30 de enero de 2007
28 de enero de 2007
Febrero: Agenda de Piquetes
Madres Contra la Guerra anuncia su piquete mensual en contra de la guerra y el reclutamiento militar de los jóvenes puertorriqueños:
Río Piedras
Frente a las oficinas de Reclutamiento del ARMY en en la Calle Georgetti en la Plaza Pública; el viernes, 23 de febrero de 12 md a 1:00 pm.
Mayaguez
Todos los primeros viernes de mes de 12 md a 1:00 pm, en el Towncenter de Mayaguez; denunciando las tácticas de reclutamiento del Ejército.
Extraño ataque a militares
Bagdad - Las fuerzas estadounidenses perdieron siete soldados, elevando a por lo menos 12 el número de sus bajas en los últimos tres días.
Las siete muertes se debieron a artefactos explosivos colocados a la vera de los caminos, dos en la provincia de Diyala, dos en Bagdad y otras tres en un lugar no divulgado al norte de la capital.
Con esta noticia trascendió que cuatro de los cinco soldados estadounidenses muertos en Kerbala el pasado 20 de enero habían sido secuestrados y luego asesinados a sangre fría por los secuestradores, que vestían uniformes, según explicó el mando norteamericano.En un comunicado, el Ejército ha revelado detalles del incidente, en el que los atacantes -un total de doce- hablaban inglés, iban vestidos con uniformes estadounidenses, y tenían cinco vehículos como los de los convoyes militares.
Asimismo, iban armados con armas estadounidenses.
Todos estos detalles les ayudaron a penetrar sin problemas en el centro de la policía de Kerbala, donde en aquel momento se celebraba una reunión con las autoridades provinciales para estudiar la seguridad en la región ante la proximidad de las masivas peregrinaciones por la fiesta chiita de Achura.
En la investigación del caso, desde un principio llamó la atención a los investigadores el hecho de que los atacantes no sufrieran ninguna baja y que tampoco hubieran intentado agredir a los participantes iraquíes de la reunión.
De otra parte, ayer, el Ejército mató a catorce presuntos terroristas en un ataque aéreo contra un refugio, según indicó el mando militar de Estados Unidos en Irak.
Se informó que la operación se puso en marcha después de que las tropas norteamericanas recibieron "informaciones de inteligencia" sobre la presencia de hombres armados en uno de los barrios de Bagdad.
Inmediatamente, tropas estadounidenses rodearon el barrio, y vieron cómo algunos "terroristas", se parapetaban en un edificio.
Entonces, los sitiadores pidieron refuerzos a la aviación, que bombardeó con misiles el edificio, matando a catorce de los sospechosos.
En la operación, resultaron además detenidos otros dos de los supuestos terroristas.
También ayer, dos civiles murieron al estallar un carro bomba en un barrio de mayoría chiita de la rica ciudad petrolera de Kirkuk, al norte de Bagdad. "El automóvil estalló en el barrio de Al Wasati, en el sur de la ciudad.
Sólo estalló una parte de los explosivos que había en el vehículo y la otra fue desactivada por agentes.
Por otra parte, un portavoz del Gobierno, que declinó identificarse, reveló que tres personas resultaron heridas por el estallido de proyectiles de mortero que cayeron sobre un barrio chiita.
25 de enero de 2007
Baleados al tocar tierra: Helicóptero de estadounidenses cae en barrio suní
BAGDAD(AP) Cuatro de los cinco estadounidenses muertos cuando su helicóptero cayó en un barrio suní del centro de Bagdad fueron asesinados con tiro en la nuca, dijo ayer un militar iraquí.
El militar -que al igual que otros habló a condición de guardar el anonimato porque no fueron difundidos públicamente los detalles- dijo que los cuatro fueron abatidos a tiros en tierra, pero no dio más detalles.
Sin embargo, un funcionario estadounidense indicó en Bagdad que no había pruebas que respaldaran la información de que los cuatro recibieran un tiro en la nuca.
El militar iraquí contó que el helicóptero fue abatido, aunque esa versión fue disputada por un mando militar en Washington. El iraquí indicó que el helicóptero fue ametrallado en el distrito de Fadhil, en la margen oriental del río Tigris, mientras que el funcionario estadounidense agregó que no había indicios de que el helicóptero, propiedad de la empresa Blackwater USA, hubiese sido abatido. Las fuentes estadounidenses dijeron desconocer qué causó la caída de la aeronave.
Blackwater USA confirmó que cinco estadounidenses empleados por la firma con sede en Carolina del Norte como especialistas de seguridad murieron en Irak, según su vocera Anne Tyrrell.
El embajador estadounidense Zalmay Khalilzad ofreció sus condolencias por la muerte de los cinco, con los que había viajado.
"Ayer tuvimos un día muy malo", indicó Khalilzad a los periodistas durante una conferencia de prensa en la embajada. "Perdimos cinco hombres de una gran talla".
Agregó que había viajado con los cinco y que acudió a la morgue a ver los cadáveres, aunque sin especificar el lugar.
Khalilzad no dio más detalles. Indicó que el caso sigue siendo investigado y reconoció que es difícil establecer lo sucedido debido "al caos de la guerra".
Otro funcionario estadounidense, quien también habló a condición del anonimato, dijo que en el incidente estuvieron mezclados tres helicópteros Blackwater. Uno de ellos aterrizó por razones desconocidas y uno de los empleados de Blackwater fue abatido en ese momento, agregó. Ese helicóptero al parecer pudo despegar pero otro se estrelló en la misma zona. No explicó la suerte del tercer helicóptero.
Tomado de PrimeraHora.com
Army captures AWOL soldier after Mojave Desert hunt
Army captures AWOL soldier after Mojave Desert hunt
NEEDLES – An Army Ranger absent without leave after serving in Iraq and
Afghanistan was captured on a remote mountaintop by military and local
searchers who had been scouring the Mojave Desert region for days.
Andrew Stone, 20, of Wisconsin abandoned his car Friday and took area maps
into the wilderness. He was listed as AWOL by the Army and may face
criminal charges in Georgia, where Stone is stationed, the San Bernardino
County Sheriff's Department said.
Led by two Army Black Hawk helicopters, searchers on horseback and off-road
vehicles found Stone on a peak Sunday south of the Mojave National
Preserve, sheriff's Deputy Dave Pichotta said.
Some 50 searchers from Barstow, Morongo Basin, Needles, Victor Valley,
Wrightwood and Yucaipa participated in the hunt. Stone has no known ties to
the area, about 90 miles south of Las Vegas near the California-Arizona border.
Army officials referred reporters to the 75th Rangers Regiment, composed of
three Ranger battalions with headquarters at Fort Benning, Ga., but there
was no immediate comment to telephone and e-mail messages.
Sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beavers said there was no additional
information from the Sheriff's Department.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/ news/military/20070122- 1101-ca-awolsoldier.html
24 de enero de 2007
En 2006 murieron más de 34.000 iraquíes, 93 por día
PL La violencia en Iraq bajo ocupación militar de Estados Unidos mató a 34.542 civiles durante el año pasado, una cifra tres veces mayor que las ofrecidas por el gobierno en Bagdad, según afirmó hoy un funcionario de ONU. Otras 36.685 personas fueron heridas durante igual período, según un informe elaborado por el especialista en Derechos Humanos y enviado especial a Iraq, Gianni Magazzeni. Las cifras reveladas por el experto de la ONU triplican estimados iniciales basados en estadísticas del Ministerio del Interior en Bagdad, la capital iraquí.
Los datos recopilados por Magazzeni están basados en reportes del Ministerio de Salud, hospitales y el Instituto de Medicina Legal en Bagdad, según dijo un portavoz oficial a la prensa en esta sede.
Las autoridades iraquíes anunciaron a principios de este mes que 12.357 civiles habían muerto a causa de la incontrolable espiral de violencia en ese país ocupado.
De acuerdo con el reporte del especialista de ONU en Derechos Humanos, 30.842 personas fueron detenidas en Iraq hasta el pasado 31 de diciembre.
La situación de violencia en el país ha obligado al cierre de escuelas y universidades y mas de 470.000 personas han sido obligadas a abandonar sus viviendas, según el informe de Magazzeni.
Durante los debates del Foro Social Mundial piden que se juzgue a Rumsfeld
Una asociación de fiscales alemanes puso una demanda contra él en noviembre de 2004 en los tribunales germanos.
El ex secretario de Defensa de EEUU Donald Rumsfeld fue objeto el lunes de duras críticas en el Foro Social Mundial que se celebra en Nairobi y durante los debates de la conferencia se exigió que responda ante la Justicia.
''No sé si acabará en la cárcel, pero sé que debería ir a prisión y, al menos, espero que viva el resto de su vida con vergüenza'', dijo Peter Weiss, abogado del Centro por los Derechos Constitucionales de Nueva York y que ha defendido a presos retenidos por Estados Unidos en la cárcel de Guantánamo.
Weiss, junto a la Federación Internacional de Derechos Humanos y una asociación de fiscales alemanes, pusieron una demanda en noviembre de 2004 en los tribunales germanos, que tienen jurisdicción universal sobre crímenes de guerra y contra la humanidad.
Acusaron a Rumsfeld y otros altos funcionarios civiles y militares estadounidenses de crímenes de guerra, incluido el delito de tortura, por los hechos ocurridos en la prisión iraquí de Abu Ghraib y en Guantánamo.
''La demanda fue rechazada en febrero de 2005 sobre la base de que los acusados podían ser juzgados en su propio país, pero hemos vuelto a presentarla el pasado noviembre, alegando que han pasado dos años y Estados Unidos no ha mostrado intención de procesar a sus funcionarios'', explicó.
El abogado se unió a otros activistas de derechos humanos de Argentina, Nicaragua, Brasil, Colombia y República Democrática del Congo en un panel para compartir experiencias de lucha contra la impunidad en el mundo, celebrado en el Foro Social Mundial (FSM) de Nairobi.
Por: TeleSur
22 de enero de 2007
Al Zawahiri desafía a Bush: 'Envíe a todo su ejército para que sea aniquilado'
- Advierte a EEUU de que la seguridad pasa por lograr un "entendimiento" con los musulmanes
Imagen del nuevo vídeo del número dos de Al Qaeda. (Foto: SITE)
WASHINGTON.- "Envíe a todo su ejército para que sea aniquilado a manos de los muyahidín" porque Irak "es capaz de hundir a 10 Ejércitos como el suyo", ha amenazado el número dos de Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, al presidente de los EEUU, George W. Bush, a través de un vídeo.
Según informa en su página de Internet el instituto Búsqueda de Entidades Terroristas Internacionales (SITE), -una organización dedicada a la investigación del terrorismo internacional, con sede en Washington-, el vídeo incluye subtítulos en inglés, dura algo más de 14 minutos y se titula 'La Ecuación Correcta'.
Vestido de negro, con un turbante blanco y sobre un fondo negro, el egipcio se mofa de la estrategia de Bush de reforzar las tropas de EEUU en Irak con algo más de 21.000 soldados adicionales y se dirige a los estadounidenses para recordarles que "la seguridad es un destino compartido" y que ésa es "la ecuación correcta".
"Si nosotros estamos seguros, ustedes podrían estar seguros y si estamos a salvo, podrían estar a salvo. Y si nos atacan y matan, definitivamente, con el permiso de Alá, les atacarán y matarán", advierte el líder de la red terrorista.
Al Zawahiri también advierte a los ciudadanos de EEUU de que la seguridad pasa por lograr un "entendimiento" con los musulmanes y de que, si siguen apoyando las políticas de Bush, no conseguirán la paz.
Según el Instituto SITE, en el mismo vídeo se burla del mandatario estadounidense, cuando se cuestiona "¿por qué envía 20.000 soldados sólo? ¿Por qué no envía 50.000 ó 100.000? No es usted consciente de que los perros de Irak echan de menos a los cadáveres de sus tropas".
Inmediatamente después, le reta a que envíe a todo su Ejército a territorio iraquí y se muestra convencido de que los muyahidín (guerreros sagrados) son capaces de destruirlo.
Este mensaje de Al Zawahiri constituye la primera reacción de Al Qaeda a la nueva estrategia de EEUU para Irak y se difunde la víspera del discurso sobre el Estado de la Unión que hoy pronunciará el presidente Bush y en el que está previsto que vuelva a defender esa estrategia como única vía posible para reconducir el conflicto iraquí.
La violencia continúa
Sin embargo y, a pesar de esta nueva estrategia la violencia continúa incrementándose en el país árabe. Este lunes tres explosiones en mercados de Bagdad y cerca de Baquba dejaron al menos 100 muertos y dos centenares de heridos .
Se trata del segundo atentado más grave en la ciudad en un plazo de menos de una semana. El pasado día 16, un atentado también con coches bomba mató a 70 personas, en su mayoría estudiantes, en la entrada de la Universidad Al Mustansariya de Bagdad.
El fin de semana también resultó trágico para las tropas estadounidenses. Entre el sábado y el domingo 23 militares perdieron la vida en diferentes incidentes, a pesar que comienzan a llegar a Bagdad las tropas de refuerzo y los partidos iraquíes toman posiciones.
Por: Agencias
24 soldados de EE.UU. muertos el fin de semana
Bagdad - Cinco soldados estadounidenses murieron en enfrentamientos armados en la provincia de Al Anbar, al oeste de Bagdad y feudo de la insurgencia suní, informó hoy el mando militar de Estados Unidos en la capital iraquí.
Con éstos son ya 24 los militares muertos en combate en una sola jornada, la del sábado, que la convierte en una de las más sangrientas para las filas estadounidenses desde que en marzo de 2003 invadieron Irak.
Los muertos en Al Anbar son cuatro soldados y un infante de Marina, ambos del Quinto Regimiento, debido a "las heridas sufridas por fuego enemigo", según el comunicado estadounidense.
De los 24 soldados fallecidos, la mitad viajaban en un helicóptero "Black Hawk" derribado en el noreste de Bagdad, según varias fuentes, aunque el ejército estadounidense no confirmó que el aparato cayera por fuego enemigo.
Otros cinco militares murieron en un ataque armado perpetrado por desconocidos contra un edificio oficial de la ciudad de Kerbala cuando celebraban una reunión con la policía iraquí.
Dos soldados más perecieron por la explosión de bombas colocadas en las carreteras: uno de ellos pertenecía a la 105 Brigada de Ingenieros y murió cuando circulaba por el norte del país, mientras que el segundo perdió la vida en algún lugar del norte de la capital, según los escasos datos ofrecidos en los comunicados militares de EE.UU.Por: EFE
20 de enero de 2007
Carta de Michael Moore: Dear Mr. President: Send Even MORE Troops (and you go, too!)
Dear Mr. President: Send Even MORE Troops (and you go, too!) ...from Michael Moore
1/10/07
Dear Mr. President,
Thanks for your address to the nation. It's good to know you still want to talk to us after how we behaved in November.
Listen, can I be frank? Sending in 20,000 more troops just ain't gonna do the job. That will only bring the troop level back up to what it was last year. And we were losing the war last year! We've already had over a million troops serve some time in Iraq since 2003. Another few thousand is simply not enough to find those weapons of mass destruction! Er, I mean... bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice! Um, scratch that. Try this -- BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST! YES!!!
You've got to show some courage, dude! You've got to win this one! C'mon, you got Saddam! You hung 'im high! I loved watching the video of that -- just like the old wild west! The bad guy wore black! The hangmen were as crazy as the hangee! Lynch mobs rule!!!
Look, I have to admit I feel very sorry for the predicament you're in. As Ricky Bobby said, "If you're not first, you're last." And you being humiliated in front of the whole world does NONE of us Americans any good.
Sir, listen to me. You have to send in MILLIONS of troops to Iraq, not thousands! The only way to lick this thing now is to flood Iraq with millions of us! I know that you're out of combat-ready soldiers -- so you have to look elsewhere! The only way you are going to beat a nation of 27 million -- Iraq -- is to send in at least 28 million! Here's how it would work:
The first 27 million Americans go in and kill one Iraqi each. That will quickly take care of any insurgency. The other one million of us will stay and rebuild the country. Simple.
Now, I know you're saying, where will I find 28 million Americans to go to Iraq? Here are some suggestions:
1. More than 62,000,000 Americans voted for you in the last election (the one that took place a year and half into a war we already knew we were losing). I am confident that at least a third of them would want to put their body where there vote was and sign up to volunteer. I know many of these people and, while we may disagree politically, I know that they don't believe someone else should have to go and fight their fight for them -- while they hide here in America.
2. Start a "Kill an Iraqi" Meet-Up group in cities across the country. I know this idea is so early-21st century, but I once went to a Lou Dobbs Meet-Up and, I swear, some of the best ideas happen after the third mojito. I'm sure you'll get another five million or so enlistees from this effort.
3. Send over all members of the mainstream media. After all, they were your collaborators in bringing us this war -- and many of them are already trained from having been "embedded!" If that doesn't bring the total to 28 million, then draft all viewers of the FOX News channel.
Mr. Bush, do not give up! Now is not the time to pull your punch! Don't be a weenie by sending in a few over-tired troops. Get your people behind you and YOU lead them in like a true commander in chief! Leave no conservative behind! Full speed ahead!
We promise to write. Go get 'em W!
Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com
Razones psiquiátricas para no ser activados los reservistas
Psychiatric/Psychological Reports for Recalled Iraq War Vets
Functional Capacity Certification (Standard Form 507)
This form is included in the packet ordering vets back into the military and must be filled out and faxed immediately to delay the reactivation order. 60 days delay may be given.
Veterans fill out the top part and a physician fills out the bottom. The veteran should note any physical injury on the form that would impair their mobility. If they have been treated for psychiatric problems they should include this as well. On the bottom is a physician's statement. The diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and either Bipolar Affective Disorder (BAD) or Major Depression with Psychotic features should provide a temporary delay to returning to participating in the Iraq War again. This form must be signed by a physician. A primary care physician can sign this form. Psychosis and Bipolar Affective Disorder are considered exclusionary conditions for returning to fight in the Iraq War. Post Traumatic Stress is not an exclusionary diagnosis. The only psychiatric medications that are exclusionary are mood stabilizers such as lithium and valproic acid or antipsychotic medications. The military prohibits any comment on the recommendation that an individual not fight in the Iraq War.
Psychiatric or Psychological Evaluation
A comprehensive psychiatric or psychological report should follow the Functional Capacity Certificate. This document is the medical report that supports the diagnosis of PTSD and a second psychiatric condition such as Bipolar Affective Disorder or Major Depression with Psychotic features. BAD should include symptoms of mania or hypomania with irritability, excessive activity in spending, not sleeping, increased sex. Major Depression with Psychotic Features is depression with hopelessness, not eating, poor appetite. Psychotic features could include paranoia or delusions, beliefs that are not based on reality. Psychotic features can also be hallucinations, visual or auditory. Vivid flashbacks can sometimes be described as hallucinations. If depression is present, does the individual have thoughts of not wanting to be alive? Has he/she had thoughts of doing something to hurt him/herself? What type of thoughts? If any of these features are present this person is suicidal. Documentation of suicidal ideation is crucial. Wishing that you are not alive is passive suicidal ideation which requires further exploration. Suicidal individuals are not desired back the Iraq War. If homicidal ideation is present this also should be noted.
This document should be written by a mental health professional such as psychiatrist, psychologist, psychiatric social worker, licensed counselor, psychiatric nurse or clinical nurse specialist. It can be a private, community, VA or military mental health person. The severity of psychiatric problems should not be minimized. Since many military or VA mental health practitioners may be wary of doing this it might be wise and quicker to go a private mental health professional. If Panic Disorder, Generalized Anxiety, Agoraphobia, Sleep Disorder such as Sleep Terror or Obstructive Sleep Apnea are present, put these in the report as well, but it is best to have just two or three diagnosis. The following format should be used:
History of Present Illness:
Past History:
Mental Status Examination:
Diagnosis:
Discussion of seriousness of disorders:
SI alguna persona nos puede ayudar a traducir este texto, comuníquese a madrescontralaguerra@gmail.com. MCG
"la guerra cruel y sin sentido..."
Nadie en EEUU recuerda la condena del reverendo a "la guerra cruel y sin sentido..." de Vietnam
El legado de Martin Luther King, reducido a "promover la caridad" David Brooks
"Sabía que nunca podría pronunciarme contra la violencia de los oprimidos en los ghettos sin primero haber hablado claramente ante el surtidor de violencia más grande en el mundo hoy día: mi propio gobierno", declaró el reverendo Martin Luther King Jr. hace casi 40 años en torno a la guerra en Vietnam, pero esas palabras no forman parte de ningún acto oficial hoy al celebrarse el día federal dedicado a esa figura.
Cinco días después que el presidente George W. Bush anunció el envío de otras 20 mil tropas a Irak, en medio de otra guerra que cada día se parece más a Vietnam en sus consecuencias y dinámicas internas, el legado de King es reducido, por el mundo oficial, a un mensaje de cooperación y actos caritativos. El poderoso ejemplo y palabra de esta heroica figura al ser elevada al panteón de héroes oficiales es limitada a referencias a la "igualdad" y al "yo tengo un sueño" famoso de un país que supera el racismo.
El presidente Bush acudió hoy a una preparatoria pública en Washington para marcar el día feriado, acompañado del procurador general Alberto Gonzales, para participar en este "día de servicio". Ahí comentó: "insto a la gente de todo el país a que tomen la oportunidad de ayudar a alguien necesitado, y así honrar el legado de Martin Luther King".
¿Y qué estaban haciendo los voluntarios, el procurador general y el presidente en la prepa para "honrar" el legado de King? Enviando postales a víctimas del huracán Katrina para, en palabras del presidente, "decirle a alguien en la zona de Nueva Orleáns, nos preocupamos por ti, la gente está pensando en ti; con la esperanza de elevar el espíritu de alguien".
Pero fue justo en Nueva Orleáns donde Bush y su gobierno abandonaron a miles de víctimas en su gran mayoría afroestadunidenses pobres en los primeros días después del desastre y donde el país redescubrió las profundas raíces de racismo, desigualdad, opresión y la irresponsabilidad social y ambiental del gobierno en Washington, o sea, que no mucho de fondo ha cambiado desde que los días en que King había denunciado estas mismas injusticias.
Un procurador "contradictorio"
Sin embargo, un procurador general que ha justificado la anulación de derechos legales básicos y hasta la tortura escribiendo tarjetas postales para "honrar" a King y su legado, es una imagen algo contradictoria, por decirlo diplomáticamente.
Aunque casi todo gobierno que designa a una figura histórica como emblema nacional la reinventa con una historia oficial, el caso de King es más notable porque surge de una historia reciente que continúa teniendo una presencia contemporánea en un país donde el racismo, la desigualdad y la discriminación no sólo no se han superado, sino que en algunos casos, están peor que nunca.
Más aún, el esfuerzo por anular parte del mensaje de disidencia King de la versión oficial revelan que sus palabras siguen vigentes 40 años después, en un país que está en medio de otra guerra. "Este negocio de quemar a seres humanos con napalm, de llenar los hogares de nuestro país con huérfanos y viudas, de inyectar la droga envenenada del odio a las venas de personas normalmente humanitarias, de enviar a casa a hombres minusválidos y sicológicamente trastornados que regresan de campos de batalla oscuros y sangrientos, eso no puede reconciliarse con la sabiduría, la justicia y el amor. Una nación que continúa, año tras año, gastando más en la defensa militar que en programas de asistencia social, se está aproximando a la muerte espiritual", declaró King en su famoso discurso el 4 de abril de 1967 en la iglesia Riverside en Nueva York.
Justo un año antes de ser asesinado, King insistió en que no se podía hablar sobre la opresión en casa sin hablar sobre la opresión y la violencia estadunidense contra otros países. Fue así que afirmó que la lucha por la justicia tenía que enfrentarse contra el racismo, la explotación económica y el militarismo, vinculando estos temas, y llamando por una "revolución radical de valores".
En su discurso en Nueva York, King denunció la guerra injusta contra los vietnamitas, pero también se refiere a los efectos que esto tiene contra los jóvenes estadunidenses enviados a esa guerra. Dijo que no sólo se estaba sujetando a estas tropas al "proceso brutalizador" de cualquier guerra, sino también que "estamos agregando el cinismo al proceso de muerte, ya que ellos (las tropas) se enterarán, en poco tiempo, que ninguna de las cosas en nombre de las cuales se dice que estamos luchando son parte de esto. No tarda para que entiendan que su gobierno los ha enviado a una lucha entre vietnamitas, y los más sofisticados seguramente se dan cuenta que estamos de lado de los ricos, los seguros, mientras creamos un infierno para los pobres".
Exigió: "de alguna manera esta locura tiene que detenerse. Debemos detenerla ahora". King convocó a la protesta, a todo tipo de acción contra la guerra. Condenó el silencio, incluso el suyo en los años anteriores, al declarar que era una traición. "No podemos mantenernos silenciosos mientras nuestra nación realiza una de las guerras más crueles y sin sentido de la historia".
No es sorprendente que Bush y otros políticos prefieran no recordar estas palabras, y que los grandes medios tampoco difundan este mensaje hoy. Ni siquiera la nueva presidenta de la Cámara baja y por lo tanto líder de la oposición política a la presidencia Nancy Pelosi, hizo alusión a estas palabras de King.
De hecho, existe la sospecha de que designar un día feriado para King fue justo un intento por desactivar su mensaje. Según recuenta el periodista Sean Gonsalves en Alternet fue el presidente Ronald Reagan quien promulgó la ley para establecer el día feriado por King. Otro famoso reverendo, Charles Adams, en un sermón en la misma iglesia Riverside en 1998, abordó este misterio: "¿Ahora, por qué firmó esa legislación Ronald Reagan? ¿Podría ser que Reagan entendía que la forma más fácil para deshacerse de Martin Luther King Jr. era rendirle culto? Honrarlo con un día feriado que él nunca hubiese deseado para celebrar su natalicio y su muerte sin comprometernos con su visión o su amor. Es más fácil elogiar a un héroe muerto que reconocer y seguir a un profeta vivo".
Pero el creciente coro de denuncia, de protesta, y de oposición a la guerra en Irak está rodeando al presidente y otros políticos mientras escriben tarjetas a víctimas de las consecuencias de sus políticas. Unos cuantos políticos, líderes religiosos, opositores a la guerra y defensores de la historia del pueblo sí recordaron y buscaron hoy hacer rebotar los ecos de la condena moral y política del reverendo sobre la actual coyuntura. A pesar del gigantesco esfuerzo para impedirlo, la sonora voz de King y sus aliados aún rompen el silencio oficial por todo el país. ._,___
18 de enero de 2007
El costo de la guerra alcanza proporciones históricas
January 14, 2007
WASHINGTON — By the time the Vietnam war ended in 1975, it had become America's longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today's dollars.
By the time the bill for World War II passed the $600-billion mark, in mid-1943, the United States had driven German forces out of North Africa, devastated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, and launched the vast offensives that would liberate Europe and the South Pacific.
The Iraq war is far smaller and narrower than those conflicts, and it has not extended beyond the tenure of a single president. But its price tag is beginning to reach historic proportions, and the budgetary "burn rate" for Iraq may be greater than in some periods in past wars.
If U.S. involvement continues on the current scale, the funding for the Iraq war — combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and other foreign fronts in the war on terrorism — is projected to surpass this country's Vietnam spending next year.
And the accumulating cost is adding to resistance to President Bush's war policy in Congress as well as in public opinion, even though concern about the cost in human lives, the war's impact on America's place in the world and other such factors loom larger.
Last week, when Bush unveiled his new war plan — which included sending an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq and launching another effort to provide jobs and public services in Baghdad — the cost issue was raised by Republicans as well as Democrats.
But it had been simmering for more than a year.
Members of Congress have talked relatively little about the war's accumulating price tag because of the human costs, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said. "But certainly we're cognizant of it," she said. "When you say for what we're spending in a month in Iraq, you could fully fund and double the science budgets of the United States and come up with a viable alternative to oil, it puts it in perspective."
Even so loyal a Republican as Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who chaired the budget committee until the Democrats took control of the Senate this year, criticized the administration's approach to war costs, calling it "without any discipline as to how much is going to be spent."
"They're gaming the system," Gregg said.
At a media briefing before Bush's speech Wednesday night, a senior administration official said the president's plan would entail $5.6 billion in military expenses and $1 billion in reconstruction and other civilian costs.
In the broad landscape of federal spending, those are not huge numbers, though $6.6 billion is more than enough to cover the budgets for all the country's national parks, national forests, historic monuments, protected wetlands and wildlife refuges for a year.
What makes the cost issue increasingly sensitive is not just questions about whether it will buy success but also the fact that the new plan's cost will add to a mountain of bills for earlier military and reconstruction efforts with what many see as little or no positive return on the investment.
Some Republicans, especially fiscal conservatives worried about the deficit, are particularly unhappy because, they say, the president and the Defense Department have refused to address the war's impact on the budget in a straightforward way.
Instead of including war costs in the regular budget, such as the one Bush will send to Congress next month, the administration has been asking Congress for emergency-spending bills that short-circuit many of the usual review procedures for appropriating funds.
"Muting and undermining the legitimacy of the congressional role in funding is, I think, undermining to some degree the commitment to the war effort itself," Gregg said.
The administration says its approach is necessary because it is unable to determine what it will need for the war in the coming fiscal year, which begins each October. Critics say that may have been true early in the war but that by now most costs are predictable far in advance.
Last year, Congress approved a provision in the annual defense authorization bill calling on the administration to change course and put its request for war funds in regular spending bills subject to full congressional review.
Said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the provision's author: "Neither the White House nor the Congress is making the tough decisions about how we are going to pay for the ongoing wars. Adding hundreds of billions of dollars that are more conveniently designated as emergency expenditures — so they do not have to be budgeted for along with other national priorities — is only making our fiscal problems that much greater."
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) proposed that Congress block Bush's new plan by withholding funds. To date, Congress has not used its power of the purse to limit Bush's prosecution of the war, partly because it doesn't want to seem to deny U.S. troops any needed support.
"If you cut off funding, you're cutting off support for the troops," said Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young of Florida, a top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. "Whether you support the battle they're involved in or not, the vast majority of the American public is still very supportive of our troops."
During Vietnam, Congress did threaten to limit the use of the defense budget. At one point, for example, it prohibited the use of funds in Cambodia.
But Congress flexed its fiscal muscles only toward the end of the Vietnam War. Bush's war on terrorism is in its seventh year, and at a comparable stage of Vietnam, antiwar lawmakers could muster only a handful of votes for limiting funds.
>From the beginning of President Lyndon B. Johnson's troop buildup in 1965 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the United States spent the equivalent of $662 billion in 2007 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service. The war in Iraq is harder to measure because its costs tend to be mixed up with those of the war in Afghanistan and Bush's broader global war on terrorism, says Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
Starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation enacted a week after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Kosiak figures the United States had spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended Sept. 30.
For fiscal 2007, Congress has so far approved $70 billion. The president is expected to ask Congress for $100 billion more.
Even if the fighting stopped soon, which few expect, the bills would continue to accumulate as the Pentagon pushed to restore what the war had cost in troops and material.
By Joel Havemann
Times Staff Writer
Militares de EU piden fin de la guerra
Soldados en activo y reservistas llaman al Capitolio a impulsar el regreso de las tropas
DAVID BROOKS CORRESPONSAL /LA JORNADA (MÉXICO)
Nueva York, 16 de enero. Más de mil integrantes de las fuerzas armadas de Estados Unidos presentaron hoy una petición al Congreso para el retiro de todas las tropas y bases de este país en Irak, en un acto sin precedente de disidencia organizada en las filas militares.
"Como estadounidenses, patriotas orgullosos de servir a la nación en uniforme, instamos respetuosamente a nuestros líderes políticos en el Congreso a apoyar el retiro expedito de todas las fuerzas militares y bases de Irak. Permanecer en ese país no funcionará y no vale el precio. Es hora de que las tropas estadunidenses regresen a casa", se plantea en la petición, firmada por más de mil soldados activos y en reserva con por lo menos un turno de servicio en Irak.
Esta solicitud es una manifestación de la creciente ira y descontento en las filas militares. Iniciada por Liam Madden, un marine de 22 años, y el marinero Jonathan Hutto, de 29, fue colocada en un sitio de Internet (www.appealforredress.org), en el cual se solicitaban firmas a sus compañeros en el ejército, la fuerza aérea y la marina.
En poco más de dos meses la lista creció de decenas a más de mil. La mayoría de los firmantes eran soldados en activo y los demás reservistas, pero figuran algunos oficiales de rango bajo o medio, incluyendo unos cuantos coroneles. Es "el movimiento más significativo de soldados organizados y disidentes visto en Estados Unidos desde 1969, cuando mil 366 miembros activos de las fuerzas armadas firmaron un desplegado de plana completa en el New York Times llamando a dar fin a la guerra de Vietnam", apunta el periodista Marc Cooper en The Nation.
Eugene Fidell, presidente del Instituto Nacional de Justicia Militar, lo caracteriza así: "simplemente, sin precedente".
La Solicitud por un Remedio (Appeal for Redress), como formalmente se llama esta iniciativa, empleó una ley federal que permite que militares en activo puedan enviar una comunicación a un legislador federal sobre cualquier tema sin ser sujetos a ninguna represalia, siempre y cuando en el momento de hacerlo no estén uniformados o en servicio. Con ello se escudan por cargos de insubordinación y violación a las normas de conducta castrense. Sin embargo, todos saben que firmar tal declaración es peligroso, particularmente para quienes quieren desarrollar una carrera en las fuerzas armadas.
"Con el reciente llamado para incrementar las tropas en Irak, el Congreso debería escuchar a aquellos de nosotros que hemos estado ahí y a los que serán afectados directamente por este cambio de política", declaró hoy Hutto.
Su colega el sargento de marines Madden agregó: "Nos están traicionando. Nuestro esfuerzo se está explotando porque se emplea para acciones ilegales e inmorales".
Madden reiteró hoy el llamado para que el Congreso escuche a las tropas y a los veteranos de Irak, y pidió que suspendan el financiamiento de la guerra ya que "las tropas se están muriendo mientras los políticos están disputando y alegando".
Ayer, en conferencia de prensa anunciaron que hoy acudirían al Congreso para entregar la solicitud y las firmas. El sargento Jabbar Magruder, integrante de la Guardia Nacional que estuvo 11 meses en Tikrit, declaró que "los soldados desean resistir, quieren regresar a casa ahora. Necesitamos que los ciudadanos nos respalden".
El representante federal James McGovern recibió la petición e informó que se la va a entregar al secretario de la Cámara para ser publicada en el informe legislativo oficial. Agregó que "estas tropas están arriesgando sus carreras" y les dijo que "estoy agradecido por su valentía".
El representante liberal Dennis Kucinich, quien ha promovido un plan para el retiro de la presencia militar estadunidense, también recibió la petición.
El representante John L. Lewis, una de las figuras que participó en las históricas marchas organizadas por el asesinado reverendo Martin Luther King en los años 60, declaró que estas tropas "han ejercido su derecho constitucional a la libre expresión, y han cuestionado una guerra injusta".
Representantes de otras organizaciones de disidentes de la guerra, como Veteranos de Irak contra la Guerra, Familias Militares se Expresan, Veteranos por la Paz y varias asociaciones pacifistas se presentaron en apoyo a los promotores de la iniciativa.
Hutto y Madden han dicho que al enterarse de la historia de la resistencia de soldados disidentes en Vietnam, descubrieron la táctica para manifestar la creciente oposición a la guerra entre sus compañeros.
No es la primera expresión de disidencia en el ámbito militar. De hecho, varios generales y almirantes retirados se habían pronunciado abiertamente contra el manejo de la guerra del presidente George W. Bush a lo largo de los últimos meses, al intensificarse el debate nacional sobre el conflicto.
Los dos generales encargados de la guerra recién sustituidos por Bush habían dicho que existía consenso absoluto entre los comandantes en el campo de batalla de Irak de que un incremento del número de tropas no es una solución viable.
Pero también entre los rangos más bajos hay descontento, lo que cada vez se expresa más en público. Se conocen casos de soldados que rehusaron cumplir órdenes en Irak, y de familias de reservistas que enviaron miles de firmas en protesta por los turnos de combate extendidos.
Hay versiones de constantes deserciones, de soldados que han escapado para esconderse en Canadá, y casos de militares que han declarado que no pueden cumplir con órdenes por razones de principios.
Uno de ellos, el teniente del ejército Ehren Watada, quien en menos de un mes enfrentará un juicio militar por rehusarse a ser enviado a Irak, que considera "una guerra ilegal" y que su participación lo obligaría a cometer "crímenes de guerra", ha estado instando al público a expresar su repudio a la política bélica de Bush.
"El pueblo estadunidense tiene el poder para poner un alto a esta guerra", declaró la semana pasada en un foro en una universidad de Seattle. "Los argumentos empleados en mi contra son los mismos que usaron hace 30 años. Vietnam es ahora Irak".
17 de enero de 2007
Impeach Bush Now
Full page Impeach Bush ad in today's New York Times!
Please take action today:
Today's New York Times carries the full page ad calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush (Jan. 12, 2007). Congratulations to all members of ImpeachBush/VoteToImpeach.org who helped place this New York Times ad. This is the third full-page impeachment ad to run in the New York Times. With everyone's support, we have also placed ads in the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, USA Today, and other newspapers around the country.
The timing for the ad is excellent. Coming 36 hours after Bush brazenly announced an expansion of his criminal war and occupation in Iraq, the country is seething with anger. Because Bush remains in office, thus far escaping impeachment, thousands more Iraqis and U.S. soldiers will be killed and wounded in a war that should never have happened.
We want to seize the momentum and place the ad in various other newspapers. We will also be having a major impeachment contingent on March 17, the 4th anniversary of the war in Iraq, at the March on the Pentagon in Washington DC. We can place more ads and organize the nationwide grassroots campaign, including this contingent, with everyone's continued support and commitment to ImpeachBush.org. If you can help, click here.
The danger that Bush poses is extreme. His speech of Wednesday night, directly in opposition to the wishes of the American people, not only announced his plan to deepen the war in Iraq, but made clear his direct threat to attack Syria and Iran. Impeachment is imperative. Congress must act before more and more are killed and before Bush's war spreads into other countries. We cannot wait two more years.
The danger that Bush poses is extreme. His speech of Wednesday night, directly in opposition to the wishes of the American people, not only announced his plan to deepen the war in Iraq, but made clear his direct threat to attack Syria and Iran. Impeachment is imperative. Congress must act before more and more are killed and before Bush's war spreads into other countries. We cannot wait two more years.
Please take action today:
1. Forward this email to all of your lists and your friends and families. You can do so by clicking here.
2. Be sure to sign the referendum for impeachment and get everyone you know to sign it too. We will be announcing the new calendar and plan of action shortly to everyone who has signed up. People throughout the United States are now openly and frequently discussing the possibility of impeachment and urging their Congressional representatives to take the right step. The letters to the editor and full page ads that you have worked to place have forced the mass media to acknowledge that impeachment is a real issue for this President. Check your email in the coming days for announcements of the next steps and actions, and be sure to get as many as you can to sign the referendum and get involved.
2. Be sure to sign the referendum for impeachment and get everyone you know to sign it too. We will be announcing the new calendar and plan of action shortly to everyone who has signed up. People throughout the United States are now openly and frequently discussing the possibility of impeachment and urging their Congressional representatives to take the right step. The letters to the editor and full page ads that you have worked to place have forced the mass media to acknowledge that impeachment is a real issue for this President. Check your email in the coming days for announcements of the next steps and actions, and be sure to get as many as you can to sign the referendum and get involved.
All of us at ImpeachBush/VotetoImpeach.org
Video: Horribles escenas de las tropas nortemaericanas en Irak
Este video muestra a lo qeu se atienen las tropas del ejército estadounidense destacadas en Irak prácticamente todos los días. El video puede parecer un poco fuerte para nosotros desde nuestra pantalla..., imagínate vivirlo en carne propia. ¡Que regresen las tropas ahora! -MCG
Group Delivers Appeal For Iraq Withdrawal To Congress
WASHINGTON -- A group of military officers and their families rallied on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, calling for an end to what they call the "occupation of Iraq."
The group hand delivered an appeal to Congress to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq from more than 1,000 active-duty troops.
A Bethesda, Md., woman whose son died in Iraq last year was among the protestors who spoke to the crowd.
"We must stop this escalation," Gilda Carbonaro said. "We must bring these children home. They're our children. We must do what we haven't done before. We must pay attention. We must demand that Congress bring them home."
Carbonaro's son Alex is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was killed when his Humvee rolled over an explosive device last May. It was his second tour of duty in Iraq.
16 de enero de 2007
En Kabul nuevo secretario estadounidense de defensa
KABUL, 16 enero (PL) —. El nuevo secretario estadounidense de defensa, Robert Gates, llegó a esta capital para examinar con la administración afgana y los mandos militares las incontrolables acciones de la resistencia y la inseguridad en esta nación.
De acuerdo con el general Tom Collins, portavoz del Pentágono, Gate se entrevistará durante su breve estancia en Kabul con el presidente Hamid Karzai y oficiales de alto rango de Estados Unidos y la OTAN.
El jefe del Pentágono será informado sobre la precaria situación de seguridad, la sostenida lucha de la insurgencia afgana y las dificultades para estabilizar y controlar el territorio musulmán centroasiático, en especial la región sureña.
Más de cuatro mil personas, incluidas mil 500 civiles, murieron en el 2006 en enfrentamientos y atentados. También perdieron la vida más de 190 soldados extranjeros, más que en ningún año desde la invasión de Estados Unidos en octubre del 2001.
Gates, quien fue director de la Agencia Central de Inteligencia, arribó a esta populosa urbe islámica desde Bruselas, donde se reunió con el secretario general de la OTAN, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
La Fuerza para la Asistencia a la Seguridad (ISAF), comandada por la OTAN cuenta con 32 000 efectivos después de asumir en 2006 el control sobre la seguridad en todo el territorio afgano, tras la incapacidad de las tropas norteamericanas.
El Gobierno iraquí muestra el vídeo de la ejecución de los colaboradores de Sadam
BAGDAD | AUYA.- El Gobierno iraquí ha mostrado a un grupo reducido de periodistas las imágenes sin sonido de la ejecución de Barzan al Tikriti y Auad al Bandar, colaboradores del ex dictador Sadam Husein. No se prevé que la grabación se difunda en público.
Según quienes estuvieron presentes en la proyección, las imágenes muestran a Al Tikriti, hermanastro de Sadam y ex jefe de los servicios de espionaje, y Al Bandar, antiguo presidente de la Tribunal Revolucionario, vestidos de rojo, con una capucha en la cabeza y aparentemente asustados.
Varios verdugos, también encapuchados, los conducen al lugar de la ejecución, que aparentemente es el mismo donde fue ejecutado Sadam el pasado 30 de diciembre.
Al Bandar (izq.) y Al Tikriti. (Foto: EFE)
El cuerpo de Al Tikriti —enfermo de cáncer desde hace al menos un año— se separó de la cabeza y cayó al suelo sobre un charco de sangre, mientras que el cadáver de Al Bandar permaneció colgado de la soga.
Según el Gobierno iraquí, durante la ejecución no se reprodujeron los insultos que crearon polémica en el ajusticiamiento del ex dictador.
A las 03.00, hora local, "y de acuerdo con la Constitución y la Ley de Ordenamiento Judicial", Al Tikriti y Al Bandar —condenados el pasado 5 de noviembre— fueron ahorcados en presencia de un número reducido de personas , según anunció horas después el portavoz del Ejecutivo, Ali al Dabag, que tuvo que firmar un compromiso para respetar a los reos y la ley.
Ambos fueron enterrados unas horas más tarde en un jardín en la localidad de Auya, junto a la tumba de Sadam, después de que sus cadáveres fueran trasladados a una base militar estadounidense y entregados a las autoridades locales.
Al Tikriti era jefe de los servicios de espionaje en 1982, mientras que Al Bandar presidía el tribunal que juzgó y condenó a muerte en un juicio sumarísimo a 148 chiíes de la aldea de Duyail por su implicación en el asesinato fallido contra el entonces presidente del país árabe.
Yafar al Musawi, que fue el fiscal del 'caso Duyail' y estuvo en la ejecución, afirmó en declaraciones a una radio iraquí que Al Tikriti tuvo un último momento de debilidad y gritó "yo no hice nada, fue todo cosa de Fadel al Barrak", en alusión a otro alto funcionario de los servicios de espionaje en aquella época.
Por: Agencias
La ONU calcula que 34.452 civiles han muerto y otros 36.000 fueron heridos en Irak en 2006
BAGDAD | GINEBRA.- La ONU ha puesto cifras a la violencia que azota a Irak. Según sus datos, 34.452 civiles murieron en 2006 y otros 36.000 resultaron heridos. Sólo entre los meses de noviembre y diciembre, 6.736 iraquíes fueron asesinados, 4.731 de ellos en Bagdad.
El responsable de derechos humanos de la ONU en Irak, Gianni Magazzeni, acusa al Gobierno iraquí de no facilitar la seguridad y culpa de parte de la violencia a las milicias.
"Las autoridades competentes no proporcionan protección efectiva a la población de Irak", declaró Magazzeni, añadiendo que hay milicias que "actúan en connivencia o que se han infiltrado" en las fuerzas de seguridad.
Las cifras aportadas por la ONU son mucho más elevadas que cualquier estadística aportada por los funcionarios del Gobierno iraquí. El propio Ejecutivo calificó el último informe bimensual de la ONU de noviembre de extremadamente exagerado y prohibió hacer públicos datos sobre este asunto.
El informe, que se basa en datos de los hospitales y las morgues, muestra un ligero descenso en el número de víctimas mortales durante los dos últimos meses del año, con 6.376 fallecidos. Es decir, en noviembre y diciembre hubo una media de 105 muertos al día. Mientras, en los dos meses anteriores murieron 7.054 civiles.
Al presentar en Ginebra las conclusiones del informe, el portavoz del Alto Comisionado de la ONU para los Derechos Humanos (ACDH), José Díaz, precisó que esas cifras no incluyen a miembros iraquíes de las fuerzas de seguridad muertos en esos ataques. "La situación es particularmente grave en Bagdad, donde la mayoría de víctimas y cuerpos no identificados que se encuentran diariamente también presentan signos de tortura", agregó.
La ONU insta a reforzar el Estado de Derecho
El informe sobre Irak subraya que "las causas más profundas de la violencia sectaria tienen que ver con asesinatos por venganza, con la ausencia de castigo a los responsables de esos crímenes y con la creciente sensación de impunidad ante las violaciones de los derechos humanos".
Frente a la escalada de violencia en el país árabe, que se agravó tras los ataques suníes contra un mausoleo sagrado chií en Samarra, en febrero de 2006, el informe apunta que un nuevo plan de seguridad para Irak sólo tendrá un efecto real si, al mismo tiempo, hay una reforma que refuerce el Estado de Derecho y de acceso a todos los iraquíes a la justicia.
El informe también hace hincapié en la necesidad de que tanto las fuerzas de la coalición en Irak, lideradas por EEUU, como las fuerzas de seguridad iraquíes, respeten las normas internacionales de derechos humanos en las operaciones que realizan en las distintas provincias del país.
La ONU recuerda finalmente que hay 30.842 detenidos iraquíes bajo su control, a los que no se les ha imputado cargo alguno.
Por: Agencias
Varias explosiones en una universidad y un mercado dejan 70 muertos en Irak
BAGDAD.- Al menos 70 personas han muerto y 117 resultaron heridas en dos atentados perpetrados en el este de Bagdad, uno de ellos en las inmediaciones de una universidad, según informaron fuentes del ministerio iraquí del Interior.
En el ataque más sangriento, al menos 60 personas murieron y 110 resultaron heridas en un doble atentado cerca de la Universidad de Al Mustansariya, en el este de Bagdad.
Según las fuentes, primero explotó un coche-bomba que se encontraba aparcado y cinco minutos después un suicida con un cinturón de explosivos se inmoló en la puerta trasera de la Universidad.
Las fuentes explicaron que las explosiones ocurrieron cuando los estudiantes salían de la universidad. Entre los heridos hay alumnos, profesores, miembros de la seguridad del campus y civiles que se encontraban en el lugar en el momento de los hechos.
Nuevo ataque en un mercado
Otras diez personas perdieron la vida y siete más resultaron heridas cuando un grupo de hombres armados con metralletas dispararon indiscriminadamente contra la gente que hacía sus compras en un mercado popular.
Según dijeron las fuentes, en este último ataque, los agresores dispararon desde dos motocicletas y un microbús en marcha, mientras atravesaban el mercado Al Bunuq.
Con estos últimos ataques, son ya cinco los atentados que han sacudidoeste martes la ciudad de Bagdad. Justo, el día en el que las Naciones Unidas han hecho público un informe en el que cifran los muertos civiles en Irak durante 2006 en 34.452.
Horas antes una bomba colocada en un minibús en el barrio chií de Ciudad Sadr, en el este de la capital, dejó al menos cuatro muertos y once heridos.
Otras quince personas fallecieron y decenas más resultaron heridas por la explosión de dos artefactos en una mezquita de un barrio suní en el centro de Bagdad.
Además, cuatro civiles perdieron la vida y diez resultaron heridos por el estallido de otro artefacto explosivo, también, en el centro de la capital, según fuentes de la policía iraquí.
Por: EFE
15 de enero de 2007
Pentágono anuncia extender indefinidamente las veces que la Guardia Nacional o la Reserva es movilizada
Madres Contra la Guerra
COMUNICADO DE PRENSA
Pentágono anuncia extender indefinidamente las veces que la Guardia Nacional o la Reserva es movilizada
12 de enero de 2007
Puerto Rico - Madres Contra la Guerra denuncia la decisión del Pentágono de extender indefinidamente las veces que un efectivo militar de la Guardia Nacional y/o de la Reserva puede servir en servicio activo. El General Peter Pace, a cargo del " Joint Chiefs of Staff" anunció que esta medida se ha tomado porque las tropas activas están teniendo poco tiempo de descanso entre asignaciones a zonas de guerra. Lo que esto significa concretamente, es que se puede enviar a miembros de la Guardia Nacional o de la Reserva a zonas de guerra en incontables ocasiones. Hasta ahora, sólo se les podía enviar hasta un máximo de 24 meses. El único límite que se establece en ello es que las movilizaciones no pueden exceder 24 meses. En términos prácticos, ahora se les podrá movilizar por 24 meses, desmovilizarlos a que retornen a su vida civil junto a su familia al cumplirse ese término y luego volver a enviarlos en zonas de guerra . El costo de todo este movimiento excede los8 mil millones de dólares, que sale del erario público, mientras los bolsillos de los más de 100,000 contratistas que hacen negocio en Irak se enriquecen .
Mientras eso ocurre, a miembros de una brigada de la Guardia Nacional de Minnesota se les ha extendido su estadía en Irak a 125 días adicionales. El impacto social, psicológico no solo para el militar , sino también a sus familiares . Se afecta, además , la economía del estado porque ese empleo no puede ser ocupado mientras el miembro de la GN está en servicio activo.
Adicionalmente, el Pentágono anunció que va a aumentar el número de efectivos militares del Ejército de 65,000 a 547,000 y de la Marina de Guerra de 27,000 a 202,000 en los próximos sesenta meses, lo que acrecenta un estado institucionalizado de violencia y militarización de Estados Unidos, con un presupuesto militar 4 veces mayor que el de Japón, el segundo a nivel mundial.
Continuaremos los esfuerzos por evitar que otras familias pasen por el horror de tener un hijo o hija en la guerra: no al reclutamiento.
Sonia Santiago Hernández,
Portavoz MCG
Continuaremos los esfuerzos por evitar que otras familias pasen por el horror de tener un hijo o hija en la guerra: no al reclutamiento.
Sonia Santiago Hernández,
Portavoz MCG
6 de enero de 2007
Cuanto vale la vida de un soldado?
El Ejército de EE UU envía cartas a 300 soldados fallecidos o heridos en
Irak para que vuelvan a filas
Por: Agencias
Fecha de publicación: 06/01/07
El Ejército estadounidense ha pedido disculpas a las familias de cerca de
300 soldados fallecidos o heridos en combate, que recibieron por error una
serie de cartas en las que se les obligaba a regresar al servicio activo.
Para colmo de despropósitos, las misivas fueron enviadas días antes de
Navidad.
Les llegaron a más de 5.100 soldados que habían abandonado el servicio,
entre los que se incluían 75 muertos en combate y cerca de 200 heridos a
consecuencia de los enfrentamientos en Irak. "Personal del Ejército se está
poniendo en contacto con las familias de los oficiales para disculparse
personalmente por mandar las cartas por equivocación", señala el mando
estadounidenses en un comunicado enviado la madrugada del sábado. El
Ejército no ha explicado todavía cómo o cuándo se descubrió el error, pero
se ha apresurado a aclarar que la base de datos que registra la condición de
los oficiales que se encuentran de baja en el servicio activo está siendo
"cuidadosamente examinada" para eliminar los nombres de los fallecidos.
Este error se produce mientras se está a la espera del anuncio de un cambio
de estrategia en irak por parte del presidente de EE UU, George W. Bush. Los
analistas apuntan a que, tras recibir el informe de la comisión de expertos,
el presidente opte por un aumento del envío de tropas. Una tesis con la que
no están de acuerdo los principales líderes demócratas del Congreso de EE
UU, que instaron ayer a Bush a que busque una solución política al conflicto
en Irak.
http://www.aporrea.org/internacionales/n88778.html
Irak para que vuelvan a filas
Por: Agencias
Fecha de publicación: 06/01/07
El Ejército estadounidense ha pedido disculpas a las familias de cerca de
300 soldados fallecidos o heridos en combate, que recibieron por error una
serie de cartas en las que se les obligaba a regresar al servicio activo.
Para colmo de despropósitos, las misivas fueron enviadas días antes de
Navidad.
Les llegaron a más de 5.100 soldados que habían abandonado el servicio,
entre los que se incluían 75 muertos en combate y cerca de 200 heridos a
consecuencia de los enfrentamientos en Irak. "Personal del Ejército se está
poniendo en contacto con las familias de los oficiales para disculparse
personalmente por mandar las cartas por equivocación", señala el mando
estadounidenses en un comunicado enviado la madrugada del sábado. El
Ejército no ha explicado todavía cómo o cuándo se descubrió el error, pero
se ha apresurado a aclarar que la base de datos que registra la condición de
los oficiales que se encuentran de baja en el servicio activo está siendo
"cuidadosamente examinada" para eliminar los nombres de los fallecidos.
Este error se produce mientras se está a la espera del anuncio de un cambio
de estrategia en irak por parte del presidente de EE UU, George W. Bush. Los
analistas apuntan a que, tras recibir el informe de la comisión de expertos,
el presidente opte por un aumento del envío de tropas. Una tesis con la que
no están de acuerdo los principales líderes demócratas del Congreso de EE
UU, que instaron ayer a Bush a que busque una solución política al conflicto
en Irak.
http://www.aporrea.org/internacionales/n88778.html
Gobernador se limpia las manos ante muerte de soldados boricuas: Hoy piquete frente a las oficinas de reclutamiento en Mayagüez
Madres Contra la Guerra
COMUNICADO DE PRENSA
Sonia Santiago Hernández,
portavoz Madres Contra la Guerra
COMUNICADO DE PRENSA
Gobernador se limpia las manos ante muertes de soldados boricuas en Irak
Mayagüez, Puerto Rico (5 de enero de 2007) – Estudiantes de la Facultad de Derecho Eugenio María de Hostos y la organización Madres Contra la Guerra han reaccionado indignados ante una misiva enviada a los estudiantes en la cual el gobernador Aníbal Acevedo Vilá se lava las manos ante los terribles acontecimientos en Irak al no querer exigir el regreso de los soldados boricuas destacados en aquel país.
El gobernador indica en la carta que lamenta disentir de los estudiantes ante la situación en Irak ya que "el servicio militar es uno totalmente voluntario y el que no quiere ir a la guerra no va".
La misiva del gobernador haciendo estas declaraciones responde a una iniciativa de varias organizaciones estudiantiles como los Estudiantes de Derecho Hostosianos Pro Independencia (EDHPI) y la Asociación Nacional de Estudiantes de Derecho (ANED) de exigirle al primer ejecutivo que pida el retorno inmediato de los soldados boricuas destacados en combate.
El pasado mes de diciembre ha sido catalogado como el más sangriento desde la invasión estadounidense a Irak en el año 2003. Se estima que más de 3,000 soldados estadounidenses han muerto y que unos 700,000 iraquíes han sido asesinados a raíz del conflicto. Tomando en consideración lo inmoral e injusto de este conflicto armado hemos reclamado al gobierno de Puerto Rico y al gobernador Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, que exija el inmediato retorno de los soldados puertorriqueños destacados en Irak. Como representante máximo de nuestro pueblo y como parte de sus funciones ejecutivas, que es velar por los mejores intereses del país, le corresponde al gobernador, además de las manifestaciones contundentes de nuestro pueblo, hacer este llamado urgente.
"Las declaraciones del gobernador son unas muy irresponsables y desatinadas. El afirmar que el servir en el ejército es un ejercicio totalmente voluntario es una declaración irresponsable y enajenada de toda realidad. En un país en donde tanto el nivel de pobreza y de analfabetismo sobrepasan el 50% y en donde existe una taza de desempleo de aproximadamente un 20% no existe tal elemento de voluntariedad para servir en el inmoral ejercito de los Estados Unidos" dijo César J. Pérez Lizasuain portavoz de Estudiantes de Derecho Pro Independencia (EDHPI).
A su vez Sonia Santiago, portavoz de Madres Contra la Guerra, aseveró que "no cejaremos en nuestro compromiso de luchar por los derechos humanos y civiles de los soldados y en la lucha por evitar que otras familias pasen por el calvario de tener un hijo o hija en la guerra: a la juventud que no se enlisten y a los militares que soliciten la objeción por conciencia"
Por su parte, Carlos Cruz Carrión, Presidente de Asociación Nacional de Estudiantes de Derecho-Hostos aseguró que "El gobernador ha mostrado nuevamente su vocacióncolonial y su insensibilidad con los soldados puertorriqueños y sus familias. Es una vergüenza que tengamos a un gobernador tan cobarde".
La organización Madres Contra la Guerra y la EDHPI se unen en la "truyita de Reyes " hoy viernes 5 de enero en una manifestación en contra del reclutamiento militar en el Centro Comercial Town Center en Mayagüez empezando al mediodía (12:00pm).
Sonia Santiago Hernández,
portavoz Madres Contra la Guerra
5 de enero de 2007
Publicación de documentos que revelan malos tratos en Guantánamo
EFE
WASHINGTON.- La Oficina Federal de Investigaciones (FBI) ha difundido varios documentos sobre malos tratos y técnicas de interrogatorio a prisioneros presenciados por sus agentes en la base naval estadounidense de Guantánamo (Cuba), donde hay detenidos sospechosos de terrorismo.
Los documentos, que describen informes de al menos 25 agentes del FBI, fueron difundidos a solicitud de la Unión de Libertades Civiles Americanas (ACLU), que ha demandado al ex secretario de Defensa, Donald Rumsfeld, en nombre de las víctimas de esos malos tratos.
"En varias ocasiones los testigos vieron a los detenidos en las salas de interrogatorio encadenados de manos y pies y en posición fetal sin agua ni alimentos . La mayoría defecaron o se orinaron y quedaron abandonados allí 18, 24 horas o más", según uno de los documentos.
Uno de los agentes del FBI dijo haber visto a un prisionero "temblando de frío" y a otro en una habitación caliente y sin ventilación "casi inconsciente sobre el suelo y un montón de pelo a su lado", aparentemente que él mismo se había extraído durante la noche.
Los informes también describen a una mujer encargada de la guardia quien, según uno de los detenidos, apretó sus genitales y le empapó la cara con sangre de su menstruación.
Prácticas aprobadas por Defensa
Algunos militares y contratistas dijeron a los agentes del FBI que las técnicas de interrogatorio habían sido aprobadas por el Departamento de Defensa, hasta noviembre pasado a cargo de Rumsfeld. El FBI afirmó que muchos de los incidentes ya habían sido revelados previamente y estaban en conocimiento del Departamento de Defensa.
Por otra parte, añadió que había investigado a casi 500 agentes asignados a Guantánamo desde los atentados del 11 de septiembre del 2001 y determinó que ninguno de ellos había participado en ese tipo de interrogatorios.
"Esta extensa evaluación interna demuestra que el FBI no estuvo involucrado en este tipo de actividades, de ninguna manera", dijo Richard Kolko, portavoz de la agencia federal.
En Guantánamo hay alrededor de 400 detenidos, que el Gobierno estadounidense considera "combatientes enemigos". La mayoría fueron capturados en Afganistán e Irak después de los atentados del 11-S.
El comandante Joe Carpenter, portavoz del Pentágono, señaló que los problemas que se plantean en los informes no son nuevos y que una docena de revisiones de los métodos utilizados en Guantánamo ha establecido que no existe una política que permita los abusos. No obstante, señaló que entre los detenidos de Guantánamo se incluyen "algunos de los terroristas más salvajes".
"La política del Departamento de Defensa es clara. Tratamos a los detenidos de manera humana. Estados Unidos cuenta con centros de detención seguros, humanos y profesionales para los combatientes enemigos que entregan valiosa información en la guerra contra el terrorismo", agregó.
Sin embargo, según Jameel Jaffer, abogado de ACLU, los documentos demuestran que el Congreso debe supervisar de manera más estrecha esas actividades en Guantánamo. "Si uno autoriza de forma vaga, no habrá fin a los métodos abusivos que usen los interrogadores", añadió.
Nueva estrategia en Irak
¿Nueva estrategia en Irak es un aumento de tropas? -MCG
Washington - El presidente estadounidense, George W. Bush, anunció hoy que dará a conocer los principios de su nueva estrategia para la guerra en Irak la próxima semana.
Bush hizo el anuncio después de reunirse con la canciller alemana, Angela Merkel, en la Casa Blanca.
"Estaré listo para detallar la estrategia que ayudará a los iraquíes a lograr el objetivo de un país que puede gobernarse, sustentarse y defenderse a sí mismo en algún momento de la próxima semana. Aún debo realizar algunas consultas", dijo el presidente de EE.UU.
"Una cosa es segura: Quiero garantizar que la misión está clara y es específica, y que puede ser alcanzada", añadió Bush.
En los últimos días se ha filtrado a la prensa que ese plan prevé un aumento de entre 15,000 y 30,000 tropas del contingente de 140,000 que actualmente está presente en el país mesopotámico.
El mandatario también se refirió al juicio y a la ejecución de Saddam Hussein el pasado 30 de diciembre. "Hubiera deseado, obviamente, que el proceso hubiera sido más digno", afirmó Bush, pero recalcó que juicio fue "justo".
Bush alabó a Merkel por su apoyo a las sanciones contra Teherán aprobadas por unanimidad por el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU el mes pasado.
"Fue un mensaje importante enviado a Irán de que el mundo libre quiere que haya un futuro pacífico, pero no vemos un futuro pacífico con los iraníes desarrollando un arma nuclear", dijo Bush.
La resolución prohíbe suministrar material y tecnología que Teherán pueda utilizar para sus programas nucleares y de misiles.
Las autoridades de Irán insisten en que su objetivo es producir energía nuclear con fines pacíficos.
Merkel llegó hoy mismo a Washington para una visita relámpago a la capital de EE.UU., su tercera desde que asumiera el cargo hace algo más de un año.
Alemania ha asumido esta semana la presidencia del G-8 para este año, así como la presidencia semestral de la Unión Europea.
Niño muere imitando ejecución de Saddam
Washington - Un niño de origen guatemalteco murió en Houston (Texas) cuando aparentemente trataba de imitar la ejecución del ex gobernante iraquí Saddam Hussein, informa hoy el diario "The Houston Chronicle".
El periódico citó declaraciones del portavoz de la policía del condado de Webster, Tom Claunch, quien dijo que el cuerpo del niño de 10 años, identificado como Sergio Pelico, fue encontrado en la mañana del pasado domingo.
Claunch manifestó que la madre del menor declaró que antes de ahorcarse Sergio había visto las noticias sobre la ejecución de Saddam Hussein un día antes.
"Creemos que se trata de un accidente. Pensamos que (el niño) estaba experimentando", dijo Claunch, según "The Houston Chronicle".
El diario también citó declaraciones del psicólogo Edward Bischof, quien dijo que el menor, que cursaba el quinto grado en la Escuela Elemental de Clear Lake City, posiblemente tratara de "imitar" un comportamiento mostrado por la televisión que le pareció interesante o emocionante.
"Creo que tal vez este niño haya estado tratando de hacer algo que le pareció entretenido sin la madurez emocional o psicológica de pensar lo que hacía", añadió.
"Saddam Hussein fue mostrado (por la televisión de cable) de pie en el cadalso con el nudo alrededor de su cuello una docena de veces por hora. Este es un caso real en el que la televisión parece haber sido un estimulante", añadió.
Uno de los tíos del muchacho anunció que la familia reúne dinero para enviar su cuerpo a Guatemala.
4 de enero de 2007
Aumenta la oposición a la guerra entre los militares
by Marc Cooper
The Nation - from the January 8, 2007 issue
posted December 20, 2006
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/cooper
Mark Dearden chooses his words with extreme precision.
And not just with the deliberateness of a 36-year-old
with a BA from Brigham Young, an MA in public health
from Tulane and an MD from George Washington University.
Dearden is also an active-duty lieutenant commander in
the Navy who joined in 1997 and is still considering the
possibility of a lifetime military career. "So this was
a very difficult decision for me to come to," he says in
a quiet, thoughtful voice. "I don't take this decision
lightly."
Nor should he. Just a few weeks ago Dearden took the
dramatic step of signing a petition to Congress--what's
being called by its organizers an Appeal for Redress--
opposing the war in Iraq and calling for the withdrawal
of US troops. When the Appeal is delivered to Capitol
Hill in mid-January, all the names of its almost 1,000
uniformed endorsers will be seen by members of Congress,
if they care to look. But with his Nation interview,
Dearden is now going public. And while the military
cannot take reprisals against those who have supported
the Appeal, many of the signers agree that there are an
infinite number of ways they can be punished, including
internal evaluations, denial of promotions and harsh
assignments or postings. "I'm expressing a right of
people in the military to contact their elected
representatives, and I have done nothing illegal or
disrespectful," says Dearden, now an anesthesiology
resident at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. After
two tours in Iraq attached to a Marine battalion,
including participation in the initial 2003 invasion,
Dearden says that signing the Appeal gave him "closure"
on what he describes as very tough deployments. "It gave
me peace," he says.
Dearden has indeed joined the most significant movement
of organized and dissident GIs seen in America since
1969, when 1,366 active-duty service members signed a
full-page ad in the New York Times calling for an end to
the Vietnam War. The Appeal for Redress, surfacing only
in late October, has taken anti-Iraq War sentiment
that's been simmering within the ranks and surfaced it
as a mainstream plea backed by the enormous moral
authority of active-duty personnel. It's an undeniable
barometer of rising military dissent and provides a
strong argument that the best way to support the troops
is to recognize their demand to be withdrawn from Iraq.
While clearly inspired by the GI movement of the Vietnam
era, it takes a much different tack. Instead of
attacking or confronting the military, as the resistance
movement of the 1960s often did, the Appeal works within
the military's legal framework.
The Appeal was posted as a simple three-sentence
statement on a website managed by a Navy seaman:
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in
uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in
Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all
American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in
Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is
time for U.S. troops to come home.
The Appeal comes as the natural culmination of previous
flickerings of military discontent with official Iraq
policy. The bogging down of the war, along with the Bush
Administration's use of a "backdoor draft"--the
extension of tours of duty and an unprecedented call-up
of active and inactive reserves--has stoked the
discontent. Two years ago, some two dozen Army
reservists refused to carry out a supply mission in
Iraq, complaining that their vehicles were unsafe.
Twenty Florida National Guard members petitioned their
commanders to bring the troops home. In Kansas, Army
reserve family members collected 8,000 signatures on a
website protesting extended tours. While figures are
difficult to confirm, counselors at the GI Rights
Hotline estimate that as many as 1,000 or more troops
and reservists go AWOL every month, not wanting to serve
in Iraq. About 200 to 300 have fled to Canada, according
to military rights lawyers. And in a half-dozen or so
high-profile cases, uniformed personnel are facing
court-martial and jail for refusing deployment to Iraq.
Therein resides the power of the Appeal for Redress. Its
signers don't marginalize themselves as lawbreakers,
resisters or deserters. Potential signers have been
assured they are sending a communication to Congress
protected under the Military Whistleblower Protection
Act and will not be subject to reprisal. The result has
been electrifying. In the two months since it surfaced,
almost three times as many people have signed it as are
members of the two-year-old Iraq Veterans Against the
War. Almost three-quarters of the signers are active
duty (the rest are reserves), and include several dozen
officers, of whom a handful are colonels.
Interviews with more than two dozen signers, both in
Iraq and on domestic US military bases from Fort Stewart
in the east to Hawaii's Hickam Air Force Base, reveal a
movement that includes low-level grunts and high-ranking
officers, as well as a rich diversity of racial,
economic and educational backgrounds. The signers
offered a variety of motivations--ideological,
practical, strategic and moral--but all agreed the war
was no longer worth fighting and that the troops should
be brought home. As the debate on Iraq sharpens in the
wake of the Baker-Hamilton report and as a new
Democratic Congress is seated, the collective voice of
active-duty opponents of the war is likely to add
considerable clout to the antiwar movement.
This Martin Luther King holiday weekend, members of the
Appeal will appear on Capitol Hill to formally present
the petition to Congress to press their case. For an
all-volunteer force, says Eugene Fidell, president of
the National Institute of Military Justice, "it's simply
unprecedented."
The genius of the Appeal resides not only in its
simplicity but also in its nonconfrontational tone.
"This is not about resistance. This is about working
inside the democratic process," says lawyer J.E. McNeil,
who helps run the GI Rights Hotline and who has helped
advise the Appeal organizers. "This is about being proud
of being a soldier, an airman or a marine, about being
proud of your duty without giving up your rights as a
citizen."
This was certainly the attraction for Dearden and for
many other signers interviewed. "I love the military,"
Dearden says. "I was thrilled to find this legal outlet
for what I felt. If more active duty knew there were
legal and respectful ways to make their opinion known,
they would eagerly join."
The inspiration to create the Appeal came to 29-year-old
Seaman Jonathan Hutto earlier this year while he was
floating off Iraq on the aircraft carrier Theodore
Roosevelt. Born into an Atlanta family of civil rights
activists, a former student body president at Howard
University, and someone who had worked with Amnesty
International and the ACLU, Hutto was not the most
typical of Navy enlistees when he joined up in 2003. But
with $48,000 in student loans to pay off and with a
young child to support, he thought the Navy would be a
"good transition."
As the war in Iraq worsened, Hutto felt he could no
longer maintain his silence. He had an impeccable
service record, having been named "sailor of the
quarter" among his junior enlisted shipmates. But he had
to do something to come out against a war he thought
immoral and unnecessary. That's when one of his former
professors sent him a thirty-year anniversary copy of
Soldiers in Revolt by David Cortright. Now a Notre Dame
professor and one of America's leading peace activists,
Cortright wrote his book as a chronicle of the 1960s GI
movement he helped to found. "The title alone just hit
me," says Hutto, as we talk in a Washington-area
coffeehouse, on a day he's off duty from his Norfolk
base. "This was all new to me. And I got to thinking,
What's to prevent active-duty folks from doing the same
sort of thing right now?"
Hutto immediately contacted Cortright and started
talking over the idea of the Appeal with a few close
friends. Last June Hutto organized a Friday night
screening of the antiwar documentary Sir! No Sir! at the
local YMCA just off the Norfolk naval base. Filmmaker
David Zeiger's documentary reconstructs the GI movement
of the Vietnam era. Cortright came as guest speaker and
found a receptive crowd of about seventy-five.
One of those who attended the talk was 22-year-old Liam
Madden, who had joined the Marines in 2002. "I was
visiting a friend in Norfolk and thought we were going
to a bar," he remembers. Instead, his buddy took him to
the YMCA event and they caught the last half of
Cortright's speech. Madden had already completed an Iraq
tour in Anbar province with an all-reserve unit and had
come back disillusioned with the war. "If anything, it
convinced me that no tangible results could be achieved
in Iraq," he says. "No one was safer. No one was happier
because we were there."
Hutto, Madden, Cortright and a few others moved ahead
with the idea of the Appeal. On October 29 Hutto
published an op-ed piece announcing it in the Navy
Times. Three days earlier the Appeal had appeared on the
Web.
"Amazing," is how Cortright describes the chain of
events that grew out of that YMCA meeting. "That
encounter alone was one of the most fascinating moments
of my last thirty-five years," he says over lunch in
Washington. "Even I wasn't prepared for the depth and
intensity of feeling against this war by so many active-
duty members. I'm stunned. It's been moving so fast we
can barely think it through."
Cortright sees an enhanced if not central political role
for the rising active-duty movement. "They have been
there and seen it, seen the disaster," he says. "It's
much more real for them than for others in the peace
movement. MoveOn and other groups got focused on the
election while vets, families and active-duty folks are
still suffering the burdens of the war." He adds, "Some
of our liberal friends will again soon start focusing on
the '08 election. So these active-duty folks over the
next two years could become a key force in pushing for
withdrawal."
The most compelling voices among the active dissenters
who have signed the Appeal are those of troops still on
the front lines in Iraq. Among them is a thirtysomething
Army major, a Distinguished Military Graduate from a
prestigious Southern university. Now on his second tour,
"Major Frank," as I will call him, was first deployed to
Baghdad just weeks after the 2003 invasion. "I believed
wholeheartedly in the mission to oust Saddam Hussein,"
he says, "and would have been proud to die liberating
Iraq from the evil dictator, because at the same time I
felt I was protecting my country and my family [from]
weapons of mass destruction."
Now, Frank says, he sees no point in the war, and no
end. His Iraqi unit is 97 percent Shiite and is
sympathetic to the extremist militia of fundamentalist
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "We are merely being used as
military pawns in a political struggle for Iraq," he
says. "So, yes! I am opposed to our brave men and women
dying every day for nothing because we cannot control
this civil war."
Frank says he can pinpoint the precise moment when he
turned against the war: last June 23. He was on patrol
with his Iraqi unit when they came upon an illegal
checkpoint set up by Sadr's Mahdi militia. The militants
were using ambulances taken from the Ministry of Health
to block the roads, thereby preventing American troops
from maneuvering. He was flabbergasted when the Iraqi
Army troops refused not only to take down the checkpoint
but also returned to the militia a number of automatic
weapons that had been seized from them by the army.
This sort of depressing reality is what prompted Frank
to sign the Appeal. "I proudly joined the Appeal for
Redress out of the sense of hopelessness that I had
inside for what we are actually doing here," he says.
He's angry with both the Bush Administration and the top
brass in Iraq. "They sit behind their desks in the Green
Zone and filter reports to their bosses. No one wants to
admit that we are failing." Frank says he's quite open
about his views, and finds overwhelming support for them
among his fellow soldiers. "Yes, yes, yes," he says, "My
entire team feels the same way I do. And the other
battalion [trainers] that I have come across feel that
way, including my commanders.... In fact, I have not had
one person in the last five months disagree with me. The
typical response is, 'I know what you mean.'"
That sentiment was, indeed, echoed by an Army officer
and signer of the Appeal who wanted to be identified
only by his real last name. Lieutenant Smith, a 24-year-
old Kansan deployed with an infantry unit in Baghdad,
joined up six years ago not only because he saw the
military as a route to pay for college but also because
he felt it was an obligation to "pay back" America for
the opportunities it affords. His doubts about the war,
strong from the beginning, only hardened. "I became very
angry after two friends from college were killed, both
in their 20s," Smith says. "I started to wonder what
they had died for. Both were killed by roadside bombs
near the area where my unit operates now. And when I
found out about them before I deployed, my outlook
changed. I started to lose any sense of satisfaction
with what I was doing for the Army because what I was
doing was in some roundabout way supporting what had
just killed two friends."
Smith says it was his stateside father-in-law who
directed him to the online Appeal. Smith had heard about
another Army lieutenant, Ehren Watada, who has been
resisting deployment to Iraq on the grounds that the war
is unconstitutional and who now faces court-martial [see
sidebar page 14]. But that was not a route he wished to
travel. "I have an antiwar history from college," Smith
says. "But I hate what Lieutenant Ehren Watada did and
the way he did it. I wanted a way to say I thought the
war was wrong without looking like a coward." At the
same time, however, Smith says that he wants his voice
to be heard. "I hope the Appeal will cement in the mind
of Congress growing unrest about the war," he says.
"Congress got a mandate from Americans that the war was
not popular, and now they can get an official mandate
from troops serving abroad that we feel the same way but
are limited in the way we can express it."
Some within the ranks have been more outspoken about
that discontent, mostly as a product of accelerated
politicization and radicalization while in uniform. Take
the case of 28-year-old Californian Ronn Cantu, an Army
sergeant stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. Both his
grandfathers served in the Army, his father was drafted
into Vietnam and Cantu himself enlisted in 1998 as a
self-described "Bush conservative."
After serving out his contract, Cantu re-enlisted in
March 2003. "I was in junior college studying journalism
but couldn't re-adjust to civilian life. And as a
journalism major I was constantly watching and reading
the news, and I got totally sold that Iraq was a threat,
that it had WMD, that it was going to erase America off
the map."
Next thing he knew, Cantu was attached to an infantry
unit in Iraq. In charge of ammo, and after making more
than 300 harrowing convoys, he had seen enough. He voted
against Bush in 2004 and now strongly opposes the war.
While still on active duty he has not only signed the
Appeal but has joined Iraq Veterans Against the War. On
its website he's a contributor of pointed essays bucking
Bush Administration policy. He's also started his own
website--soldiervoices.net--where he's running his own
freewheeling online GI forum. A firm supporter of troop
withdrawal, Cantu has nevertheless enlisted for three
more years and is currently preparing for a second tour
of Iraq. "I'm going back with a job in military
intelligence. It's a job that I think can help end the
war," he says. "Working in human intelligence, I will be
able to talk to Iraqis and that way find and hear the
truth."
A few of the antiwar dissidents lean more toward
resistance than re-enlistment. Marc Train, 19, is an
Army grunt stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and a
signer of the Appeal. A native of Salina, Kansas, Train
joined the Army right out of high school, convinced that
he had no other real career prospects.
Some of his comrades in the Third Infantry Division are
scheduled to deploy to Iraq for a staggering third tour
of duty. For Train, it will be his first--if he doesn't
refuse. He says he wasn't very political before
enlisting, but now he's been radicalized. He realizes
now he joined the Army only to get a job and that he's
grown suspicious of the Administration's motives for war
in Iraq. "I think it's all about oil," he says. Train
has made clear to his superiors that he's not happy
about deploying to Iraq and might refuse to step over
the line when the mobilization order becomes effective
in January. He's already lost the security clearance for
the intelligence job he was trained for, and he's now
enmeshed in a series of official investigations. "I want
separation from the Army because I don't want to be just
a cog in the machine. I've registered as a member of the
Socialist Party USA."
Asked whether he will refuse duty if not given the
discharge he seeks, Train answers: "That's a very strong
question for me, a very strong consideration. Right now,
I'm about 70 percent leaning toward not going."
Some expert observers of military affairs, like Robert
Hodierne, senior managing editor of Army Times
Publishing, argue that the numbers of active-duty
soldiers and sailors who have signed on to the Appeal
and expressed some sort of public dissent aren't
impressive. "Dissent of that nature represents but a
small percentage of the people in uniform," Hodierne
says, pointing out that 1.4 million serve in the armed
forces. "What we are sensing is a great deal of
disenchantment with the way the war has been fought, not
whether it is or is not an unjust war."
But Kelly Dougherty, co-chair of the board of Iraq
Veterans Against the War, who served with the Colorado
Army National Guard in Iraq in 2003-04, says that
critics like Hodierne are underestimating the level of
dissent in the ranks. "Critics will say 800 or 1,000
signers isn't significant. I think it is," she says from
her Philadelphia headquarters. "For everyone who has
heard about the Appeal there are so many dozens of
others who agree with it but have not heard about it or
agree with it but are intimidated by the military." The
military, meanwhile, has so far taken a hands-off
approach to the Appeal. None of the active-duty
personnel interviewed for this piece reported any
reprisals. "The only official word I've gotten came from
my public affairs officer," said Appeal founder Hutto.
"He told me the rules: Don't do anything while in
uniform or while on duty. And that was that."
Commander Chris Sims, spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet
Naval Air Force, says that Hutto violates no military
regulations if he's off-duty when speaking out. And
Pentagon spokesman Maj. Stewart Upton, when asked about
the Appeal, said: "Members of the armed forces are free
to communicate with Congress in a lawful manner that
doesn't violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice."
Lawyer J.E. McNeil at the GI Rights Hotline is convinced
that the benign response from the higher command
reflects the level of doubt that currently permeates the
military. "There are enough people in the military who
agree with these guys is why they are not getting much
flak," she says. "I think there's a lot of sympathy
among officers. We talk to them all the time. And while
a lot of them don't want to stand up publicly, we know
they admire those who have signed the Appeal. Admire
them and support them."
One barometer of discontent is the sheer number of calls
and inquiries that keep pouring in to the GI Rights
Hotline, holding steady for the past year at about 3,000
a month. From the National Lawyers Guild Military Law
Task Force comes a similar report. "There's no let-up,
we're swamped all the time," says San Francisco-based
co-chair Marti Hiken. "And whenever a reserve unit is
activated, our phones begin ringing off the hook. We
hear from people who didn't even know they were still in
the reserves and can't understand what's happening to
them."
That so-called backdoor draft, the mobilizing not only
of National Guard and Army reserves but even of the
Individual Ready Reserve (the IRR was called up for the
first time since the Gulf War) has been a major catalyst
for the military antiwar movement. It helped fuel the
founding of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) four
years ago and has since helped it grow to include more
than 3,000 families.
Two years before the media focused the spotlight on
Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who camped out for
weeks at a time near Crawford, Texas, trying to confront
George W. Bush on the reasons for her son Casey's death
in Iraq, Nancy Lessin and her husband, Charley
Richardson--with a son in the Marines--began publicly
campaigning against the war. One of the organizations
sponsoring the Appeal, MFSO brought a few dozen military
families to the Washington Mall on Veterans Day weekend
to lobby for a meeting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
By the time their plane touched the ground, however,
Rumsfeld had been dumped and instead they met with a
representative of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Lessin, who works as a safety and health coordinator for
the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, describes that meeting as
cordial but unsatisfying. She expresses fear that even
with an incoming Democratic Congress, or maybe as a
result of it, there will be too much room for
distraction. Whether it moves toward impeachment or the
convening of protracted hearings or endless debate over
the Baker-Hamilton report, Lessin argues it's all beside
the central point. "What we are looking for from
Congress is action, not words," says Lessin. "We're
worried the Democrats will focus the headlines on
hearings, on how bad the management of the war has
been--but we know that already. To the politicians who
say we need two or three months to consider this or that
plan, we ask: What do you say looking in the eye of one
of those whose child is killed in those two or three
months?"
Soon, some of those Congress members will have the
opportunity to look in the eyes of not only the parents
but also the troops. Appeal organizers, working on the
Martin Luther King Day appearance on the Hill, are
hoping to help galvanize Democratic support for a more
explicit pro-withdrawal position. So far, only veteran
antiwar Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has
explicitly endorsed the Appeal. Senator Patrick Leahy of
Vermont has made some complimentary remarks. How much
support the Appeal can muster on the Hill in the coming
weeks could be a watershed test for Democrats.
Phil Waste, a 67-year-old retired elevator repairman
turned activist with MFSO, with three sons and two
grandchildren who have served or are currently deployed
in Iraq, thinks the window of opportunity for Democrats
to take up the call of organized active-duty dissidents
is narrow. If the new Congressional majority dawdles
over the war, the Democrats will become targets of the
antiwar protesters. "I think those who say they oppose
this war have to act now, not months from now," he says.
"And I am most definitely talking about the Democrats.
This past election was a referendum on the war, and that
mandate better be heeded. If not, two years from now
they will be out on their butts. And I along with
everyone else I know will work my ass off to see that
happen."
[Marc Cooper is a Nation contributing editor and a
contributor to The Notion. He is a visiting professor of
journalism and associate director of the Institute for
Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for
Communication. His books include Pinochet and Me: A
Chilean Anti-Memoir and Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels
of a Radical Reporter. His work has been recognized by
the Society of Professional Journalists, PEN America and
the California Associated Press TV and Radio
Association.]
The Nation - from the January 8, 2007 issue
posted December 20, 2006
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/cooper
Mark Dearden chooses his words with extreme precision.
And not just with the deliberateness of a 36-year-old
with a BA from Brigham Young, an MA in public health
from Tulane and an MD from George Washington University.
Dearden is also an active-duty lieutenant commander in
the Navy who joined in 1997 and is still considering the
possibility of a lifetime military career. "So this was
a very difficult decision for me to come to," he says in
a quiet, thoughtful voice. "I don't take this decision
lightly."
Nor should he. Just a few weeks ago Dearden took the
dramatic step of signing a petition to Congress--what's
being called by its organizers an Appeal for Redress--
opposing the war in Iraq and calling for the withdrawal
of US troops. When the Appeal is delivered to Capitol
Hill in mid-January, all the names of its almost 1,000
uniformed endorsers will be seen by members of Congress,
if they care to look. But with his Nation interview,
Dearden is now going public. And while the military
cannot take reprisals against those who have supported
the Appeal, many of the signers agree that there are an
infinite number of ways they can be punished, including
internal evaluations, denial of promotions and harsh
assignments or postings. "I'm expressing a right of
people in the military to contact their elected
representatives, and I have done nothing illegal or
disrespectful," says Dearden, now an anesthesiology
resident at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. After
two tours in Iraq attached to a Marine battalion,
including participation in the initial 2003 invasion,
Dearden says that signing the Appeal gave him "closure"
on what he describes as very tough deployments. "It gave
me peace," he says.
Dearden has indeed joined the most significant movement
of organized and dissident GIs seen in America since
1969, when 1,366 active-duty service members signed a
full-page ad in the New York Times calling for an end to
the Vietnam War. The Appeal for Redress, surfacing only
in late October, has taken anti-Iraq War sentiment
that's been simmering within the ranks and surfaced it
as a mainstream plea backed by the enormous moral
authority of active-duty personnel. It's an undeniable
barometer of rising military dissent and provides a
strong argument that the best way to support the troops
is to recognize their demand to be withdrawn from Iraq.
While clearly inspired by the GI movement of the Vietnam
era, it takes a much different tack. Instead of
attacking or confronting the military, as the resistance
movement of the 1960s often did, the Appeal works within
the military's legal framework.
The Appeal was posted as a simple three-sentence
statement on a website managed by a Navy seaman:
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in
uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in
Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all
American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in
Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is
time for U.S. troops to come home.
The Appeal comes as the natural culmination of previous
flickerings of military discontent with official Iraq
policy. The bogging down of the war, along with the Bush
Administration's use of a "backdoor draft"--the
extension of tours of duty and an unprecedented call-up
of active and inactive reserves--has stoked the
discontent. Two years ago, some two dozen Army
reservists refused to carry out a supply mission in
Iraq, complaining that their vehicles were unsafe.
Twenty Florida National Guard members petitioned their
commanders to bring the troops home. In Kansas, Army
reserve family members collected 8,000 signatures on a
website protesting extended tours. While figures are
difficult to confirm, counselors at the GI Rights
Hotline estimate that as many as 1,000 or more troops
and reservists go AWOL every month, not wanting to serve
in Iraq. About 200 to 300 have fled to Canada, according
to military rights lawyers. And in a half-dozen or so
high-profile cases, uniformed personnel are facing
court-martial and jail for refusing deployment to Iraq.
Therein resides the power of the Appeal for Redress. Its
signers don't marginalize themselves as lawbreakers,
resisters or deserters. Potential signers have been
assured they are sending a communication to Congress
protected under the Military Whistleblower Protection
Act and will not be subject to reprisal. The result has
been electrifying. In the two months since it surfaced,
almost three times as many people have signed it as are
members of the two-year-old Iraq Veterans Against the
War. Almost three-quarters of the signers are active
duty (the rest are reserves), and include several dozen
officers, of whom a handful are colonels.
Interviews with more than two dozen signers, both in
Iraq and on domestic US military bases from Fort Stewart
in the east to Hawaii's Hickam Air Force Base, reveal a
movement that includes low-level grunts and high-ranking
officers, as well as a rich diversity of racial,
economic and educational backgrounds. The signers
offered a variety of motivations--ideological,
practical, strategic and moral--but all agreed the war
was no longer worth fighting and that the troops should
be brought home. As the debate on Iraq sharpens in the
wake of the Baker-Hamilton report and as a new
Democratic Congress is seated, the collective voice of
active-duty opponents of the war is likely to add
considerable clout to the antiwar movement.
This Martin Luther King holiday weekend, members of the
Appeal will appear on Capitol Hill to formally present
the petition to Congress to press their case. For an
all-volunteer force, says Eugene Fidell, president of
the National Institute of Military Justice, "it's simply
unprecedented."
The genius of the Appeal resides not only in its
simplicity but also in its nonconfrontational tone.
"This is not about resistance. This is about working
inside the democratic process," says lawyer J.E. McNeil,
who helps run the GI Rights Hotline and who has helped
advise the Appeal organizers. "This is about being proud
of being a soldier, an airman or a marine, about being
proud of your duty without giving up your rights as a
citizen."
This was certainly the attraction for Dearden and for
many other signers interviewed. "I love the military,"
Dearden says. "I was thrilled to find this legal outlet
for what I felt. If more active duty knew there were
legal and respectful ways to make their opinion known,
they would eagerly join."
The inspiration to create the Appeal came to 29-year-old
Seaman Jonathan Hutto earlier this year while he was
floating off Iraq on the aircraft carrier Theodore
Roosevelt. Born into an Atlanta family of civil rights
activists, a former student body president at Howard
University, and someone who had worked with Amnesty
International and the ACLU, Hutto was not the most
typical of Navy enlistees when he joined up in 2003. But
with $48,000 in student loans to pay off and with a
young child to support, he thought the Navy would be a
"good transition."
As the war in Iraq worsened, Hutto felt he could no
longer maintain his silence. He had an impeccable
service record, having been named "sailor of the
quarter" among his junior enlisted shipmates. But he had
to do something to come out against a war he thought
immoral and unnecessary. That's when one of his former
professors sent him a thirty-year anniversary copy of
Soldiers in Revolt by David Cortright. Now a Notre Dame
professor and one of America's leading peace activists,
Cortright wrote his book as a chronicle of the 1960s GI
movement he helped to found. "The title alone just hit
me," says Hutto, as we talk in a Washington-area
coffeehouse, on a day he's off duty from his Norfolk
base. "This was all new to me. And I got to thinking,
What's to prevent active-duty folks from doing the same
sort of thing right now?"
Hutto immediately contacted Cortright and started
talking over the idea of the Appeal with a few close
friends. Last June Hutto organized a Friday night
screening of the antiwar documentary Sir! No Sir! at the
local YMCA just off the Norfolk naval base. Filmmaker
David Zeiger's documentary reconstructs the GI movement
of the Vietnam era. Cortright came as guest speaker and
found a receptive crowd of about seventy-five.
One of those who attended the talk was 22-year-old Liam
Madden, who had joined the Marines in 2002. "I was
visiting a friend in Norfolk and thought we were going
to a bar," he remembers. Instead, his buddy took him to
the YMCA event and they caught the last half of
Cortright's speech. Madden had already completed an Iraq
tour in Anbar province with an all-reserve unit and had
come back disillusioned with the war. "If anything, it
convinced me that no tangible results could be achieved
in Iraq," he says. "No one was safer. No one was happier
because we were there."
Hutto, Madden, Cortright and a few others moved ahead
with the idea of the Appeal. On October 29 Hutto
published an op-ed piece announcing it in the Navy
Times. Three days earlier the Appeal had appeared on the
Web.
"Amazing," is how Cortright describes the chain of
events that grew out of that YMCA meeting. "That
encounter alone was one of the most fascinating moments
of my last thirty-five years," he says over lunch in
Washington. "Even I wasn't prepared for the depth and
intensity of feeling against this war by so many active-
duty members. I'm stunned. It's been moving so fast we
can barely think it through."
Cortright sees an enhanced if not central political role
for the rising active-duty movement. "They have been
there and seen it, seen the disaster," he says. "It's
much more real for them than for others in the peace
movement. MoveOn and other groups got focused on the
election while vets, families and active-duty folks are
still suffering the burdens of the war." He adds, "Some
of our liberal friends will again soon start focusing on
the '08 election. So these active-duty folks over the
next two years could become a key force in pushing for
withdrawal."
The most compelling voices among the active dissenters
who have signed the Appeal are those of troops still on
the front lines in Iraq. Among them is a thirtysomething
Army major, a Distinguished Military Graduate from a
prestigious Southern university. Now on his second tour,
"Major Frank," as I will call him, was first deployed to
Baghdad just weeks after the 2003 invasion. "I believed
wholeheartedly in the mission to oust Saddam Hussein,"
he says, "and would have been proud to die liberating
Iraq from the evil dictator, because at the same time I
felt I was protecting my country and my family [from]
weapons of mass destruction."
Now, Frank says, he sees no point in the war, and no
end. His Iraqi unit is 97 percent Shiite and is
sympathetic to the extremist militia of fundamentalist
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "We are merely being used as
military pawns in a political struggle for Iraq," he
says. "So, yes! I am opposed to our brave men and women
dying every day for nothing because we cannot control
this civil war."
Frank says he can pinpoint the precise moment when he
turned against the war: last June 23. He was on patrol
with his Iraqi unit when they came upon an illegal
checkpoint set up by Sadr's Mahdi militia. The militants
were using ambulances taken from the Ministry of Health
to block the roads, thereby preventing American troops
from maneuvering. He was flabbergasted when the Iraqi
Army troops refused not only to take down the checkpoint
but also returned to the militia a number of automatic
weapons that had been seized from them by the army.
This sort of depressing reality is what prompted Frank
to sign the Appeal. "I proudly joined the Appeal for
Redress out of the sense of hopelessness that I had
inside for what we are actually doing here," he says.
He's angry with both the Bush Administration and the top
brass in Iraq. "They sit behind their desks in the Green
Zone and filter reports to their bosses. No one wants to
admit that we are failing." Frank says he's quite open
about his views, and finds overwhelming support for them
among his fellow soldiers. "Yes, yes, yes," he says, "My
entire team feels the same way I do. And the other
battalion [trainers] that I have come across feel that
way, including my commanders.... In fact, I have not had
one person in the last five months disagree with me. The
typical response is, 'I know what you mean.'"
That sentiment was, indeed, echoed by an Army officer
and signer of the Appeal who wanted to be identified
only by his real last name. Lieutenant Smith, a 24-year-
old Kansan deployed with an infantry unit in Baghdad,
joined up six years ago not only because he saw the
military as a route to pay for college but also because
he felt it was an obligation to "pay back" America for
the opportunities it affords. His doubts about the war,
strong from the beginning, only hardened. "I became very
angry after two friends from college were killed, both
in their 20s," Smith says. "I started to wonder what
they had died for. Both were killed by roadside bombs
near the area where my unit operates now. And when I
found out about them before I deployed, my outlook
changed. I started to lose any sense of satisfaction
with what I was doing for the Army because what I was
doing was in some roundabout way supporting what had
just killed two friends."
Smith says it was his stateside father-in-law who
directed him to the online Appeal. Smith had heard about
another Army lieutenant, Ehren Watada, who has been
resisting deployment to Iraq on the grounds that the war
is unconstitutional and who now faces court-martial [see
sidebar page 14]. But that was not a route he wished to
travel. "I have an antiwar history from college," Smith
says. "But I hate what Lieutenant Ehren Watada did and
the way he did it. I wanted a way to say I thought the
war was wrong without looking like a coward." At the
same time, however, Smith says that he wants his voice
to be heard. "I hope the Appeal will cement in the mind
of Congress growing unrest about the war," he says.
"Congress got a mandate from Americans that the war was
not popular, and now they can get an official mandate
from troops serving abroad that we feel the same way but
are limited in the way we can express it."
Some within the ranks have been more outspoken about
that discontent, mostly as a product of accelerated
politicization and radicalization while in uniform. Take
the case of 28-year-old Californian Ronn Cantu, an Army
sergeant stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. Both his
grandfathers served in the Army, his father was drafted
into Vietnam and Cantu himself enlisted in 1998 as a
self-described "Bush conservative."
After serving out his contract, Cantu re-enlisted in
March 2003. "I was in junior college studying journalism
but couldn't re-adjust to civilian life. And as a
journalism major I was constantly watching and reading
the news, and I got totally sold that Iraq was a threat,
that it had WMD, that it was going to erase America off
the map."
Next thing he knew, Cantu was attached to an infantry
unit in Iraq. In charge of ammo, and after making more
than 300 harrowing convoys, he had seen enough. He voted
against Bush in 2004 and now strongly opposes the war.
While still on active duty he has not only signed the
Appeal but has joined Iraq Veterans Against the War. On
its website he's a contributor of pointed essays bucking
Bush Administration policy. He's also started his own
website--soldiervoices.net--where he's running his own
freewheeling online GI forum. A firm supporter of troop
withdrawal, Cantu has nevertheless enlisted for three
more years and is currently preparing for a second tour
of Iraq. "I'm going back with a job in military
intelligence. It's a job that I think can help end the
war," he says. "Working in human intelligence, I will be
able to talk to Iraqis and that way find and hear the
truth."
A few of the antiwar dissidents lean more toward
resistance than re-enlistment. Marc Train, 19, is an
Army grunt stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and a
signer of the Appeal. A native of Salina, Kansas, Train
joined the Army right out of high school, convinced that
he had no other real career prospects.
Some of his comrades in the Third Infantry Division are
scheduled to deploy to Iraq for a staggering third tour
of duty. For Train, it will be his first--if he doesn't
refuse. He says he wasn't very political before
enlisting, but now he's been radicalized. He realizes
now he joined the Army only to get a job and that he's
grown suspicious of the Administration's motives for war
in Iraq. "I think it's all about oil," he says. Train
has made clear to his superiors that he's not happy
about deploying to Iraq and might refuse to step over
the line when the mobilization order becomes effective
in January. He's already lost the security clearance for
the intelligence job he was trained for, and he's now
enmeshed in a series of official investigations. "I want
separation from the Army because I don't want to be just
a cog in the machine. I've registered as a member of the
Socialist Party USA."
Asked whether he will refuse duty if not given the
discharge he seeks, Train answers: "That's a very strong
question for me, a very strong consideration. Right now,
I'm about 70 percent leaning toward not going."
Some expert observers of military affairs, like Robert
Hodierne, senior managing editor of Army Times
Publishing, argue that the numbers of active-duty
soldiers and sailors who have signed on to the Appeal
and expressed some sort of public dissent aren't
impressive. "Dissent of that nature represents but a
small percentage of the people in uniform," Hodierne
says, pointing out that 1.4 million serve in the armed
forces. "What we are sensing is a great deal of
disenchantment with the way the war has been fought, not
whether it is or is not an unjust war."
But Kelly Dougherty, co-chair of the board of Iraq
Veterans Against the War, who served with the Colorado
Army National Guard in Iraq in 2003-04, says that
critics like Hodierne are underestimating the level of
dissent in the ranks. "Critics will say 800 or 1,000
signers isn't significant. I think it is," she says from
her Philadelphia headquarters. "For everyone who has
heard about the Appeal there are so many dozens of
others who agree with it but have not heard about it or
agree with it but are intimidated by the military." The
military, meanwhile, has so far taken a hands-off
approach to the Appeal. None of the active-duty
personnel interviewed for this piece reported any
reprisals. "The only official word I've gotten came from
my public affairs officer," said Appeal founder Hutto.
"He told me the rules: Don't do anything while in
uniform or while on duty. And that was that."
Commander Chris Sims, spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet
Naval Air Force, says that Hutto violates no military
regulations if he's off-duty when speaking out. And
Pentagon spokesman Maj. Stewart Upton, when asked about
the Appeal, said: "Members of the armed forces are free
to communicate with Congress in a lawful manner that
doesn't violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice."
Lawyer J.E. McNeil at the GI Rights Hotline is convinced
that the benign response from the higher command
reflects the level of doubt that currently permeates the
military. "There are enough people in the military who
agree with these guys is why they are not getting much
flak," she says. "I think there's a lot of sympathy
among officers. We talk to them all the time. And while
a lot of them don't want to stand up publicly, we know
they admire those who have signed the Appeal. Admire
them and support them."
One barometer of discontent is the sheer number of calls
and inquiries that keep pouring in to the GI Rights
Hotline, holding steady for the past year at about 3,000
a month. From the National Lawyers Guild Military Law
Task Force comes a similar report. "There's no let-up,
we're swamped all the time," says San Francisco-based
co-chair Marti Hiken. "And whenever a reserve unit is
activated, our phones begin ringing off the hook. We
hear from people who didn't even know they were still in
the reserves and can't understand what's happening to
them."
That so-called backdoor draft, the mobilizing not only
of National Guard and Army reserves but even of the
Individual Ready Reserve (the IRR was called up for the
first time since the Gulf War) has been a major catalyst
for the military antiwar movement. It helped fuel the
founding of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) four
years ago and has since helped it grow to include more
than 3,000 families.
Two years before the media focused the spotlight on
Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who camped out for
weeks at a time near Crawford, Texas, trying to confront
George W. Bush on the reasons for her son Casey's death
in Iraq, Nancy Lessin and her husband, Charley
Richardson--with a son in the Marines--began publicly
campaigning against the war. One of the organizations
sponsoring the Appeal, MFSO brought a few dozen military
families to the Washington Mall on Veterans Day weekend
to lobby for a meeting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
By the time their plane touched the ground, however,
Rumsfeld had been dumped and instead they met with a
representative of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Lessin, who works as a safety and health coordinator for
the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, describes that meeting as
cordial but unsatisfying. She expresses fear that even
with an incoming Democratic Congress, or maybe as a
result of it, there will be too much room for
distraction. Whether it moves toward impeachment or the
convening of protracted hearings or endless debate over
the Baker-Hamilton report, Lessin argues it's all beside
the central point. "What we are looking for from
Congress is action, not words," says Lessin. "We're
worried the Democrats will focus the headlines on
hearings, on how bad the management of the war has
been--but we know that already. To the politicians who
say we need two or three months to consider this or that
plan, we ask: What do you say looking in the eye of one
of those whose child is killed in those two or three
months?"
Soon, some of those Congress members will have the
opportunity to look in the eyes of not only the parents
but also the troops. Appeal organizers, working on the
Martin Luther King Day appearance on the Hill, are
hoping to help galvanize Democratic support for a more
explicit pro-withdrawal position. So far, only veteran
antiwar Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has
explicitly endorsed the Appeal. Senator Patrick Leahy of
Vermont has made some complimentary remarks. How much
support the Appeal can muster on the Hill in the coming
weeks could be a watershed test for Democrats.
Phil Waste, a 67-year-old retired elevator repairman
turned activist with MFSO, with three sons and two
grandchildren who have served or are currently deployed
in Iraq, thinks the window of opportunity for Democrats
to take up the call of organized active-duty dissidents
is narrow. If the new Congressional majority dawdles
over the war, the Democrats will become targets of the
antiwar protesters. "I think those who say they oppose
this war have to act now, not months from now," he says.
"And I am most definitely talking about the Democrats.
This past election was a referendum on the war, and that
mandate better be heeded. If not, two years from now
they will be out on their butts. And I along with
everyone else I know will work my ass off to see that
happen."
[Marc Cooper is a Nation contributing editor and a
contributor to The Notion. He is a visiting professor of
journalism and associate director of the Institute for
Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for
Communication. His books include Pinochet and Me: A
Chilean Anti-Memoir and Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels
of a Radical Reporter. His work has been recognized by
the Society of Professional Journalists, PEN America and
the California Associated Press TV and Radio
Association.]
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