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GI Special 4F17: "They're Grumbling" - June 19, 2006


We speak with Peter Laufer, a Vietnam war resister and author of the new book, "Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq."
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the number of men and women who have refused to go to Iraq to begin with or to redeploy – or Afghanistan?
PETER LAUFFER: It's an incredibly important question, Amy, and we really don't have any way to have a hard figure on that total.
But, anecdotally -- as I did the research for the book and talked to one after another of these soldiers rejecting the mission -- anecdotally, I would have to say the numbers are big and growing because they talk to me about members of their unit who, even if they're not overtly rejecting the war by disobeying orders, or going AWOL, or deserting, or filing for conscientious objector status, they are grumbling.
They’re over there unhappy with what is going on, displeased with the policy; and they're opposing the war.

[24065]



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GI Special 4F17: "They're Grumbling" - June 19, 2006

Thomas F. Barton

GI Special:

thomasfbarton@earthlink.net

6.19.06

Print it out: color best.  Pass it on.

 GI SPECIAL 4F17:

 How Many More For Imperial War?

Minnesota Army National Guard Spc. Brent W. Koch, 22, of Morton, Minn., died in Iraq on June 16, 2006, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his military vehicle in Ad Diwaniyah, Iraq.  (AP Photo/Courtesy of the family)

 

 

“They Are Grumbling”

“They’re Over There Unhappy With What Is Going On, Displeased With The Policy; And They’re Opposing The War”

 

 

June 15th, 2006 Democracy Now [Excerpt]

 

We speak with Peter Laufer, a Vietnam war resister and author of the new book, "Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq."

 

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the number of men and women who have refused to go to Iraq to begin with or to redeploy – or Afghanistan?

 

PETER LAUFFER: It's an incredibly important question, Amy, and we really don't have any way to have a hard figure on that total.

 

But, anecdotally -- as I did the research for the book and talked to one after another of these soldiers rejecting the mission -- anecdotally, I would have to say the numbers are big and growing because they talk to me about members of their unit who, even if they're not overtly rejecting the war by disobeying orders, or going AWOL, or deserting, or filing for conscientious objector status, they are grumbling.

 

They’re over there unhappy with what is going on, displeased with the policy; and they're opposing the war.

 

MORE:

 

“He And His Whole Platoon Don’t Want To Go Back”

 

16 June 2006 By Medea Benjamin, Truthout Interview [Excerpt]

 

Diane Wilson, a founding member of CODEPINK, announced at the Mother's Day peace vigil in Washington, DC, on May 14 that she was going on a hunger strike to bring the troops home from Iraq and invited others to join her. The Troops Home Fast, which will begin on July 4, has already attracted hundreds of supporters.

 

Medea: Do you have family members fighting in Iraq?

 

Diane: I've got nephews there, and my daughter's fiancé is a gunner who already served in Iraq and is about to be sent back again.

 

He told me about the checkpoints, how they once shot up an innocent family.

 

He's totally traumatized.

 

When I told him about the fast idea, he encouraged me to do it.

 

He and his whole platoon don't want to go back.

 

Do you have a friend or relative in the service?  Forward this E-MAIL along, or send us the address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly.  Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the war, at home and inside the armed services.  Send requests to address up top.

 

 

IRAQ WAR REPORTS

 

 

Death Number 2500:

He Was More Than A Number

 

June 16, 2006 By John Hoellwarth, Army Times staff writer [Excerpts]

 

The 2,500th member of the U.S. armed forces killed since the war in Iraq began is a Marine from California, the Defense Department announced today.

 

Cpl. Michael Estrella, of Hemet, was killed June 14 during combat operations in Anbar Province, Iraq, the Defense Department said.

 

A field radio operator by military specialty, Estrella was assigned to India Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, at the time of his death.  His unit has been in Iraq since March.

 

Estrella was on his second combat deployment when he was killed.

 

The U.S. suffered its 2,000th casualty in late October, when statistical data showed that more than half of the fallen were under age 25.

 

Estrella, at 20, had already earned the Combat Action Ribbon, National Defense Medal, Afghanistan and Iraq Campaign Medals, and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal at the time of his death.  

 

 

Injured Soldier

 

6.12.06 WEAU

 

An Eau Claire Memorial graduate and former teacher is in a German hospital after being injured in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq.

 

Petty Officer First Class Dean Berlin suffered four cracked bones in his back, cracked bones in his neck and a broken shoulder, according to his father, Cecil.

 

Cecil Berlin says his son is expected to be transferred back to the United States Friday. At that time, he, along with Petty Officer Berlin’s wife, Amy, and their four children will come to visit after receiving the news late Monday.

 

“I could hardly understand him,” Berlin’s father said.  “I asked if he was sick.  He said there was a problem. I said roadside bomb?  He said yes.”

 

Berlin’s wife and children currently live in Rock Falls in Dunn county.

 

 

Eyewitness To Blast That Injured CBS News Team

 

June 8, 2006 Bucks County Courier Times [Excerpt]

 

LANDSTUHL, Germany

 

Sitting in a hospital room at the large Army Regional Medical Center here, Specialist Kenneth Snipes talks about what he remembers of the car bomb that ripped through the convoy in which he was riding in Baghdad last week.

 

The 22-year-old soldier from Lakeview, S.C., a member of the 112th Infantry out of Fort Hood, Texas, had been on convoy duty before.  It was routine, if one could believe that there was anything routine about driving in a convoy in Baghdad.

 

Riding convoys is the most hazardous duty in Iraq.  Every convoy is a potential target for the insurgents' roadside bombs.  Their IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are their major means of inflicting casualties upon U.S. and coalition forces.

 

They lack the numbers and firepower to stand and fight, so they use electronic devices to detonate lethal bombs from afar as a convoy drives by.  [He gets it, unlike the idiots who yowl about cowardly Iraqis.]

 

Snipes remembers that the convoy had stopped a couple of times, and soldiers had gotten out of the vehicles to check the area.

 

On the last such stop, he later learned, a nearby parked vehicle, apparently packed with explosives, was detonated.  His back was toward the vehicle, about 20 or 25 meters away, when he heard the blast. He instinctively turned his head in its direction and the explosion slammed into his face.

 

His mouth and nose were severely damaged.  He lost some teeth.  He didn't want to be photographed.  He had difficulty speaking.

 

He was not the only casualty.

 

Other soldiers were hit, two members of a CBS-TV news team were killed and reporter Kimberly Dozier was seriously injured. 

 

 

REALLY BAD IDEA:

NO MISSION;

HOPELESS WAR:

BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW

U.S. soldiers at the scene after a car bomb exploded in Mosul, May 31, 2006. (Khaled al-Mosy/Reuters)

 

 

 

AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS

 

 

G.I. Sniper Found And Killed

 

6.15.06 New York Daily News

 

An Army sniper was discovered in his hiding place and killed by enemy fighters in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan’s Kunar province on the eve of a major U.S.-led operation to crush a Taliban uprising.  

 

Officials have not released the soldier’s name but confirmed he was from the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y.

 

 

Assorted Resistance Action

 

June 16, 2006 By Jason Straziuso, Associated Press & 14 June 2006, By Joan Smith. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

 

On Friday, Taliban militants attacked a coalition patrol in southern Uruzgan province, forcing troops to retreat to a nearby compound to fire back with mortars and call in air support, said coalition spokesman Maj. Quentin Innis.  No soldiers were hurt, although it was unclear whether there were any casualties among the militants.

 

A coalition convoy also was ambushed in nearby Zabul province but no casualties were reported, he said.

 

The Taliban are back.  Less than five years after British and US troops drove them out of Afghanistan, they are launching increasingly audacious attacks, including an ambush of British troops in Helmand province last weekend.

 

 

“The Taliban Have Gone From Operating In Company-Size Units Of About 100 Men Last Year To Battalion-Size Units Of About 400 Men This Year”

 

June 18, 2006 By Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post Staff Writer

 

As fighting in Afghanistan has intensified over the past three months, the U.S. military has conducted 340 airstrikes there, more than twice the 160 carried out in the much higher-profile war in Iraq, according to data from the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East.

 

The airstrikes appear to have increased in recent days as the United States and its allies have launched counteroffensives against the Taliban in the south and southeast, strafing and bombing a stronghold in Uruzgan province and pounding an area near Khost with 500-pound bombs.

 

The airstrikes between early March and late May concentrated on two areas -- the provinces of the south-central mountains that are the Taliban's major redoubt and eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan, where al-Qaeda and its allies operate. But U.S. warplanes have also hit targets near the capital of Kabul, near the main U.S. base at Bagram, and near other major cities such as Jalalabad and Ghazni.

 

The attacks have been executed by aircraft ranging from large B-52 bombers to small Predator drones, and have employed attacks including 2,000-pound bombs and strafing.

 

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who recently returned from a visit to Afghanistan, said the Taliban have gone from operating in company-size units of about 100 men last year to battalion-size units of about 400 men this year.

 

The enemy in Afghanistan is "adaptive" and "very smart," Freakley said.  One tactic they have used lately to counter U.S. dominance in the air is to withdraw, when fighting, into compounds where civilians are located, which has resulted in civilian deaths in two sets of airstrikes near Kandahar.

 

The spate of recent civilian deaths caused by the bombing has hurt the U.S. image in Afghanistan.

 

NEED SOME TRUTH?  CHECK OUT TRAVELING SOLDIER

Telling the truth - about the occupation or the criminals running the government in Washington - is the first reason for Traveling Soldier.  But we want to do more than tell the truth; we want to report on the resistance - whether it's in the streets of Baghdad, New York, or inside the armed forces.  Our goal is for Traveling Soldier to become the thread that ties working-class people inside the armed services together. We want this newsletter to be a weapon to help you organize resistance within the armed forces.  If you like what you've read, we hope that you'll join with us in building a network of active duty organizers.  http://www.traveling-soldier.org/  And join with Iraq War vets in the call to end the occupation and bring our troops home now! (www.ivaw.net)

 

 

Big Surprise!

U.S. Occupation Relies On Local Rapists, Torturers And Mass Murderers

 

6.16.06 Boston Globe

 

A sensitive United Nations report that has been shelved for the past 18 months accuses leading Afghan politicians and officials of orchestrating massacres, torture, mass rape and other war crimes in the country over 23 years of conflict.

 

Human rights activists involved in producing the report say that the international body has been worried about identifying former warlords who are now in positions of power and who could upset Afghanistan’s fragile political balance.

 

Among those identified in the report are an ethnic Uzbek warlord whom President Hamid Karzai appointed as an adviser and several former mujahideen commanders who were elected last fall to the country’s new parliament

 

 

“They Do Not Have The Right To Shoot At Afghans.  Let Them Shoot At People In Their Own Country, Not Here”

 

3.25.06 Socialist Worker (Canada)

 

“I don’t hate Canadians.  But I cannot forgive them.  You cannot come to our country and kill us.”

 

These were the heart-rending words of Semen Gul, grieving widow of Nasrat Ali Hassan, gunned down by Canadian troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

 

“You say sorry” she said to the journalist from the Toronto Star. “What does sorry mean to me?  Will sorry feed my children?”

 

This weekend the Toronto Star reported that Nasrat Mi Hassan, a 45-year- old tin pot maker and father of six, was shot and killed without warning by Canadian troops, while returning to his home in a rickshaw with his family.

 

In the post-shooting spin control, military officials played the terrorism card, telling the Globe and Mail that “. . .former Taliban and other insurgents (were) eager to exploit any incident in order to incite violence against coalition troops” and reiterating the insulting racist notion that Afghanis were incapable of rebuilding their country without western help.

 

To appease outraged Afghanis and Canadians alike, the soldier who fired on Hassan and his family was removed from duty pending investigation, and the death was antiseptically conveyed to the media as “regrettable”.

 

Semen GuI, Hassans bereaved wife, made a point of telling the Toronto Star that she did not think all Canadians were bad.  But in the midst of her anguish, she asked hard questions: if “sorry” was going to feed her children, and why troops were behaving as if all Afghanis were Al-Qaeda or Taliban. 

 

She maintained that if the Canadians had given any kind of warning, the rickshaw driver would have stopped.

 

“They do not have the right to shoot at Afghans.  Let them shoot at people in their own country, not here,“ she told the Star.

 

Tuesday March 14, Nasrat Au Hassan was driving a motorized rickshaw coming back, with his family, from dinner at the home of a relative in Kandahar, Afghanistan.  There were seven people packed in with him.

 

As it rounded a corner, in the black of night, a Canadian-staffed road block was just 15 metres away.  Somehow, the Canadians saw this rickshaw as a threat, even though its top speed is a hardly threatening 20 kilometres per hour.

 

The Toronto Star quoted Hassan’s widow Semen Gul saying; “I lived for many years in Iran.  I know all about police checkpoints.  We were not stopped by the Afghans.  And there was no warning shot from the Canadians, no shouting, no shots fired in the air, no light shining on us.  There was only this sudden gunfire, three shots, and my husband falling out of the rickshaw into the street.”

 

There are conflicting reports about what happened next.  According to one source, her husband lay bleeding to death on the street for 15 minutes, while Canadian soldiers remained holed up behind the checkpoint.  According to another source, a Canadian medic did attend to the fallen man, but determined that his injuries were not life-threatening.

 

All agree, however, that the Canadians did nothing to get the wounded man to a hospital.  He was taken there eventually, not by the Canadian troops who had shot him, but by Afghan police.

 

 

 

TROOP NEWS

 

 

“When I Was In Iraq, We Were Killing Innocent People For Oil”

“It Was Obvious They Didn’t Want Us There”

 

Jun 18 By CAROLYN THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer

 

A group of American military deserters publicly embraced their new lives in Canada on Saturday with the support of “peace mom” Cindy Sheehan, who said she wished the son she lost in Iraq was among them.

 

“They’re trying to deport me,” said Darrell Anderson of Lexington, Ky., who arrived in Canada by way of Niagara Falls in January 2005.  He spent seven months in Iraq with the Army’s 1st Armored Division and received a purple heart following a roadside bomb attack before deciding during a leave he would not go back.

 

“When I was in Iraq, we were killing innocent people for oil. It was obvious they didn’t want us there,” said Anderson, 24, who is petitioning to remain in Canada.

 

The gathering at a park in the town of Fort Erie, across the border from Buffalo, N.Y., was organized by peace groups on both sides of the border.

 

“They say we’re traitors, we’re deserters,” said former Marine Chris Magaoay, 20, of the Hawaiian island of Maui.

 

“No, I’m a Marine and I stand up for what I believe in, and I believe the Constitution of the United States of America is being pushed aside as a scrap piece of paper.”

 

The soldiers thanked Canadians for their hospitality and were cheered by about 100 in an audience that included Iraq veterans opposed to the war and Vietnam-era resisters who sought refuge in Canada decades earlier.

 

Sheehan, who energized the anti-war movement last summer with her monthlong protest outside President Bush’s Texas ranch, said she has spent time with many of the resisters.

 

“They’re moral human beings who don’t want to go to Iraq and kill innocent people to line the pockets of George Bush and the war machine,” she said.

 

 

Mission Rejected:

U.S. Soldiers Who Say No To Iraq

 

06/15/06 Democracy Now! [Excerpts]

 

Jeremy Hinzman, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who fled to Canada to avoid fighting in Iraq; Aidan Delgado, who became a conscientious objector after fighting in Iraq; and Camilo Mejia, the first Iraq War veteran sent to prison for refusing to fight.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We begin with Jeremy Hinzman.

 

JEREMY HINZMAN: Based on all the pretenses and rationale that we – we, the U.S., gave for invading, none of them held true.

 

And there were no weapons, there was no link between the secular Baathists, Al Qaeda, and the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, and the notion of installing a puppet regime doesn’t really sound like democracy to me.

 

And I just couldn’t bring myself to kill or be killed for the sake of that.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Aidan Delgado.

 

AIDAN DELGADO: The idea to become an objector before was kind of abstract, you know, ‘cause you’re not really a soldier, you’re just going to these weekend drills. But then when you’re in war and you’re seeing it face to face, it becomes much more immediate and you just can’t ignore it anymore.

 

And, ultimately, I was at such ill ease and so miserable in the conflict doing what I was doing, that ultimately I had to, and that’s when I – I turned in my weapon and said, “take this back.  I want to become a conscientious objector.”

 

AMY GOODMAN: Camilo Mejia.

 

CAMILO MEJIA: You see yourself in a situation where you end up doing really, really bad things, and those are the kind of things that soldiers who come home and, you know, they’re, you know, they’re not missing any body parts – have to deal with. You know?

 

I mean, you see that soldiers come home and, you know, they’re not physically injured and you think they’re fine and you’re completely wrong.  There’s a lot of things that we have to deal with that people don’t even know about, you know—things that we carry in our hearts and in our memory. And a lot of times soldiers don’t deal with that for a long time, you know.

 

I see it happen too often, you know, especially when you go to prison, and you start going to see counselors and stuff like that, you know, they tell you without you even knowing it that you had P.T.S.D. and, you know, other psychological problems that you didn’t know you even had.  And that’s one of those things, you know?

 

I mean, you see yourself in a hostile situation, you see somebody with a weapon and you shoot without asking questions or anything, and next thing you know you just killed a child.  You know?

 

Or, you know, you get into a firefight and you shoot at the enemy, and then at the end, you see a lot of civilians who were caught in the middle are dead, you know, and maybe the guys who started shooting at you just got away.

 

So, it’s a lot of stuff that, you know, you just question, you know. Once you have the time and, you know, you come to terms with what you have done, it just haunts you. For some people it happens soon, for some people it takes longer. But, you know, sooner or later, you’re always accountable for your actions.

 

 

Straws In The Wind:

Glynn County, Georgia, Turns Against The War

 

[Thanks to D who sent this in.]

 

Jun 13, 2006 By JOE OVERBY, The Brunswick News

 

Robert Randall of Brunswick and other concerned Glynn County residents have decided enough is enough and want American forces in Iraq to come home.

 

"A sizable amount of people in Glynn County ... agree that we need to be getting out of Iraq," Randall said.

 

It is that opinion that prompted him and others to organize GlynnPeace, a group pushing for an end to the war.

 

Randall said he hopes GlynnPeace can be an outlet and voice for local opposition to the war.

 

"We're looking to become, how would you say, a magnet for that sentiment to gravitate toward," he said.

 

The group opposes the war in Iraq on numerous levels, including its cost in lives. The death toll has already topped 2,450, and that's just American lives, he said. Upwards of 10,000 Iraqis have died.

 

There is also the monetary cost of waging war, he said.

 

"It creates a situation where we're not able to meet the human needs that exist within our own country," Randall said.


:: Article nr. 24065 sent on 19-jun-2006 10:16 ECT

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