How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → disrupting the military → refuseniks, deserters, soldiers defying orders

Last week, a group of 27 pilots with Israel’s air force signed and made public a letter saying that they would not participate in certain types of “liquidation” attacks that recklessly endangered innocent Palestinians. Some of these attacks, which are designed to assassinate terrorists before the terrorists can launch their own attacks on Israel, are carried out by bombing civilian areas where the suspected terrorists are thought to be, and without regard for the innocents who will certainly be killed in such an attack.

The Israeli establishment’s take on this is more-or-less “better their innocent civilians than ours.” But some Israelis are reluctant to quietly relinquish their claim on the moral high ground and would rather that Israel not resort to the deliberate murder of innocents as its official policy.

I spent some time discussing the moral calculus involved in these types of attacks several months ago when a U.S. “bunker buster” bomb was deliberately dropped on a residential neighborhood in Baghdad in the hopes that Saddam Hussein was in a fortified building underneath the neighborhood. (See: The Picket Line — )

I bring this up here not to readdress that issue, and certainly not because I want to start hashing over the Israel/Palestine conflict in this blog, but because I was surprised at how seriously this gesture by the 27 pilots (most of whom were not assigned to fly the disputed “liquidation” missions in the first place) is being taken in Israel.

There are other conscientious objectors in Israel and other “refuseniks” in the Israeli military, and the debate about Israel’s policies is just as vigorous there as it is, say, in Blogistan. So it’s not that nobody has ever thought about these issues before.

It appears to have something to do with the prestige that the air force has in Israel. People are taking this a lot more seriously because pilots have a reputation of being steadfast and courageous defenders of Israel and of Zionism. One of the signatories, Yiftah Spector, is a hero of legend in Israel. The establishment probably fears that if such pilots are starting to question their orders, things may really be slipping.

The pilots aren’t just claiming that the bombing policies that are being carried out are immoral, but illegal (probably under the Nuremberg principles and however those principles are represented in Israeli law and military codes of conduct) and that they are obliged to disobey illegal orders. So this is more than a personal statement of conscience — it is putting other pilots on notice that they need to address for themselves a conflict between their orders and the law. And the Israeli establishment is interpreting this as a call to mutiny.

I wonder if a person or small group of people could get conscientious objection onto the public agenda here in the U.S.. Certainly it would take more than just the usual lefty suspects writing op-ed pieces or some malcontent and his blog. It would take someone unexpected, well-respected in establishment circles, and somewhat famous. I somehow doubt that Colin Powell is going to find religion and get on Fox News and say “Bush is going to have to find another Secretary of State if he wants someone to make excuses for a shock-and-awe attack on Damascus or Tehran.” Who’s your nominee for the role?

I’m more of a bottom-up than top-down person, myself, so I’ll nominate you before I nominate some celebrity.

Also, I wrote about the debate prompted by prominent conscientious objectors in Israel’s military. I wondered at the time what something similar would look like in the US.

In ’s San Francisco Chronicle was a piece about how some groups are trying to encourage soldiers to defy illegal orders in Iraq, particularly with an open letter to occupation soldiers co-authored by an Israeli refusenik and an American conscientious objector.

There isn’t much sign that these moves have had much of an effect yet, although some soldiers are failing to come back from leave for whatever motives.

Another line has been crossed.

A 17-member Army Reserve platoon… deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a “suicide mission” to deliver fuel, the troops’ relatives said .

The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq — north of Baghdad — because their vehicles were considered “deadlined” or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.

Sgt. McCook, a deputy at the Hinds County, Miss., Detention Center, and the 16 other members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock Hill, S.C., were read their rights and moved from the military barracks into tents, Patricia McCook said her husband told her during a panicked phone call about .

Empire Notes summarizes the troops’ worries:

Fuel convoys in the “Sunni Triangle” nearly always come under fire; one soldier reportedly claimed that the chance of being attacked was “99 percent.” ¶ The platoon considered their trucks to be extremely unsafe; some were not able to go more than 40 mph, and would be sitting ducks. They ordinarily get an escort of armed Humvees and helicopters, but an escort was not available for [this] mission.

I’m sure these troops can expect to be dealt with very harshly for their insubordination, and that they knew this when they made their decision.

While fear of attack was certainly a motivating factor, 17 soldiers (or perhaps as many as 19) are not going to up and disobey their commands like this from simple fear or cowardice.

This is something more serious — a lack of faith that what they are fighting for is at all worth fighting for. An ad by the Iraq War veteran’s group Operation Truth puts it this way:

“I was called to serve in Iraq because the government said there were weapons of mass destruction — but they weren’t there,” Spc. Robert Acosta, 21, who was an ammunitions specialist with the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, says in the thought-provoking ad. “They said Iraq had something to do with 9/11 — but the connection wasn’t there… So when people ask me where my arm went, I try to find the words, but they’re not there.” The ad ends with a shot of Acosta removing his prosthesis, revealing a stub where his right hand should be.

This rebellious platoon may very well be the tip of the iceberg, an indication of a more widespread disillusionment that “more troops” or “allies” won’t cure. There’s only so long you can stay motivated if the enemy is fighting from patriotism or revenge or religious fervor, while you’re being told:

“You’re not going to make Iraq safe for democracy,” the sergeant said. “You are going for one reason alone: oil. But you’re still going to go, because you signed a contract. And you’re going to go to bring your friends home.”

As ill equipped as the convoy may have been, they had the might, wealth and organization of the U.S. armed forces behind them — those who threatened them were probably wearing sandals. This isn’t about their relative strengths — adding armor to the Humvees or Germans to the coalition won’t help — but about motivation.

An article in the Washington Post was remarkable for showing how widespread the cynicism expressed by Marines is in one platoon:

“I feel we’re going to be here for years and years and years,” said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. “I don’t think anything is going to get better; I think it’s going to get a lot worse. It’s going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We’re going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence.… We’re always going to be here. We’re never going to leave.”…

“Every day you read the articles in the States where it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s getting better and better,’ ” said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder, 22, of Gettysburg, Pa. “But when you’re here, you know it’s worse every day.”…

“The reality right now is that the most dangerous opinion in the world is the opinion of a U.S. serviceman,” said Lance Cpl. Devin Kelly, 20, of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones, 20, of Ball Ground, Ga., agreed: “We’re basically proving out that the government is wrong,” he said. “We’re catching them in a lie.”…

An order was suddenly passed for the Marines to search all buses for insurgents or weapons. ¶ “This is what we call a dog-and-pony show,” said Kelly, the heavyset, sharp-tongued lance corporal from Fairbanks. He said the operation was essentially a performance for American reporters who were traveling with the Marines. “This is so you can write in your paper how great our response is,” he said.… ¶ “We just scared the living [expletive] out of a bunch of people,” he said. “That’s all we did.”…

Asked if he was concerned that the Marines would be punished for speaking out, [Cpl. Brandon] Autin responded: “We don’t give a crap. What are they going to do, send us to Iraq?”

I’m seeing a lot more about deserters and refuseniks in the press lately. There are the eight soldiers who got caught up in the sneaky “stop-loss” net and who are trying to sue their way out. And Pablo Paredes decided not to come aboard when Expeditionary Strike Group Five left San Diego:

“I just want people to see how people feel about this. It’s not just a few crazy liberals talking to the media to make money. I’m not making any money, I’m going to jail for a year for this. I want to do because I feel that strongly about it and I know a lot of people feel this way,” Petty Officer Third Class Pablo Paredes told 10News.

Paredes, 23, wore a T-shirt that read: ‘Like a cabinet member, I resign.’

He acknowledged that the action he is planning could result in a court martial and imprisonment.

“I know other people are feeling the same way I am, and I’m hoping more people will stand up,” he said. “They can’t throw us all in jail.”

Also , conscientious objector Jeremy Hinzman’s plea for political asylum was heard at Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board.

One of the more than 5,000 U.S. military deserters, Jeremy Hinzman, had an Immigration and Refugee Board hearing in Canada at which another ex-soldier, Jimmy Massey testified that U.S. military atrocities were commonplace in Iraq.

His story is one of an increasing number that tell of the savagery of the occupation troops. This despite strong measures to try to keep this brutality from being brought to light:

On , Sgt. Frank “Greg” Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California National Guard’s 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation. Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac’d to a military medical center outside the country.

Although no “medevac” order appears to have been written, in violation of Army policy, Ford was clearly shipped out because of a diagnosis that he was suffering from combat stress. After Ford raised the torture allegations, Artiga immediately said Ford was “delusional” and ordered a psychiatric examination, according to Ford. But that examination, carried out by an Army psychiatrist, diagnosed him as “completely normal.”

A witness, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Marciello, claims that Artiga became enraged when he read the initial medical report finding nothing wrong with Ford and intimidated the psychiatrist into changing it. According to Marciello, Artiga angrily told the psychiatrist that it was a “C.I. [counterintelligence] or M.I. matter” and insisted that she had to change her report and get Ford out of Iraq.

Documents show that all subsequent examinations of Ford by Army mental-health professionals, over many months, confirmed his initial diagnosis as normal.

That’s from today’s Salon magazine. An ACLU press release yesterday tells of another cover-up:

A memo from Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, Defense Intelligence Agency chief, entitled “alleged detainee abuse by TF 62-6,” describing how DIA personnel who complained about abuses were threatened, had their car keys confiscated and e-mails monitored, and were ordered “not to talk to anyone in the U.S.” or leave the base “even to get a haircut.”

The memo also describes how the task force’s officers punched a prisoner in the face “to the point he needed medical attention,” failed to record the medical treatment, and confiscated DIA photos of the injuries. The date of the incident is unclear.

Combine what we know of the abuses that have come to light with this new evidence of the vigor of cover-up attempts, then add in the Dubya Squad’s penchant for secrecy and foot-dragging about FOIA disclosures, and then estimate the size of the iceberg we’re seeing the tip of.

Update: a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report published on cast doubt on the atrocity stories told by Jimmy Massey. However, that report has itself been called into doubt. See also: this Democracy Now debate, and Paul Rockwell’s defense of Massey.

U.S. Navy sailor Pablo Paredes decided not to go when his ship left port . He recently went on trial in military court. Here are some excerpts from his statement to the judge last week:

I am convinced that the current war in Iraq is illegal. I am also convinced that the true causality for it lacked any high ground in the topography of morality. I believe as a member of the Armed Forces, beyond having duty to my Chain of Command and my President, I have a higher duty to my conscience and to the supreme law of the land. Both of these higher duties dictate that I must not participate in any way, hands-on or indirect, in the current aggression that has been unleashed on Iraq. In the past few months I have been continually asked if I regret my decision to refuse to board my ship and to do so publicly. I have spent hour upon hour reflecting on my decision, and I can tell you with every fiber of certitude that I possess that I feel in my heart I did the right thing.…

I understood… what the precedent was for service members participating in illegal wars. I read extensively on the arguments and results of Nazi German soldiers, as well as imperial Japanese soldiers, in the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, respectively. In all I read I came to an overwhelming conclusion supported by countless examples that any soldier who knowingly participates in an illegal war can find no haven in the fact that they were following orders, in the eyes of international law.

Nazi aggression and imperialist Japan are very charged moments of history and simply mentioning them evokes many emotions and reminds of many atrocities. So I want to be very clear that I am in no way comparing our current government to any of the historical counterparts. I am not comparing the leaders or their acts, not their militaries nor their acts. I am only citing the trials because they are the best example of judicial precedent for what a soldier/sailor is expected to do when faced with the decision to participate or refuse to participate in what he perceives is an illegal war.

I think we would all agree that a service member must not participate in random unprovoked illegitimate violence simply because he is ordered to. What I submit to you and the court is that I am convinced that the current war is exactly that. So, if there’s anything I could be guilty of, it is my beliefs. I am guilty of believing this war is illegal. I’m guilty of believing war in all forms is immoral and useless, and I am guilty of believing that as a service member I have a duty to refuse to participate in this war because it is illegal.

The judge agreed… both that he was guilty, and, apparently, that Paredes had reasonable cause to believe that the war in Iraq was an illegal one.

I was intrigued to learn that Ernest McQueen, a former U.S. Marine, who went AWOL during the Vietnam War, has recently been arrested and charged with desertion.

He deserted in when the story of the My Lai massacre and coverup hit the papers.

I can’t help but wonder about the reason why the military has gone after this stale, 36-year-old desertion case. It must be getting nervous about being able to keep the people currently in uniform from ducking out and it wants to send a message.

Lieutenant Ehren Watada is the first American commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to the Iraq War. He spoke to the Veterans for Peace National Convention last weekend. Excerpts:

Tonight I will speak to you on my ideas for a change of strategy. I am here because I took a leap of faith. My action is not the first and it certainly will not be the last. Yet, on behalf of those who follow, I require your help — your sacrifice — and that of countless other Americans. I may fail. We may fail. But nothing we have tried has worked so far. It is time for change and the change starts with all of us.…

, I speak with you about a radical idea. It is one born from the very concept of the American soldier (or service member). It became instrumental in ending the Vietnam War — but it has been long since forgotten. The idea is this: that to stop an illegal and unjust war, the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it. [Applause] …

The Nuremburg Trials showed America and the world that citizenry as well as soldiers have the unrelinquishable obligation to refuse complicity in war crimes perpetrated by their government. Widespread torture and inhumane treatment of detainees is a war crime. A war of aggression born through an unofficial policy of prevention is a crime against the peace. An occupation violating the very essence of international humanitarian law and sovereignty is a crime against humanity. These crimes are funded by our tax dollars. Should citizens choose to remain silent through self-imposed ignorance or choice, it makes them as culpable as the soldier in these crimes.…

The military, and especially the Army, is an institution of fraternity and close-knit camaraderie. Peer pressure exists to ensure cohesiveness but it stamps out individualism and individual thought. The idea of brotherhood is difficult to pull away from if the alternative is loneliness and isolation. If we want soldiers to choose the right but difficult path — they must know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they will be supported by Americans. To support the troops who resist, you must make your voices heard. If they see thousands supporting me, they will know. I have heard your support, as has Suzanne Swift, and Ricky Clousing — but many others have not. Increasingly, more soldiers are questioning what they are being asked to do. Yet, the majority lack awareness to the truth that is buried beneath the headlines. Many more see no alternative but to obey. We must show open-minded soldiers a choice and we must give them courage to act.…

I tell this to you because you must know that to stop this war, for the soldiers to stop fighting it, they must have the unconditional support of the people. I have seen this support with my own eyes. For me it was a leap of faith. For other soldiers, they do not have that luxury. They must know it and you must show it to them. Convince them that no matter how long they sit in prison, no matter how long this country takes to right itself, their families will have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, opportunities and education. This is a daunting task. It requires the sacrifice of all of us. Why must Canadians feed and house our fellow Americans who have chosen to do the right thing? We should be the ones taking care of our own. Are we that powerless — are we that unwilling to risk something for those who can truly end this war? How do you support the troops but not the war? By supporting those who can truly stop it; let them know that resistance to participate in an illegal war is not futile and not without a future.

I have broken no law but the code of silence and unquestioning loyalty. If I am guilty of any crime, it is that I learned too much and cared too deeply for the meaningless loss of my fellow soldiers and my fellow human beings. If I am to be punished it should be for following the rule of law over the immoral orders of one man. If I am to be punished it should be for not acting sooner. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period … was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

The peacenik press is full of news over the court-martial of Ehren Watada, who has refused to deploy to Iraq because he believes he was improperly ordered to fight an illegal war. But, as in Thoreau’s day, “the soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.” Watada, I’m happy to hear, is having none of that:

“Should citizens choose to remain silent through self-imposed ignorance or choice, it makes them as culpable as the soldiers in these crimes.” … “we as Americans have to step up and say either we agree with what’s going on or we disagree with what’s going on.… If you disagree… then you are going to have to ask yourself what are you willing to sacrifice of yourself in order to correct the injustice and wrongs of this government in regard to the Iraq War.”

“We all take part in it — if you pay your taxes, you’re taking part in this war. We all have a responsibility, as they determined after Nuremberg, whether you’re the lowest soldier or the highest ranking general, or just a regular civilian, we all have responsibility… to resist and refuse enabling and condoning this criminal behavior,” he said.

People in the peace movement are eager to remind Congress that “You Can’t Oppose the War and Fund the War” but are they willing to be reminded themselves?

Lately, I’ve been doing some volunteer work for Courage to Resist, an American group that supports members of the U.S. military who have turned against its wars and have refused to fight.

They’ve done a series of audio interviews with some of these soldiers, and I’ve been helping to transcribe these so they can be published in book form.

While each story is unique and interesting in its own right, there’s also an awful, relentless monotony in it. Many of the stories follow the same basic pattern: Some kid, hoping to improve on a mediocre lot in life and motivated by a desire to do something worthwhile for his (or sometimes her) country, talks to a military recruiter and gets a great song-and-dance about opportunity and how in the military we’re all one big happy family that sticks by each other through thick and thin. Once in, the corruption, dishonesty, and betrayal of the military and its degrading, cruel, and dehumanizing culture start to pile on, and the new soldier starts to understand that he’s been had. Sent overseas, he discovers quickly that his actual mission doesn’t bear any resemblance to the noble stories the government and propagandists are pitching back home, and that his life and his mission are considered far less important than ass-covering up the chain of command. When he tries to get help — for instance for his injuries, for his post-traumatic stress disorder, or for the family he’s left behind — he finds that the “big happy family that sticks together” quickly becomes disparagement, abuse, bureaucracy, and wholly inadequate assistance: at best they’ll try to drug you up to keep you quiet. Finally deciding to get out, he then finds that the military has dozens of ways of making you suffer if you try to leave, and that there’s often no exit except as an outlaw.

David Cortelyou dropped out of high school, got an equivalency certificate, but couldn’t find work, so he signed up. He was trained as a fire support specialist and deployed to Iraq in 2005. In Iraq he learned that when you’re surrounded by cruelty and killing, “it was either laugh about it, cry about it, or say nothing and go insane.” When an insurgent blew himself up nearby while laying an IED, they laughed about it. When his platoon tortured to death a dog that was hanging around one of their guard points — “slit its throat, smashed its skull with a shovel, cut its belly open, broke its leg” (and then killed its puppies when they found out it was a mother) — they laughed about it. And that was in Bi’aj, which was relatively “safe” (a mortar destroyed his tent once, but he was out on mission at the time).

In contrast, Ramadi, where he was assigned next, was “hell on earth.” His platoon was assigned to train and support green cavalry scouts, but because his battalion commander considered his platoon to be too valuable an asset to waste on such works, the cav scouts went out unsupported, making rookie errors and taking considerable casualties.

And the cav scouts got mutilated. I’ll say it: the cav scouts, they got their asses kicked in Ramadi. I can’t remember how many memorial services I went to where I talked to the guys afterwards and they told me about what was going on. Their commander was sending them down black routes, which is a road that it’s a 100% chance that you’re gonna get hit, whether it be IED or small-arms. You don’t go down black routes, because it’s 100% that you’re gonna get hit. You’re gonna get hit by something. So they have routes and whatnot mapped out so you know where to go and where not to go. Well, their commander would send them down black routes because it got them to their objective faster. Half way to the objective they’d have to turn around and come back because they were loaded down with casualties — dead or otherwise. And I kept hearing about this, and I like, “well, what the hell — we’re supposed to be there for these guys’ support and they don’t have the support they need, they’re getting pinned down by small-arms fire, and if we woulda been there we coulda called in artillery, they would have had an extra rifle firing friendly rounds.”

On another occasion “we had to escort a few paperweight, pencil-pushers, desk-jockeys, office pokes, people who had never been outside the wire for combat situations, no clue what they were doing” and when they hit a mine, one was killed, and the remaining desk-jockeys made matters worse by clumsily interfering with radio communications while Cortelyou’s team was trying to call in a medevac.

But, “laugh about it, cry about it, or say nothing and go insane.” Preparing to go out on another route clearance mission, his crew were delayed at the gate by a convoy of trucks bringing back the casualties from another battle.

And because it was… it was right across the street, quite literally right across the street from the front gate — about five minutes after it ended we had a bunch of Iraqi police trucks — these white Chevrolet pickup trucks that they use for their police vehicles — and about five minutes after it ended these vehicles started pulling in the front gate and the backs of them are loaded with dead — not just wounded, but dead — soldiers. And I’m not talking about a few bodies in the back, I’m talking these trucks — five or six trucks — loaded, piled on top of each other, with dead bodies, dead Iraqi police. And the last truck that came in only had like four bodies in it, but they had let the tailgate down. And sitting on the tailgate, this large, fat, Iraqi police member had been hoisted on the tailgate — and, uh, laugh about it, cry about it, or say nothing and go insane: we laughed about it. Who cares? They were Iraqi. “Oh, and by the way, did you see that fat fucker on the last truck?” ’Cause he was, he was a huge guy. Every bump they hit, you could see his fat jiggle. And it was ridiculous, because he was only half-way on the truck as it was, and because he was so large, every bump they hit his fat jiggled and shifted his weight — he ’bout damn near fell off the back of the truck. And so, we laughed about it — ha ha!, the Iraqis can’t fight as well as we can, whatever, and did you see that fat fuck on the back truck? — and after that, nothing was ever said about it.

And to be honest, I had completely forgotten about that, about the trucks. It wasn’t until about seven or eight months ago I was sitting here talking to one of the NCOs from my platoon, down-range, he and I were sitting here talking about some shit that had happened there. He mentioned it and at first I had no clue what he was talking about… no clue. I thought he was just bullshitting with me and makin’ shit up. And then he explained, “no man: the truck that came in that was loaded with dead IPs. You don’t remember that, man? You were a gunner at that time, you should’ve seen it.” And he kept trying to explain it to me and I couldn’t remember. And then he mentioned the fat man on the back truck, and as soon as he mentioned the fat man on the back truck it came back to me like a dam had just broken open or something, and the first five minutes of remembering it was like I was there again watching these trucks roll in.

…Yeah, that was a real bad month for us: soldier dies in my arms, two weeks later we get a convoy full of dead IPs, every day for three or four weeks after that we were attending memorial services…

…There’s a lot of other stuff that happened in Iraq that I can’t even talk about, just stupid shit like that that just bears on my mind every single day. I got to think about the stupid shit: the dog, the guy that blew himself up, the truck full of people, the battle buddy dying in my arms, the chain of command stupidity I guess. And every day I’ve got to think about this and try and deal with it. And the Army, their way of trying to help, is to give me pills and get me doped up so I forget about it, or so I don’t talk about it.

David switched from “laugh about it” to “say nothing and go insane.” When they were being processed out of Iraq, as part of the process they were asked if they had any psychological issues they wanted to deal with first. Some of the other soldiers interviewed by Courage to Resist mentioned this same sneaky trick. They ask you if you need help while you’re in Germany waiting to be processed home, and they make sure you know that if you say “yes” that’s going to delay your processing and keep you away from home that much longer, and so, in Cortelyou’s words, “98% of the people say, ‘no; fuck no. We’ve been in Iraq for 15 months, we don’t want to be cooped up in a shrink’s office rehashing everything that happened, we want to be going out partying, getting drunk, whatever.’ ”

So that’s what we did. And it wasn’t until about two months later that I started having nightmares, and… not flashbacks, but just, I started getting really tense and nervous and anxious about everything. A car door slams too hard and I freak out. Driving down the road, even now — this is a year later, a year later — I still, driving down the road, find myself looking on the sides of the roads. I’m not just spacing out, I’m looking for things: tripwires, pressure plates, shit that’s not supposed to be there. When I walk past people, I find myself being suspicious of ’em, especially if they have their hands in their pockets. Every time I leave my room, I pat my chest — a year later, a year down the road and I still look for my weapon — and because it’s not folded across my chest, yeah, now I don’t, but I still look for it. But I used to look for it and when it wasn’t there I would turn around and go back into my room and look for it. Now all I do is just pat down my chest looking for the strap, and if it’s not there, then I just… it clicks, and okay, yeah, hello, you’re not in Iraq anymore; you don’t have a weapon. And I used to go back into my room searching for my weapon, and it would take me five or 10 minutes to realize that, hello, wise guy, you’re in Germany not Iraq, you don’t have a weapon. Two, three months later, I had all these problems, all these issues, and because of the platoon I was in I was scared to go to anybody for help. Because my platoon was, you know, the John Wayne handbook prodigy: tough skin, tough guys, big burly tough guys, don’t cry, don’t talk about problems, and whatever — and all that macho bullshit. So instead of talkin’ to anybody about it, I started burning myself to feel human, because a lot of shit that happened downrange wasn’t human.

After months of suicide attempts with overdoses of pills washed down with alcohol, and of burning himself, getting “blister on top of blister on top of blister, so I had a good four of five inches of just blistered skin” on his palms and wrists and fingers so he could feel the pain and think “alright, you’re still human, whatever, I guess,” someone finally called him on it. But “instead of ‘hey, man, do you need to sit down and talk about something, you maybe wanna go to chaplain or maybe a mental health specialist — do you wanna talk about something?’ — no no, no no: ‘hey man, did you know you can get in trouble for damaging government property?’ ”

They said that? They said that by burning yourself you could get in trouble for damaging government property?

Yeah.

So you were property.

I was pissed. I was furious. For one, I’m already having problems because I got this feeling like I’ve turned into a machine — a machine that can kill without second thoughts, a machine that can look at a dead person and laugh about it. And so I’m already having a little bit of… identity issues, if you will. And now I’m told that I’m government property, and I’m damaging it? All right, well, fuck you very much, Uncle Sam: I’m done. If this is how you’re going to react to a soldier having a problem, I’m done; I quit.

He went AWOL, then turned himself back in. He got a mental health referral for a discharge from a mental health specialist that worked for the Army, but not much in the way of assistance — though everyone he talked to, from the psychiatrist to the chaplain, seemed to want to give him pills. He didn’t want to go on pills, in part because his suicide attempts had been with pills, but he seemed to have to explain this over and over again to the same people until it was like talking to a brick wall.

Between the mental health discharge recommendation and the disciplinary hearing for going AWOL, which he thought also would end in a discharge, Cortelyou figured that at least his combat service was over. But then they told him that they were assigning him to a unit that was due to redeploy as soon as he served a three-month disciplinary restriction.

I was just there, just kind of passing in and out of time, not knowing what I was going to do. I can’t be in the military; it’s not that I don’t want to be: I can’t. I can’t stand being around people in uniform, I can’t stand being in uniform, because every day all it is is a constant, 24-hours, seven-days-a-week reminder of not only what I did but what I witnessed and kept my mouth shut to. So again in December, late December, just after Christmas, I went AWOL again. And this time I was gone for 40-some-odd days; I’d become a deserter.

This time, the Army gave him a Chapter 14 discharge for a pattern of misconduct and the commission of a serious offense. He was released from the Army earlier .

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Some bits-and-pieces from here-and-there:

  • If you’ve been following along with my Aristotlethon, you may be interested to know that I’ve posted PDFs of the many translations and commentaries I’ve been relying on at a supplemental bibliography page. These are corrected versions of the PDFs available from Google Books. I’ve adjusted the page numbering to accurately reflect the page numbers of the original books, have removed blank, damaged, or duplicate pages, and have added bookmarks that allow you to quickly jump to particular books and chapters.
  • Here’s an interesting trick I hadn’t heard of before:
    1. Overpay your taxes with a substantially too-large bad check.
    2. The IRS automatically sends you a refund check.
    3. The IRS notices, too late, that your check was worthless.
    A new Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report says that this happened over 15,000 times during the last tax filing season, and the IRS lost more than $20 million this way.
  • If you’re a tax resister, tax protester, or tax evader, would this interfere with your ability to sponsor your fiancé(e) during the process of getting a visa extension or citizenship? Hmmm… good question. Take it away, immigration lawyer Brad Bernstein.

  • There’s a new group called “Oath Keepers” that I’ve been hearing about mostly on fringe paleocon sites, but that now is getting big enough to get some MSM buzz.

    The gist is that the group purports to consist of members of U.S. law enforcement and the military who have vowed not to obey any orders that contradict their understanding of their duty to the U.S. Constitution, as given in their oaths of office (typically, such oaths include a promise to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”).

    They anticipate that the government will become more tyrannical, and that the “domestic” enemies to the Constitution will come from within government and will issue unconstitutional orders to disarm Americans, put them under martial law, eliminate state sovereignty, blockade American cities, enlist foreign troops in the subjugation of American citizens, put Americans in detention camps, and so forth.

    In preparation for this, they are trying to build a movement of folks in uniform who insist that they will refuse to obey orders to do such things.

    That the group formed with sudden urgency and enthusiasm just as Obama was taking office may lead you to suspect that this is largely a group of paranoid right-wingers of the OMG The New World Order Is Vaccinating Us Against the Flu; Next They’ll Take Our Guns And Lock Us In Concentration Camps Run By ACORN variety. You’d be right. But, like it or not, this is what grassroots dissent from within the ranks is liable to look like, at least at first. And any such movement that advocates that folks in uniform judge and possibly disobey orders is salutary, at least to that extent.

  • There are some ominous signs that the IRS may turn on sole proprietors next. The government suspects that many sole proprietors who declare losses on their tax returns are doing so fraudulently — by deducting fake or non-business-related expenses, by not disclosing income, or by pretending that their expensive hobbies are really businesses. The agency estimates that over half of the losses claimed by unprofitable sole proprietorships were not legally justified, and fully 70% of such sole proprietorships reported such losses. In spite of this, the agency has not put much effort into plugging the leak, in part because the losses on each return are typically small and the effort involved in auditing a sole proprietorship return is costly.

Today, some dispatches concerning a mass tax strike in the south of France in :

Marcellin Albert

Marcellin Albert

French Wine Growers’ Plan

General Refusal to Pay Taxes If Relief Is Not Soon Granted

Copyright, , by The New York Times Co.

Paris, .— Marcélin Albert, the leader of the winegrowers’ agitation in Southern France, does not place much reliance in the Governmental promises of relief.

He continues to organize his forces with a view to a general refusal to pay taxes after , if the promises are not put in action by that date.

If you’re enjoying the sight of Hillary Clinton whining and the various Sheikhs and diplomats of the world cringing and spinning in the face of the ongoing Wikileaks disclosures, you can show your appreciation by contributing financially to the people who took great risks to help make it possible:

  • The Bradley Manning Defense Fund is a project of Courage to Resist, which helps refuseniks of all stripes. Bradley Manning is the number one suspect in the leaks and is currently a prisoner of the United States government.
  • Wikileaks is supervising the release of the documents and trying to maintain a safe haven for people who want to bring other such secrets to light.

If you follow this blog at all, you know I’m not one for enthusing about new activist campaigns and certainly not one to go around exhorting folks to donate to some cause or other. I tend to err on the side of (perhaps overly-cynical) aloofness: preferring to let campaigns and groups put some proof in the pudding before I serve it to my friends. And these past several years, the pudding served up by the organizations and actions opposing the warfare state has been pretty thin.

But WikiLeaks is the real thing, folks. It is taking bold, dangerous, big, deliberate steps to strike at the root of the problem. The best evidence of how they’re succeeding where so many have failed is in the frothing-at-the-mouth of the warfare states’ biggest offenders. (They ignored and ridiculed Cindy Sheehan and hoped she’d go away; they’re openly plotting the murder of Julian Assange.)

And Wikileaks could certainly use our help. As you may be aware, government authorities, throwing their weight around outside of ordinary legal channels, have been successfully pressuring companies providing internet service for WikiLeaks to cut them off. Because of this, for example, the wikileaks.org domain no longer works (you can still reach the site at other addresses, like wikileaks.de, and at the numerical IP address 213.251.145.96).

Amazon web services, a “cloud” service and storage provider, shamefully bowed to U.S. government pressure to stop hosting WikiLeaks data, and the U.S. has even forbidden many of its employees to view or link to the WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables — to the extent of blocking the site to public web browsers at the Library of Congress. WikiLeaks computers are under a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack from enraged private and government entities. The Washington Times and others have publicly called for the assassination of WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, and he is being sought on criminal charges that have all the fingerprints of a dirty trick.

While none of these things are going to be able to stop WikiLeaks from continuing to release the U.S. diplomatic cables that sparked all this retaliation (they’re too crafty for that), it gives you some idea of the strength and fury of the forces arrayed against them — forces that are determined to degrade the ability of WikiLeaks (or anyone else encouraged by their success) to pull off any similar feats in the future.

So I encourage you to put some skin in the game. There are several ways to donate money. You can also follow @wikileaks on Twitter, which can be a good way to stay informed about things you can do to help, which may include downloading data to your home computer so that WikiLeaks data is duplicated and widely-distrubuted so that it is less-vulnerable to attack. If you have the time and interest, you can also spend some time reading through some of the released cables, summarizing them and contrasting them with official government statements from the period.

But don’t sit this one out. Finally citizens and refuseniks have struck a major blow against the empire. You’re going to want to look back at this moment and remember being on the right side.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Claire Wolfe has written a good meditation on the dangers of lifestyle purity perfectionism. I have a lot of admiration for folks who go to eccentric extremes to root out even the tiniest vestages of collaboration from their lives. I also think that keeping our faces turned in the direction of always becoming a little better in this regard is good exercise in staying conscious and conscientious (at least that way if you decide to compromise, you won’t do it unconsciously or with self-deception). That said, I think it’s probably true that there are diminishing returns after a while from this approach and it can become a sort of self-indulgent ethical yoga.
  • , Alassane Ouattara apparently won the presidential election in Ivory Coast over incumbent Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo disagrees and refuses to leave office. Ouattara called on the citizens of Ivory Coast to discontinue paying taxes to the Gbagbo government.
  • The website Financial Integrity is holding a writing competition. “Around the world people are aligning their spending with their values. They’re trusting their own choices more than what the advertisers put forth. People are emphasizing financial integrity. Stories are being made, as real people make real choices and experience the bumps and bruises and triumphs of transforming their relationship with money.” Perhaps the story of your conscientious tax resistance is the winner they’re looking for.
  • Fred Reed on the American Monkey Trap.
  • Kevin Zeese on the courageous stand of Bradley Manning.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

I volunteered to help transcribe some of the interviews that Courage to Resist conducted with members of the U.S. military who, in recent years, have wised up and turned their backs on the wars they were sent to fight.

The stories they told were often heart-wrenching, horrifying, and infuriating, but also at times inspiring. It seems hard enough for the rest of us to stick our necks out to oppose the government and its wars — think how much more courage it would take if you were in uniform.

I wrote up a summary of one such story, that of David Cortelyou, back in .

Courage to Resist has just put out a collection of these stories by modern military resisters: About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.

Here are some excerpts that give you a taste for what you’ll find inside:

Joining up

Kimberly Rivera: One recruiter came to my parents’ house, sat down with me and my parents, and basically gave all the positive reasons of why I should join the military. And then they’re like, “well, if you want, you can just go and take the test and see what jobs you qualify for,” and I’m like, “okay.” So I agreed to go do that, but what I realize is when they first gave their spiel they had my parents sign some sort of… they called it a “permission slip” or something, to just allow them to talk with us, but come to find out that wasn’t necessarily a permission slip to allow them to talk with us, it was a permission slip to allow them to recruit me.

But of course I’m not thinking that the government is playing people like that, because I grew up being told, you know, that America is the greatest place on earth and I had patriotism… it’s just ingrained in you.

So in 2000 I was a junior and I went in, took the test, and then I next had to talk to a military counselor. And when I go to talk to the counselor, he’s the one that’s actually gonna be telling me what kind of jobs I’m gonna qualify for with my scores. The military has over 270… maybe even 300 different types of jobs you can get into now, and they gave me three choices, so that was really odd. So I chose a job, but not knowing that when I chose my job I signed for a military contract. And then after signing it I just had to basically convince myself that I did the right thing and that this was going to be the right choice for me.

It goes through so fast, and as soon as you pick your job you sit in the little place and you basically are waiting to be sworn in. And then from that moment on, I’m like, “you know what? I just joined the military.”

Basic training

Robin Long: In basic training they’re trying to break everyone down and build ’em up the way that the Army wants them to be — we were marching around, singing cadences everywhere about killing people, and blood, and guts and gore — they were kind of dehumanizing the Iraqi people. I was hearing on mainstream media, you know, the United States was going to Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, to liberate the Iraqi people, yet I’m being taught that I’m going to the desert to — excuse the racial slur — to kill ragheads. And that at first didn’t sit very well with me, and so I started asking questions to my drill sergeant, like “why are we calling the Iraqi people ragheads?” and they were like, “well, that’s what they are.” And I told them that I really didn’t feel comfortable with them calling them that, and they… I guess I was picked on quite a bit, I was kind of the oddball at first.…

In the Army you just want to fit in. You don’t want to stand out in any way because they’ll do things like smoke the entire platoon — “smoke” means like intense physical activity for an extended period of time — while I’m watching them, to make them angry at me, because I don’t agree with what the president is saying or what my superiors are saying. So, then, back in the barracks, you know, I get the cold shoulders and don’t really have the friends, so I guess that got me to shut up for a while. Maybe the last month of basic training I wasn’t voicing my concerns… I’m sure there were people that agreed with me. I never talked to any, because I think they saw the way I was treated and they didn’t want that for themselves. So no one would admit to me, but I knew there was some people that were thinking on their own too.

Brandon Hughey: I began to notice that it was not just teaching people how to fight, but it was also completely dehumanizing the other side. It was sorta… a lot of racial slurs, a lot of insults that are just commonly used towards Arab people and towards Iraqi people in basic training. And you began to see that they don’t think of ’em as equal. They think of them as less than us and they seem like they tried to drill that into our heads that they’re not as good as us and they’re less than us. I suppose they do that because when you’re over there it makes ’em easier to point your rifle and kill them.

I’d been taught that all human life regardless of country-of-origin is of equal value. Just ’cause somebody’s from Iraq or the Middle East doesn’t mean that their life is worth less than an American. And in basic training you began to notice that they sort of didn’t share that way of thinking, to put it lightly.

War stories

Ryan Johnson: I started talking to vets that had returned to find out what their experiences in the military were, to find out what their experiences in Iraq were, so I knew what I was getting into, because I’d already jumped into something without getting proper information before I joined the military.

They were telling me stories of watching tanks running over civilian vehicles in the street. They were telling me stories of abusing civilians, shooting civilians, seeing dead children in the street, firing on vehicles at checkpoints and then when they look inside they find the dead bodies of a family with no weapons, or an incinerated child. Horrible stories that gave them constant nightmares and made it intolerable for them to even be in a public crowded place. They were telling me about when they came home from Iraq their families would take them to Disney World and they couldn’t even enjoy it with their family. They had to sit in the hotel room while their family went to Disney World without them.

Brad McCall: I heard the stories that were being told about Iraq, stories and details of atrocities that were being committed against innocent people in Iraq. The vets who were telling these stories were proud of them. They were bragging. They were totally bragging about what they’d done and about what other members of the unit had done. They were laughing about it, and it was just a big joke and they couldn’t wait to go back because they enjoyed killing people.

When I heard these, the first thing I did was I ran to the bathroom and, you know, I got sick to my stomach.… When I got done with that, I went straight to my commander and reported it to him. He said, “Oh, well, we’ll have to have a talk with the veterans and make sure they don’t tell you guys these stories anymore.” That was all that was ever done about it. So from there I really started thinking for myself for once — politically and morally and spiritually — even what my really true hardcore beliefs are.

Skyler James: Soldiers who had returned from deployment were everywhere at Fort Campbell, and they would always talk about what they did to the people over there in Iraq — these are horrible things, and I thought, “Why are they bragging about them and trying to one-up each other?”

Matthis Chiroux: When I was with this unit from Hohenfels, Germany, I actually witnessed when they told Gen. B.B. Bell that only about half of the turrets in their humvees worked, that the other half were rusted to the point that they couldn’t rotate the weapons on top of the vehicles, and that really they were just riding around for show: were they to come under any kind of attack they would be completely unprepared to respond. They would have to basically turn these vehicles on the wheels to aim; they couldn’t twist these turrets around. And the young soldiers of this unit were telling the general about this, and the general was extremely upset and immediately got on a satellite phone and called back to Germany and chewed out one of his guys back there and asked ’em “hey, why do I have soldiers on the ground underneath the control of this Romanian battalion and their gun turrets don’t even work” and “basically, I want somebody here, fixing these things within 24 hours, or you’re fired.”

And from what I heard, that happened. I left the next day, before the inspectors from Bagram showed up, but I saw this as very productive, I saw: hey, this unit has a problem, their weapons don’t work, and they just told the general about it, and now they’re going to get fixed. But what ended up happening was all of these troops got chewed out by their first sergeant and their commanding officer for being whiners and making the unit look bad in front of the general.

That’s one of the things that my fellow Iraq Veterans Against the War are often testifying about is the fact that all of the bad things were going on but that people were failing to report them up the chain because they were afraid of looking bad, they were afraid of being scrutinized as possibly deficient or defective soldiers as part of deficient or defective units, and that that was somehow their fault and they should feel ashamed about that and keep it quiet for the sake of unit cohesion and putting on good appearances for the world and for the commanders.

Turning points

Kimberly Rivera: I worked at the front gate, and every single Saturday, different civilians — just civilians that don’t work with us — come in and put in a claim for restitution basically. And I don’t know what their family has gone through, I don’t know what they have lost, some of them gotten their only rifle in the house taken from them which may be their only security for their family for anybody coming in, and some of them got their young teenage boys and their husbands taken from them and are wondering where they are, and some of them had been traumatically injured.

Well this one Saturday I remember just clear as day, just like I see everybody now that I approach on a daily basis, like I have never left Iraq I see this little girl — she was about two years old, maybe, same age as my little girl back home — and could just I see her shaking. It was like a violent shake, not a seizure-type shake, but noticeable. And tears were just rolling out of her face, rolling down her eyes. She wasn’t weeping, she wasn’t crying, nothing. And kids don’t just cry without screaming, you know? And I knew those were… something traumatizing happened to that little girl that she would have tears of trauma roll down her face. And I was helpless, there was nothing I could do, I was in all my battle gear, I was carrying an M16 assault rifle and it was loaded ’cause I was required to keep it on red-safe when I was on the job. And I was just scared that if I was to just pick her up like I wanted to do and kind of assure her that everything was gonna be okay — even though I didn’t know if everything could be okay, or what happened to her; I couldn’t comprehend how this girl’s dad would have to deal with that, and I couldn’t comprehend, being a mom myself, how I would react to my little girl being that way and knowing that I’m helpless to do anything to help her or even know what’s going on in her mind and the situation that she’s been through. And that was very traumatizing for me because I personally couldn’t imagine ever seeing my little girl the same way that she was…

Older women are so mature and so proud of being alive and they don’t speak a lick of English and they would just come and sit and stare at you while they were waiting to do their claims. And in their eyes, piercing your heart and your soul basically saying “why are you doing this to me? what did I do to you? what caused you to want to hurt my family like that?” And you can feel it. They didn’t have to say it; you can feel it and you can see it in their face. And I couldn’t take that.

I can see just people — Iraqi civilians that worked with us — lose somebody that they just knew, and would rip their clothes and fall down on the ground. I had no idea what the heck was going on. That seems totally not like any type of grief that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. But it was compassion. Compassion I’ve never seen, never felt and don’t even comprehend to this day. And that was amazing to me, that I could see that people that don’t even know each other but know what’s going on in their lives, that they would have that much compassion for one another that they would be grieving.

Getting out

Kimberly Rivera: My sergeants knew I was going through a lot of stress, and when I finally got my two-week leave I guess they were afraid that I was not going to come back. So they decided to pull me in and have a little chat about why not to desert. They said basically they could do anything they wanted to me — not just ruin my life, but they could also, if they wanted, make an example of me and kill me during a time of war. That came from their mouths. But by this time there was nothing that they could say or do to scare me straight.

We were on the road for about two weeks, just in and out of different places. And I was super-paranoid.… I’ve seen the drag-outs myself. In Kuwait we did the trainings for taking prisoners and clearing out rooms and houses, so I had some sense of knowing exactly what they did on their raids, even though I’ve never been out on the raids myself. So it’s pretty scary having that SWAT-type training and knowing that the way that you would probably take someone out is the same way that they would take you out.

And so we were hopping around a lot. We weren’t staying in one particular place, we didn’t use the internet, we didn’t get on-line, we didn’t use cell-phones even — we took out the batteries, and we took out the SIM cards, so if they tried to check our phones and see if they were working they would just know that it wasn’t working, instead of just being turned off. That’s how strong you felt you were being pursued. And, any state you go to, they can find you on your social security, they can track your credit cards, they can track the money, even, if they wanted to, and so it’s pretty frightening. So we got to Canada and we felt very relieved that we were there, and maybe like I could start my healing process from Iraq and just continue with our lives.

Michael Thurman: I think G.I. resistance is going to be the ultimate thing that stops the war, because definitely politicians and the government won’t do it. It’s going to have to be the actions of individuals that bring down the pillars of war.