning me into an angry killer and when I acted like an angry killer and when it was portrayed on TV, nobody liked it or could handle it. That’s what a soldier is designed to do.”

Webster said the mainstream media today hide the reality of war on another front.

“I believe that with the media blackout that we‘ve got now in Afghanistan, it means the general public can’t see what’s actually going on. Anything that does get out is scripted and vetted,” he explained.

Webster wanted to share his side of what happened in Iraq. In 2007, he approached filmmakers Richard Atkinson and Chris Rowe to make ‘Diary of a Disgraced Soldier.’ Neil Cole later joined the filmmaking team.

The documentary started off as an explanation and exploration of the beating incident and its aftermath, Atkinson told IPS, but they soon realised that “the most compelling story” was how Webster coped with his PTSD.

The filmmakers wanted to present a soldier’s perspective and, after following Webster for 18 months, Atkinson said the film gets “to the essence of what going through PTSD does to a person.” The documentary includes video diaries filmed by Webster himself.

“The emotional and mental impact of war seems to be something that is seldom discussed,” said Atkinson. “In addition to this, there seems to be an awful lot of opinion from media commentators but not so much from the soldiers themselves who are after all the ones in the firing line.”

A 2008 RAND Corporation study found that about one in five U.S. military members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffers from PTSD or major depression.

In one scene in the documentary, Webster says he feels like he has two personalities. “It’s like I’m constantly controlling a demon,” he says. Later, he wonders aloud, “Perhaps I am an evil person.”

In an interview with IPS, Webster says he is not an evil person. “Nobody’s truly evil,” he clarified.

Part of Webster’s recovery process has involved art. In the documentary, Webster and fellow veteran Lee Kamara are shown holding a music concert ‘Voices of War’ to raise money for homeless veterans, the Royal British Legion and the charitable organisation Combat Stress.

But Webster realised that few people were interested. “They don’t want to hear about war and depression,” he said in the documentary. “Nobody wants to know.” In the film, Webster also contemplates suicide and is himself homeless for a period.

Webster has since formed an organisation with Kamara by the same name, ‘Voices of War’. Webster paints, writes poetry and makes music about his time in Iraq. His website states that they want “the whole world to hear [their] music and be inspired by the songs.”

Kamara, who served in Basrah, Iraq, said he dealt with PTSD through music.

“Music takes me to a different place and helps me relieve stress,” Kamara told IPS. “I find that being with the piano on my own helps me have happiness and peace.”

A new father, Kamara recommends that other soldiers use art to channel their military experiences. “Anything that relaxes [soldiers],” Kamara said, “is a great way of forgetting.”

Lovella Calica, an American multimedia artist, also encourages veterans with post traumatic stress to use art as part of their healing process. She is the founder and director of the Warrior Writers Project, a creative community for veterans articulating their experiences.

“Whether or not a veteran identifies as an artist or a writer, I think it’s worth a try,” said Calica. “It’s not going to hurt anything. There are points in the process where it might be hard and it might be difficult. But I think you have to really push through that stuff to get further.”

Bob Paxman agrees that art can be helpful. The founder and chief executive of the non-profit charity Talking 2 Minds, Paxman has helped about 200 active-duty soldiers and veterans who suffer from PTSD.

“For somebody that’s very visual, painting would be fantastic,” said Paxman, a master practitioner synergy trainer who also had PTSD. He served in the British military’s Special Air Services in “many hostile environments around the world” for 10 years.

Like Webster, Paxman looked outside of the traditional treatment services for soldiers with PTSD. Paxman eventually found a unique process that uses therapeutic neural linguistic programming, hypnosis and timeline therapy.

Paxman said his organisation “desperately needs financial support” but has been ignored by the British government. He said the British government is not providing adequate care to active-duty soldiers and veterans returning from war. “It’s a systematic problem,” he told IPS.

Webster also criticised Britain’s medical treatment of soldiers with PTSD. “It’s just neglect, pure neglect,” Webster told IPS. “It’s pure criminal negligence the way [the government] treats soldiers suffering from PTSD. We’re almost treated like second-class citizens.”

While Webster says he feels in control of his own life and has now “totally left Iraq behind,” he will “always have memories.”

“For the rest of my life, I’ll never forget it,” Webster said.

(*Zack Baddorf is a U.S. military veteran who served in Iraq.)

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Feb 10 2010 (IPS)

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.

Stop-loss is a policy that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts. According to the Pentagon, more than 120,000 soldiers have been affected by stop-loss since 2001, and currently 13,000 soldiers are serving under stop-loss orders, despite public pledges by President Barack Obama to phase out the policy.

Attorney David Gespass, a member of the National Lawyers Guild and founding member of the Military Law Task Force, has been consulting on the case and will possibly represent Hall.

“It’s not clear to me if he’ll be tried in Kuwait or Iraq,” Gaspass told IPS. “It may be a matter for the military judge to decide, once there is one.”

Gespass explained he believes the Army is handling the case this way for two reasons.

“One, it will make it much more difficult to defend because it’s impossible to get witnesses over to a war zone, and two, it denies Hall’s right to a public trial. I think the fundamental reason is to make it more difficult for his supporters and witnesses to be there,” he said. Gaspass believes the Army’s position “is that that’s where all the alleged victims are [Iraq], and they wanted to have the trial where their witnesses are going to be. For me, it’s a lot easier for the Army to get witnesses back to the states than it is for Marc to get his witnesses to a war zone.”

Hall, who is in the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, was placed in Liberty County Jail for the song, in which he angrily denounces the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military.

On Dec. 12, Hall was thrown in jail by his command, on the pretext that the song he had written is considered a threat, and he is facing charges under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which covers communication threats.

“The charges are connected to song lyrics allegedly written by Spc. Hall that allege deadly threats against his chain of command and fellow Soldiers, specifically shooting them,” reads a statement released the by the Fort Stewart Public Affairs Office.

“I explained to [my first sergeant] that the hardcore rap song was a free expression of how people feel about the Army and its stop-loss policy,” explained Hall, in response to the charges. “I explained that the song was neither a physical threat nor any threat whatsoever. I told him it was just hip-hop.”

Military service members do not completely give up their rights to free speech, particularly not when they are doing so artistically while off duty, as was the case with Hall.

The military is claiming that he “communicated a threat” with his song. Hall mailed a copy of the song to the Pentagon after the Army unilaterally extended his contract for a second Iraq deployment.

The Army’s latest decision to deploy Hall to Kuwait is an unusual twist in a case that has already attracted widespread criticism from GI rights lawyers. Once in Kuwait, Hall will be driven into Iraq to meet up with his is old unit, and placed in confinement and court martialed there.

Kevin Larson of the Fort Stewart Public Affairs Office says the trial will be held in Iraq because that is where important witnesses are.

“It makes sense from the standpoint of witnesses. Most of the witnesses are deployed,” he said.

Jim Klimanski, a civilian military lawyer and member of the National Lawyers Guild and the Military Law Task Force, told IPS that he feels the military is overreacting to the case, and that it is simply a matter of free speech and that the Army’s actions violate Hall’s First Amendment right to free speech.

“It’s a political case, and the military should know that,” Klimanski explained. “I think they are overreaching and overreacting because of Maj. Hassan (who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood on Nov. 5), and I can understand that to some degree, but cooler heads should prevail and they should deal with stop-loss, and maybe we’ll get the case thrown out.”

IPS obtained a redacted copy of the Army’s Charge Sheet against Hall, filed by Marcus Seiser, which includes five charges. On the sheet, Hall is accused of telling someone he would “go on a rampage,” that “the song makes threats of acts of violence,” and that Hall is accused “of planning on shooting the brigade or battalion commanders.”

Jeff Paterson, the director of the soldier advocacy group Courage to Resist, which is assisting Hall, told IPS, “Marc’s case is unique in that the military hasn’t shown a propensity to go after these political speech cases for several years. We think this is an important case because it could set precedent for free speech rights for those in the military.”

Klimanski, along with underscoring the importance of the case for the First Amendment, thinks the case highlights the military’s ongoing use of stop-loss, which also contributes to how they have responded to Hall’s song.

“It’s a song, and he puts it out to the public,” Klimanski told IPS. “We’re not talking about a Major Hassan who is quietly plotting violence … this is political hyperbole. This is his rant on stop-loss. It’s political speech.”

“He’s over there saying I have no control over my life,” Klimanski added, “I could be in here forever. We’re talking about a war that could go on forever. So poor old Marc Hall could possibility be in the military forever. I see this as an issue of political speech. The military may not like what they’re hearing, but that’s what it is. There are people in the military saying their being in it is/was wrong, and they want out.”

“They are sending him to Iraq just to punish him,” Klimaski believes. “Not that they need to do that to conduct a court martial. They are trying to find any which way to inflict punishment on Marc.”

Hall’s supporters also say that it is highly unlikely that his current military lawyer will be available to deploy at a moment’s notice.

“He will get a new military lawyer who is probably very busy and won’t have time to build a proper defence,” said Klimaski, “They are trying to stack the deck. It is illegal to ship him to Iraq or Kuwait, but who is going to contest it? You would have to go to Iraq to contest it. They know that they are not going to have a civilian lawyer out there. They are just trying to punish him without due process.”

At the time of this writing, Hall was awaiting his being shipped to the Middle East, which could happen any time.

Excerpt:

By Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 2010 (IPS)

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.

“Of the more than 30,000 suicides in this country each year, fully 20 percent of them are acts by veterans,” said VA Secretary Eric Shinseki at a VA-sponsored suicide prevention conference on Monday. “That means on average 18 veterans commit suicide each day. Five of those veterans are under our care at VA.”

The spike in the suicide rate can most clearly be attributed to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the high number of veterans returning to the U.S. with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

”We have now nearly two million vets of Iraq and Afghanistan and we still haven’t seen the type of mobilisation of resources necessary to handle an epidemic of veteran suicides,” Aaron Glantz, an editor at New America Media editor and author of “The War Comes Home”, told IPS.

”With [President Barack] Obama surging in Afghanistan coupled with his unwillingness to withdraw speedily from Iraq, it means we have more veterans who have served more and more tours and as a result we have an escalating number of people coming home with PTSD, depression and other mental health issues,” Glantz continued.

Health officials have pointed to the multiple tours of duty served by many U.S. soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq as one of the stresses placed on military personnel that differs from previous wars fought by the U.S.

“The unfortunate truth is that the real challenge begins when these service men and women return home and readjust to day-to-day life,” said Rep. Michael McMahon, co-founder of the Congressional Invisible Wounds Caucus.

“The Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs must be prepared with the appropriate staff and funding to conduct post-deployment psychological screenings with a mental health professional for all service men and women,” he said. “Evidently, the paper questionnaires currently in use simply do not suffice. How many more young men and women must die before we provide the necessary mental health care?”

The VA estimated that in 2005, the suicide rate per 100,000 veterans among men ages 18-29 was 44.99, but jumped to 56.77 in 2007.

A Rand Corporation report last year found that as many as 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans exhibited symptoms of PTSD or depression.

”As I’ve often asked, mostly of myself, but also of others from time to time, why do we know so much about suicides but so little about how to prevent them?” said Shinseki.

The VA came under attack by veterans’ groups in April 2008, when internal emails sent by the VA’s head of mental health, Dr. Ira Katz, showed that the VA was attempting to conceal the number of suicides committed by veterans.

Under the Obama administration, the approach to handling the increasing number of suicides appears to have shifted, with a greater focus on transparency – the VA is holding a three-day conference on suicide this week. Last year, Obama announced a 25-billion-dollar increase in the VA’s budget over the next five years.

While the emphasis on greater transparency, particularly with regards to PTSD and mental health issues, and increased funding for the VA has been welcomed, many are still concerned that the troop surge in Afghanistan and the ongoing U.S. role in Iraq will put ever greater strains on the VA and its ability to deal with soldiers returning from multiple tours of duty.

”The first Gulf War was over in a matter of months. This war has gone on for nine years in Afghanistan and seven years in Iraq. There are two million vets, most of whom have served multiple tours,” said Glantz.

”What this means is that the military has never faced the stress it faces now. Not even in Vietnam where we had a draft and most soldiers only served one tour. In Iraq and Afghanistan everyone’s on the frontlines all the time. Even being in a vehicle going from one military base to another is extremely dangerous,” he said.

Shinseki cited the fact that of the 18 veterans who commit suicide each day, five are under the care of the VA, as evidence that both the VA’s efforts to prevent suicides are falling short and that the VA is failing to bring enough veterans under its care.

Suicides among active duty personnel have also risen, with 147 reported suicides in the Army from January through November 2009 – an increase from 127 in the same period of 2008.

Among non-active duty reserve soldiers, 50 suicides were reported in 2008 but the number had risen to 71 during the first 11 months of 2009.

Suicide rates in all four services of the military are significantly higher than in the general population, with 52 Marines, 48 sailors, and 41 members of the Air force committing suicide in 2009.

The final figures for suicides in the Army during 2009 will be released Thursday.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Dec 7 2009 (IPS)

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.

Working for a personnel-recruiting company which was contracted by the Defence Department at Camp Lejeune, Manion became alarmed at the military’s inability to give sufficient treatment to returning soldiers. He was also concerned by their reports of outright abuse meted out by some commanders against lower-ranking soldiers who sought help.

Manion told IPS that last April two Marines urgently sought his help soon after the clinic opened at 7am. They told him, “One of these guys is liable to come back [from Iraq or Afghanistan] with a loaded weapon and open fire.”

This episode is just one that is indicative of pervasive and worsening systemic problems afflicting a military mental health care system that is overburdened, overstressed, under-staffed, and ill equipped, but one that, according to Manion. Care is also administered by career military officers who are “ill- trained to provide the complex psychiatric expertise necessary to effectively treat psychologically impaired soldiers.”

Manion explained to IPS that upon returning home, troops suffering from myriad new-onset deployment related mental health problems were flooding the available resources. When they did come in, they had to bear the brunt of pervasive harassment, and oftentimes outright psychological abuse from Marine Corps superiors who refused to acknowledge the validity, much less the severity of their problems.

“I saw previously strong Marines, people who were now very fragile – who were broken by two or more deployments – come back to be squashed by their commanders, who told them they were “goddamn losers”,” Manion told IPS.

Manion went on to warn his superiors of the widespread systemic problems – he informed them that he was alarmed at the possibility of these leading to violence on the base.

Rather than being praised for his series of increasingly urgent memos on the impending disaster, Manion was fired by the contractor that hired him. While a spokeswoman for the firm says it released Manion at the behest of the Navy, the Navy preferred not to comment on this story.

Chuck Luther is a two-tour Iraq war veteran and a former sergeant who served 12 years in the military. He is also the founder and director of “The Soldier’s Advocacy Group of Disposable Warriors,” and lives in Killeen, nearby Fort Hood, where he used to be based.

Luther told IPS that he is working on 20 cases of soldiers suffering from PTSD who have been either maltreated by their commanders, have not been given proper treatment for their PTSD, or both.

He hopes to avoid another disaster like that which occurred on Nov. 5, when Major Nidal Hassan – suffering from a combination of secondary trauma and dealing with major ongoing harassment for being a Muslim – went on a shooting spree that killed 13 soldiers, and wounded dozens more.

“The ground has been laid for another crisis, another shooting… it’s volatile here, nothing has been resolved,” Luther told IPS, “The average Joe on the street thinks things are resolved here, but they are anything but resolved. We are primed to have more soldier on soldier violence if something doesn’t change right away.”

Manion holds deep concern for the future of both those treating traumatised soldiers, and the soldiers themselves.

“If not more Fort Hoods, Camp Liberties, soldier fratricide, spousal homicide, we’ll see it individually in suicides, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, family dysfunction, in formerly fine young men coming back and saying, as I’ve heard so many times, “I’m not cut out for society. I can’t stand people. I can’t tolerate commotion. I need to live in the woods.” That’s what we’re going to have. Broken, not contributing, not functional, members of society,” Manion explained.

In 2008, according to the Marine Corps, at least 42 Marines committed suicide, and at least 146 others attempted to do so.

An example of what Manion and Luther are concerned about is U.S. Army Specialist Lateef Al-Saraji, a decorated combat veteran, who came back from the occupation of Iraq with severe PTSD.

When Saraji returned to the U.S., it took him months to get an appointment with a counsellor on his base. He was then referred to an off-base psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with severe PTSD.

In an email to Luther, Saraji wrote that he “felt that the Army did not care about me and my superiors did not seem to care. On Jul. 1 the psychologist, Mr. Leach, wrote a letter recommending I have 2 weeks off.”

Rather than his commander, Sergeant 1st Class Duncan, follow the recommendation of Leach, Saraji was accused of going absent without leave and told he would not be given the 2 weeks off, along with being written up.

“I got too depressed,” Saraji wrote of his experience, “I was going to kill myself. I was depressed and tired of the racism and prejudice that I was receiving. I was talking on the phone with the Chaplain and he heard me cock my gun.”

Luckily, very shortly thereafter three officers appeared at his door and took him to nearby Fort Hood, where he was admitted into a psychiatric unit for a week. From there he was transferred to a facility in Wichita Falls for three weeks, where he was jumped by five soldiers who harassed him and called him a “towel head” and “sand nigger.” He was moved to a different floor of that hospital, but wrote, “I was afraid for my safety so I tried to run away from the hospital.”

Saraji returned to Fort Hood, only to find Duncan writing him up yet again. According to Saraji, when Duncan learned Saraji had nearly attempted suicide, he coolly told Saraji that he should go kill himself.

“Either Duncan was about to end up injured, or Saraji was going to injure himself,” Luther, who is appalled at Saraji’s treatment by his commander, told IPS, “These lower level commanders continue to intimidate and harass these soldiers, even soldiers who want to be deployed. Saraji had even offered to go back to Iraq. When you go find these guys getting kicked out for misconduct- you’ll find that prior to this you had commanders pushing them, punishing them, and harassing them, then they break.”

The warnings of Luther and Manion have already proven prophetic.

On Nov. 22, Killeen police reported that Fort Hood soldier, Army Spc. David Middlebrooks, was stabbed to death. The next day, 22-year-old Joshua Wyatt, another Fort Hood soldier, was shot to death in his residence. The killers of both soldiers are alleged to be Fort Hood soldiers as well.

Killings involving Fort Hood soldiers have been commonplace in recent years, even prior to the mass killing on Nov. 5. In the years leading up to that event, soldiers from Fort Hood were involved in the deaths of at least seven people in the previous five years alone, several of these incidents being soldier-on- soldier violence.

Taking one of these as an example, in Sep. 2008, Spc. Jody Wirawan fatally shot 1st Lt. Robert Fletcher. When Killeen police arrived, Wirawan proceeded to commit suicide.

In addition, Luther told IPS that at least two soldiers at Fort Hood have attempted suicide since Nov. 5.

And the killings are not limited to Fort Hood.

In upstate New York in the town of Leray, on the outskirts of Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division, between Nov. 29 and 30, soldiers Waide James and Diego Valbuena were murdered by Joshua Hunter, another Fort Drum soldier, according to Jefferson County Sheriff John Burns.

Both victims died of multiple stab wounds.

On Sep. 29, five weeks before the massacre at Fort Hood, Manion sent a letter to President Barack Obama.

Manion’s letter stated, “Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I have never seen such immense emotional suffering and psychological brokenness – literally, a relentless stream of courageous, well-trained and formerly strong Marines, deeply wounded psychologically by the immensity of their combat experiences.”

The letter went on to explain how he had, over the previous six months, raised serious concerns “about several very dangerous inadequacies of the clinics [at Camp Lejune] operations as well as recurring incidents of significant psychological abuse of Marines who were seeking our care.”

The doctor warned President Obama that his experience at Camp Lejeune “represents a more pervasive problem at Camp Lejeune and perhaps even throughout the institutional culture of the military.”

Seeing the clear potential for the impending disaster of soldier-on-soldier violence as a result of untreated PTSD, Manion’s letter continued with a sense of urgency: “Mr. President, given what I’ve witnessed and personally experienced, I think that, beyond the immediate issue of my firing and my patients’ care, it’s vital that these flaws be named and examined.”

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Nov 16 2009 (IPS)

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.

Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives today.

“I see the ugly,” Luther told IPS. “I see soldiers beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all the time, and most folks don’t want to look at this, including the military.”

Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of the Soldier’s Advocacy Group of Disposable Warriors, knows about these types of internal problems in the military because he has been through many of them himself.

Luther told IPS that he believes the real number of soldiers at Fort Hood committing suicide is being dramatically underreported by the military.

“There are suicides of active-duty troops occurring regularly both on and off base,” Luther said. “One of them I knew personally since I served with him in Iraq and he was one of my soldiers, and they still have him listed as under investigation for suicide.”

“From what I know right now, there are at least three suicides they are not reporting at all. Most notably, there is a soldier who committed suicide that the Army confirmed through a press conference, and this is not being reported, and I’m working with the Pentagon to try to find out why that is not being reported,” he said. “The Army won’t even release his name.”

Yet Luther believes the situation is even worse.

“I definitely believe there are more than these. If this is what they’ve hidden from us that we know of, we can rest assured there are many, many more than this. We filed a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] to get information from them [Army], but they bog you down in red tape,” he said.

Due to the military’s continued attempts to mask the true number of suicides in the ranks, along with an ongoing refusal to make the radical policy changes necessary to properly treat soldiers and psychiatric care providers exposed to secondary post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Luther fears the worst for the future.

“There will be more 5 November [referencing the recent Fort Hood tragedy] attacks on fellow soldiers, and they will likely be even more drastic,” he said.

“Everybody has to outdo someone, so the next are likely to be worse. Violence breeds violence. I was trained to be very violent in combat as a scout…we killed or detained Iraqis before anyone else got there. Two months ago I warned the Army’s Chain of Command that before we had an attack by a soldier on other troops when they come home, we needed to make some dramatic changes.”

At the time of the interview, one week after army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan’s shooting rampage left 13 dead and over 30 wounded at Fort Hood, Luther informed IPS that in the previous three days at Fort Hood, “I’ve heard commanders tell soldiers requesting psychological help that they are full of crap and don’t have PTSD…so if we can’t implement these needed changes quickly and rapidly we are going to have more loss of life on U.S. soil by soldiers killing other soldiers.”

While not on the scale of the recent shooting incident, several other killings by soldiers have been reported at Fort Hood over the last two years.

According to official military statistics, Fort Hood already suffers the highest number of suicides among Army installations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. While Luther believes the number is far higher, Army officials at Fort Hood admit to at least 10 suicides on the base from January to July of this year, and at least 75 “confirmed” suicides since 2003.

Several years of repeated war-zone deployments are taking their toll, as Army personnel are experiencing record rates of PTSD, depression, other mental health problems, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicides.

According to the Army Suicide Event Report, a total of 99 soldiers killed themselves in 2006, the highest rate of military suicides in the 26 years the military has been keeping statistics on suicides. More than a quarter of them were by troops in combat postings in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure does not include post-discharge suicides by military personnel.

In 2007, at least 115 suicides were reported by the Army, another record. Last year set another record, with at least 133 reported suicides, in addition to there being a record number of suicides in the Marine Corps that year.

The suicide rate for the Army for 2008 was calculated roughly at 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers, which for the first time since the Vietnam War is higher than the adjusted civilian rate.

Thus far, 2009 is on pace to set another record for the number of suicides in the Army.

Private Michael Kern, an active-duty Iraq war veteran who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008.

On Nov. 9, four days after the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Kern told IPS, “The 20th Engineering Battalion was hit hard in this rampage. They are scheduled to deploy in January to Afghanistan, and lost a lot of good folks on Thursday [Nov. 5]. I personally know a soldier in that Battalion who attempted suicide last night.”

Mental health problems and suicide appear to now be systemic in the military.

By October 2007, data within the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicated that approximately 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan were coping by taking prescription antidepressants and/or sleeping pills to cope.

In 2008, the Daily Telegraph of London reported that two out of five suicide victims among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found to be on antidepressants.

In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a stunning report revealing, “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan – 300,000 in all – report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”

A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000 veterans who are receiving care from the VA are attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans kill themselves daily.

Excerpt:

By Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON, Nov 12 2009 (IPS)

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.

When news of the Fort Hood massacre, which took the lives of 13 soldiers and wounded 30, first emerged on Nov. 5, White House and military leadership issued statements of condolence for the soldiers and families affected by the massacre but also emphasised that terrorism seemed an unlikely explanation for Hasan’s violent rampage.

Gen. George Casey, the Army’s top officer, spoke repeatedly in the days immediately following the shooting in attempts to avert an anti-Muslim backlash.

“I’m concerned that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” Casey told CNN’s “State of the Union”.

“The speculation could potentially heighten the backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers,” he told ABC’s “This Week”.

Casey emphasised that although the shooting was horrific, “It would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity became a casualty here.”

While visiting the United Arab Emirates last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano echoed the sentiments expressed by Casey.

“This was a terrible tragedy for all involved,” Napolitano told reporters in Abu Dhabi. “Obviously, we object to – and do not believe – that anti-Muslim sentiment should emanate from this.”

“There does seem to be a rush to judgment about possible religious motivations for the tragedy,” Thomas Cincotta, civil liberties project director at Political Research Associates, a Somerville Massachusetts based progressive think tank, told IPS.

“People are using this as an opportunity to spread Islamophobia, this has to be contained. The White House and this administration have tried to contain this,” he said.

Senator Joseph Lieberman broke ranks early on with the White House, declaring Hasan a “self-radicalised, home-grown terrorist” on Fox News Sunday.

Lieberman, an Independent, will be holding Senate hearings on the massacre next week.

While the Army and White House have remained consistent in their message that conclusions shouldn’t be drawn until all the facts have been examined, right-wing pundits and politicians have been quick to label Hasan’s shooting spree an act of Islamic terrorism.

They charge that the response from the White House and military leadership reflects a dangerous trend of political correctness which forbids “common sense” conclusions about what Hasan’s motivation may have been.

“Such [politically correct] statements are an affront to most Americans’ intelligence, which common-sensically applies a prosaic form of the scientific method: They look for the explanation that best fits the facts,” wrote Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney.

“The facts – which are becoming ever more numerous by the day – are that the purported perpetrator of these crimes, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is ‘a devout Muslim’ who, as such, has had to follow at least since 2001 the dictates of the theo-political-legal and seditious program that authoritative Islam calls Shariah,” Gaffney wrote.

“One of those dictates is that the faithful must engage in jihad, or holy war, to achieve the submission of unbelievers to Islam,” he continued in his weekly column in the Washington Times.

“Every few months either an Islamic-inspired terrorist plot will be foiled, or a young Muslim male will shoot, run down, or stab someone while invoking anger at non-Muslims,” opined historian Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review.

“In other words, the attack on Fort Hood happened on schedule. It was the rule, not the exception. And something like it will occur again – soon,” he concluded.

Details have emerged suggesting Hasan followed the profile of many other mass shooters in U.S. history – quiet, a loner, exhibiting symptoms of emotional and psychological problems and frustrated with a perceived set of grievances against him – and felt isolated and under attack as a Muslim within the Army.

Other mass shooters in the past year have included: in April, Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant whose failure to learn English and paranoia left him increasingly isolated and angry, leading to his killing of 13 people at an English class in Binghamton, New York; and in March, Michael McLendon, who failed at attempts to join both the Marines and the police and kept lists of companies and people which he perceived as having slighted him, killed 11 people in Alabama.

The similarities to other recent U.S. mass shootings are noticeable but Hasan’s connections to radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki have received the most attention from right-wing pundits.

“Some have detected in the Fort Hood coverage a return to a pre-9/11 mindset, and there is some truth to this. In particular, the left-liberal tendency to stereotype servicemen and veterans as psychopaths, suckers and victims is a return to form,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board member James Taranto.

“But the bending over backward to explain away the role of religious fanaticism in the Fort Hood massacre is, it seems to us, something new – something distinctly post-9/11, or post-post-9/11,” he continued.

“The prescriptions coming from the right wing, trying to turn the Fort Hood massacre into an act of religious inspired terrorism, has potential to throw fuel on the fire,” said Cincotta. “Any crackdown or overzealous response against communities of colour or Arab and Middle Eastern communities could do real harm in the future to our political freedoms.”

Bryan Fischer, director of issues analysis at the conservative American Family Association, took the extreme position of suggesting that Muslims should no longer be allowed to serve in the military, earning him a mention in The Washington Post, the LA Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Palm Beach Post.

“Of course, most U.S. Muslims don’t shoot up their fellow soldiers. Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to serve,” wrote Fischer.

“You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms,” he wrote.

“And don’t give us reassurances about the oaths that Muslim soldiers take to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Hasan took that oath, and it proved meaningless. In fact, the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to lie to you through his teeth, since lying to the infidel to advance the cause of Islam is commended, not just permitted, in the Koran,” Fischer went on to say.

Cincotta strongly disagreed with Fischer’s suggestion that Muslims should be purged from the military.

“Suggestions like that are absolutely preposterous. Already the military is facing a chronic shortage of Arabic and Farsi speakers,” said Cincotta. “These solutions wouldn’t make us any safer.”

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
PHOENIX, Arizona, Nov 6 2009 (IPS)

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”.

“Fort Hood is pretty much a ghost town right now,” Specialist Michael Kern, an active duty veteran of the Iraq war, told IPS by telephone. “Most units gave their soldiers the day off. Security is heightened all over. There are soldiers on guard everywhere. In my opinion, they are afraid of another attack.”

Kern, who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008.

“We’re all in shock,” Kern added, “Every single person that I’ve talked to is in shock. I’m surprised this hits so close to home, but at the same time, I knew something like this was going to happen given what else is happening – the war is coming home, and something needs to be done.”

“Innocent civilians are being wounded and killed here at home by soldiers, and this is completely unacceptable,” he said.

The alleged gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, entered a Soldier Readiness Center (SRC), where troops get medical evaluations and complete paperwork just prior to being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, and opened fire with two non-military issued handguns.

Maj. Hasan killed 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, and wounded over 30 others, before being shot four times by a civilian police officer. Hasan is now in stable condition in a local hospital, where he is in the custody of military authorities.

Col. John Rossi, a spokesman at Fort Hood, told reporters that Hasan was “stable and in one of our civilian hospitals”. Rossi added, “He’s on a ventilator.”

Maj. Hasan joined the army just out of high school and is 39 years old. He had counseled wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, and was transferred to Fort Hood in April. He had recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan.

His cousin, Nader Hasan, has said in media interviews that Maj. Hasan was very reluctant to be deployed overseas and had agitated not to be sent. “We’ve known over the last five years that was probably his worst nightmare,” he said.

Responding to the allegations in the media that the attack was based on his Muslim faith, Kern told IPS that he did not know of anyone on the base who felt this was the case.

“We all wear the same uniform here, it’s all green. I’ve seen the news, but most folks here assume it’s just a soldier that snapped,” Kern explained. “I have not talked to anyone who thinks what he did has anything to do with him being a Muslim. There are thousands of Muslims serving with dignity in the U.S. military, in all four branches.”

Fort Hood, located in central Texas, is one of the largest U.S. military bases in the world. It contains up to 50,000 soldiers, and is one of the most heavily deployed to both occupations.

Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy involvement in both occupations. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more suicides than any other Army post since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In this year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month – at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone.

In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a U.S. soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling centre at a U.S .base in Baghdad.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon at the time that the shootings occurred in a place where “individuals were seeking help”.

Mullen added, “It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress… It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments.”

Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones that is further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments.

The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

While soldiers returning home are routinely involved in shootings, suicide, and other forms of self-destructive violent behaviours as a direct result of their experiences in Iraq, we have yet to see an event of this magnitude on a base in the U.S.

To many, the shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades does not come as a surprise considering that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than “43,000 service members – two-thirds of them in the Army or Army Reserve – were classified as non-deployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed to Iraq.

In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a stunning report revealing that, “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan – 300,000 in all – report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”

President Barack Obama, speaking during an event at the Department of the Interior in Washington, said that the mass shooting at Fort Hood was a “horrific outburst of violence”. He added: “It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an army base on American soil.”

Victor Agosto, an Iraq war veteran who was discharged from the military after publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, has had firsthand experience with the SRC at Fort Hood, where he too was based.

“I knew there would be a confrontation when I was there, because the only reason to do that process is to deploy,” Agosto, speaking to IPS near Fort Hood, explained.

Agosto was court-martialed for refusing an order to go to the SRC to prepare to deploy to Afghanistan.

“I was court-martialed for refusing the order to SRC in that very same building. I didn’t enter the building, but I didn’t go in because I was refusing the process,” Agosto continued. “It’s a pretty important place in my life, so it’s interesting to me that this happened there.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
KAUAI, Hawaii, Aug 17 2009 (IPS)

Six months into Barack Obama’s presidency, the U.S. public’s display of antiwar sentiment has faded to barely a whisper.

Despite Obama’s vow to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq before September 2011, he plans to leave up to 50,000 troops in “training and advisory” roles. Meanwhile, nearly 130,000 troops remain in that country and more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers occupy Afghanistan, with up to an additional 18,000 approved for deployment this year.

So where is the resistance?

In independent journalist Dahr Jamail’s “The Will to Resist: Soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Haymarket Books), Jamail profiles what may ultimately prove to be the United States’ most effective anti-war movement: the soldiers themselves.

During the early years of the Iraq war, Jamail traveled to Iraq alone and reported as an unembedded freelance journalist. Over four visits, Jamail documented the war’s effects on Iraqi civilians in “Beyond the Green Zone” (2007).

Although he is a fierce critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the U.S. mainstream media which he says served as a “cheerleader” for war, Jamail admits he was raised to admire the military. However, after covering the war from Iraq between 2003 and 2005, Jamail was enraged by what he calls “the heedless and deliberate devastation [he] saw [the U.S. military] wreak upon the people of Iraq.”

Back in the U.S., traveling the country speaking out against the war, Jamail met scores of soldiers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and found that he shared with them a “familiar anguish” which drove him to further explore their motivations as soldiers. In doing so he opens the door to a growing subculture of internal dissent that is increasingly bubbling up and spilling over the edge of an otherwise ultra-disciplined, highly-controlled military society.

“The soldiers I spoke with while working on this book are some of the most ardent anti-war activists I have ever met,” Jamail told IPS. “Having experienced the war firsthand, this should not come as a surprise.”

In “The Will to Resist”, Jamail profiles individual acts of resistance that he envisions as the possible seeds of a broader anti-war movement. The book is filled with stories of soldiers who refuse missions deemed “suicidal”, go AWOL, flee abroad, refuse to carry a loaded weapon, even arranging to be shot in the leg – and those who in a final act of desperation commit suicide.

Soldiers who refuse to deploy or follow orders risk court-martial, prison time, dishonourable discharge and loss of veteran’s medical benefits, yet an increasing number of active duty soldiers and veterans are willing to do so.

Rather than accept a mission almost certain to bring death, some troops simply refuse to follow orders. Jamail describes soldiers in Iraq on “search and avoid” missions who grew adept at giving the appearance of going out on patrol when, in fact, they were lying low, catching up on sleep and trying to avoid being killed.

Jamail quotes one Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as saying, “Dissent starts as simple as saying ‘this is bullshit. Why am I risking my life?'”

Soldiers tell Jamail that incidents of refusing orders are unremarkable and “pretty widespread,” to which he responds, “It is also understandable why the military does not want more soldiers or the public to know about them.”

“Army Specialist Victor Agosto, who served a year in Iraq, has recently publicly refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan,” Jamail told IPS, “and the Army, due to the threat of more soldiers and the broader public learning of this, backed away from giving Agosto the harshest court-martial possible, to one of the lightest.”

Jamail also dedicates two chapters to soldiers who stand up to systemic misogyny and homophobia in the military. Extensive interviews with female soldiers detail a pervasive culture of institutionalised “command rape,” harassment, abuse and assault which, in a number of high-profile cases (and many more unknown) end in ostracism, coercion, demotion, suicide and murder.

Citing studies from professional medical journals that offer a grim assessment of sexual intimidation and abuse within the U.S. military, Jamail writes, “According to the group Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, one in six women in the United States will be a victim of sexual assault in her lifetime. In the military, at least two in five will. In either case, at least 60 percent of the cases go unreported.”

As Jamail recounts horrific cases of violence toward women in the military, he notes the irony of frequent claims that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are “liberating” women of those Muslim countries.

Like female soldiers, gay and lesbian service men and women are targeted for harassment and abuse. Jamail meets soldiers who, under the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, must conceal their true identity, falsely posing as straight while battling internal conflicts about their own roles in the military.

In the blunt language of the soldiers, Jamail describes the military experience as a process of dehumanisation. “The primary objective appeared to be to mistreat and dehumanise your guys [fellow soldiers],” one Marine says. “I could not do it, not to my men and not to those people. I like the Iraqis, I like the Afghanis. Why were we treating them like shit?…That is when I really started questioning what the hell was going on.”

For many soldiers however, the pain of war is simply too much to bear and so they choose their own final discharge: suicide. In an emotionally exhausting chapter, Jamail cites statistics from the Army Suicide Event Report which states active duty military suicides have risen to their highest rates since the Army started tracking self-inflicted deaths in 1980, and the numbers are growing.

Documenting the phenomenon of “suicide by cop,” Jamail quotes from a Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome (PTSD)-wracked veteran’s pre-“suicide” internet article in which he wrote, “…We come home from war trying to put our lives back together but some cannot stand the memories and decide that death is better. We kill ourselves because we are so haunted by seeing children killed and whole families wiped out.”

Contemplating the long-term implications of the more than 1.8 million military personnel who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jamail points out that the United States, for many years to come, will be faced with caring for tens of thousands of veterans whose lives are permanently marred by grave physical and traumatic brain injuries, psychological scars, PTSD, and a host of associated problems ranging from divorce and substance abuse to domestic violence, homelessness and run-ins with the law.

Other soldiers manage to cope somehow and, perhaps in a sense, recover. Following their discharge, some veterans profiled by Jamail seek to make peace with themselves by educating others about the realities they experienced in war.

The most successful and constructive of military efforts to resist war are made by those who turn their experiences into teaching tools and therapeutic exercises like music, video, theater, painting, books, blogs, photographic and art exhibitions, performance art and even making paper out of old military uniforms.

In a chapter titled ‘Cyber Resistance,’ Jamail contends the Internet “is probably the first time that we have available to us an inexpensive and extremely inclusive means to communicate and thereby advocate sustained resistance to unjust military action, at an international scale without losing any gestation time.”

Websites like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Blogspot and countless alternative news sources have given soldiers and veterans both a voice and the means to connect with those Jamail calls “fence-sitters, members of the silent majority and well-intentioned but resource-less individuals to participate in the promise of a historical transformation.”

“While we don’t have an organised GI resistance movement today that is anywhere close to that which helped end the Vietnam war,” Jamail said, “the seeds for one are there, and they are continuing to sprout amidst a soil that is becoming all the more fertile by the escalation of troops in Afghanistan, the lack of withdrawal in Iraq, and an increasingly over-stretched military.”

Excerpt:

By William Fisher
NEW YORK, Jun 23 2009 (IPS)

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.

Kathleen Gilberd Credit: Courtesy of Kathleen Gilberd

The why and how of withdrawal is the subject of a new book by Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd, respectively president and co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild. The book is entitled “Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent.”

Excerpts from an interview with the authors follow.

IPS: What is the extent of the dissent? Cohn and Gilberd: As far as we know, the military does not keep data on dissent, and it would undoubtedly be hard to do. Occasional military polls show high rates of dissatisfaction, and while these are statistically small samples, we expect actual numbers to be higher than service members would reveal on even “anonymous” military surveys.

Reports from counseling groups working with dissident soldiers reveal that dissent is clearly much higher than at the beginning of the war in Iraq, and that has carried over into a great deal of dissatisfaction and dissent even in the early months of the “surge” into Afghanistan.

IPS: What forms does the dissent take? MC & KG: Dissent takes a great many forms, and this is one of the things that makes it difficult for the military to monitor and control it. The public hears about the most visible form of dissent: increasing numbers of resisters to both wars who “go public” to express their objection.

Some, such as First Lt. Ehren Watada and Pablo Paredes, publicly refuse orders to deploy to an unlawful war, raising the duty to disobey unlawful orders. GI’s and recent veterans have also become a regular presence at national anti-war demonstrations.

In addition, there is strong GI participation in the recently established coffee-houses near military bases, and many active-duty members have joined Iraq Veterans Against the War.

More than 200 soldiers and sailors testified in Winter Soldier in 2008 about atrocities they had committed and witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By going public with their opposition to the war, at great risk to themselves, they inspired others to dissent and resist participation in the wars.

Less visible are the many GIs who simply go AWOL, seek discharge, or fail to report for activation from reserve status, in opposition to the wars; these percentages are quite high. Although some conscientious objectors have been successful in achieving CO status at the military or court level, it is difficult to measure how many GI’s apply for CO status.

Other forms of dissent, while equally important, are even more difficult to measure: GIs use blogs and other Internet vehicles to express dissent. As creative soldiers utilise modern technology to share images of the war and their opposition to the war with fellow soldiers, families, and the public, dissent sometimes escapes the military’s notice or its ability and authority to control.

Some dissent is very personal and quiet, though equally effective: GI’s distribute letters, photographs, copies of David Zeigler’s anti-war film, “Sir! No Sir!” and “know your rights” cards with discharge information to each other and quietly pass the word that it is possible to say “no”.

IPS: What are the main reasons for dissent? MC & KG: “Rules of Disengagement” details many of these reasons. Growing numbers of service members see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as illegal and immoral. They witness, and are sometimes forced to participate in, brutal actions not only against combatants, but also against civilians and prisoners.

Racism and objectification of the non-white enemy as “haji” or “raghead” are used by commands to motivate soldiers to fight. But despite desensitising military training, many find these impossible to bear.

At the same time, the military’s mistreatment of ill or injured soldiers, women, people of colour, and people perceived to be lesbian or gay is an outrage to many soldiers, who were promised that the military would take care of its own.

The failure of military medical care, in particular, is a national scandal. Post-traumatic stress disorder and suicides within the military have reached epidemic proportions. Ill and injured soldiers are denied access to medical care, or misdiagnosed and underdiagnosed in an overburdened system pressured to return troops to duty and to combat.

IPS: What is the military’s response to dissent? MC & KG: Command response to dissent varies widely. Resisters who publicly refuse orders or go AWOL generally receive a swift and harsh response through courts-martial. They can expect harsher punishment than GIs who take the same actions quietly, or go AWOL for other reasons, though sometimes military courts have responded to heartfelt objection with more leniency than commands would like.

Whenever service members “step over the line” and violate regulations in other forms of dissent, they can similarly expect disciplinary action.

Commands have more of a problem when the dissent is entirely legal and dissidents stay strictly within the regs. Here, we often see informal command retaliation through supposedly unrelated actions such as changes in duties or denial of regular leave or liberty.

Harassment from other service members is not uncommon, and is often tacitly approved by the chain of command. In fairness, though, there are commands that respect the regulations and treat lawful dissenters fairly. But all soldiers planning to make unpopular views public, even within the command, must be prepared for the possibility of harsh consequences.

IPS: What legal rights and resources exist to support dissident GIs? MC & KG: The regulations permit GIs to express opposition to the wars or to military policies in limited ways. With many limits, GI’s have the right to speak and write publicly about their views, to attend demonstrations – at least in the U.S., off base, out of uniform, and not on duty time.

Groups like the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force and the national GI Rights Network can provide information about GIs rights and referrals to attorneys when commands retaliate.

With legal assistance, commands can often be forced to respect the rights available under the regulations, and can sometimes help to combat less visible but equally problematic harassment and unequal treatment of resisters. Resisters who refuse orders or go AWOL also receive political support and, if they want, publicity, through Courage to Resist, which has taken up the cause of resisters to both wars and to oppressive military policies.

While these resources cannot guarantee that the military will treat resisters and other dissenters fairly, they can make sure that dissenting soldiers do not stand alone.

“Rules of Disengagement” explains how the military’s own regulations can be used to protect dissent, achieve CO status or obtain other discharges, fight racism and stop sexual assault and sexual harassment in the military.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, May 26 2009 (IPS)

"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."

U.S. Army Specialist Victor Agosto, a veteran of the U.S. occupation of Iraq who is refusing deployment to Afghanistan. Credit: Courtesy of Victor Agosto

While in Iraq, Agosto never left his base, located in northern Iraq.

"I never had any traumatic experiences, never fired my weapon," Agosto told IPS in a phone interview. "I mostly worked in information technology, working on computers and keeping the network functioning well. But it was in Iraq that I turned against the occupations. Through my reading, and watching what was going on, I started to feel very guilty."

Agosto added, "What I did there, I know I contributed to death and human suffering. It’s hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it."

Having served three years and nine months in the U.S. Army, Agosto was to complete his contract and be discharged on Aug. 3. But due to his excellent record of service and accrued leave, he was to be released the end of June. Nevertheless, due to the stop-loss programme, the Army decided to deploy him to Afghanistan anyway.

Stop-loss is a programme the military uses to keep soldiers enlisted beyond the terms of their contracts. Since Sep. 11, 2001, more than 140,000 troops have had tours extended by stop-loss.

A copy of his Counseling Form from the Army, dated May 1, reads, "You will deploy in support of OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] on or about [XXXXX] with 57th ESB. This is a direct order from your Company Commander CPT Michael J. Pederson."

Agosto posted copies of the Counseling Statements issued by the Army on his Facebook page. Counseling Statements outline actions taken by the Army to discipline Agosto for his refusal to obey a direct order from his company commander.

On one of them, dated May 1, Agosto’s written statement appears: "There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan. The occupation is immoral and unjust. It does not make the American people any safer. It has the opposite effect."

In another, dated May 18, he wrote: "I will not obey any orders I deem to be immoral or illegal."

On that day, Agosto was ordered to get his medical records in preparation to deploy to Afghanistan. He refused to do so. The Army threatened to take punitive measures, but Agosto wrote on the Counseling Statement, "I am not going to Afghanistan. I will not take part in SRP [Soldier Readiness Processing]."

If Agosto continues to refuse orders, he almost assuredly will face court martial, and likely jail time.

When IPS asked Agosto if he is willing to take whatever consequences the Army is prepared to mete out, he replied, "Yes. I’m fully prepared for this. I have concluded that the wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] are not going to be ended by politicians or people at the top. They are not responsive to the people, they are responsive to corporate America."

Agosto added, "The only way to make them responsive to the needs of the people is if soldiers won’t fight their wars, and if soldiers won’t fight their wars, the wars won’t happen. I hope I’m setting an example for other soldiers."

Agosto has overtly refused to follow any order that has anything to do with his taking an action that would support the occupation of Afghanistan. For a time, according to Agosto, he was given simple orders to clean the motor pool, or pull weeds.

"They switched that recently," he told IPS, "I’ve continued to be fairly defiant, so on Tuesday I have to meet with Trial Defense Services, which then begins the process of getting an Article 15, which is movement towards being court-martialed, if these reprimands continue."

"If I take the Article 15, I’ll take a reduction in rank and pay. I don’t’ know what is going to happen. I agreed to sweep the motor pool and pull weeds, but nothing else that I feel directly supports the war. I’m not going to follow orders I’m not comfortable with."

Agosto’s case is not unique. The group Courage to Resist, based in Oakland, California, actively engages in assisting soldiers who refuse to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

"Although the efforts of Courage to Resist are primarily focused on supporting public GI resisters, the organization also strives to provide political, emotional, and material support to all military objectors critical of our government's current policies of empire," reads a portion of the group's mission statement.

IPS spoke with Adam Szyper-Seibert, an office manager and counselor with Courage to Resist.

"Currently we are actively supporting over 50 military resisters like Victor Agosto," Szyper-Seibert told IPS, "They are all over the world, including André Shepherd in Germany, and several people in Canada. We are getting five to six calls a week just about the IRR [Individual Ready Reserve] recall alone."

U.S. Army Specialist André Shepherd, who went AWOL after serving in Iraq, has applied for asylum in Germany after refusing military service because he is morally opposed to the occupation of Iraq.

The IRR is composed of former military personnel who still have time remaining on their enlistment agreements but have returned to civilian life. They are eligible to be called up in "states of emergency." The Army is currently undertaking the largest IRR recall since 2004, despite the recent inauguration of a so-called anti-war president.

Szyper-Seibert said that the number of soldiers contacting Courage to Resist has been increasing dramatically in the last year, and particularly in recent months.

"The number of soldiers contacting us is increasing," he explained, "With five to six IRR’s contacting us a week, plus others going absent without leave [AWOL], the numbers are all climbing, as compared to a year ago. Since May 2008, we’ve had a 200 percent jump in how many soldiers are contacting us."

According to Courage to Resist, there have been at least 15,000 IRR call-ups since Sep. 11, 2001, for deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sgt. Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad and is also stationed at Fort Hood, recently went AWOL when his unit deployed to Afghanistan.

Like Agosto, Bishop feels it is immoral for him to deploy to support an occupation he morally opposes.

"I love my country, but I believe that this particular war is unjust, unconstitutional and a total abuse of our nation’s power and influence," Bishop’s blog reads, "And so, in the next few days, I will be speaking with my lawyer, and taking actions that will more than likely result in my discharge from the military, and possible jail time… and I am prepared to live with that."

The reason he made this decision is addressed in his blog.

"My father said, ‘Do only what you can live with, because every morning you have to look at your face in the mirror when you shave. Ten years from now, you’ll still be shaving the same face.’ If I had deployed to Afghanistan, I don’t think I would have been able to look into another mirror again."

Excerpt:

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.

Details are still coming in, but the incident reportedly happened at a stress clinic where troops get help for personal issues or combat trauma.

At an afternoon press conference, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was tight-lipped about the details of the shooting, the first such spree by a U.S. soldier through six years of war in Iraq.

“We’re still in the process of gathering information on exactly what happened,” Gates said, “but if the preliminary reports are confirmed, such a tragic loss of life at the hands of our own forces is a cause for great and urgent concern.”

A military statement said the shooting took place at around 2 p.m. local time in the mental health clinic at Camp Liberty, a sprawling base next to Baghdad International Airport. The Pentagon said the names of the dead soldiers were being withheld pending family notification. The name of the shooter was also not released.

Veterans’ advocates say the details of the incident will be critical in assessing whether the killings could have been prevented.

“We need to know if this soldier was examined by a physician before or after deployment and if any mental health symptoms were observed,” said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

“We know from repeated Congressional investigations and hearings that the military has knowingly sent soldiers with physical and mental health diagnoses and severe symptoms back to the war zones. In some cases, the service members killed themselves or others,” he said.

More than 230 active soldiers, airmen and marines committed suicide last year – the highest military suicide statistic in nearly 30 years. In January, more U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

In November 2006, a New York National Guardsman was arraigned in a military court on charges of murdering two officers in an explosion at one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

The series of incidents leaves some observers to recall the military’s internal meltdown during the Vietnam War.

“In December of 1972, the Defence Department acknowleged that somewhere between 800 and 1,000 officers had actually been blown up by their subordinates,” explained Vietnam war widow Penny Coleman, author of the book ‘Flashback: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Suicide and the Lessons of War’.

Back then, the killings were called ‘fragging’, because fragmentation bombs were usually used.

“The fragmentation devices were the weapon of choice because they left no evidence. There were obviously no fingerprints,” Coleman said. “There was no way of tracking it.”

Iraq war veterans watched the news come in with a mixture of shock, outrage, and resignation.

Former U.S. Army Captain Luis Carlos Montalvan received two Bronze Stars and one Purple Heart for wounds sustained during his two tours in Iraq. He first saw the news in the waiting room in Manhattan’s Veterans’ Affairs hospital, where Montalvan and his fellow veterans had all been waiting for hours to see a doctor.

“We were just shaking our heads,” he said.

Montalvan said many of his fellow veterans felt a mix of irony and horror that while they were waiting for hours to receive government health care stateside, their active duty counterparts were being killed by one of their own in a clinic in the war zone.

“It’s horrifying,” he added, “that there were men and women in a combat stress centre at Camp Liberty who were going to seek help and now their relatives back home who thought that their loved ones were going to get treatment are dead. They went to get treatment and they’re dead. Can you imagine the grief?”

At the Pentagon press conference this afternoon, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said the military’s investigation will include an examination into the number of tours the suspect had served in Iraq and whether he had been deployed to the war zone despite an earlier mental health diagnosis.

Mullen said the shooting spree “does speak to me about the need for us to redouble our efforts in terms of dealing with the stress [of war], dealing with those kinds of things.”

After eight years of war in Afghanistan and six years of war in Iraq, the Pentagon reports nearly 800,000 U.S. soldiers have served more than one tour in the war zone. According to the non-partisan Rand Corporation, approximately 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, while another 320,000 have sustained a traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage often caused by roadside bombs and mortars.

“The first impulse is to be angry at a service member for taking lives, that’s the first inclination,” Montalvan added, “but then you can’t help but ask: ‘What caused this person to be this upset, this angry?’ And the likely conclusion is that this person could not get help.”

*IPS contributor Aaron Glantz is author of “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans” (University of California Press/January 2009).

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Jan 16 2009 (IPS)

“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.”

Journalist Aaron Glantz makes this stunning statement in his recently released book, “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans” (UC Press).

And his controversial claim is backed up by an extremely well-researched overview of the dismal state of care provided by the government for this new generation of war veterans.

Glantz, an IPS correspondent who has been covering the U.S. occupation of Iraq for years, including several months of reportage from inside Iraq, provides a devastating overview of the plight of war veterans.

From reporting on Bush administration funding cuts to the Veterans Administration (VA), to how key Republican senators like John McCain consistently vote against veteran’s benefits and supporting legislation, “The War Comes Home” makes the case.

Glantz documents what happens when veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan return home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), their battles with the Pentagon and VA to obtain benefits, and the psychological, mental, and physical toll this is taking on the hundreds of thousands of veterans, making “The War Comes Home” a must read for anyone wanting a clear understanding of what these occupations are truly costing those in the military.

The story of Patrick Resta, an Iraq war veteran, brings the reader into the world of a returning veteran. Resta’s wife Melissa tells Glantz that upon Patrick’s return from Iraq, “Over the course of just two or three weeks, I started to notice that if I came into a room, he would just leave,” she said, “If I said something to him, he would just snap. He didn’t want to talk to me, he didn’t want to talk to really anybody, and when I confronted him with us having problems I would get let into.”

Patrick ended up going to the VA, where he was diagnosed with PTSD. By March 2008, Glantz points out, Patrick joined over 130,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans as having been diagnosed with a psychological illness by the VA’s mental health services.

While he still suffers from his illness, Patrick has gone on to make progress with the help he deserved from the VA. His story is, however, a best-case scenario.

Glantz goes on to reveal that a recent Army study that found that 18 percent of troops – out of 1,800,000 who have been to Iraq – likely suffer at least some brain damage from improvised explosive devices.

“This means as many as 320,000 potential TBI [Traumatic Brain Injury] patients,” Glantz writes. TBI symptoms include headaches, memory loss, irritability, difficulty sleeping, and balance problems.

Due to medical advances, today in Iraq 15 out of every 16 seriously wounded service members survive injuries that in previous wars would have been fatal. Yet when these veterans come home in dire need of support, they often find it lacking.

Gerald Cassidy is a case in point. After serving in Bosnia and New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, Cassidy volunteered to serve in Iraq. Narrowly escaping a roadside bomb while on a convoy, Cassidy was given no medical attention and kept on his duties of conducting home raids, escorting convoys, and guarding the perimetre of his camp.

Back in the United States, Cassidy was given a medical evaluation and diagnosed with PTSD. He was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and assigned to one of the Army’s newly created Wounded Warrior Transition Units, where injured soldiers are each supposed to be assigned a doctor, nurse care manager, and a squad leader to manage their treatment.

Five months after his return to the U.S., Cassidy was found dead in his room at Fort Knox.

Cassidy’s mother, Kay, told Glantz, “He died from lack of care. He came back from Iraq, and the Army killed him.”

Glantz reveals how Cassidy’s family went on to investigate the death, finding that their son had been lucky to have one doctor appointment and one psychiatrist appointment per month.

In addition, Kay Cassidy told of her son being left alone in his third-floor room, where he sat unattended playing video computer games. Once, he passed out in his room alone and woke up several hours later laying in a pool of blood from his nose or mouth. In another incident, her son had fainted and collapsed into a wall while walking.

“They let a young man who had passed out in his room in a pool of blood, who had passed out and hit a wall, they let a young man like that live in a dormitory room all by himself, and when he didn’t show up for [daily] roll call nobody went up to check on him for at least two and a half days,” Kay raged to Glantz, “It’s criminal negligence.”

Cassidy’s family continues to wait for answers from both the military and the U.S. government, and is one of dozens of tragedies outlined in the book that show the true cost of failed U.S. policy.

The average wait for a veteran to get an appointment at the VA is six months. Eighteen veterans – from all wars – per day are committing suicide. One thousand veterans per month, who are technically under the care of the VA, are attempting suicide.

“The War Comes Home” pulls no punches. It is a searing indictment of the total, willful failure of the Bush administration to properly care for the men and women of the military it willingly put in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan.

IPS asked the author what he hoped might come as a result of the book.

“I hope the public gains a broader understanding of what it’s like to come home from a war – of the disconnection between those who have only experienced war on television and those who’ve seen it up close,” Glantz explained.

“I feel like we are in an important historical moment, where the incoming administration either dramatically improves conditions for veterans returning home, or we face a repeat of the shameful treatment that followed the Vietnam War. Suicides among Iraq war veterans have already begun to multiply and Iraq War veterans are living homeless on the street…I want the book to play a role in ensuring that these problems are addressed.”

Excerpt:

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.

This is the crisis General Eric Shinseki will inherit when he takes the reins at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The general, who retired from the Army after the George W. Bush administration ignored his warnings on Iraq, sat for his Senate confirmation hearing for VA secretary Wednesday, where he received accolades from Democrats and Republicans alike.

The chair of the committee, Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, predicted Shinseki will be confirmed by the full Senate Jan. 20, the same day Barack Obama takes office.

Mentioning the retired general’s experience having one of his feet blown off nearly 40 years ago during the war in Vietnam, Akaka told Shinseki he was “confident you have a strong sense of empathy to those who are served by VA and a deep commitment to VA’s mission…This will serve you well as secretary.”

For his part, Shinseki promised to be “a forceful advocate for veterans”, saying Obama “charged me to ensure that veterans receive the benefits and services they earned and that the nation expects”.

Most observers agree the situation Shinseki inherits is dire.

The non-partisan Rand Corporation estimates 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, while another 320,000 have experienced a traumatic brain injury – physical brain damage often caused by roadside bombs.

Less than half, however, are getting help from the government that sent them to battle. Wounded veterans are being forced to wait six months to two years on average to learn if they qualify for disability payments, and many have been turned away when they seek medical care.

At his confirmation hearing, Shinseki vowed to “transform” the VA, to cut down on long delays, promising “timeliness and consistency” in processing disability claims, a more “transparent” bureaucratic process and increased use of new technologies.

Like the senators at the hearing, veterans’ advocates expressed optimism about Shinseki’s selection.

“As a wounded combat veteran, he has a firm understanding of the issues veterans face not only when they’re deployed and when they return home, but also just the everyday issues that a veteran has to deal with that most civilians wouldn’t understand,” said Ernesto Estrada, an Iraq War veteran and policy associate at the organisation Swords to Plowshares.

Now Estrada and others are waiting to see the specifics of Shinseki’s proposals. His answers to most of the questions posed by senators were vague, and none of the lawmakers pressed him for specifics.

In his written answers to questions from Senator Akaka, for example, Shinseki spoke of the long wait times veterans face for disability payments “I have much to learn with respect to the specifics of the claims process, but it seems to me that timeliness and quality should be primary concerns in the decision-making process,” he said.

Veterans hope Shinseki’s reputation for honesty will lead to a change in approach at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Under Pres. Bush, high-ranking officials have tried to cover up these problems. In one infamous example, the head of the VA’s mental health division, Dr. Ira Katz, directed an agency spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care from the VA attempt to kill themselves every month. The subject line of Katz’s e-mail read: “Shh!”

Those who did call attention to the crisis have been punished. In 2006, Dr. Frances Murphy was working as the undersecretary for health policy coordination at the VA when she told the medical journal Psychiatric News that waiting lists for mental health care were so long the care was “virtually inaccessible”. Days later, Dr. Murphy was sent packing.

Indeed, General Shinseki had his own battles over facts with the Bush administration.

Announcing the appointment on NBC, President-elect Obama said he picked Shinseki to head the VA because he “was right” when he warned Congress and the Bush administration about the dangers of war in Iraq.

As secretary of Veterans Affairs, Shinseki advocates hope he will continue to tell the country inconvenient truths about the long-term effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

*IPS contributor Aaron Glantz is author of “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans” (University of California Press, 2009).

By Enrique Gili
SAN DIEGO, California, Oct 15 2008 (IPS)

In their latest documentary “Soldiers of Conscience”, husband and wife filmmakers Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg probe the nature of war and the human condition, asking the question: when is killing in combat permissible?

Catherine Ryan Credit:

The soldiers – Camilo Mejia, Kevin Benderman, Joshua Casteel and Aidan Delgado – share little in common and come from diverse backgrounds. However, each felt compelled to join the armed forces out of a sense of duty and patriotism.

When confronted with the realities of serving in Iraq, however, their attitudes towards military service shifted from idealism to profound soul-searching, leading each of them to seek status as conscientious objectors.

Delgado, a Buddhist, finds the random violence inflicted on civilians to be abhorrent and is unable to use “weapons that roast people”. Casteel, an evangelical Christian, interrogates an imprisoned jihadist who challenges his religious faith. Both are eventually granted honourable discharges for their refusal to fight in Iraq.

Mejia and Benderman share harder fates, serving prison sentences after failing to report for duty. Mejia feels liberated when he’s no longer faced with taking human lives. Benderman asks the question, “When is enough, enough?”

The film opens with the revelation that an estimated 75 percent of U.S. soldiers refrained from killing the enemy during World War Two. So strong was the taboo against taking human lives that the majority of infantrymen froze under fire with the enemy in their sights.

“Will I be able to kill another human in combat?” is the moral dilemma facing soldiers serving not just in Iraq but throughout history. Many seem to be haunted by their decision.

“Will I ever like myself again?” writes one soldier.

IPS correspondent Enrique Gili spoke to Catherine Ryan from her production studio in Berkeley, California. “Soldiers of Conscience” airs in the United States on the public television channel PBS on Thursday, Oct. 16. Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: What was the initial motivation for this film? CR: We make films about social issues. So we wanted to make a film from a perspective that has not been done over and over again. We decided we wanted to understand some aspect of the Iraq War. Not from the viewpoint of generals, presidents and politicians but from the very intimate experience of individual soldiers.

IPS: How did you find your subjects? CR: We have subjects that are sincere war fighters and conscientious objectors. The objectors were pretty easy to find, they’ve been very motivated to talk.

We were granted permission. People inside the service know it’s critical. I think there is an openness and willingness among people that work with and care about soldiers to want to explore this issue. How does killing impact individual soldiers?

IPS: During the process of making the film, did you ever consider what it would take for you to kill someone and under what circumstances? CR: Of course, it’s still an ongoing investigation for me. I’ve come to understand both sides of the question. I don’t know what I would do under the circumstances. Our hope with this film is to make all of us ask questions.

IPS: Seeking conscientious objector status is a basic right stemming as far back as the U.S. colonial era. What are the origins? CR: That was why people came here. A lot of people that first came here were pacifists who were fleeing Europe in order not to serve in the wars of the kingdom. It’s an old tradition in this country.

IPS: What are the criteria? CR: Religious reasons for conscientious objection have the most clarity. When soldiers start speaking from a humanistic perspective, [i.e.] war is wrong, they have a much tougher time.

IPS: Do you have any sense of how many are applying now? CR: The Army is not releasing those numbers. By the end of the Vietnam War 170,000 had applied. . IPS: Major Peter Kilner, the West Point Military Academy instructor, spoke with a great deal of clarity of his own. CR: We really wanted to find a guy who could speak very well from the perspective of why we must obey duty in times of war. So that people could hear the things they already believe and then take in some of the perspectives of the conscientious objectors, which is not stuff that we commonly agree upon.

Our hope was that in keeping everybody in the discussion that we could keep everybody in the discussion – not to have people turn off the show because it’s either anti-war or pro-military.

IPS: All the conscientious objectors profiled have book deals. Is that a coincidence? CR: I think a huge part of it is the process that one has to go through to become a conscientious objector requires deep reflection and study. If you’re going to try to explain yourself from inside of the military system, you have to be very good. The process is like an intensive orals exam – sitting across from your commander in a room for three hours, and their job is come up with false points in your argument. That takes a lot of preparation.

And then their lives as conscientious objectors. You have to be very clear about what you think and be able talk about it in ways that people can understand, in order not to be an outcast in the world.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Oct 3 2008 (IPS)

Not many people want to spend time at Guantánamo Bay. But while studying law at the University of Miami in 2005, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan became outraged to learn of the lack of rights afforded detainees in the "war on terror" and was keen to get involved.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan. Credit: Scribe Publications

Her experiences of working as an interpreter at Guantánamo have now been collated in her recently-released book, titled ‘My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me’.

Khan currently represents a Guantánamo Bay detainee. She visited Australia in September to attend the Brisbane Writers’ Festival and while there spoke to IPS correspondent Stephen de Tarczynski via telephone.

IPS: In ‘My Guantánamo Diary’ you say that "the prison camp’s very existence is a blatant affront to what America stands for." Can you tell me what you mean by that? Mahvish Rukhsana Khan: There were detainees who were denied basic constitutional rights that America was founded upon. They were never charged and held indefinitely, for sometimes up to seven years. They were denied attorneys, held without being charged, not given an impartial trial and denied the basic rights that every alleged rapist and murderer in America has.

IPS: Is that sense of injustice what inspired you to offer your services to assist lawyers? MRK: That is what inspired me. I felt outraged. I was a law student at the time studying Guantánamo Bay and the concepts that I was studying in law school were not being applied in this case. I felt that the institution of Guantánamo was created to weasel around these cornerstone legal principles imbedded in our constitution. That is initially why I wanted to get involved. I was also just baffled at how Washington policy makers were debating the legality of these medieval torture techniques – once-upon-a-time it was [called] Chinese water torture and today in America it’s water-boarding. But it’s all the same.

IPS: Were you shocked by what you saw the first time you visited Guantánamo Bay? MRK: The first time I went I was nervous and scared. I was expecting to meet somebody who was Taliban or al-Qaeda or somebody who wouldn’t necessarily want to sit down with me because I was a woman. [I was] fully expecting to meet the worst of the worst or a bomb-making terrorist. I was scared.

On the first trip, I met a paediatrician who [now] works for the U.N. to help the new democracy in Afghanistan. His wife was an economist and he was a Shiite Muslim, which are a persecuted minority under the Taliban. He fled the Taliban to neighbouring Iran and yet there he was being accused of working for the Taliban. It made no sense.

Dr. Ali Shah [Mousovi] was accused of fighting against the Soviets several decades before. It was backed by the U.S. and he was awed that he was being accused of that while he was at Guantánamo.

And the second guy I met on that trip was an eighty-year-old paraplegic who was brought to Guantánamo Bay on a stretcher. Neither of these men had been charged with any criminal activities.

IPS: Your book reveals both mental and physical abuse that detainees were subjected to. Was this something that you were prepared for? Was the situation different to what you had imagined it would be? MRK: I had heard a lot about torture, but it was different in the sense that when you hear an eighty-year-old paraplegic who can’t walk and can't see very well, who is shackled to the floor by his slow and immobile leg, talking very uncomfortably about being beaten and having his arm broken and being stripped naked in front of women, it takes on another meaning.

IPS: You also say in your book that while you "understood the need to invade Afghanistan" after the 9/11 attacks, you "also felt the suffering of the Afghans as their country was bombed." Your heritage is Afghani – although you were born in the U.S. – so was this a conflicting time for you? MRK: It was a conflicting time in the sense that I was born and raised in America. I am American, America is my home, and after 9/11 I feared for the safety of America. But at the same time I feared for the safety of the Muslim community living in America and what that would mean. You know, individuals living in Afghanistan are a lot like my own family and so I felt for them too as they were being bombed.

IPS: Do you think that your Afghan heritage and ability to speak Pashto enabled the detainees to be more open with you? MRK: Absolutely, because I understood the cultural nuances and there wasn’t an interpreter while I was communicating with these people. We could freely understand one another. But beyond that I understood their culture and where they came from and there was this instant connection – with some of the detainees anyway – and many of them familiarised themselves quickly with me. I think there was a desire to just be associated with something that reminded them of home and I often came into those meetings wearing a shawl. I covered my hair as I didn’t know how conservative the men that I would be meeting would be and that shawl was often embroidered the way things are in their home country.

IPS: And you’ve also met one of the detainees after he was released. That must have been a very different experience from knowing him at Guantánamo Bay. MRK: It was. I met Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, who was the first detainee that I met at Guantánamo, and I promised him that once he was released I would visit him at home. And visiting him in Gardez, Afghanistan was a surreal experience because I’d only known him as this very frail, vulnerable man shackled to the floor and speaking about his desire to just open up health clinics in his country and service people after the Taliban had fallen. He was only 43 years old but he’d gone completely white – his beard – and when I saw him in Afghanistan his brothers had apparently persuaded him to cut his beard short and dye it black for his wife and kids. It was great to be able to see him with his family and safe. And he was exactly what he said he was. He was released without ever having been charged and is today working as a physician in Afghanistan.

IPS: Do you think we can learn any lessons from the use of Guantánamo Bay in the "war on terror?" I mean, the prison is still functioning and people are still detained there, but does this have to be the way it works? MRK: It doesn’t have to be the way it works because the U.S. has a system of justice and we don’t need these secret institutions. We’ve tried terrorists on U.S. soil in the past. In world trade centre bombing number one we were able to successfully try terrorists and then lock them up. Guantánamo at its peak has had almost 800 detainees – today there are about 240 – and of those, over 500 have been released, mostly without ever having been charged, with the exception of a few who died at Guantánamo. If there are hundreds and hundreds being released without charge there are obviously a lot of mistakes being made.

The other thing that a lot of people are unaware of and that I was unaware of going into Guantanamo was the bounty system. The U.S. military air-dropped thousands of leaflets across Afghanistan, offering up to 25,000 dollars per member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. That’s like hitting the super-lotto jackpot in Afghanistan because the average Afghan makes eighty cents a day, about 300 dollars a year. And added to that there are these complex tribal and ethnic, political and geographic animosities between people that go back generations and the military failed to investigate what locals were alleging about one another for a huge some of money. So, I think the lesson to be learned is that we need a better system of intelligence for one, and two, that so many mistakes will continue to happen when there isn’t transparency and a system of process.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Sep 19 2008 (IPS)

By using the written word and art, veterans of the U.S. occupation of Iraq are transforming their trauma into a message of both healing and resistance to the failed U.S. adventure.

Warrior Writers crew making paper out of old military uniforms in the studio. Credit: Combat Paper Project

Cameron began writing about his experiences in Iraq after he turned against the occupation when he had several personal realisations.

“It wasn’t until after I’d been back that I tried to shut off my experiences in Iraq,” Cameron told IPS. “I kept to myself, and was going through my memories and realised we’d destroyed their infrastructure and weren’t there to help. I realised it wasn’t about freedom and democracy, and the way we conducted ourselves, and the way we brutalised the people, made me against the occupation.”

“We were trained to fight and win battles,” he said. “I was in artillery, I was trained to blow shit up. We weren’t there to rebuild anything or help the Iraqi people.”

His writing became some of the first of what would evolve into the Warrior Writers Project, which uses writing and artistic workshops based on veterans’ experiences in the military and Iraq to bring their experiences to light and connect with one another, creating a context for both healing and resisting what their experience in the military has done to them.

“The writing from the workshops is compiled into books, performances and exhibits that provide a lens into the hearts of people who have a deep and intimate relationship with the Iraq war,” their mission statement reads.

Writings from the first workshops were made into the book, “Warrior Writers: Move, Shoot and Communicate”. A second book, “Re-making Sense”, has also been released.

“The title comes from the goal of remaking sense of our relationship with the war, of our lives, of what we do now, as veterans,” Cameron told IPS.

The Warrior Writers have also organised exhibits that showcase photographs taken by members in Iraq, as well as artwork. At the exhibits, veterans read from the books and perform pieces they had written in the workshop earlier that same day.

Cameron told IPS he feels the work is important “for catharsis and reconciliation, and also so people can hear our side of the story.”

Cameron was based at Camp Anaconda, a massive U.S. airbase just north of Baghdad. While there, he had access to satellite television and was stunned by how the corporate media was covering the occupation.

“I remember the images and stories coming out were different from what we were seeing on the ground,” he explained. “Our intelligence reports that briefed us on attacks against us and how we were getting hit, almost none of this was in the news. I remember being hit for seven days straight by mortars, but none of this was ever in the news.”

“The fundamental civil society and infrastructure has been so changed and altered in Iraq that it’s absolutely devastated,” Cameron told IPS, while speaking of the current situation there. “It’s been so altered…it’s not an argument of being on the road to victory because the surge is working, but the fact is that the country has been totally devastated. We need to understand where these people are in just trying to survive on a daily basis.”

This influenced Cameron heavily. He feels that both projects he is involved in are ways to show the truth to the U.S. public about what their government has done to Iraq.

Cameron co-founded and operates a paper mill called the People’s Republic of Paper (PRP) with artist Drew Matott, who founded the Green Door Studio in Burlington, Vermont, where the PRP is based, and together with Cameron, helped create the idea of pulping soldiers’ uniforms. Thus was born the Combat Paper Project.

By turning their uniforms into paper, soldiers utilise art to heal their trauma from the occupation of Iraq. The uniforms worn in combat are cut up, beaten and formed into sheets of paper, as veterans use a transformational process of papermaking to reclaim their uniform as a piece of art. The goal is for this to be a reconciliatory process for their experiences as soldiers in an occupation.

“The whole point is to create a space for vets to come in and in a closed context talk with each other about what they experienced in Iraq,” Matott told IPS.

“My energy is focused on helping folks heal,” he added. “One thing we do is show before and after art pieces. Usually the first pieces are very, very dark, when they [veterans] first came in. Then we show their later projects, which reveal the healing that has taken place within them, so it’s pretty optimistic.”

Cameron told IPS that for him, “To be able to take the uniform and reclaim it into what I want it to be is a deeply transformational and healing act.”

John Michael Turner, a former U.S. Marine machine gunner, was the second veteran to join the project.

Turner was still in the military when he moved to Burlington and heard about the project.

“I heard about the project that day and had a stack of uniforms in my trunk,” Turner told IPS. “So my first night in Burlington I ended up starting to make paper out of my uniforms.”

Turner, who gave powerful testimony at the Winter Soldier hearings last spring, added, “It is heartbreaking to see there are still people that believe we should be over there. Open your eyes and listen to what we have to say! I just want people to open their eyes and see what is going on, and what is being done over there.”

Through the project, Turner has found a conduit for healing what his time and actions in Iraq have wrought upon him. “All the experiences I’ve gone through, and all my built up frustration and thoughts and anger, instead of transferring that energy into another human being, I can transfer it into my uniforms, my writing, my drawings.”

By transforming his experiences and feelings into art, Turner said, “I can take a desert blouse and cut it up and turn it into a piece of paper. Then I have a blank piece of paper and put one of my poems there for other people to experience it, and for that minute they read it, they can see it through my eyes.”

Turner admitted to IPS that while he has found some relief for his trauma, “I still struggle. The problem is there is so much I need to reclaim.”

Cameron believes the work is ongoing as well.

“I can see it in my own writing – that the anger, gore and graphic frustration flows out, then transitions into a deeper reflection and contemplation about how do we approach the cultural relationship between militarism and our society,” he told IPS. “The military [in U.S. society] is so deeply rooted in us – it’s in our subconscious, and we have to root that out and be able to transcend it.”

Turner feels the work is critical. “We have to take this work and work together, all of us veterans, and help each other, or we’ll destroy ourselves.”

The project has had exhibitions around the country in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and San Francisco, with many more to come.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Sep 16 2008 (IPS)

Aside from the Iraqi people, nobody knows what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq better than the soldiers themselves. A new book gives readers vivid and detailed accounts of the devastation the U.S. occupation has brought to Iraq, in the soldiers' own words.

Iraq War veteran Sergio Kochergin leads anti-war demonstration through downtown Seattle after testifying at Regional Winter Soldier hearings. Credit: Bob Haynes/IPS

Authored by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and journalist Aaron Glantz, the book is a reader for hearings that took place in Silver Spring, Maryland between Mar. 13-16, 2008 at the National Labour College.

"I remember one woman walking by," said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the U.S. Marines who served three tours in Iraq. "She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realised that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces."

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement in Iraq, and how lax they were, even to the point of being virtually non-existent.

"During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot," Washburn's testimony continues. "The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond."

His emotionally charged testimony, like all of those in the book that covered panels addressing dehumanisation, civilian testimony, sexism in the military, veterans' health care, and the breakdown of the military, raised issues that were repeated again and again by other veterans.

"Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent," Washburn said.

Four days of searing testimony, witnessed by this writer, is consolidated into the book, which makes for a difficult read. One page after another is filled with devastating stories from the soldiers about what is being done in Iraq.

Everything from the taking of "trophy" photos of the dead, to torture and slaughtering of civilians is included.

"We're trying to build a historical record of what continues to happen in this war and what the war is really about," Glantz told IPS.

Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, tells of taking orders over the radio.

"One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation…One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment."

Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take "trophy" photos of bodies. "An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by," he said. "This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment."

Kelly Dougherty, the executive director of IVAW, blames the behaviour of soldiers in Iraq on the policies of the U.S. government. "The abuses committed in the occupations, far from being the result of a 'few bad apples' misbehaving, are the result of our government's Middle East policy, which is crafted in the highest spheres of U.S. power," she said.

Knowing this, however, does little to soften the emotional and moral devastation of the accounts.

"You see an individual with a white flag and he does anything but approach you slowly and obey commands, assume it's a trick and kill him," Michael Leduc, a corporal in the Marines who was part of the U.S. attack of Fallujah in November 2004, said were the orders from his battalion JAG officer he received before entering the city.

This is an important book for the public of the United States, in particular, because the Winter Soldier testimonies were not covered by any of the larger media outlets, aside from the Washington Post, which ran a single piece on the event that was buried in the Metro section.

The New York Times, CNN, and network news channels ABC, NBC and CBS ignored it completely.

This is particularly important in light of the fact that, as former Marine Jon Turner stated, "Anytime we did have embedded reporters with us, our actions changed drastically. We never acted the same. We were always on key with everything, did everything by the book."

"To me it's about giving a picture of what war is like," Glantz added, "Because here in the U.S. we have this very sanitised version of what war is. But war is when we have a large group of armed people killing large numbers of other people. And that is the picture that people will get from reading veterans testimony…the true face of war."

Dehumanisation of the soldiers themselves is covered in the book, as it includes testimony of sexism, racism, and the plight of veterans upon their return home as they struggle to obtain care from the Veterans Administration.

There is much testimony on the dehumanisation of the Iraqi people as well. Brian Casler, a corporal in the Marines, spoke to some of this that he witnessed during the invasion of Iraq.

"But on these convoys, I saw marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road," he stated.

Numerous accounts from soldiers include the prevalence of degrading terms for Iraqis, such as "hajis," "towel-heads" and "sand-niggers".

Scott Ewing, who served in Iraq from 2005-2006, admitted on one panel that units intentionally gave candy to Iraqi children for reasons other than "winning hearts and minds".

"There was also another motive," Ewing said, "If the kids were around our vehicles, the bad guys wouldn't attack. We used the kids as human shields."

Glantz admits that it would be difficult for the average U.S. citizen to read the book, and believes it is important to keep in mind while doing so what it took for the veterans to give this historic testimony.

"They could have been heroes, but what they are doing here is even more heroic – which is telling the truth," Glantz told IPS. "They didn't have to come forward. They chose to come forward."

*NOTE: Aaron Glantz is a contributor to Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 4 2008 (IPS)

You could hear the joy in Patrick Campbell’s voice as he reflected on U.S. President George W. Bush’s signing Monday of a new GI Bill of Rights for veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s hard to actually picture that it’s done,” the legislative director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America told IPS. “There are veterans all across this country and in Iraq and Afghanistan who are dreaming bigger dreams now. When we were in Iraq we were always talking about what we were going to do when we got home and I know that now they’re over there thinking ‘I can go to any college I want to now. I can go to the best school I can get into not just the school that I can afford’.”

The new law, which is modeled on the widely popular GI Bill available to soldiers returning from World War II, guarantees Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and any U.S. citizen who serves in the military for at least three years, a full scholarship at any in-state public university, along with a monthly housing stipend and a stipend for books and materials. It more than doubled the value of education benefits from 40,000 to 90,000 dollars.

Campbell, who served in the National Guard in Iraq while obtaining a law degree from Catholic University in Washington, noted the GI Bill will allow veterans to graduate from school debt-free, changing the arcs of their careers. “I have over 100,000 dollars in student loans that I have to worry about paying back and that’s going to dictate what kind of jobs I can have in the future,” he said. “Future veterans won’t have that problem. Now veterans can go into public service jobs and dedicate themselves to service and not have to worry about having to pay back these crushing student loans.”

The Bush administration had initially opposed the GI Bill, warning it would cost tens of billions of dollars and prove cumbersome to administer. Bush also argued that if education benefits were improved, soldiers might leave the military when their terms were up rather than re-enlisting for another tour in the war-zone.

But that position proved difficult to hold once veterans were able to bring media attention to it. Newspapers across the country ran opinion pieces against the president’s position. Among the most scathing was a May 28 editorial from the New York Times. “Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform,” the editorial read. “So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.”

Another problem for Bush was that Democratic leaders in Congress folded the GI Bill into a massive 162-billion-dollar war spending bill, which allowed him to continue fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no strings attached. If Bush wanted to continue those wars, he would need to sign the GI Bill too and on Monday signed the new law into effect.

Speaking in the Oval Office, the president praised the expanded GI Bill for paying “a debt of gratitude to our nation’s military families” which “will help us to recruit and reward the best military on the face of the Earth.”

But even as Bush signed the new GI Bill, Iraq war veterans received a significant piece of bad news from a federal judge in San Francisco. After two months of deliberations, U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti ruled against the group Veterans for Common Sense, which had launched a national class action lawsuit against the Bush administration for failing to provide proper medical care and disability compensation for veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over the course of the trial, the Department of Veterans Affairs was forced to release a series of damning documents which showed, among other things, that 18 U.S. war veterans commit suicide every day.

In one e-mail made public during the trial, the head of the VA’s Mental Health division, Dr. Ira Katz, advised a media spokesperson not to tell reporters 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.

“Shh!” the e-mail begins.

“Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” the e-mail concludes.

Another set of documents showed that in the six months leading up to Mar. 31, 2008, 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.

In his 83-page opinion released Jun. 25, Judge Conti, a World War II veteran appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, said he found the statistics “troubling”, but that the groups “did not prove a systemic denial or unreasonable delay in mental health care” in their lawsuit.

Veterans for Common Sense has vowed to appeal.

“What you have with the president signing the GI Bill for the 21st century is the start of desperately needed massive overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs,” the group’s director, Paul Sullivan, told IPS. “The VA needs an overhaul because today there are 600,000 veterans of all wars waiting on average more than six months to get disability benefits. And, according to VA’s own internal records, about 25 percent of VA’s 5 million patients wait more than a month to see a doctor.”

“We hope that with the president changing his position on caring for veterans that he will now instruct the Department of Defence and Department of Veterans Affairs to also overhaul the healthcare and disability benefits programmes for our veterans as he has just done for education with his signing of the GI Bill,” he said.

*IPS Correspondent Aaron Glantz is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans” (UC Press) and “Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations” (Haymarket).

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
SEATTLE, Jun 3 2008 (IPS)

In a clear change of strategy to energise public anti-war sentiment, Iraq veterans led a determined demonstration of hundreds through the streets of downtown Seattle last Saturday, following regional Winter Soldier hearings at the Seattle Town Hall.

Iraq War veteran Sergio Kochergin leads anti-war demonstration through downtown Seattle after testifying at Regional Winter Soldier hearings. Credit: Bob Haynes/IPS

This tactic was apparently meant to draw in more national mainstream media coverage of the event, which, with few exceptions, did not materialise.

Chanan Suarez Diaz, the Seattle Chapter president of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), which organised last weekend's event, had told IPS that his chapter, along with others in the northwest region, intended to make a major effort to draw the public into both the testimonials and taking action afterwards.

The Seattle regional Winter Soldier event was open to the public.

A late April poll conducted by CNN/Opinion Research Corp. found that nearly three-quarters (68 percent) of respondents opposed the Iraq war. The strategy of the regional IVAW groups is clearly meant to capitalise on the growing opposition to the occupation of Iraq among the U.S. public.

Christopher Diggins, a psychotherapist who attended the demonstration, reflected the feelings of many – that this strategy is important.

"This tactic is better because you have to get the community involved," Diggins told IPS. "You have to have community awareness and support."

"I want to show my solidarity for vets who are against the war, because it is the only way this war is going to stop," he added. "It's hard to have the war if nobody is going to fight."

Diggins founded the Soldiers Project Northwest in Washington State (www.soldiersproject.org). The project is a group of therapists that volunteer to work one hour per week each with soldiers and their families who need assistance.

Saturday's event found veterans leaving their testimony to lead a crowd directly onto the streets to begin a demonstration. Protestors chanting "U.S. out of the Middle East, No Justice, No Peace," and carrying signs such as "You Can't Be All You Can Be If You're Dead!" stopped traffic for nearly an hour.

"I'm here to support the war resisters," Theresa Mosqueda, a Seattle resident who works on health policy advocacy for children and marched behind members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), told IPS, "They are the core part of ending this war. This is an illegal and immoral war, and the resisters have the power to stop it."

At least one Iraq war veteran joined IVAW as a result of attending the hearings last weekend.

Several of the vets urged onlookers to join the march, and many did as the demonstration passed by Seattle's bustling Pike Place Market.

Nick Spring, a student from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, was one of the marchers. "I came down today because it's a great way to be informed by the vets, support GI resistance, and try to end the war," Spring told IPS.

The regional winter soldier hearings were a smaller event, and there was no national mainstream media coverage. However, there was heavy local and alternative media coverage. At least one of the major Seattle television stations covered the testimonials, as well as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the largest paper in the region.

The group Just Foreign Policy estimates that over 1.2 million Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion began in March 2003. The Opinion Business Research group in Britain estimates the same number.

According to the U.S. Department of Defence, at least 4,086 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq.

Many of the demonstrators were vets themselves who had just given testimony about their time in Iraq. They included Josh Simpson, Sergio Kochergin, Seth Manzel, Mateo Rebecchi, Jan Critchfield, Doug Connor, and many others.

Children numbered among the demonstrators as well. Nine-year-old Wes Cunningham, accompanied by his father, was asked by IPS why he was in attendance.

"It's a cool march," he said. "And I think it's bad to kill other human beings."

IVAW now boasts over 1,200 members, a 50 percent increase since the March Winter Soldier hearings in Maryland. The fastest growing segment of their membership is active-duty soldiers.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
SEATTLE, Jun 2 2008 (IPS)

Dozens of veterans from the U.S. occupation of Iraq converged in this west coast city over the weekend to share stories of atrocities being committed daily in Iraq, in a continuation of the "Winter Soldier" hearings held in Silver Spring, Maryland in March.

Iraq War veteran Seth Manzel testifies about the torture of Iraqi detainees during the Northwest Regional Winter Soldier Hearings. Credit: Bob Haynes/IPS

"I watched Iraqi Police bring in someone to interrogate," Seth Manzel, a vehicle commander and machine gunner in the U.S. Army, told the audience. "There were four men on the prisoner…one was pummeling his kidneys with his fists, another was inserting a bottle up his rectum. It looked like a frat house gang-rape."

Manzel joined the army after 9/11 for economic reasons – he'd just been laid off, and his wife had just had a baby. Manzel told another story of military medics he was with in Tal Afar who refused to treat an elderly man in their detention centre. Manzel described the old man as being jaundiced and lying on the ground, writhing in pain.

"The medics said the old man was just being lazy and they were not authorised to treat detainees," Manzel said.

Jan Critchfield worked as an army journalist while attached to the 1st Cavalry in Baghdad during 2004. "I was with a unit that shot at a man and wife near a checkpoint," Critchfield said, "She had been shot through her shinbone, and that was the first story I covered in Iraq."

Critchfield told the audience that his unspoken job in Iraq was to "counter the liberal media bias" about the occupation.

"Our target audience was in the U.S., and the emphasis was reporting on humanitarian aid missions the military conducted," Critchfield said. "I don't know how many stories I reported on chicken drops (distributing frozen chickens in a community). I don't know what else you can call that, other than propaganda. I would find the highest ranking person I could get, and quote them verbatim without fact checking anything they said."

Other veterans told of lax rules of engagement that led to the slaughter of innocent civilians in Iraq.

"We were told we'd be deploying to Iraq and that we needed to get ready to have little kids and women shoot at us," Sergio Kochergin, a former Marine who served two deployments in Iraq, told the audience. "It was an attempt to portray Iraqis as animals. We were supposed to do humanitarian work, but all we did was harass people, drive like crazy on the streets, pretending it was our city and we could do whatever we wanted to do."

As the other veterans on the panel nodded in agreement, Kochergin continued, "We were constantly told everybody there wants to kill you, everybody wants to get you. In the military, we had racism within every rank and it was ridiculous. It seemed like a joke, but that joke turned into destroying peoples' lives in Iraq."

"I was in Husaiba with a sniper platoon right on the Syrian border and we would basically go out on the town and search for people to shoot," Kochergin said. "The rules of engagement (ROE) got more lenient the longer we were there. So if anyone had a bag and a shovel, we were to shoot them. We were allowed to take our shots at anything that looked suspicious. And at that point in time, everything looked suspicious."

Kochergin added, "Later on, we had no ROE at all. If you see something that doesn't seem right, take them out." He concluded by saying, "Enough is enough, it's time to get out of there."

Doug Connor was a first lieutenant in the army and worked as a surgical nurse in Iraq. While there he worked as part of a combat support unit, and said most of the patients he treated were Iraqi civilians.

"There were so many people that needed treatment we couldn't take all of them," he said. "When a bombing happened and 45 patients were brought to us, it was always Americans treated first, then Kurds, then the Arabs."

Connor added quietly, "It got to the point where we started calling the Iraqi patients 'range balls' because, just like on the driving range (in golf), you don't care about losing them."

Channan Suarez Diaz was a navy hospital corpsman who returned from Iraq with a purple heart, among other medals. He served in Ramadi from September 2004 to February 2005 with a weapons company. He is now the Seattle Chapter president of IVAW.

"Our commanding officer wanted us to go through a route that another platoon did and was completely wiped out in an ambush," Diaz explained. "We refused. They canceled that mission and we didn't go. I don't think these are isolated incidents. I think this is happening every day in Iraq. The military doesn't want you to know about this, because it's kind of like lighting a fire in a prairie."

The first Winter Soldier event was organised in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in response to a growing list of human rights violations occurring in Vietnam.

From Mar. 13-16, 2008, IVAW held a national conference titled "Winter Solider: Iraq and Afghanistan" outside Washington, DC. The four-day event brought together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, May 22 2008 (IPS)

While the future commander of U.S. military operations throughout South Asia and the Middle East assured lawmakers Thursday that the situation in Iraq is continuing to improve, the U.S. Senate approved an additional 165 billion dollars today to fund wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan at least through next winter.

The bill, which was approved by a margin of 70 to 26, did not impose any new conditions on how the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, who leaves office next January, can spend the money, much to the disappointment of Democrats and some Republicans who had worked hard in recent weeks to attach amendments to the appropriation.

But, pressed by both the White House and the Pentagon to approve the bill without conditions by Memorial Day – the national holiday that honours fallen war veterans – the Democratic leadership decided against a major fight with the administration over control of Iraq policy at this time.

Earlier this week, the Senate Appropriations Committee had approved a package of amendments, including one that would have required the administration to gain prior Congressional approval for any future security deals with Iraq’s government. Senators rejected the package, however, in a 63-34 vote.

“We can’t help but note the irony that, as the Senate leaves for its Memorial Day recess, they have ensured the needless deaths of hundreds of soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis by voting to expand the war and occupation for another full year,” said Michael McPhearson, co-chair of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war group, after the vote.

“How many more fallen service men and women will we honour next year?” asked McPhearson, who also serves as executive director of Veterans for Peace.

Before passing the entire bill, however, the Senate approved an amendment by a veto-proof margin of 75-22 that would add nearly 50 billion dollars in education and other benefits for veterans.

The Senate version of the appropriations bill is expected to be taken up by the House of Representatives immediately after the Memorial Day recess in early June.

As currently drafted, the pending House version of the bill contains a number of constraints on the president’s freedom of action in Iraq, including a restriction on his authority to negotiate long-term security deals with Iraq that would commit Washington to defend Iraq in the face of “external and internal threats”.

But whether those constraints will survive action on the floor of the House when the bill comes up for debate remains unclear.

“There is a great danger that the House bill will include no restrictions on the administration, including a no-permanent bases provision that the Congress has voted on in the last two years,” Jim Fine of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby group, told IPS Thursday. “If the final bill [coming out of Congress] contains no policy restrictions, it will be a clear victory for the White House.”

Meanwhile, Washington’s top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, told senators Thursday that he may be able to recommend further troop reduction in Iraq in September in addition to the planned drawdown of U.S. troops to 140,000 this July.

Petraeus, who is seeking confirmation from the Senate to become chief of the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), claimed that “the number of security incidents in Iraq last week was the lowest in over four years”. That has been largely due to joint U.S. and Iraqi operations in Basra, Mosul and Baghdad’s Sadr City, the stronghold of dissident Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, he added.

“His message was clearly optimistic…and he painted a rosy picture of events,” said Fine of FCNL. “He clearly contradicted expectations by holding out the likelihood of a future drawdown of troops in Iraq [in the fall].”

Centcom covers much of the key hotspots in Washington’s “global war on terror” – the Middle East and the Gulf; all of South Asia, including Afghanistan; parts of the Caucasus, and all of Central Asia.

Former Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon, who abruptly resigned his post earlier this year, was known to be critical of the administration’s laser-like focus on Iraq, as well as its sabre-rattling against Iran. He also believed that the war in Afghanistan and the Taliban insurgency in the frontier areas of Pakistan were not receiving adequate attention or resources.

Significantly, Petraeus Thursday added his voice to concerns about the latter, warning that the next attack against the U.S. could well come out of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, where he said the al Qaeda leadership is based.

“Clearly, al Qaeda senior leadership has been strengthened in the FATA, even though their main effort is still assessed to be in Iraq, by them as well as by us,” he said. “But the organization of an attack (on the U.S.)… would likely come from the FATA.”

That assertion echoes recent assessments both by the U.S. intelligence community and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, who said earlier this week that he believes Washington should add 10,000 to 12,000 more U.S. troops to the 33,000 who already deployed in Afghanistan, but that those deployments will have to wait for further withdrawals from Iraq.

Petraeus also described Iranian influence in Iraq as “malign” and “lethal”, repeating accusations that Iran has been involved in “arming, training, funding and directing of militia extremists” who have targeted U.S. soldiers.

While saying that the U.S. should leave the military option on the table vis-à-vis Iran as a “last resort”, Petraeus added that “we must also explore policies that, over the long term, offer the possibility of more constructive relations, if that is possible.”

He also told senators that Iraq’s provincial elections will be held in November instead of October as initially planned due to the latest strife in Basra. Iraq’s provincial elections are one of the several benchmarks set by the U.S. government for Iraqi factions to meet as part of a national reconciliation process that would allow Sunni Arabs more say in the administrative affairs of the regions where they live.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, May 16 2008 (IPS)

A U.S. Army soldier who served as a military journalist in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Philippines announced Thursday his intent to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq.

“As an Army journalist whose job it was to collect and filter service members’ stories, I heard many stomach-churning testimonies of the horrors of the crimes taking place in Iraq,” said Sergeant Matthis Chiroux, 24, in an announcement under the rotunda of the House of Representative’s Cannon Office Building.

“For fear of retaliation from the military, I failed to report these crimes, but never again will I allow fear to silence me. Never again will I fail to stand,” he said.

Chirioux said he’s aware he will likely face prosecution for refusing the deployment, but said, “I choose to remain in the United States to defend myself from charges brought by the Army if they are willing to pursue them. I refuse to participate in the occupation of Iraq.”

Chirioux is a victim of stop-loss, a controversial wartime power that the George W. Bush administration has used to keep soldiers from leaving the military when their term of service expires. Critics call the policy a “back-door draft”. More than 50,000 troops have been stop-lossed since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In an interview shortly before his announcement, Chiroux told IPS the stop-loss order sent him into a downward spiral of depression.

“I became borderline suicidal,” he said. “I just went into my room and shut the door and barely emerged for close to a month. I just sat in my room reading news about Iraq and feeling completely hopeless, like I would be forced to go and no one would ever know how I felt. I was getting looped into participating in a crime against humanity and all with the realisation that I never wanted to be there in the first place.”

The turning point, Chiroux said, came when one of his professors at Brooklyn College in New York suggested he listen to the Winter Soldier hearings. The hearings, which were organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War, took place in March in Washington, DC.

Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicised incidents of U.S. brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples”, but part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation”.

For four days, dozens of Iraq war veterans testified about the horrors they’d seen and the actions they carried out while deployed. As Chirioux listened to their testimony, he realised he was not alone.

“Here’s an organisation of soldiers and veterans who feel like me,” he said. “All this alienation and depression that I feel started to ease. I found them and I’ve been speaking out with them ever since.”

Chirioux timed his announcement to coincide with a Congressional forum meant to highlight testimony offered at Winter Soldier within the halls of Congress.

Nine veterans spoke at the hearing, which was organised by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. They talked about extremely lax rules of engagement handed down by commanding officers, which they said virtually guaranteed atrocities would be committed – which in turn would create a violent backlash among Iraqi people and a continued cycle of violence.

“On several occasions our convoys came upon bodies that been lying on the road, sometimes for weeks,” said Marine Corps veteran Vincent Emmanuele, who served in al-Qaim near the Syrian border in 2004 and 2005.

“When encountering these bodies standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures, which was also standard practice when encountering the dead in Iraq,” he told the Progressive Caucus.

“On one specific occasion, after I had shot a man trying to flee while planting a roadside bomb, we dragged his body out of the ditch he was laying in and we subsequently left this man to rot in a field where we saw this man up to a week later,” Emmanuele said.

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War hope Thursday’s Progressive Caucus hearing will spark an investigation by a full Congressional committee and speed the end of the wars. But with the House of Representatives moving toward approving another 186 billion dollars in war funding, these former soldiers and Marines will have to satisfy themselves with the sentiments of liberal Congresspeople like Maxine Waters, who praised the veterans for speaking out.

“I want to thank you for having more courage than many members of Congress have for coming here in defiance of what you have been instructed and taught to do,” she said. “They attempted to tell you that you should be satisfied by everything that you saw and everything that you did and everything you witnessed, but you’re not. I praise and honour you for that.”

Excerpt:

By Zack Baddorf
HEBRON, The West Bank, Apr 28 2008 (IPS)

Nibaal Shriteh may soon be homeless. The 17-year-old Palestinian lives in a Hebron orphanage but, if the Israeli military has its way, she and 240 fellow orphans like her will be out on the streets.

A Palestinian makes a point. Credit: Zack Baddorf

The Israel Defence Forces issued orders Feb. 25 for the closure and confiscation by Apr. 7 of orphanages, schools and other facilities owned by the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS), claiming the foundation "masquerades as a charity organisation in order to cover its activities of increasing support of the Hamas terror network."

"The foundation in Hebron not only raises money for terrorism, it also recruits new terror operatives and disseminates the creed of anti-Zionism and jihad among the population," an IDF spokesman told IPS.

The Israeli army told IPS that "all of the foundation&#39s resources are devoted to funding Hamas and Hamas&#39s grip on the region…and to strengthening the terrorist network in order to target Israel." One of the oldest non-governmental organisations in the occupied territories, the charitable association is also accused of training youths in jihad and Hamas principles.

The Feb. 25 military decree, signed by the Israeli military commander of the West Bank Gen. Gadi Shamni, states that the buildings must be closed to maintain "security of the area" and "general order" in the southern West Bank city.

"The allegations being levelled against us are totally and completely and absolutely baseless," said Abd al-Kareem Farah, the ICS legal representative, through an interpreter. "We challenge the Israeli government and the Israeli army to produce a single tangible evidence to corroborate their concocted allegations. So far they haven&#39t done that."

The 46-year-old charity filed an appeal with the Israeli High Court of Justice, which temporarily froze the order indefinitely Apr. 1 and required the Israeli army to present evidence proving ICS&#39s link with the militant organisation Hamas, which holds power in the Gaza Strip following elections two years ago.

Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, said Jewish tradition requires witnesses and evidence be brought forward before the court. Since no proof has yet been submitted, the military order is "incompatible with the Jewish concept of justice," he said.

"Our Jewish tradition also teaches us that you cannot have collective punishment and you cannot harm innocent people," Ascherman added. "Therefore, from a Jewish point of view, it&#39s simply wrong to create a situation where so many people are going to suffer."

Israeli soldiers returned to charity facilities Apr. 11 and told teachers they had until Apr. 13 to evacuate the buildings. But no move has yet been made by the IDF to force a closure.

"For right now, no news is good news," Joanne Lingle, spokesperson for the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) told IPS, describing the situation as a state of "limbo."

CPT works to "support violence reduction efforts around the world." Members of Lingle&#39s team in Hebron sleep in the orphanage once every few days to document and report any potential actions by the Israeli armed forces. The military order states anyone entering or using the buildings may be imprisoned for five years and have his property confiscated or demolished.

Rasheed Rasheed, an English teacher at the charity&#39s school for boys, told IPS he has not seen "any action" by Hamas in ICS facilities in the 12 years he&#39s worked there.

"I am not Hamas. I am not Fatah. I smoke. I am not a fanatic. I am a normal person! I have no hatred for Israel or for anybody else. I am just a teacher," 37-year-old Rasheed told IPS. "I have never been told to tell my students to hate Israelis or Jews or to kill or to teach them violence. Never ever."

Rasheed admits that about 20-25 of the total 550 employees working for the ICS do have ties with the Hamas political party, but maintains the organisation has no formal connection with the militant group.

"The Israeli government has some fanatic members," said Rasheed. "Can I say that the Israeli government is all a terrorist government? I cannot say this!"

The Israeli military claims the ICS has "delivered money to Hamas terrorist operatives" and "supported the families of suicide bombers and incarcerated terrorists." But Farah said the association has its financial records and accounts "meticulously" scrutinised by Israeli and Palestinian authorities.

"Every penny that comes in and every penny that is spent, we have records," said the ICS lawyer. "It&#39s completely transparent…We are functioning in broad daylight. We have nothing to conceal. We have nothing to hide. All our papers are available for anyone who wishes to know the truth."

About 15-20 percent of the charity&#39s funding is raised from local sources, Farah noted, while the rest comes from abroad, mostly from North America, Europe and the Middle East.

The Israeli armed forces raided the organisation&#39s warehouse, bakeries and storefronts Mar. 6, and confiscated food, clothing, school supplies, refrigerators and two buses.

Farah says the Israeli authorities have no right to confiscate the property. The charity&#39s location in Hebron puts it under Palestinian authority, and this means the Israeli authorities cannot confiscate property there, according to the Oslo Accords, an agreement signed in 1993 by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

It&#39s not just a legal fight anymore.

Mohammad Jamal Salhab, deputy head of the Islamic Student Association, said Israeli troops have "terrorised" the youths with fear and uncertainty. Some children have been having nightmares and are showing signs of stress, he said, while their academic performance has been "undermined".

"Right now there is an overwhelming state of tension and stress among the kids and, frankly, we don&#39t know what to do," Salhab told IPS. "The harm to the children cannot be underestimated."

Orphan Shriteh said she is worried what will happen if the court rules against ICS, which the IDF terms an illegal organisation.

"Who will put the happiness in our hearts? Who will protect us from being lost? Who will be our shelter in the days of winter?" asked Shriteh at the Apr. 7 press conference, representing the orphans. "We hope the echo of our voice will reach your hearts to show you our grief and misery."

The Israeli military told IPS it "reserves the right for future action" against the ICS schools and orphanages. Rasheed is still unsure why the IDF wants the orphanage closed.

"The Israelis should give me an answer," Rasheed told IPS. "These are orphans. They have no hand in this issue between Hamas and the Israeli government. If the order takes place, they will end up on the street. They have no place to go."

The ICS, which was founded 26 years before Hamas, educates more than 1,700 students, aids 4,000 additional students and 5,000 poor families, and shelters 240 orphans.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SAN FRANCISCO, Apr 22 2008 (IPS)

The United States government does such a bad job of caring for wounded war veterans, advocates told a federal judge here Monday, that 18 veterans commit suicide every week.

“The suicide problem is out of control,” said Gordon Erspamer, an attorney representing the groups Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth in a class action lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). “Our veterans deserve better.”

Erspamer’s comments came in opening arguments for what is expected to be a week-long trial, the first class action brought on behalf of 1.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

Early arguments were punctuated by allegations top government officials deliberately deceived the U.S. public about the number of veterans attempting suicide.

In one e-mail made public during the trial, the head of the VA’s Mental Health division, Dr. Ira Katz, advised a media spokesperson not to tell reporters 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.

“Shh!” the e-mail begins.

“Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” the e-mail concludes.

According to CBS News, Katz’s email was written shortly after the VA provided the network with data showing there were only 790 attempted suicides in all of 2007 – a fraction of Katz’s estimate.

Earlier this month, the city of Dallas, Texas closed its psychiatric unit after the hospital experienced its fourth suicide of the year.

“On Apr. 4, a man fastened a bed sheet to the bottom corner of a door frame, draped a noose over the top, and hanged himself,” the Dallas Morning News reported last week. “Before that, a veteran hanged himself on a frame attached to his wheelchair. And in January, two men who met in the psychiatric ward committed suicide in Collin County days after being released.”

“The system is in crisis and unfortunately the VA is in denial,” Erspamer told the court, urging U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti to appoint a special master to oversee the troubled agency. The veterans’ groups are also seeking a judge’s order forbidding the VA from turning away any veteran who shows up at a facility seeking mental health care.

In a number of high-profile cases, Iraq war veterans have killed themselves after being turned away from the VA.

Lawyers for the government argued strongly against the veterans, countering the VA runs a “world-class health care system”. Multiple times during his opening statement, Justice Department lawyer Richard Lepley portrayed the veterans’ groups as “special interests” and argued the changes the groups seek in their lawsuit – better and faster mental health care, and more rights for veterans appealing denials of benefits – are beyond the judge’s authority.

“You have no standards to judge,” Lepley told Conti. “This court shouldn’t be trying to be a substitute for what the medical professionals at the VA decide.”

No veterans are set to testify at the trial, which focuses on the nature of the Byzantine bureaucratic system veterans must navigate to receive health care and disability benefits. According the Department of Veterans Affairs, the average time a veteran must wait to learn if his or her disability claim has been approved is 185 days, or about six months.

Veterans’ groups countered the real wait is much longer, noting that if a veteran appeals the disability ruling, the appeals process can drag on for years. According to internal VA documents provided by the plaintiffs, 526 veterans have died this year while their disability claims were being reviewed.

None of this surprises Kelly Conklin of Chunchula, Alabama.

Her husband Manuel was reduced to a wheelchair after experiencing a negative reaction to an anthrax vaccine administered as he was preparing to deploy to Iraq with the U.S. Navy in 2003. Military doctors pumped him with steroids and other medicine in hopes he would recover, Conklin said, but in 2005 she came to realise that was unlikely and filed a claim with the VA for disability compensation.

After three years, the family is still waiting.

“It’s an every day battle,” Kelly Conklin told IPS. “We’re having grits and eggs for supper tonight and a lot of nights. Sometimes we don’t eat anything but lima beans for supper – it depends on what we have.”

In the absence of a regular paycheque or a disability cheque, Conklin says her family of four is now living almost completely off charity, with much of the food they eat coming from the local food bank.

She said she used to be proud of her husband for his service in the Navy, but has now forbidden her youngest son from joining the Armed Forces.

“If it sounds like I’m down, yes I am down,” she told IPS. “If I sound like I’m bitter, you got that right. They’ve taken everything away from me. The only thing left for them to take from me is my birthday.”

“When we give them our spouses, we give them whole,” she said. “And if you can’t make him whole [again], then you make sure he’s taken care of.”

*Aaron Glantz is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans” (UC Press) and “Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations” (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SILVER SPRING, Maryland, Mar 21 2008 (IPS)

Hundreds of veterans who gathered outside Washington last weekend to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan are returning to their communities across the country with the goal of stoking resistance to the Iraq war from inside the U.S. military.

The so-called Winter Soldier gathering organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War was designed to demonstrate that well-publicised incidents of U.S. brutality, including the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha, are not isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples,” as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the organisers said, of “an increasingly bloody occupation”.

“We have the power to bring the troops home, when they throw down their weapons and refuse to fight,” said Phil Aliff, a recently discharged combat veteran, who helped start the first active duty chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War at Fort Drum in upstate New York.

Aliff founded that chapter after serving a year in Iraq from August 2005 to July 2006, a tour that included stints in Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, some of the most dangerous parts of Iraq for a U.S. soldier. He participated in roughly 300 patrols and was hit by so many roadside bombs that the entire unit became demoralised and started to seek out ways to avoid combat.

In April 2007, after returning home, Aliff began talking to other soldiers at Fort Drum who shared his opposition to the war. He refused a second deployment to Iraq, noting he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from his first tour, and started organising with other soldiers on the base.

“Instead of relying on media exposure as a quick fix to gaining members, we began weekly face to face meetings as a way to create transparency from the chain of command,” he said. “We had two main tasks: to educate our fellow soldiers and win victories for them. And we did win victories.”

For example, Aliff noted, one of their members, Specialist Eugene Cherry, was discharged without a court martial even though he had gone Absent Without Leave (AWOL) for 16 months after being refused treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Other veterans at Winter Soldier noted that soldiers seeking to oppose the war from inside the ranks need not break Pentagon regulations to do so.

Garret Rappenhangen, a former U.S. Army scout sniper, who served in Baquba near the Iranian border from 2004 to 2005, helped found a military blog called Fight to Survive, which he and other like-minded soldiers posted to throughout their deployments.

“When you’re in the military, you are a citizen soldier,” Rappenhagen said. “You still retain your rights as a citizen and you’re able to use those rights.”

To critics of his activities, Rappenhagen said: “It’ll be a shame if the actual use of your first amendment right [to freedom of speech] becomes unpatriotic.”

These increasing calls for GI resistance came amid an almost complete media blackout from the large U.S. news organisations.

Though the gathering was timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and was held in Silver Spring, Maryland less than 10 miles from the White House, the personal testimonies of hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans garnered only a small article in the metro section of the Washington Post. The New York Times¸ CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS ignored it completely.

Five years into the war, the country appears to be back where it started in terms of media coverage. A study by the Pew Research Centre last week revealed only 28 percent of respondents correctly said about 4,000 U.S. citizens have died in the war. Most thought the number was closer to 2,000 or 3,000.

According to the same survey, overall media coverage of the war dropped from an average of 15 percent of stories in July 2007 to just 3 percent in February 2008.

But the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who spoke at Winter Soldier could take heart in another survey released Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News which found 53 percent of respondents think the U.S. goal of achieving victory in Iraq is not possible.

Many members of Iraq Veterans Against the War see a parallel between that kind of polling and the history of GI resistance during the Vietnam war. They note that when Vietnam veterans held a similar forum on war crimes in 1971 it was also roundly ignored by the mainstream press. But that did not cause the story to go away, because word got out through military and veteran circles that resistance within the ranks was building – a development most members of Iraq Veterans Against the War see as even more important than mainstream media coverage and lobbying on Capital Hill.

“We may be smaller in number than the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were,” Rappenhagen said, “but when they held their Winter Soldier event in 1971 it was three years after the Tet Offensive. Hopefully, by speaking here today we can end this war before there is a Tet Offensive in Iraq.”

*IPS correspondent Aaron Glantz co-anchored Pacifica Radio’s live coverage of Winter Soldier 2008. You can find audio and images from the event online at the website www.warcomeshome.org.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SILVER SPRING, Maryland, Mar 18 2008 (IPS)

"I would like to share with you how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard without having made many decisions," 24-year-old former Guantanamo prison guard Christopher Arent told a crowd of hundreds at last weekend&#39s Winter Soldier gathering outside Washington, DC.

A sign at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Credit: Andrew Duffy/IVAW

Arent explained that he was initially happy with the Guard, but that his mood changed when he was deployed to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2003. There, he served in the detention operations centre of the prison, where he managed the movement of inmates from one part of the facility to another.

"I would get into the office at 4:30 in the morning and sometimes there would be an interrogation occurring in the interrogation room," he said. "Inside the interrogation room, it would be 10 to 20 degrees [F.] with loud music playing. And there would be the detainee shackled to the floor by his hands and feet with nothing to sit on, with loud music playing in the freezing cold."

After serving a tour at Guantanamo, Arent told the assembled veterans that he believes the mere existence of the prison is torturous.

"I&#39ve heard a lot of speculation about what torture is considered," he said. "First and foremost, I would like to ask everyone whether living inside a cell for five years without ever seeing your family or your friends, without ever being told why you&#39re being held there – I consider that torture."

Arent was one of many former soldiers who served in U.S. military prisons abroad to speak at the Winter Soldier gathering. The event, which was organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War, aimed to show that their stories of wrongdoing were not isolated incidents limited to a few "bad apples", as the Pentagon claims, but were everyday occurrences.

Each veteran who spoke at Winter Soldier went through a detailed screening process before being allowed to testify. The process included providing Iraq Veterans Against the War with their military ID or discharge papers, and contacts of other soldiers they served with, who were then interviewed to verify the stories.

Former sergeant Domingo Rosas, who served in al-Qayim near the Syrian border from April 2003 to April 2004, told the assembled veterans he was ordered not to allow detainees under his watch to fall asleep.

"They were not allowed to sit down or lay down and anytime they started to doze off or they put their heads against the wall, I&#39d hit (the outside of their cell) with a pick axe handle and try to keep them up, keep them awake," Rosas said.

Rosas said he stood guard while interrogators tortured prisoners behind him.

"I witnessed one detainee rolling around in the mud being kicked again and again," he said. "I saw the interrogator pouring water on his face, waterboarding him. And another detainee was standing there with a bag over his head and was forced to carry a huge rock until he couldn&#39t do it anymore and collapsed. That image seared itself into my mind&#39s eye and I can&#39t forget it. I won&#39t forget it."

Former Iowa National Guardsman Andrew Duffy gave similar testimony. A medic at Abu Ghraib from 2005 to 2006, Duffy spoke about critical medical care being denied to detainees.

He spoke in detail about one prisoner, a diabetic Iraqi who was delirious and was not allowed to take insulin for days. Duffy said he asked his superiors if he could transfer the man to the hospital for treatment, but that his request was denied.

His captain said he "could not transfer the detainee and that [the man] could drink water," Duffy said. "She also said he probably wouldn&#39t die but that it wouldn&#39t matter anyway."

A few days later, Duffy said, the man died from lack of care.

In response to an inquiry by the Washington Post, a Pentagon official argued that such events are not commonplace as the veterans claimed.

"When isolated allegations of misconduct have been reported, commanders have conducted comprehensive investigations to determine the facts and held individuals accountable when appropriate," Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros told the paper.

In response, Iraq Veterans Against the War released their own statement. "These service members&#39 and veterans&#39 testimonies are ultimately not about individual conduct, but about the nature of occupation," it read. "The military is being asked to win an occupation. The troops on the ground know this is an impossible task. Their commanders know this is an impossible task. "

"We&#39re asking the Department of Defence to stop saying that it can achieve the impossible," IVAW&#39s statement concludes. "We have a political problem that cannot be solved with a military solution. This is not a war that can be won. It is an occupation that can only be ended."

*IPS correspondent Aaron Glantz co-anchored Pacifica Radio&#39s live coverage of Winter Soldier 2008. You can find audio and images from the event online at the website www.warcomeshome.org.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
SILVER SPRING, Maryland, Mar 15 2008 (IPS)

Garret Reppenhagen received integral training about the Geneva Conventions and the Rules of Engagement during his deployment in Kosovo. But in Iraq, "Much of this was thrown out the window," he says.

"The men I served with are professionals," Reppenhagen told the audience at a panel of U.S. veterans speaking of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, "They went to Iraq to defend the U.S. But we found rapidly we were killing Iraqis in horrible ways. But we had to in order to remain safe ourselves. The war is the atrocity."

The event, which has drawn international media attention, was organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War. It aims to show that their stories of wrongdoing in both countries were not isolated incidents limited to a few "bad apples", as the Pentagon claims, but were everyday occurrences.

The panel on the "Rules of Engagement" (ROE) during the first full day of the gathering, named "Winter Soldier" to honour a similar gathering 30 years ago of veterans of the Vietnam War, was held in front of a visibly moved audience of several hundred, including veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Winter soldiers, according to U.S. founding father Thomas Paine, are the people who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours

Reppenhagen served in Iraq from February 2004-2005 in the city of Baquba, 40 kms northeast of Baghdad. He said his first experience in Iraq was being on a patrol that killed two Iraqi farmers as they worked in their field at night.

"I was told they were out in the fields farming because their pumps only operated with electricity, which meant they had to go out in the dark when there was electricity," he explained, "I asked the sergeant, if he knew this, why did he fire on the men. He told me because the men were out after curfew. I was never given another ROE during my time in Iraq."

Another veteran of the occupation of Iraq on the panel was Vincent Emmanuel. He served in the Marines near the northern Iraqi city of Al-Qaim during 2004-2005. Emmanuel explained that "taking potshots at cars that drove by" happened all the time and "these were not isolated incidents".

Emmanuel continued: "We took fire while trying to blow up a bridge. Many of the attackers were part of the general population. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything in order to push through the town. I remember myself emptying magazines into the town, never identifying a target."

As other panelists nodded in agreement, Emmanuel spoke of abusing prisoners who he knew were innocent, adding, "We took it upon ourselves to harass them, and took them to the desert to throw them out of our Humvees, while kicking and punching them when we threw them out."

Two other soldiers testified about planting weapons or shovels on civilians they had accidentally shot, to justify the killings by implying the dead were fighters or people attempting to plant roadside bombs.

Jason Washburn was a corporal in the marines, and served three tours in Iraq, his last in Haditha from 2005-2006.

"We were encouraged to bring &#39drop weapons&#39 or shovels, in case we accidentally shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and pretend they were an insurgent," he said, "By the third tour, if they were carrying a shovel or bag, we could shoot them. So we carried these tools and weapons in our vehicles, so we could toss them on civilians when we shot them. This was commonly encouraged."

Washburn explained that his ROE changed "a lot".

"The higher the threat level, the more viciously we were told to respond. We had towns that were deemed &#39free fire zones&#39. One time there was a mayor of a town near Haditha that got shot up. We were shown this as an example because there was a nice tight shot group on the windshield, and told that was a good job, that was what Marines were supposed to do. And that was the mayor of the town."

Jason Wayne Lemieux is a Marine who served three tours in Iraq.

"My commander told me, &#39Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved&#39, that was our mission on our first tour," he said of his first deployment during the invasion nearly five years ago.

Lemieux continued, "After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew [meant the people] were to be killed. I can&#39t tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us."

John Michael Turner served two tours in the Marines as a machine gunner in Iraq. Visibly upset, he told the audience, "I was taught as a Marine to eat the apple to the core." Turner then pulled his military metals off his shirt and threw them on the ground.

"Apr. 18, 2006 was the date of my first confirmed kill," he said sombrely. "He was innocent, I called him the fat man. He was walking back to his house and I killed him in front of his father and friend. My first shot made him scream and look into my eyes, so I looked at my friend and said, &#39Well, I can&#39t let that happen&#39, and shot him again. After my first kill I was congratulated."

Turner explained one reason why establishment media reporting about the occupation in the U.S. has been largely sanitised. "Anytime we had embedded reporters, our actions changed drastically," he explained. "We did everything by the books, and were very low key."

To conclude, an emotional Turner said, "I want to say I&#39m sorry for the hate and destruction that I and others have inflicted on innocent people. It is not okay, and this is happening, and until people hear what is going on this is going to continue. I am no longer the monster that I once was."

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By Dahr Jamail
SILVER SPRING, Maryland, Mar 14 2008 (IPS)

Hart Viges joined the U.S. Army the day after Sep. 11, 2001, in the belief that he could help make the world a safer place.

U.S. veterans speak out about indiscriminate shootings of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Credit: Dahr Jamail/IPS

The term "haji" is used by U.S. soldiers in Iraq to degrade and dehumanise the Iraqi people.

Viges, like others who spoke, said that U.S. troops routinely detained innocent people during home raids.

"We never went on the right raid where we got the right house, much less the right person – not once," he said.

He also said it was common practice for troops to take photographs as "war trophies".

"We were driving in Baghdad one day and found a dead body on the side of the road," Viges said. "We pulled over to secure the area and my friends jumped off and started taking pictures with it, smiling. They asked me if I wanted to join them and I said no, but not because it was unethical, but because it wasn&#39t my kill. Because you shouldn&#39t take trophies with those you didn&#39t kill. I wasn&#39t upset this man was dead, but just that they shouldn&#39t be taking credit for something they didn&#39t do. But that&#39s war."

The event, which has drawn international media attention, was organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Its goal is to give U.S. service members a chance to talk about their experiences during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and to show that their stories of wrongdoing in both countries were not isolated incidents limited to a few "bad apples", as the Pentagon claims, but were everyday occurrences.

Adam Kokesh served in Fallujah beginning in February 2004 for roughly one year. Speaking on a panel about the Rules of Engagement (ROE), he held up the ROE card soldiers are issued in Iraq and said, "This card says, &#39Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself&#39."

Kokesh pointed out that "reasonable certainty" was the condition for using deadly force under the ROE, and this led to rampant civilian deaths. He discussed taking part in the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. During that attack, doctors at Fallujah General Hospital told IPS there were 736 deaths, over 60 percent of which were civilians.

"We changed the ROE more often than we changed our underwear," Kokesh said. "At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark. I don&#39t think soldiers should be put in the position to choose between their morals and their instinct for survival."

Kokesh also testified that during two cease-fires in the midst of the siege, the military decided to let out as many women and children from the embattled city as possible, but this did not include most men.

"For males, they had to be under 14 years of age," he said. "So I had to go over there and turn men back, who had just been separated from their women and children. We thought we were being gracious."

The Mar. 13-16 event has been named "Winter Soldier" to honour a similar gathering 30 years ago of veterans of the Vietnam War. Winter soldiers, according to U.S. founding father Thomas Paine, are the people who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours.

Iraq Veterans Against the War was founded in 2004 to give those who have served in the military since Sep. 11, 2001 a way to come together and speak out against what they say is an unjust, illegal and unwinnable war. Today, IVAW has over 800 members in 49 states, Washington, D.C. and Canada and on military bases overseas.

Steve Casey served in Iraq for over a year, from mid-2003.

"We were scheduled to go home in April 2004 but due to rising violence, we stayed in with Operation Blackjack," Casey told the audience. "I watched soldiers firing into the radiators and windows of oncoming vehicles. Those who didn&#39t turn around were unfortunately neutralised one way or another – well over 20 times I personally witnessed this. There was a lot of collateral damage."

Jason Hurd served in central Baghdad from November 2004 until November 2005. He told of how, after his unit took "stray rounds" from a nearby firefight, a machine gunner responded by firing over 200 rounds into a nearby building.

"We fired indiscriminately at this building," he said. "Things like that happened every day in Iraq. We reacted out of fear for our lives, and we reacted with total destruction."

Hurd said the situation deteriorated rapidly while he was in Iraq. "Over time, as the absurdity of war set in, individuals from my unit indiscriminately opened fire at vehicles driving down the wrong side of the road. People in my unit would later brag about it. I remember thinking how appalled I was that we were laughing at this, but that was the reality."

Hurd expressed what the over 200 veterans in the room appeared to agree with.

"We&#39re disrupting the lives of our veterans with this occupation, not only the lives of Iraqis. If a foreign occupying force came here to the U.S., do you not think that every person that has a shotgun would not come out of the hills and fight for their right for self-determination?"

To rousing applause, Hurd ended his testimony with, "Ladies and gentlemen, that country is suffering from our occupation, and ending that suffering begins with the total and immediate withdrawal of all of our troops."

Video and photographic evidence will also be presented at the event, and the testimony and panels can be viewed live on Satellite TV and over streaming video on ivaw.org.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 29 2008 (IPS)

Another high-ranking George W. Bush administration official has resigned. The Department of Veterans Affairs Undersecretary for Benefits Daniel Cooper quit Thursday amid mounting criticism over a backlog of disability claims for injured veterans that runs six months long and an appearance he made in a fundraising video for an evangelical Christian organisation where he said Bible study was more important than doing his job.

Cooper has been under fire for using his office to proselytise for evangelical Christianity ever since he appeared in a 2004 fundraising video for Christian Embassy, which carries out missionary work among the Washington elite as part of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, “It’s not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that’s more important than doing the job – the job’s going to be there, whether I’m there or not.”

Cooper’s declaration inflamed veterans who saw the number of veterans waiting for the Veterans Administration (VA) to decide their disability claims balloon to 400,000 on his watch, with the average veteran waiting six months for a decision from the government.

“He was clearly a fundamentalist Christian first and essentially a government paid missionary for his particular world view of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” said Mike Weinstein, who runs the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. “The fact that he’s gone obviously is good.”

Spokespersons for the Department of Veterans Affairs refused to grant an interview for this story.

In a statement, Bush’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake praised Cooper, saying, “Dan Cooper’s leadership, management savvy and personable touch were indispensable in guiding VA benefits programmes into the Internet era and adapting the department to the needs of service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Most veterans groups disagree.

“Cooper was in charge of and responsible for massive injustice for hundreds of thousands of veterans who slipped through the cracks waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for disability benefits,” said Paul Sullivan, executive director of the group Veterans for Common Sense.

“He was fully aware that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were putting a burden on VA in 2004 and he did nothing,” Sullivan added. “In 2005, he was told again. He did nothing. In 2006, he was told again. He did nothing. In 2007, when the Walter Reed scandal broke, all Cooper could do was say that he would make some marginal changes.”

Cooper’s resignation – for “personal reasons” – comes two on the heels of President Bush’s signing two months ago of the Dignity for Wounded Warriors Act, which has numerous provisions designed to lessen the bureaucracy that wounded veterans face when they return home from Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans’ advocates say they hope Daniel Cooper’s resignation will lead to serious changes in the way the VA does its job.

But Matt Cary, the president of Veterans and Military Families for Progress, says the Bush administration has been slow to implement key reforms.

“I’m concerned that agencies that are this large and have been institutionalised for a long time will have difficulty in streamlining this and moving it quick enough to alleviate the needs of veterans and their families,” Cary told IPS.

More than 263,000 veterans have received treatment from the VA after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Close to 250,000 have filed disability claims. A new book released this week co-authored by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that 700,000 U.S. war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually file for disability.

“They need to have this income,” Cary said. “If it’s a disabled veteran, then the spouse needs to stay home and take care of that veteran and the faster that they can move this process along, the easier it will be for that spouse to be able to go to work and provide additional income for their family.”

Pentagon studies show about 20 percent of returning veterans (320,000 people) suffer from physical brain damage called traumatic brain injury. Government studies also show that as many 50 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans (800,000 people) suffer from the psychological injury post-traumatic stress disorder.

Daniel Cooper’s resignation is effective Apr. 1. Under federal law, a search commission will be put together to present recommendations for Cooper’s successor to the secretary to propose to the president for appointment. The VA’s under-secretary for benefits is subject to Senate confirmation and serves at the pleasure of the president.

*Aaron Glantz has reported extensively from Iraq and on the treatment of U.S. soldiers when they return home. He is editor of the website www.warcomeshome.org and will be co-hosting Pacifica Radio’s live broadcast of the Winter Soldier hearings from Mar. 14-16.

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By IPS Correspondents
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 28 2008 (IPS)

U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are planning to descend on Washington from Mar. 13-16 to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in those countries.

“The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it,” said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. “That’s left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like.”

Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicised incidents of U.S. brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples”, as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation”.

“The problem that we face in Iraq is that policymakers in leadership have set a precedent of lawlessness where we don’t abide by the rule of law, we don’t respect international treaties, so when that atmosphere exists it lends itself to criminal activity,” argues former U.S. Army Sergeant Logan Laituri, who served a tour in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 before being discharged as a conscientious objector.

Laituri told IPS that precedent of lawlessness makes itself felt in the rules of engagement handed down by commanders to soldiers on the front lines. When he was stationed in Samarra, for example, he said one of his fellow soldiers shot an unarmed man while he walked down the street.

“The problem is that that soldier was not committing a crime as you might call it because the rules of engagement were very clear that no one was supposed to be walking down the street,” he said. “But I have a problem with that. You can’t tell a family to leave everything they know so you can bomb the shit out of their house or their city. So while he definitely has protection under the law, I don’t think that legitimates that type of violence.”

Iraq Veterans Against the War is calling the gathering “Winter Soldier,” after a quote from the U.S. revolutionary Thomas Paine, who wrote in 1776: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Organisers say video and photographic evidence will also be presented, and the testimony and panels will be broadcast live on Satellite TV and streaming video on ivaw.org.

Winter Soldier is modeled on a similar event held by Vietnam Veterans 37 years ago.

In 1971, over 100 members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered in Detroit to share their stories with fellow citizens. Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were isolated exceptions.

“Initially even the My Lai massacre was denied,” notes Gerald Nicosia, whose book “Home to War” provides the most exhaustive history of the Vietnam veterans’ movement.

“The U.S. military has traditionally denied these accusations based on the fact that ‘this is a crazy soldier’ or ‘this is a malcontent’ – that you can’t trust this person. And that is the reason that Vietnam Veterans Against the War did this unified presentation in Detriot in 1971.”

“They brought together their bona fides and wore their medals and showed it was more than one or two or three malcontents. It was medal-winning, honored soldiers – veterans in a group verifying what each other said to try to convince people that these charges cannot be denied. That people are doing these things as a matter of policy.”

Nicosia says the 1971 Winter Soldier was roundly ignored by the mainstream media, but that it made an indelible imprint on those who were there.

Among those in attendance was 27-year-old Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, who had served on a Swift Boat in Vietnam. Three months after the hearings, Nicosia notes, Kerry took his case to Congress and spoke before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats.

“Many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia,” Kerry told the committee, describing the events of the Winter Soldier gathering.

“It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit – the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.”

In one of the most famous antiwar speeches of the era, Kerry concluded: “Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be – and these are his words – ‘the first president to lose a war’. We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Nicosia says U.S. citizens and veterans find themselves in a similar situation today.

“The majority of the American people are very dissatisfied with the Iraq war now and would be happy to get out of it. But Americans are bred deep into their psyches to think of America as a good country and, I think, much harder than just the hurdle of getting troops out of Iraq is to get Americans to realise the terrible things we do in the name of the United States.”

*Aaron Glantz has reported extensively from Iraq and on the treatment of U.S. soldiers when they return home. He is editor of the website www.warcomeshome.org and will be co-hosting Pacifica Radio’s live broadcast of the Winter Soldier hearings from Mar. 14-16.

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