blog.Objector.us

letter to the editor, Austin American Statesman, 12/8/08

Tomas — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:11:52 +0000

Recent letters praising the military for protecting our “freedoms” show little understanding of its true purpose, that being, protecting resource exploitation. As a Vietnam vet I have endeavored for years to understand why I let myself be exploited to fight a war based on lies. My study has helped me understand that war has always been based in commerce, greed and fear. The original definition of “war” is, to bring to confusion. Truth is the cure for confusion and sustainable prosperity requires it. The real “slap in the face” is the incessant preaching that the military ensures freedom. Rationalizations don’t work when we are trying to improve the quality of life.

Thomas Heikkala

tomas_heikkala@yahoo.com

“How Does Killing Impact Individual Soldiers”

Tomas — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:08:40 +0000

“How Does Killing Impact Individual Soldiers?”

http://ipsnews. net/news. asp?idnews= 44279

Enrique Gili interviews CATHERINE RYAN

SAN DIEGO, California, Oct 15 (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?

The film refrains from answering directly, instead offering
clear-eyed accounts of four U.S. soldiers who refused to fight and
the countervailing views of their critics.

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.

Wall Street Takes Welfare

Tomas — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:31:55 +0000

It Begrudges to Ordinary Americans

Why is it that the rich and reckless accept “welfare” for themselves while rejecting it for those who need it most, particularly woman.

http://www.alternet .org/reproductiv ejustice/ 100234/?page= entire

Today we sit and watch as the high-rolling gamblers and critics of “big government” take welfare. These are many of the same people who thought it was just fine to deprive millions of women of critical resources and let them fend for themselves.

Even before the catastrophic news out of Wall Street in recent days, women have been worried about their economic security.

Last March a Gallup poll found that in the past two years more women than men said that they worry about the economy (64 percent versus 57 percent). The same holds for health care, crime, the environment, drug use, unemployment, hunger and homelessness.

More men are employed by Wall Street and more men have money invested there. That means the male anxiety meter is probably much higher now that they risk losing their jobs, pensions, portfolios and homes. But women’s worries have probably shot up even more.

Women are likely to lead in the economic-anxiety gap because distressing economic events fall harder on people with less. “I don’t play the stock market, but it does affect us. It affects me personally. It affects the little guy,” a female dispatch supervisor of a limo company that serves investment bank employees recently told the New York Times.

The same holds for all the secretaries and housekeepers who keep investment houses clean and running.

Decades of Lost Ground

But what makes the bailout of the fat tomcats so galling is that women at the bottom of the economic ladder have lost ground during the last 30 years, with very few seeming to notice or care.

From F.D.R.’s New Deal in the 1930s to L.B.J.’s Great Society in the 1970s, the expansion of government programs for the middle class and the poor — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public assistance, as well as health and social services — provided a modest economic backup for women who predominate among recipients.

Great Depression leaders who saw government as the solution to that economic crisis bailed out banks in exchange for tighter regulations to curb speculation. But they also created cash-assistance programs that increased women’s purchasing power and protected them against economic hardship.

Those programs redistributed income downward and expanded the capacity of the federal government to kick-start the economy while cushioning consumers and workers from the vagaries of the market.

Beginning with President Carter in the mid 1970s, our leaders changed their tune, blaming economic woes on “big government.” Successive administrations relaxed the rules on financial markets and cut funding for the safety net.

Benefits Didn’t Trickle Down

Advocates of “less government” promised that benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of us. Instead their laissez-faire strategy weakened government benefits, one of the three interlocking pillars of economic support counted on by thousands of women from all walks of life.

The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that government spending for domestic discretionary programs fell from a high of 4.8 percent of national output, or gross domestic product, in 1978 to 3.4 percent in 2007. That equals billions of dollars in cuts. Except for rising health care costs, spending on entitlement programs — such as Social Security, unemployment insurance and public assistance — also fell from 8.5 percent of the gross domestic product in 1983 to 7 percent in 2007.

During the past eight years, war spending zoomed ahead, bringing us to the present spectacle, where we see U.S. military spending exceeding that of the rest of the world combined.

Meanwhile, Bush tax policies diverted dollars from public services and boosted corporate profits to a record high of almost 14 percent of national income while the share going to wages dropped to its lowest level since 1929. Combined with relaxed government oversight and rampant speculation the way was paved for abusive mortgage practices that turned Wall Street into one big profit bubble waiting to pop.

With these excesses as a backdrop, women saw their other two pillars of economic security weaken as well: marriage to a wage-earner and paid employment.

Falling marriage rates combined with three decades of sagging male breadwinner wages have undercut the capacity of matrimony to provide women with the financial security it once offered.

Wobbling Wages and Work

From 1979 to 2006, the real value of the median weekly wage of men 25 years and older fell steadily to $797 from $807.

The massive entry of women into the work force since World War II — one of the most significant social trends in modern U.S. history — gave them a third pillar of support. But this too is now wobbling.

As male wages stagnated many women went to work — not as a matter of choice, as headlines about women opting in and out might suggest — but just to make ends meet. Between 1970 and 2005 the proportion of married couples with two earners jumped to 62 percent from about 46 percent, Labor Department data show. The U.S Women’s Bureau finds wives’ contribution to family income rose to 35 percent from 26 percent.

But many of today’s 68 million wage-earning women have recently suffered more job losses than men and a larger drop in wages than the general population, according to the Women’s Bureau. In 2006 full-time female workers earned an average of $627 week or about $32,000 a year.

While we watch the spectacle of the government channeling untold billions of taxpayer dollars into failing Wall Street giants the three pillars of economic support for women — the safety net, marriage and wages — continue to crumble.

The public bailout of corporate America may be necessary given the risks of a collapse to the global economy. But why is it that the rich and reckless accept “welfare” for themselves while steadfastly rejecting the same for women in need? It’s time to take a billion here and there to assist the women raising families on too little income to keep a roof over their heads.

“No Plans to Declassify” New National Intelligence Estimate for White House

Tomas — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:56:52 +0000

“No Plans to Declassify” New National Intelligence Estimate for White House

http://abcnews. go.com/Blotter/ story?id= 5867448&page=1
September 23, 2008—

US intelligence analysts are putting the final touches on a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan that reportedly describes the situation as “grim”, but there are “no plans to declassify” any of it before the election, according to one US official familiar with the process.

Officials say a draft of the classified NIE, representing the key judgments of the US intelligence community’s 17 agencies and departments, is being circulated in Washington and a final “coordination meeting” of the agencies involved, under the direction of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is scheduled in the next few weeks.

According to people who have been briefed, the NIE will paint a “grim” picture of the situation in Afghanistan, seven years after the US invaded in an effort to dismantle the al Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Vanee Vines, said “it is not the ODNI’s policy to publicly comment on national intelligence products that may or may not be in production.”

The finished secret NIE would be sent to the White House and other policy makers.

Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence, has made it his policy that such key judgments “should not be declassified” , although several have recently, including a report on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“That does not portend that this is going to become a standard practice,” McConnell said it a guidance memo last year.

Seth Jones, an expert on Afghanistan at the Rand Corporation think tank, called the situation in Afghanistan “dire.”

“We are now at a tipping point, with about half of the country now penetrated by a range of Sunni militant groups including the Taliban and al Queida,” Jones said. Jones said there is growing concern that Dutch and Canadian forces in Afghanistan would “call it quits.”

“The US military would then need six, eight, maybe ten brigades but we just don’t have that many,” Jones said.

Last week, Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress “we’re running out of time” in Afghanistan. “I’m not convinced we’re winning it in Afghanistan, ” Adm. Mullen testified.

Perhaps foreshadowing the NIE assessment on Afghanistan, Adm. Mullen told Congress, “absent a broader international and interagency approach to the problems there, it is my professional opinion that no amount of troops in no amount of time can ever achieve all the objectives we seek in Afghanistan. ”

The limited number of US and NATO troop in Afghanistan has been a recurring theme during the 2008 Presidential election and a dire assessment in a new NIE could make the Bush administration‘ s handling of the situation there a campaign issue in the final month of the campaign.

Public Service - Community Service

Tomas — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:51:53 +0000

{ Those that Belittle ‘Community Service’ should Actually try it, they’ll find out exactly what it entails, and do some good for their communities, themselves, and country as well! }

The Spirit of Public Service

http://www.nytimes. com/2008/ 09/13/opinion/ 13sat3.html? th&emc=th

At a forum at Columbia University marking the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, John McCain and Barack Obama took a break from their increasingly harsh presidential contest to speak with genuine passion about a worthy cause they both share: engaging more Americans in national service.

What was striking about their back-to-back interviews, conducted by Judy Woodruff of PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and Richard Stengel of Time magazine before 1,000 people in Columbia’s Lerner Hall, was their respectful tone. At one point, Mr. McCain even expressed admiration for Mr. Obama’s work done years ago as a community organizer, departing from disparaging remarks made by his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, at the Republican convention. Their overlapping views were no less remarkable.

Both candidates agreed that President Bush erred following 9/11 by asking Americans to go shopping rather than making a serious effort to channel the nation’s aroused sense of patriotism to sustained and productive volunteer activities. They pledged to make a new call to public service a hallmark of the next presidency.

Giving concrete expression to those pledges, the candidates are among the co-sponsors of a promising piece of legislation introduced on Friday in the Senate. Drafted by Senators Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, and Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, the bill would build on the success of AmeriCorps.

It would expand the number of full-time and half-time national service volunteers eligible for a modest educational voucher at the end of an intensive year of work by 175,000, bringing the total to 250,000. The new slots would be devoted to meeting public needs in areas such as strengthening schools, improving health care for low-income communities, cleaning up parks and aiding efforts to boost energy efficiency.

The bipartisan backing for this initiative strikes a hopeful chord.

V.A. to Allow Voter Signup for Veterans at Facilities

Tomas — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:57:58 +0000

[peacerootsalliance] V.A. to Allow Voter Signup for Veterans at Facilities

Tuesday, September 9, 2008 5:12 AM

From:

“James”

Add sender to Contacts

To:

“Jim”

WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday that it would no longer ban voter registration drives among veterans living at federally run nursing homes, shelters for the homeless and rehabilitation centers across the country.

In May, the department said such drives would violate the prohibition on political activity by federal employees and would be disruptive.

The reversal came after months of pressure from state election officials, voting rights groups and federal lawmakers who said that such drives made it easier for veterans to take part in the political process.

Veterans’ participation could be particularly important this year in a presidential election in which the handling of the Iraq war and treatment of veterans will be major campaign issues.

“V.A. has always been committed to helping veterans exercise their constitutional right to vote, which they defended for all Americans while serving their nation,” said Dr. James B. Peake, secretary of veterans affairs. “We’ve now established a uniform approach to helping those of our patients who need assistance to register and to vote.”

Veterans officials said that they would welcome state and local election officials and nonpartisan groups to hospitals and outpatient clinics to help register voters but that such assistance needed to be coordinated by those facilities in order to avoid disruptions to patient care.

More than 100,000 people reside for a month or longer at V.A. facilities nationally, a number that has grown as soldiers return wounded from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The real question now,” said Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, “is whether the V.A. will implement the new policy in time for the November election and whether local and state voting officials will take proactive steps to sign up the veterans at these facilities.”

The new policy requires that information about the right of V.A. patients to register and vote, and other patients’ rights, be posted in every veterans hospital, and that all patients be provided a copy of these rights when they are admitted to a veterans facility.

“Given the sacrifices that the men and women who have fought in our armed services have made, providing easy access to voter registration services is the very least we can do,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who introduced legislation in July to reverse the V.A. ban. Ms. Feinstein added that she would soon hold hearings on the issue.

http://www.nytimes. com/2008/ 09/09/us/ politics/ 09vets.html? _r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Recruiting Nazis to Serve in Iraq

Tomas — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:40:32 +0000

The Dangerous Consequences of Recruiting Nazis to Serve in Iraq

http://www.alternet .org/rights/ 96959/playing_ with_fire: _the_dangerous_ consequences_ of_recruiting_ nazis_to_ serve_in_ iraq/?page= 2

By David Holthouse, Hate Watch
August 29, 2008.

The U.S. military appears to be teaching a skinhead with genocide on
his mind how to become a tactical bomb maker.
–

The racist skinhead logged on with exciting news: He’d just enlisted
in the United States Army.

“Sieg Heil, I will do us proud,” he wrote. It was a June 3 post to
AryanWear Forum 14, a neo-Nazi online forum to which “Sobibor’s SS,”
who identified himself as a skinhead living in Plantersville, Ala.,
had belonged since early 2004. (Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in
Poland during World War II).

About a month after he announced his enlistment, Sobibor’s SS bragged
in another post to Forum 14 that he’d specifically requested and been
assigned to MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, 98D. MOS98D
soldiers are in high demand right now. That’s because they’re
specially trained in disarming Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)
like the infamous roadside bombs that are killing and maiming so many
U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably, a part of learning
how to disarm an IED is learning how to make one.

“I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the
government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can’t share
them here,” Sobibor’s SS informed his fellow neo-Nazis.

One of his earlier posts indicated his reasons serve a darker purpose
than defending America: “Once all the Jews are gone the world will
start fixing itself.”

Sobibor’s SS included enough biographical details in his various
posts to Forum 14 over the years, including that he’s a single father
from the small town in southern Alabama, that a military investigator
with access to enlistment records for recent months should have
little trouble discerning whether the Army is actually teaching a
skinhead with genocide on his mind how to be a tactical bomb maker.

But there’s little reason to expect that will happen.

Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers
of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were
taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and
lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by
infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat
training and gain access to weapons and explosives.

Forty members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a
zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military.
“Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow
service members and the public,” U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an
Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. “We
witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may
become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”

But neither Rumsfeld nor his successor, Robert Gates, enacted any
sort of systemic investigation or crackdown. Military and Defense
Department officials seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent
active white supremacists from joining the armed forces, or to weed
out those already in uniform.

Furthermore, new evidence is emerging that not only supports the
Intelligence Report’s findings, but also indicates the problem may
have worsened since the summer of 2006, as enlistment rates continued
to plummet, and the military accepted an ever-lower quality of
soldier in a time of unpopular war.

First of all, a new FBI report (PDF) confirms that white supremacist
leaders are making a concerted effort to recruit active-duty soldiers
and recent combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, “White
Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11,” which was
released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: “Sensitive and
reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are
encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi
activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the
military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training
for the benefit of the extremist movement.”

The FBI report details more than a dozen investigative findings and
criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as
active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years.
For example, in September 2006, the leader of the Celtic Knights, a
central Texas splinter faction of the Hammerskins, a national racist
skinhead organization, planned to obtain firearms and explosives from
an active duty Army soldier in Fort Hood, Texas. That soldier, who
served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, was a member of the National
Alliance, a neo-Nazi group.

“Looking ahead, current and former military personnel belonging to
white supremacist extremist organizations who experience frustration
at the inability of these organizations to achieve their goals may
choose to found new, more operationally minded and operationally
capable groups,” the report concludes. “The military training
veterans bring to the movement and their potential to pass this
training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to
carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.”

Currently, 46 members of the white supremacist social networking
website Newsaxon.com identity themselves as active-duty military
personnel. Six of these individuals are members of “White Military
Men,” a New Saxon sub-group.

Earlier this year, the founder of White Military Men identified
himself in his New Saxon account as “Lance Corporal Burton” of the
2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida, according to a
master’s thesis by graduate student Matthew Kennard. Under his “About
Me” section, Burton writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle
effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis),” and, “Love to watch things blow
up (Hachies House).”

As part of his thesis research, Kennard, at the time a student at
Columbia University’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative
Journalism, also monitored claims of active-duty military service
earlier this year on the neo-Nazi online forum Blood and Honour,
where “88Soldier88″ posted this message on Feb. 18: “I am in the ARMY
right now. I work in the Detainee Holding Area [in Iraq]. I am in
this until 2013. I am in the infantry but want to go to SF [Special
Forces]. Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come.”

One of the Blood and Honour members claiming to be an active-duty
soldier taking part in combat operations in Iraq identified himself
to Kennard as Jacob Berg. He did not disclose his rank or branch of
service. “There are actually a lot more ’skinheads,’ ‘nazis,’ white
supremacists now [in the military] than there has been in a long
time,” Berg wrote in an E-mail exchange with Kennard. “Us racists are
actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don’t
every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing
sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and
yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I’m so proud
of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live
to see a new dawn.”

The Army is currently investigating war crimes allegations leveled
against Iraq combat veteran and active-duty Army soldier Kenneth
Eastridge, 24, who is facing trial for the December 2007 murder of a
fellow serviceman. After Eastridge was arrested for that killing,
National Public Radio publicized his MySpace page, which showed
Eastridge displaying a tattoo of SS lightning bolts, a common
neo-Nazi insignia.

Another member of Eastridge’s company recently told Army
investigators that Eastridge used a stolen AK-47 to fire
indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians from his moving Humvee on the
streets of Baghdad. “The military is to some extent desperate to get
people to fight, soldiers who are not fit, mentally and physically
sick, but they continue to send them,” Eastridge’s attorney told
Kennard. “Having a tattoo was the least [Eastridge's] concerns.”

As part of the research for his thesis, “The New Nazi Army: How the
U.S. military is allowing the far right to join its ranks,” Kennard
used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain from the Army’s
Criminal Investigative Division investigative reports concerning
white supremacist activity in 2006 and 2007. They show that Army
commanders repeatedly terminated investigations of suspected
extremist activity in the military despite strong evidence it was
occurring. This evidence was often provided by regional Joint
Terrorism Task Forces, which are made up of FBI and state and local
law enforcement officials.

For example, one CID report details a 2006 investigation of a
suspected member of the Hammerskins, a multi-state racist skinhead
gang, who was stationed at Fort Hood, a large Army base in central
Texas. According to the report, there was “probable cause” to believe
that the soldier “had participated in a white extremist meeting and
also provided a military technical manual 31-210, Improvised
Munitions Handbook, to the leader of a white extremist group in order
to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets.”

The report shows that agents only interviewed the subject once, in
November 2006, before Fort Hood higher-ups called off the
investigation that December.

Another report, also from 2006, covers an investigation of another
Fort Hood soldier who was posting messages on Stormfront.org, a major
white supremacist website. One CID investigator expresses his
frustration at the muddled process for dealing with extremists. “We
need to discuss the review process,” he writes. “I’m not doing my job
here. Needs to get fixed.”

A third CID report, regarding a 2007 investigation, notes the
termination of an investigation of a soldier at Fort Richardson,
Alaska, who was reportedly the leader and chief recruiter for the
Alaska Front, a white supremacist group. According to the report, the
investigation was halted because the solider was “mobilized to Camp
Shelby, MS in preparation for deployment to Iraq.”

The Demise of Conscience

Tomas — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:38:06 +0000

Excerpts from:

The Demise of Conscience
http://www.lewrockw ell.com/hornberg er/hornberger150 .html
by Jacob G. Hornberger / August 22, 2008
–

Conscience and aggressive war

Everyone agrees that neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi
people ever attacked the United States. Everyone agrees that no Iraqi
participated in the 9/11 attacks. There is no question but that in
the Iraq War, the United States is the aggressor nation and Iraq is
the defending nation.

In the run-up to the invasion, I recall reading an article in which
U.S. soldiers were asking military chaplains whether God would
forgive them for killing Iraqis. It was obvious that their
consciences were bothering them. I suspect that they were wondering
whether it was consistent with God’s law to kill people whose
government had not attacked their country.

I’ll never forget reading what some of the chaplains told those
soldiers. They told them that they need not concern themselves with
what lay ahead. They said that they could place their trust in the
judgment of their commander in chief. In other words, they could go
into Iraq and kill people without having any crisis of conscience.

One cannot help but wonder whether those chaplains, in reaching their
judgment, confronted the critical moral question: How could the
killing of any Iraqi be morally justified, given that the U.S.
government was going to be the aggressor in the conflict? How could
killing people while serving as part of an aggressor force be
reconciled with God’s laws? I can’t help but wonder how many U.S.
soldiers who were struggling with their conscience before the
invasion are bedeviled by it today.

A reflection of the demise of conscience that has accompanied the
warfare state is the fact that, as far as I know, only one U.S.
soldier refused to deploy to Iraq on the grounds that to do so would
involve the wrongful killing of people. He was an officer – Lt. Ehren
Watada. Watada pointed out that not only was the war on Iraq illegal
from the standpoint of U.S. law (because the president had failed to
secure the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war
against Iraq), it would also constitute the war crime of waging a war
of aggression. Watada’s conscience would not permit him to kill
people in such a conflict.

How was Watada treated by U.S. officials? As a criminal. The U.S.
military prosecuted him for refusing to obey orders to deploy to
Iraq. He was ridiculed for following the dictates of conscience. The
Pentagon’s mistreatment of Watada was a powerful message to any other
soldier who might be struggling with his conscience – that this is
what happens to people of conscience in the U.S. army.

While several civil libertarians came to Watada’s defense, it would
be safe to say that most Americans didn’t know about or didn’t care
about his case. Conscience, it is widely assumed, can play no role
once the nation is at war, at least not with respect to whether one’s
own government is in the right or the wrong. All that matters is
victory. It was the same mindset that guided most Germans in World War II.
—

No remorse for the Iraqi dead

On top of all these shifting and morphing rationales for killing
Iraqis was the official policy of the Pentagon, announced early on,
that U.S. forces would not keep count of the Iraqi dead. Isn’t that a
rather unusual policy for a government that is supposedly doing all
this for the benefit of the Iraqi people?

Through it all, most Americans have had absolutely no remorse for the
Iraqi dead and maimed. Having stultified consciences, those Americans
just don’t care that Iraqis have been killed. In fact, the only
reason that many Americans are having second thoughts about Iraq is
that American soldiers are being killed there, not because people’s
consciences are bothering them because of all the Iraqi people
killed. They simply take the attitude that since it’s war, people are
going to die, or they compare it to other wars and blithely conclude,
“Oh well, at least the number of people killed isn’t as high as it
has been in other wars.”

Conscience and Iraqi deaths

In fact, some Americans have reduced the Iraq War to a mathematical
equation, one which holds that any number of Iraqi deaths is worth it
if it helps to achieve “democracy.” Conscience has disappeared in
that equation.

All too many Americans have convinced themselves that any war in
which the U.S. government is involved, including a war of aggression
against a country that never attacked the United States, is
automatically a just war. Such a conclusion, they feel, relieves them
of any exercise of conscience with respect to the consequences of such a war.

But only defensive wars are morally justifiable and consistent with
God’s commandment against killing. Does God permit killing people
under a fake and false WMD rationale? Does God permit killing a
person for the sake of democracy-spreading ? Does God permit killing
people as part of a “magnet” defense? Does God permit killing people
as part of some conjured-up Islamic plan to conquer the Christian West?

Many Americans, including some priests and ministers, don’t dare to
ask those questions because to do so might require the exercise of
conscience, which is not an easy process to undergo.

The demise of conscience has produced a society of people who go to
church on Sunday, where they regularly pray for the troops in Iraq,
without permitting their consciences to consider the fact that the
U.S. government has no right to be in Iraq and that the troops have
no right to be killing Iraqi people.

How many Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and occupation of
Iraq? We don’t know the exact number because, again, the Pentagon has
steadfastly said that it has absolutely no intention of keeping track
of how many Iraqis it kills. But the best estimates indicate that
approximately a million Iraqis have been killed as a consequence of
the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Now, reflect on that for a few minutes. One million people, dead. Not
a thousand. Not a hundred thousand. Not half a million. One million
dead people. That is not a small number of dead people.

Now, add that million to the estimated hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
people who died as a result of the brutal sanctions against Iraq
during the 1990s.

The standard attitude among all too many Americans is that it’s all
been “worth it” because Saddam Hussein was a “bad man” who needed to
be replaced by a U.S. stooge. It was the same attitude of UN
Ambassador Madeleine Albright, who told Sixty Minutes that the deaths
of half a million Iraqi children from the sanctions had been “worth
it” – i.e., worth the attempt to oust Saddam from power and replace
him with a ruler acceptable to U.S. officials.

But no American, including U.S. soldiers, had the moral right to kill
even one Iraqi, much less a million, simply because Saddam Hussein
was a “bad man” whom U.S. officials were trying to oust from power.
God does not permit the killing of any person for the sake of
democracy-spreading , making them “magnets,” or imaginary threats. The
commandment is clear: Thou shalt not kill.

Meanwhile, Americans blithely go about their business at home,
indifferent to or even enthusiastic about the number of Iraqi people
killed at the hands of the U.S. war machine in a war of aggression
against people who never attacked the United States and who did not
want war with the United States.

Conscience – the ferreting out of right and wrong and the pursuing of
right – has been subordinated to the almighty judgments and decisions
of the federal government. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “Indeed
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his
justice cannot sleep forever.”

Free Gaza Boats Arrive in Gaza

Tomas — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:35:41 +0000

http://www.freegaza.org

FREE GAZA BOATS ARRIVE IN GAZA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date : 08-23-2008

GAZA (23 August 2008) - Two small boats, the SS Free Gaza and the SS Liberty, successfully landed in Gaza early this evening, breaking the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The boats were crewed by a determined group of international human rights workers from the Free Gaza Movement. They had spent two years organizing the effort, raising money by giving small presentations at churches, mosques, synagogues, and in the homes of family, friends, and supporters.

They left Cyprus on Thursday morning, sailing over 350 kilometers through choppy seas. They made the journey despite threats that the Israeli government would use force to stop them. They continued sailing although they lost almost all communications and navigation systems due to outside jamming by some unknown party. They arrived in Gaza to the cheers and joyful tears of hundreds of Palestinians who came out to the beaches to welcome them.

Two small boats, 42 determined human rights workers, one simple message: “The world has not forgotten the people of this land. Today, we are all from Gaza.”

Tonight, the cheering will be heard as far away as Tel Aviv and Washington D.C.

QUOTES FOR PUBLICATION

“We recognize that we’re two, humble boats, but what we’ve accomplished is to show that average people from around the world can mobilize to create change. We do not have to stay silent in the face of injustice. Reaching Gaza today, there is such a sense of hope, and hope is what mobilizes people everywhere.”
–Huwaida Arraf.

Huwaida is Palestinian-American, and also a citizen of Israel. She’s a human rights activist and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement. In 2007 she received her Juris Doctor from American University in Washington D.C. Currently she teaches Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. Huwaida sailed to Gaza aboard the SS Liberty.

“We’re the first ones in 41 years to enter Gaza freely - but we won’t be the last. We welcome the world to join us and see what we’re seeing.”
–Paul Larudee, Ph.D.

Paul is a cofounder of the Free Gaza Movement and a San Francisco Bay Area activist on the issue of justice in Palestine. He sailed to Gaza aboard the SS Liberty.

“What we’ve done shows that people can do what governments should have done. If people stand up against injustice, we can truly be the conscience of the world.”
–Jeff Halper, Ph.D.

Jeff is an Israeli professor of anthropology and coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), a non-violent Israeli peace and human rights organization that resists the Israeli occupation on the ground. In 2006, the American Friends Service Committee nominated Jeff to receive the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni. Jeff sailed to Gaza aboard the SS Free Gaza.

For More Information, please contact:

(Gaza) Huwaida Arraf, tel. +972 599 130 426

(Gaza) Jeff Halper, tel. +972 542 002 642

(Cyprus) Osama Qashoo, tel. +357 99 793 595 / osamaqashoo@gmail.com

(Jerusalem) Angela Godfrey-Goldstein

The Real Crisis of Katrina

Tomas — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:26:35 +0000

The ChildTrauma Academy
www.ChildTrauma.org
The Real Crisis of Katrina
The real crisis from Katrina is coming. It is more relentless and more powerful than the flood
waters in New Orleans; more destructive than the 150 mile an hour winds of Katrina. It will
destroy a part of our country that is much more valuable than all of the buildings, pipelines,
casinos, bridges and roads in all of the Gulf Coast. Over our lifetime, this crisis will cost our
society billions upon billions of dollars. And the echoes of the coming crisis will haunt the next
generation.

This crisis is foreseeable. And, much of its destructive impact is preventable. Yet our society may
not have the wisdom to see that the real crisis of Katrina is the hundreds of thousands of ravaged,
displaced and traumatized children. And our society may not have the will to prevent this crisis.
We understand broken buildings; we do not understand broken children.
We will spend billions of dollars rebuilding the roads, bridges, buildings, pipelines, oil rigs,
casinos and houses. Will we spend billions healing these children? We will spend billions to reclaim
New Orleans. Will we spend billions to reclaim the potential of these children?
The future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast does not depend on structures. Our future
depends on our children. If we do not provide the safe, nurturing, predictable and enriched
experiences these children need and if we do not arm our caregivers, educators and mental
health providers with the tools they need to understand, engage, educate and heal traumatized
children all these new buildings will be filled with struggling children growing into adulthood
expressing only a fraction of their true potential.

We know that traumatic experiences can result in a host of chronic, sometimes, life-long, problems.
More than 35 % of the children exposed to a single traumatic event will develop serious mental
health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That is just the start, however.
Children exposed to adverse experiences are at much greater risk for physical health problems
throughout life; this includes heart disease, diabetes and hypertension. Traumatized children are
at much greater risk for other emotional, social and mental health problems; and as these children
grow into adults the risk follows them. Adults with childhood trauma have increased divorce rates,
depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, drug abuse and dependence, school failure,
and unemployment among many other problems. These children have a much higher probability
of requiring the services of our expensive public systems throughout life; special education, child
protection, mental health, health and criminal justice.

And we also know that when traumatized children receive appropriate services, they can heal.
We know that if traumatized children can live in safe, consistent, relationally-rich, and nurturing
homes and communities they heal. Indeed, traumatic experience can provide a wisdom and
strength that is impossible to get any other way. Yet this healing takes place and wisdom grows
only when the child is safe, secure and her emotional needs have been met.

If we do not help these children, what has been lost will pale in comparison to what could be lost.

The potential creativity, productivity and humanity of thousands of these children are at risk. Will

we spend the same attention and dedicate the same economic and personal resources to help

these children that we will in rebuilding infrastructure? I doubt it.

Our society’s true view of children is reflected in the already under-funded, overwhelmed public
services working with children; education, child mental health, early childhood services, child care,
child protection - all are under funded and overwhelmed by the existing needs of children. This
flood of need spreads far beyond the streets of New Orleans. Even before Katrina we were
drowning our front-line child care providers, our educators, our child welfare workers and our
mental health providers. In all of the effected communities and in each of the communities
stepping up to help these families the existing educational, health, mental health and social
services are already barely meeting the needs of the children they serve. To these overwhelmed
services we will be adding hundreds of thousands of children - displaced, overwhelmed,
distressed and traumatized. We need to help these systems and these providers so they can help
these children.

These needs can be met. Addressing the coming crisis will require leadership, energy, wisdom,
money and time. We need compassion and knowledge; kindness and good intentions will not
solve these problems. We need to build trauma-informed systems; early childhood, child care,
education, law enforcement, health, mental health, child protection and juvenile justice are all
profoundly impacted by traumatized children. Further, we need to educate our policy makers,
parents and caregivers about the impact of trauma on children. The more we all understand the
effects and impact of traumatic events the easier it will be to prevent and buffer these effects.
And for those children who do develop serious mental health problems we need to have traumainformed
mental health services available; we need far more trained providers than we currently
have. And we need to know more about preventing and healing trauma-related emotional,
behavioral, social, cognitive and physical problems; therefore we need to fund and conduct much
more research.

In short we need to give our children the same attention and resources we give our roads,
bridges, pipelines and infrastructure. The health, productivity and creativity of a society are
renewed each generation through its children. The society that understands and acts on this will
succeed; the society that does not is doomed to fail. Let us not fail these children. Let us not fail
ourselves.

Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
Senior Fellow
The ChildTrauma Academy
ChildTrauma@aol.com

For more information on what you can do to help understand and respond to the impact of Katrina
on children please visit The ChildTrauma Academy website; www.ChildTrauma.org. The ChildTrauma
Academy staff is preparing a set of support materials for various sets of responders. This includes
materials for first responders, families, children and teachers impacted by Hurricane Katrina.

--