Thursday, March 20, 2008

THIS JUST IN! THE DISCO MOVEMENT!

 
 
ACROSS AMERICA MANY MADE THEMSELVES USELESS TONIGHT TAKING PART IN ACTIONS, OR RATHER NON-ACTIONS, ON THE PART OF WALKON.ORG.
 
SOME USED THEIR VOICES TO BE SILENT BECAUSE SURELY SILENCE WILL END THE WAR!
 
SOME CARRIED SIGNS!
 
THESE REPORTERS SPOKE WITH WESTY BOYDY, BRAIN CHILD OF WALKON.ORG WHO EXPLAINED THE PURPOSE OF THE VIGILS, "ELECT DEMOCRATS."
 
BUT DON'T PEOPLE PARTICIPATING THINK THEY'RE ENDING THE WAR?
 
"LOOK," WESTY DECLARED, "I COME FROM THE MOVEMENT, THE DISCO MOVEMENT.  AND THERE WASN'T A NIGHT BACK IN THE 70S THAT I DIDN'T LIE TO SOME WOMAN TO GET HER HOME.  THAT'S WHAT I DID AND IT'S WHAT I STILL DO.  I AM THE BOOGIE MAN OF CORPORATE PEACE.  HELL, IF I COULD GET IT UP AT MY AGE, I'D STILL BE CLUBBING.  BUT I CAN'T AND VIAGRA GIVES ME A CROTCH RASH SO INSTEAD I FOCUS ON TRICKING PEOPLE INTO BELIEVING THEY'RE ENDING THE WAR WHILE THEY ARE REALLY JUST TAKING PART IN ACTIONS TO ELECT DEMOCRATS."
 
WE WERE ABOUT TO ASK WESTY BOYDY ANOTHER QUESTION, HOWEVER, SWEARING HE SAW LIZA, BIANCA AND LIZ, HE RUSHED OFF UNBUTTONING HIS SHIRT DOWN TO THE WAIST AND HOLLERING, "I LOVE THE NIGHT LIFE! I'VE GOT TO BOOGIE!"
 
 
 
Starting with war resistance.  Tamara Jones (Washington Post) interviewed war resisters in Canada for a report the paper ran earlier this week.  Phil McDowell shared how he had finished his tour of duty in Iraq, he had completed his service contract, been discharged in June of 2006,  only to learn that he was being stop-lossed.  He explained, "I tried contacting senators and congressmen.  I tried to contact civilian military lawyers, but they all said the time frame was too short."  He signed up after 9-11 and thought he would be serving a larger purpose, one that "would define our generation" only to learn differently, that the search for WMDs had ceased, that the rationale was now "freedom" for Iraqi, "But then we'd go on convoys and they'd instruct us to run cars off the road if they were in our way. . . .  It's a hard personal realization to join the Army out of patriotism and accept your country was wrong."  Learning he was being forced back into the military, McDowell began searching for alternatives and with Congress and military lawyers refusing to help, he found the website for the War Resisters Support Campaign.  That is an organization that assists US service members who go to Canada to seek asylum. Two earlier war resisters, Lee Zaslofsky, Tom Riley and others provide assistance to today's war resisters::
 
Zaslofsky and Riley never even knew each other before this movement, and both feel frustrated that more Vietnam-era settlers haven't come forward. Don't they owe that much? "Ancient history," they hear again and again from the weary grandfathers who want to forget that they were once angry young men. Plans are being made to develop a Web site, do some documentaries, organize more events to draw out the graying Vietnam generation. Thousands, not a few hundred, should be rising up again for this fight, Zaslofsky fumes.
Now the volunteers are labeling 800 envelopes for the letters they'll urge rallygoers to send to Ottawa. In her pink hoodie and ponytail, Phil McDowell's wife, Jamime Aponte, 28, runs the meeting with the precision and enthusiasm of a majorette. She wants to know: Who's been putting up posters where? Are there enough pens to hand out at the church?
Zaslofsky is grateful for her energy. He is weary and not a little disgruntled, himself. He thought he would be easing into a comfortable retirement by now after a career in public health, but here he is working himself ragged for $200 a week as the WRSC director, which just covers his rent, and why is the adopted country he has grown to love making this so damn hard?
"I feel so lucky that my generation of war resisters had it far easier than they do, and probably had a much easier time of it emotionally because there were so many more of us, and because so many more Americans were actively opposing the war than do so now," Zaslofsky says. "They don't have a widespread social movement backing them up."
 
The letters are necessary because in November  the Canadian Supreme Court refused to hear the appeals of Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey. Today, Canada's Parliament remaining the best hope for safe harbor war resisters have, you can make your voice heard by the Canadian parliament which has the ability to pass legislation to grant war resisters the right to remain in Canada. Three e-mails addresses to focus on are: Prime Minister Stephen Harper (pm@pm.gc.ca -- that's pm at gc.ca) who is with the Conservative party and these two Liberals, Stephane Dion (Dion.S@parl.gc.ca -- that's Dion.S at parl.gc.ca) who is the leader of the Liberal Party and Maurizio Bevilacqua (Bevilacqua.M@parl.gc.ca -- that's Bevilacqua.M at parl.gc.ca) who is the Liberal Party's Critic for Citizenship and Immigration. A few more can be found here at War Resisters Support Campaign. For those in the US, Courage to Resist has an online form that's very easy to use. That is the sort of thing that should receive attention but instead it's ignored. We will note war resisters in Canada tomorrow.  There is not time today, my apologies.          

There is a growing movement of resistance within the US military which includes Matt Mishler, Josh Randall, Robby Keller, Justiniano Rodrigues, Chuck Wiley, James Stepp, Rodney Watson, Michael Espinal, Matthew Lowell, Derek Hess, Diedra Cobb, Brad McCall, Justin Cliburn, Timothy Richard, Robert Weiss, Phil McDowell, Steve Yoczik, Ross Spears, Peter Brown, Bethany "Skylar" James, Zamesha Dominique, Chrisopther Scott Magaoay, Jared Hood, James Burmeister, Eli Israel, Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Terri Johnson, Clara Gomez, Luke Kamunen, Leif Kamunen, Leo Kamunen, Camilo Mejia, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, Linjamin Mull, Agustin Aguayo, Justin Colby, Marc Train, Abdullah Webster, Robert Zabala, Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder, Corey Glass, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Lee, Mark Wilkerson, Patrick Hart, Ricky Clousing, Ivan Brobeck, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, Blake LeMoine, Clifton Hicks, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Joshua Casteel, Katherine Jashinski, Dale Bartell, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Chris Capps, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake, Christopher Mogwai, Christian Kjar, Kyle Huwer, Wilfredo Torres, Michael Sudbury, Ghanim Khalil, Vincent La Volpa, DeShawn Reed and Kevin Benderman. In total, at least fifty US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum. 

Information on war resistance within the military can be found at The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline [(877) 447-4487], Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters. Tom Joad maintains a list of known war resisters. In addition, VETWOW is an organization that assists those suffering from MST (Military Sexual Trauma).    
 
 
On the fifth anniversary of the illegal war, the number of US service members killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war stands at 3992 -- eight away from 4,000.  Many others died after they made it out of Iraq.  Some on R&R in places like Kuwait.  Some were transported  to the US and placed in hospitals to care for their wounds only to die from those wounds (Anthony Raymond Wasielewsk, Gerald J. Cassidy, Jack D. Richards, Raymond A. Salerno III and John "Bill" Smith).  Some returned only to find a medical system that was falling apart and did not serve them, did not treat them and they took their own lives and there are many examples there including Jeffrey Lucey whose parents, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, testified on Friday at Iraq Veterans Against the War Winter Soldier Investigation's panel on The Crisis in Veterans Health Care.  Joyce Lucey explained of her family's loss, "Unfortunately the tragedy is not that it just happened to one Marine but that this continues to happen to others four years after our son's death to countless others -- names that will never be placed on a memorial wall."  The death toll for US service members is much greater than the official numbers from the Pentagon.  As Daniel Fanning noted during Winter Soldier, "that number doesn't even take into the number of people who have come home with PTSD and taken their own lives." 
 
Iraq veteran Fanning was speaking Sunday morning as part of the panel on The Breakdown of the Military.  His testimony would include time and resources wasted in a military stretched to the limit including training in the use of bayonets (a weapon, he noted, that hadn't been used in decades), missions that were based on bad intel (raiding a 'bombing factory' that was just an empty building being painted by one person).  Steve Mortello addressed the breakdown as well and the constant maintenance required on equipment and vehicles that were breaking down.  He spoke of returning to the US and being diagnosed with PTSD, "I remember just this feeling that I told myself after I got through this everything would be cool. . . . I'll never forget the things that happened over there and I think about them every day and I hope wholeheartedly the American people can understand the impact this occupation has had on the American military . . . It's tearing us apart."
 
On the same panel, Iraq veteran Kristofer Goldsmith offered testimony.  He noted he never saw work done on the water treatment plant in Sadr City, he never saw al Qaeda.  He saw destruction, he saw Iraqi civilians turned into prisoners of war, he saw stop-loss.  Most of all, he saw a refusal to treat US service members.  "We were told that if we were to seek" mental healthcare, he explained, "we would be locked away."  They were also told it would be the end of their military careers.  Since no medical assistance was provided, he did what many do, self-medicate.  He talked of getting drunk and using alcohol to treat his wounds.  He was diagnosed with PTSD and still received no help but was told he would be redeploying to Iraq. Shortly after that, he attempted to take his own life and woke up "locked to a gurney and in a mental ward" while the military was still wanting to deploy him and accusing him of 'malingering' to avoid his call up. He was held accountable for that and told he couldn't fight it because to do so would bring down the military system. His discharge papers note his "serious offense," he explained, "I committed a serious offense by trying to kill myself because I was damaged by the war." Because of that "serious offense," the Iraq War veteran is denied the only thing he was counting on receiving: education benefits.  He now delivers pizzas because it's the only job he could find where he can call in and say he's going to be three hours late because he's still standing in line at the VA waiting for assistance.
 
He did something else during his testimony.  He spoke of a book that helped him, a book that informed him.  We're not naming the book because the authors have disgraced themselves.  One of the authors is David Corn.  (The other's human slime whose name is never mentioned at this site.)  David Corn bores America, at Mother Jones, with yet another mash note today to Barack Obama.  David Corn's book influenced someone, someone who took the time to give it credit during his Winter Soldier testimony and Corn has so little manners, so little gratitude that anyone read that book, so little concern for the illegal war, that he can't even take a moment to blog at Mother Jones about the veteran -- whose suffering continues -- who took the time to mention Corn by name.  That's shameful.  That's embarrassing. 
 
 
Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) continued bringing the testimonies from Winter Soldier to her audience today.  She featured Camilo Mejia, Mike Totten, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, Tanya Austin and Jeffrey Smith.  Tanya Austin hasn't been mentioned in a snapshot so far so we'll excerpt some of her testimony:
 
If you guys could throw up the website, please? What we have up here is stopmilitaryrape.com--or dot-org, sorry. And what's really cool about this website is it was this individual's way of telling her story and trying to make progress, because the military didn't do anything to help her. So, finally, she decided, well, if the military won't help me, I'm going to help me and everyone like me.
As you see there on the homepage, these are some really frightening statistics. 25 percent of women will be sexually assaulted on college campuses. 12 percent of women will be raped while in college. 28 to 66 percent of women in the military report sexual assault. The reason the number varies so much is military reports versus VA reports. It's a lot easier to tell someone at the VA that you've been sexually assaulted than it is to tell your own command, which is not right. And 27 percent of women are reported raped. And what's interesting about this statistic is if you report that you've been raped and no charges are brought against your rapist, you haven't been raped. You're not part of that statistic. And, unfortunately, for our military, this is something that happens way too often, is the cover-up of sexual assault, of rape of individuals experiencing the worst from their comrades.
So here is what they're currently doing about it. According to the Department of Defense's own statistics, 74 to 85 percent of soldiers convicted of rape or sexual assault leave the military with an honorable discharge, meaning rape conviction does not appear in their records anywhere. Only two to three percent of soldiers accused of rape are ever court-martialed. And only five to six percent of soldiers accused of domestic abuse are ever court-martialed. In fact, several multiple homicides have recently taken place on military bases that have not even been criminally prosecuted. The Department of Defense's definition of morale booster for male soldiers: female soldiers--take as needed, dispose when finished and continue serving with honor. Please remember that many suffer in silent shame and never forget what's going on.
Now I'd like to tell this individual's particular story. And having experienced sexual harassment in the military myself, this is kind of difficult, as it is for everyone on this panel up here. But our stories need to be told.
We are often asked how we get started with Stop Military Rape, Military Rape Crisis Center. I'm a veteran of the United States Coast Guard and a survivor of military sexual trauma. I was raped in May of 2006 by a fellow shipmate. I followed all the necessary steps, including reporting the assault and providing evidence: a confession letter written by my rapist. In August of 2006, I was informed that I will be discharged. According to the Coast Guard Academy psychologist, surviving rape makes deployment--makes one ineligible for worldwide deployment, and as a result, I can no longer serve in the Coast Guard. What follows was a nine-month battle between the Coast Guard and myself, while I tried to keep my job and change the Coast Guard's unofficial policy that rape survivors shouldn't be allowed to serve in the Coast Guard.     
I was a female in my early twenties, brand new to the Coast Guard. I admit it: I did not know every Coast Guard policy or try to know something beyond my E3 rank. All I know is that what was happening to me was not--was just not right. I felt powerless. I didn't know how to fight the military. I was taught how to fight with them, for them. But how could I fight for my rights to stay with them?     
Out of the need to vent and needing an outlet to express the horror I was experiencing as a result of being raped, I started an online blog on MySpace. I was not expecting much of it. I just wanted to let out all the pain in me and share with the public. I almost immediately started receiving emails from active-duty military members and veterans alike, each wanting to share their story. Everybody's story was so different, yet so similar. I received one email from an eighteen-year-old female who was raped two hours prior by a member of her command and was scared and had no one else to turn to. I received an email from a Coast Guard veteran who was raped ten-plus years ago while serving, and I was the first person he ever told.           
I started doing research online about military rape. I learned about Tailhook and read the brave story of Army Specialist Suzanne Swift. What was happening to me in the Coast Guard was very common and had been going on for a long time. I knew that I was in for the biggest battle of my life. I could not abandon my fellow men and women in uniform. Something's got to change. 
Stop Military Rape and the Military Rape Crisis Center was formed. We are the nation's largest support group for the survivors of military sexual trauma. In 2007, we assisted over 12,000 men and women of military sexual trauma and their families. We are starting to work with Congress to change the military policy of sexual assault. Every man and woman that volunteer to serve their country should have the right to serve without the fear of being sexually assaulted, harassed and/or raped. In addition, no one should be reprimanded or punished for reporting a crime that was done to them.  
May 30th is International Stop Military Rape Awareness Day. Write to your representatives, contact the media, do what we're doing now, and let them know that military rape is something we just can't stand for.
 
 
Kelly Dougherty, former sergeant in the Colorado Army National Guard and present executive director of IVAW, warned that it would not be easy to listen to these testimonials. "But we believe that the only way this war is going to end is if the American people truly understand what we have done in their name."        
A certain kind of patriotism closes off a lot of otherwise good minds. It accepts the testimony of the decorated general without question but shuns the testimony of the ordinary soldier as seditious.            
After my basic training in 1969, I was assigned to the burn ward at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. It was hard work, but I think I was a good nurse, maybe even a good officer. Our unit had an ironclad esprit de corps; all of us, regardless of rank, worked with one accord for the sake of those terribly wounded soldiers, alleviating their pain when we could, cheering on the remarkable survivors, trying to make the others comfortable until the end.
Meanwhile, beyond the gates of the post, veterans in beat-up uniforms were angrily protesting against the war. Their stories about atrocities and lies and failed policies were too much for me to take in. I still had no time to read the news. But with all my heart, I wanted the war to end as much as they did, so that the days of burned flesh and amputations would be over.               
It was a very long time before those days were over.
 
 
Winter Soldier provided realities about the Iraq War (and Afghanistan), about what's happening in the service and what happens when leaving the service.  It as a very important action.  If you missed it, archives of Winter Soldier can be found  at Iraq Veterans Against the War, at War Comes Home, at KPFK, at the Pacifica Radio homepage and at KPFA, here for Friday, here for Saturday, here for Sunday.  Aimee Allison (co-host of the station's The Morning Show and co-author with David Solnit of Army Of None) and Aaron Glantz were the anchors for Pacifica's live coverage (and archives are now up at Pacifica Radio).    
 
 

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