Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
Now Available!
Today's
Stories
May
4, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 2004
Virginia
Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall
May
1 / 2, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy
in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat
Robert
Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No
Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders,
Useless Spies, Angry World
Heather
Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin
American Troops Flee Iraq
Diane
Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq:
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
Diane
Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and
Sharon Speak the Same Language
Patrick
Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked,
Shocked, Shocked
Chris
Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists
and Annihilation
April
29 / 30, 2004
Dave
Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome
Death of Pat Tillman
Kathy
Kelly
The Warden's Tour
Greg
Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Banality of Evil
Michael
S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the
Ultimate Depception
Patrick
Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies
April
28, 2004
Christopher
Brauchli
Meet Congressman Know-Nothing:
Tom Tancredo
Wendy
Brinker
The Politics of the Numb
Faisal
Kutty
The Dirty Work of Canadian Intelligence
John
Chuckman
Seeking the Evil One
Mike
Whitney
Flag-Draped Coffins and the Seattle Times
Tom
Mountain
Rwanda and the F***** Word
Graeme
Greenback
The Iraqi Alamo: a CNN/CIA Production
Tracy
McLellan
The War Comes Home
M.
Junaid Alam
We are the Barbarians
William
Loren Katz
Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson
April 27, 2004
James
Davis
The Colombia 3 Acquitted
Dave
Lindorff
Chalabi as Prosecutor
Bruce
Schneier
Terrorist Threats and Political
Gain
Cockburn
/ Sengupta
British Generals Resist Calls for
More Troops to Aid Americans in Iraq
Walt
Brasch
Presidential Letters: The Day I
Was Asked to Feed an Elephant
Saul
Landau
The Empire in Denial and the Denial
of Empire
April 26, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Crossing the Shia Line: US Troops
Prepare to Enter Najaf
Wayne
Madsen
Trading Places: Will the US Go the Way of the USSR?
Grover
Furr
Protest, Rebellion, Commitment
Elaine
Cassel
Lies About the Patriot Act
Mickey
Z.
Inspired by Pat Tillman?
Greg
Moses
Bremer's De-De-Ba'athjfication Gambit
Gila
Svirsky
Anarchy in Our Souls
Uri
Avnery
Vanunu and the Terrible Secret
April 24 / 25, 2004
William
A. Cook
Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry
and Bush Melt into One
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank
Brandy
Baker
A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So
Robert
Fisk
A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free
Speech
Ben
Tripp
October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios
Nelson
Valdés
"Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Return to the Future
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Killed Pat Tillman
Mark
Scaramella
Does Anybody Know Anything?
Patrick
Cockburn
The Return of Saddam's Generals
Gary
Engler
Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas
Col.
Dan Smith
Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush
Greg
Weiher
Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam...
Elaine
Cassel
Life on the Outside: a Review
Vanessa
Jones
Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney
Jim
French
Agriculture's Bullied Market
Hammond
Guthrie
Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles
Poets'
Basement
Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella
April 23, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
The Only Solution is Immediate Withdrawal
Dave
Lindorff
Imagination Deficit Disorder
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Contractors and Mercenaries: the Rising Corporate Military Monster
Norman
Solomon
Country Joe Band, 2004: "What Are We Fighting For?"
Cynthia
McKinney
All Things Are Not Equal: the Perils of Globalization
CounterPunch
Wire
A Bitch Called Wanda
Karyn
Strickler
Sierra Club, Inc.
Hammond
Guthrie
Yellow Caked in the Face
Paul
de Rooij
Graveyard of Justifications: Glossary
of the Iraqi Occupation
April 22, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
When Terror Came to Basra: "I
Saw a Minibus of Children on Fire"
Tanya
Reinhart
The Wall Behind Disengagement
Lance
Selfa
Why is Kucinich Still in the Race?
Josh
Frank
Street Fighting Man? Kucinich's Pulled Punches
Sen.
Robert Byrd
Bush Owes America Answers on Iraq
William
S. Lind
Why We Get It Wrong
Mickey
Z.
Undoing the Latches
Robert
Jensen
Why They Fast: Remembering the Victims of the World Bank
John
L. Hess
The New York Times from 30,000 Feet
April
21, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Yeats on Iraq
Alfredo
Castro
Colombia's Forgotten Prisoners
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's Taliban Drug Deal
William
A. Cook
George 1 to George 2
Jack
Random
Iraq and Vietnam
Jean-Guy
Allard
Alarcon Meets the Editors
Mike
Whitney
Charade in the Desert
Bill
Christison
Only Major Policies Changes Can
Help Washington Now
April 20, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Bush and Kerry Share a Problem
Stan
Cox
Wal-Mart's Magic Numbers
Bruce
Anderson
On Listening to Air America
Joseph
Kalvoda
Czech Mate for Condi
Greg
Moses
Yesterday's Intelligence
Stan
Goff
The Democrats and Iraq
Website
of the Day
Santorum Happens
April 19, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
The "Central Hand" of the
Resistance
Mike
Whitney
Bob Woodward's Imperial Trifles
Douglas
Valentine
52 Pick-Up and the 100-to-1
Rule
John
Chuckman
The Sharon Annex: Evil Does Often
Triumph
Doug
Giebel
Welcome to the Club
Rahul
Mahajan
Hospital Closings and War Crimes
April
16 / 18, 2004
Robert
Fisk
Bush Legitimizes Terror
Saul
Landau
Subverting Brazil and Cuba
Dave
Lindorff
Paying for War: $2,150 per Family
and Counting
Brandy
Baker
Fallujah's Collateral Damage
Mickey
Z.
The Left Attacks from the Right
Bruce
Jackson
The Bush Press Conference: Gott Mit
Uns
Norman
Solomon
How the "NewsHour" Changed
History
Alexander
Cockburn
Bush, Kerry and Empire
April
15, 2004
Greg
Moses
Follow the Families, Not the Script
Virginia
Tilley
The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt:
Just Change the Channel
Ron
Jacobs
They Coulda Been Champions of the
World: Hurricane Carter and Ron Kovic
Michael
Neumann
A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes
Reporting in the Toronto Globe and Mail
April
14, 2004
Tom
Reeves
Return to Haiti: an American Learning
Zone
Reza
Fiyouzat
Japan and Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
What Bush Really Said
Diane
Christian
The Real Passion
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
May
4, 2004
The Role
Another Open
Letter to the Troops in Iraq
By STAN GOFF
In 1994, I was running an A-Detachment
in 3rd Special Forces, ODA-354 to be precise, a team that specialized
in free-fall parachute infiltration and special (strategic) reconnaissance.
3rd Special Forces Group's area of operation encompassed sub-Saharan
Africa and the Caribbean, and our team was specifically designated
for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So we had two language
requirements on the team, Spanish and French (even though most
Haitians actually speak Haitian Kreyol).
I had a communications sergeant
on my team named Ali Tehrani. His father was an expatriate Iranian
who'd married a German, and Ali had been raised in extremely
comfortable circumstances in Europe, where his father and the
society around him pushed him to fluency in English, German,
Spanish, and French. Ali also spoke decent Italian. He was the
most fluent French-speaker on the battalion, and a year before
we were sent to Haiti with the 1994 invasion, Ali had been sent
to the camps constructed by the United States military in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, for the purpose of detaining tens of thousands of
Haitians who were trying to escape the brutal repression and
grinding poverty of Haiti in ramshackle boats. Ali was needed
there because of his language fluency.
Ali was typical of many of
the "non-white" members of Special Forces in two respects.
He was demonstrably patriotic - compelled, it seemed, to prove
his devotion to the American security state - and he adopted
the prevailing attitude within much of Special Operations of
Negrophobia - a kind of institutional disdain for Black troops
that served to bloc other "non-whites" with whites
in SF. It's a peculiar mechanism of white supremacy where there
is not a master-race mentality so much as a deficient-race ideology
from which all others could self-exclude. This - along with an
anabolic version of masculinity - served as one form of social
glue in SF culture, though there were a few exceptions.
Ali's Negrophobia wasn't virulent
like that I had witnessed in other SF troops. In fact, he was
willing to grant exceptions among individual Black soldiers fairly
easily. It was more part of his obsessive desire to fit in.
Ali had spent six months "working
the camps" at Guantanamo in 1993.
When we received word of our
mission to invade Haiti in 1994, he reacted violently. His revulsion
toward Haitians was visceral and white-hot. Given that my own
team's mission might depend on both Ali's language capabilities
("my" language was Spanish) and on our ability to establish
rapport with local Haitians, Ali's outburst sent up a warning
flare in front of me, and I made time to sit down with him for
a long talk.
Ali was, aside from his passive
racism and the simmering rage that one could always sense just
below his surface, a very intelligent and sensitive man. I  always suspected that he may
have suffered either physical or psychological abuse as a child.
When we talked, we fairly quickly
concluded together that his aversion to Haitians had something
to do with the role he had been thrown into against the Haitians
at the camps, the role of jail-boss, and he agreed to keep that
in mind and to subordinate his conditioned reflexes on the matter
to mental time-outs in order to assure that he would behave appropriately
while we were on the mission in Haiti, which he did... most of
the time.
But the point I'm getting to
is this. The antagonism that Ali experienced as an individual
toward Haitians was structured by the institutional antagonism
built into the jailer-and-jailed relationship. Ali had internalized
the external reality that he was a prison guard and they were
the prisoners. His job was to dominate, to bend Haitians to his
will, and every exercise of human agency by the Haitians threatened
that. Their very humanity - that combination of independent consciousness
and will - was structured by the prison-camp phenomenon to be
an enemy force in relation to Ali and the other prison-keepers.
In 1971, Stanford University
Professor of Psychology Phillip Zimbardo designed an experiment
that would come to be known as the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Subjects were recruited and paid a modest stipend, whereupon
they were separated into "prisoners" and "guards,"
and placed in a mock prison built in a Stanford basement. The
prisoners were stripped, deloused, shackled, and placed in prison
clothes, while the guards were given authoritative uniforms,
sunglasses, and batons. Long story short - within two days there
was a near prison riot, psychosomatic illness began to break
out, white middle-class kids in the role of guards became rapidly
and progressively more sadistic and arbitrary, and the two-week
experiment had to be abandoned after only six days... before
someone was badly hurt or killed.
The experiment seemed to support
the truism that "absolute power corrupts absolutely."
But that conclusion serves as a description, not an explanation.
It describes what happens to the individual, but it fails to
account for the role of rationalization that legitimates the
domination, and it completely fails to account for institutional
support of that domination.
When one uses the term "systemic,"
she is saying that the source of this abuse is not individual
moral failure, but a predictable expression of the system and
its structures.
The abuses of detainees, by
US troops, by CACI International and Titan Corporation mercenaries,
and by the CIA in Iraq, is "systemic."
But in the same way that the
system found an expression in the thoughts and emotions of Ali
Tehrani, in the same way that the structure of domination and
subjection pushed him to rationalize away his shared humanity
with his Haitian captives, we can now see in the leering grins
of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, who are regular people - like
the experimental subjects in the Stanford Prison Experiment -
who quickly learned to behave as sadistic torturers. The military
has admitted that 60% of these detainees are neither combatants
nor threats.
As this is written, the US
military is about to release hundreds of detainees who fall in
that category, and there will be more horror stories coming,
because it was systemic.
People were not only humiliated
and forced to pose in degrading positions with each other naked.
They were forced to masturbate in front of taunting guards. Some
were sodomized with foreign objects. It appears that some were
also beaten to death during interrogation - one whose body was
put on ice for a day then carted away the next on a litter with
a faked intravenous infusion in the arm.
Now the cover stories are being
spun out like webs.
We are being asked to believe
that:
(1) The only abuse that occurred
against anyone detained by American forces in Iraq was photographed
and reported.
(2) No abuses occurred anywhere
that were not photographed or reported.
(3) The one percent of US troops
who are the "bad apples" all happen to serve together
in the same unit... the unit that is the only one guilty, and
that happened to get caught because of the photographs.
(4) The aggressive investigation
now being proclaimed by everyone from George W. Bush to CENTCOM,
about abuses that were already on record in the military (an
internal investigation had already been launched in February
by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, but was kept from the public),
would have happened had the photographs and story not been aired
on national television.
(5) The military was not attempting
to cover up their own investigation, and that they would have
informed the public of these abuses even had Seymour Hersh not
put the whole miserable episode into print.
(6) The military did not cover
anything up in the two weeks between the time CBS warned them
that they were going to air an expose and when they actually
did air it.
(7) No one in the chain of
command above Brigadier General Janis Karpinski is responsible
for the failure to halt these abuses, even though Lieutenant
General Ricardo S. Sanchez was informed of the investigation
of these abuses, complete with sworn statements and photographs,
by General Taguba last February.
Other abuses and violations
of the Geneva Conventions and Laws of Warfare are already on
record, some with videos available on the web, such as:
(1) Shooting people who are
clearly not armed and who are engaged in no threatening behavior.
(2) Shooting into ambulances.
(3) Shooting wounded people
who are not armed.
(4) Shooting wounded people
who are obviously no longer capable of fighting.
(5) Shooting into crowds.
There has never been a Stanford
Military Occupation Experiment to complement the Stanford Prison
Experiment, unless we just count the military occupations themselves.
There is a structured, systemic antagonism between an occupying
military and the people whose land they occupy. And there will
be no investigations of any of it, because there never are, unless
and until the American public is confronted with them.
The National Command Authority
and its cheerleaders cannot say out loud... this is what we are
doing, and it can't get done unless we dehumanize the occupied.
This reality, this system, will express itself in the thoughts
and emotions of you, the troops who carry it out, because this
military occupation is in a sense making a prison of Iraq and
making you, the troops, its turnkeys.
It will only be those exceptional
individuals among you in the military who refuse to surrender
their humanity - no matter how little you may understand the
big picture - and who will witness. You who do break with the
system and witness are very important people, important to history,
because your refusal to surrender your own moral integrity to
the system may lead to our collective salvation by ending this
felonious occupation. The troops who filed reports about the
abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison were such exceptions.
So were Tom Glen and Ron Ridenhour.
In The Culture of Narcissism,
Christopher Lasch wrote in 1979 about US leadership during the
occupation of Vietnam:
"Success in our society
has to be ratified by publicity... all politics becomes a form
of spectacle. It is well known that Madison Avenue packages politicians
and markets them as if they were cereals or deodorants; but the
art of public relations penetrates more deeply into political
life... The modern prince [an apt turn of phrase for the current
member of the Bush political dynasty] ... confuses successful
completion of the task at hand with the impression he makes or
hopes to make on others. Thus American officials blundered into
the war in Vietnam... More concerned with the trappings than
with the reality of power, they convinced themselves that failure
to intervene would damage American 'credibility...' [They] fret
about their ability to rise to crisis, to project an image of
decisiveness, to give a convincing performance of executive power...
Public relations and propaganda have exalted the image and the
pseudo-event."
What these images of the Abu
Ghraib humiliation and torture have done in the United States
is collide with the "exalted image and the pseudo-event"
of the Bush propaganda apparatus, just as the images of the My
Lai massacre did in 1969. That collision between the reality
and the real image of war startles civilians here in the La-La
Land of wide screen TV and suburban SUV's, and it shakes them
out of their opiated shopper dream-state.
My Lai is what General Colin
Powell was remembering when he implemented "the Powell Doctrine"
for the military, which includes a co-opted press and a vigorous
attempt to keep things like flag-draped coffins off of those
wide screen TVs.
Most of you don't remember
My Lai.
On March 16, 1968, units of
the Americal Division, to which Powell was assigned as a staff
officer in Chu Lai, entered a Vietnamese village called My Lai
and spent four hours raping women, burning houses, then finally
massacring men, women, and children - including infants who dying
women tried to shield with their own bullet-riddled bodies. The
massacre was stopped by a Georgia-born helicopter pilot named
Hugh Clowers Thompson who landed his chopper between the few
surviving Vietnamese and the blood-intoxicated soldiers, and
ordered his door gunners to open fire on the Americans if they
failed to stand down.
A few weeks later, General
Creighton Abrams, then commanding general in Vietnam, received
a letter from a young Specialist-4 in the Americal Division named
Tom Glen:
"The average GI's attitude
toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is
a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish
in the realm of human relations... Far beyond merely dismissing
the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and thought,
too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity;
and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry
humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have
only a debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in
loyalty to the Saigon government, particularly when such acts
are carried out at unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect
of sanctioned policy... [American soldiers attack Vietnamese]
for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes
and without provocation or justification shoot at the people
themselves... Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable
hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of 'You VC,' soldiers
commonly 'interrogate' by means of torture that has been presented
as the particular habit of the enemy. Severe beatings and torture
at knife point are usual means of questioning captives or of
convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet Cong... It would
indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American
soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for
justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national
character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity
to such beliefs... What has been outlined here I have seen not
only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with,
and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is
a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more
firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance
Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."
Glen's letter was forwarded
from Abrams' office to the Americal Division and ended up with
Major Colin Powell in Chu Lai.
Powell never followed up by
questioning Glen, and instead ended his "investigation"
of Glen's allegations after accepting uncritically the claim
by Glen's commander that Glen hadn't been close enough to "the
front" (whatever that was supposed to be in Vietnam) to
have any knowledge of such alleged abuses. Powell then began
his career as a damage-control expert in the military by writing
a letter, dated December 13, 1968, in which he said, ""There
may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs...
[but] this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout
the Division... In direct refutation of this [Glen's] portrayal
is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the
Vietnamese people are excellent." He went on to impugn Glen's
account for having been brought to light only reluctantly and
lacking sufficient detail.
This was, of course, horseshit.
Abuses were systemic.
Glen had only heard through
rumors about My Lai. It was another GI, Ron Ridenhour, an infantryman
who was not willing to surrender his humanity to occupier-racism,
who finally pieced together, on his own initiative, the story
of the My Lai massacre, and brought it to public light. When
the photographs of the massacre were combined with Ridenhour's
account, and the American public was confronted with the reality
of an entire unit participating in a systematic massacre of civilians,
it marked a turning point in the loss of political support in
the United States for continued military occupation of Vietnam.
Powell himself admitted war
crimes in his memoir, My American Journey, where he wrote, "I
recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male...
If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely
suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in
front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of
hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him."
Powell would also come to the defense of Brigadier General John
Donaldson who had the door gunners on his own helicopter shoot
Vietnamese for sport. Donaldson was exonerated, naturally, in
a military investigation.
Powell not only developed as
a skilled cover-up artist, he would eventually incorporate this
ability to manage public perception about war as a key element
in the "Powell Doctrine," which he imposed on the military
and the press. He never forgot My Lai, and he has always believed
that exposure of My Lai and other atrocities were responsible
for the US defeat in Vietnam.
Donald Rumsfeld shares these
beliefs with Colin Powell. They are both wrong. The two phenomena
that collide with this Powell-Rumsfeld orientation were and are
(1) the decision of their 'enemy' never to quit, and (2) the
inevitability that someone who is part of the occupation force
will be confronted with these contradictions between "the
exalted image and the pseudo-event" and the real character
of war - and that this someone will expose it in an attempt to
rescue his or her own humanity.
The war in Vietnam was lost
by the French then the Americans because they didn't belong there,
and the resistance endeavored to do whatever was necessary to
make that point. This is also the situation in Iraq.
So I'll leave to others the
analysis of whether the troops facing courts martial are scapegoats
(they are, and they are also probably guilty as hell), and whether
or not the military is letting the officers off with reprimands
and walking papers to prevent the fire spreading (which it is).
I'll just emphasize that the war in Iraq cannot be won. Not because
of the inability of US troops to fight, but because we don't
belong there. And since that's the case (which I firmly believe
it is) every life - Iraqi, American, or otherwise - that is lost
or ruined... is wasted.
All this talk of whether Military
Intelligence or the mercenaries working for CACI International
or the CIA or the MP commanders were responsible is diversionary
bullshit so we won't see how Iraq itself has become the Stanford
Military Occupation Experiment.
Because if we conclude that
the problem is systemic, then the only thing to do to stop this
is to walk away. And the Bush administration sent troops there
for the purpose not of building democracies, but of building
permanent military bases in the heart of oil country, and if
they walk away, they can't rightly build bases, can they?
So we can either blithely obey
and support our new Neros, or we can continue to cling to the
absurd notion that the vandal can rebuild the house they just
ravaged, or we can do what we might to make them walk away. Troops
that come forward will play a key role in this moral imperative.
Every troop that comes forward
with accounts of the inhumanity of this war - while jeopardizing
his or her career - is serving to hasten an end to this criminal
enterprise of the Military-Petroleum Complex. These troop/witnesses
will serve to hasten an end to the suffering of Iraqi families
and the suffering of the families of the occupying forces. They
will serve to prevent more torture, more humiliation, more suspicion
and hatred, and more lives being thrown away on this imperial
folly.
Every troop who keeps his secrets,
who faithfully serves the system and never bears witness, can
travel for the rest of his life.
She can go to Rio de Janeiro.
He can go to Bangladesh.
She can go to Lagos, or Montreal,
or Tokyo, or Moscow, or Antarctica.
But no matter where he goes,
there he'll be - alone with the growing weight of his own silence
on his head, wrapping himself in his own rationalizations, and
restlessly turning away from the faces that look back at him
in the mirrors of his memory.
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He
is a member of the BRING
THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special
Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.
Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
Weekend Edition
Features for April 24 / 25, 2004
William
A. Cook
Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry
and Bush Melt into One
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank
Brandy
Baker
A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So
Robert
Fisk
A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free
Speech
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Tripp
October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios
Nelson
Valdés
"Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Return to the Future
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Killed Pat Tillman
Mark
Scaramella
Does Anybody Know Anything?
Patrick
Cockburn
The Return of Saddam's Generals
Gary
Engler
Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas
Col.
Dan Smith
Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush
Greg
Weiher
Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam...
Elaine
Cassel
Life on the Outside: a Review
Vanessa
Jones
Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney
Jim
French
Agriculture's Bullied Market
Hammond
Guthrie
Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles
Poets'
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