http://www.truth-out.org/bradley-manning-and-gi-resistance-us-war-crimes66791
Saturday 15 January 2011
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent nine months reporting
directly from Iraq, where he followed the US invasion in 2003. His
stories have been published by Inter Press Service, Truthout, Al
Jazeera, The Nation, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, The Guardian,
Foreign Policy in Focus, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Independent and
many others. Dahr reports for Democracy Now! and has appeared on Al
Jazeera, the BBC, NPR and numerous other television and radio
stations around the globe.
Jamail is the author of two recent books: "Beyond the Green Zone:
Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist" (2008) and "The Will to
Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse To Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan" (2009).
He also contributed Chapter 6, "Killing the Intellectual Class," for
the book "Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted,
Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered" (2010). Learn more at
www.dahrjamailiraq.com.
--
Angola 3 News: On April 4, 2010, WikiLeaks released a classified 2007 video
http://www.collateralmurder.com/ of a US Apache helicopter in Iraq
firing on civilians and killing 11 people, including Reuters
photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, 40-year-old Saeed
Chmagh. No charges have been filed against the US soldiers involved.
In sharp contrast, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst named
Bradley Manning has been accused of leaking the classified video.
Arrested in May and facing up to 52 years in prison for a range of
charges, Manning is now being held under what lawyer and journalist
Glenn Greenwald has termed "inhumane
conditions."
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/14/manning/index.html
Manning's support website http://www.bradleymanning.org/ declares
that "exposing war crimes is not a crime." Indeed, the Nuremberg
Laws, established after the horrors of World War II, declare that
soldiers have a legal obligation to resist criminal wars. Let's take
a closer look at this issue of US war crimes. What do you think are
the strongest arguments that have been made for why the US invasions
of Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal?
--
Dahr Jamail: To be clear, while I've covered Iraq extensively, I've
not covered Afghanistan. Thus, I'll keep all my answers in the
context of my expertise, that being Iraq.
That said, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq could not have
more clearly violated international law. Even the former secretary
general of the United Nations (UN), Kofi Annan, said in September
2004 that the Iraq war was illegal and breached the UN Charter.
An illegal war is thus the mother of all war crimes, for from that
stems all the rest. What I've seen in Iraq has been a parade of war
crimes committed by the US military: rampant torture, collective
punishment (Fallujah is an example), deliberate firing on medical
workers, deliberate killing of civilians for "sport" and countless others.
Then, there is the fact that both occupations are so clearly about
the control of dwindling resources and their transport routes, that
the excuses given for them by the US government (by both Bush and
Obama) are both laughable and insulting to anyone capable of a
modicum of critical thought.
A3N: How do you rate the corporate media's coverage of the Bradley
Manning story?
DJ: It's been a farce, a classic case of shoot the messenger. When
someone becomes a soldier, they swear an oath to support and defend
the US Constitution by following "lawful" orders. Thus, they are
legally obliged by their own oath to not follow unlawful orders. What
Manning did by leaking this critical information has been to uphold
his oath as a soldier in the most patriotic way. Now, compare that
with how he has been raked over the coals by most of the so-called
mainstream media.
A3N: How do they address the argument that exposing war crimes is not a crime?
DJ: Usually they don't, because the corporate media - and the
government, for that matter - avoid the words "war crime" as though
they are a plague. Thus, they avoid the issue at all cost.
A3N: In your opinion, how do the corporate media present the US
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the US public?
DJ: With Iraq, the occupation is presented as though it was a
mistake, as though the great benevolent US empire was mistakenly
mislead into the war, but since "we" are there, it is good that at
least Saddam Hussein has been removed - and now, of course, the US
has only done the best it can in a tough situation.
With Afghanistan, the occupation is presented to the public as the
ongoing frontline battle against "terrorism," while in reality, they
should call Afghanistan "pipeline-istan" because it's all about
securing the access corridors for natural gas and oil pipelines from
the Black Sea through Afghanistan - the four main US bases there are
located along the exact pipeline route - to the coast of Pakistan.
A3N: How does the corporate media narrative contrast with what you
have seen firsthand in Iraq?
DJ: The difference is night and day. The whitewashing and outright
lying by the corporate media is offensive to me. It is repulsive, in
fact, when compared to what the reality on the ground is in Iraq. The
brutality of the US military there against the civilian population
would shock people. More than 1 million Iraqis have been slaughtered
because of the US occupation. As you read this, you can know that one
in every ten Iraqis remains displaced from their homes. Can you
imagine that? The US policy in Iraq has been so destructive that one
out of every ten Iraqis is currently displaced from his or her home,
seven years into the occupation.
A3N: Returning now to the issue of soldier resistance, what are the
various reasons that antiwar soldiers give as motivation for their
opposition to the occupations?
DJ: These reasons mostly come from what the soldiers see once they
arrive in the occupation: the buckets of money being made by the
contractors, the lack of goals for the occupation beyond generating
huge amounts of profit for war contractors and the reasons given for
the invasion and occupation being entirely false. So, most seem to
become antiwar when they see that they've been lied to, used,
betrayed, and that they are putting their lives on the line so that
war contractors can get richer.
A3N: What are some of the ways that antiwar soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan have resisted?
DJ: Myriad ways. The most common, and least dramatic, is going AWOL
[absent without leave]. More than 60,000 soldiers have now taken that
route since September 11, 2001. So, often, folks will go do a
deployment, come back for a break, then simply not show up when it's
time for their unit to redeploy.
Some of the more interesting means of resistance I've found entailed
doing what soldiers refer to as "search and avoid" missions. One
soldier told me how they would go out to the end of their patrol
route in their Humvees, find a big field and park. They'd call in to
base every hour to check in and say, "We're fine, we're still
searching this field for weapons caches." And they would sit there
doing nothing until the time was up for their patrol, and they'd
return to base. I met more and more soldiers who shared similar
stories, from all over Iraq, during different times of the
occupation. That's when I realized how low morale was and how
widespread different kinds of resistance had become.
Other soldiers found out how to manipulate their locator beacon on
the GPS unit in the Humvees, so they'd sit and have tea with Iraqis
while someone moved their beacon around so their base thought they
were patrolling.
A3N: How has US military leadership responded to this resistance?
DJ: They don't know about much of it when it's happening, although
there have been times when a unit has been caught doing something
like the aforementioned, and they've broken up the unit, but that has
been quite rare overall.
With AWOL troops, the military doesn't have the manpower to send
their MP's [military police] after them, so the military lets them go
and waits for them to get a traffic ticket, for example. Then the
cops hand them over to the MPs, who throw the AWOL soldiers in the
brig to await a court-martial. Then, often, the soldier is told he or
she can go back to Iraq or Afghanistan, or he or she will be court-martialed.
A3N: In your book "The Will to Resist," you document many different
cases of soldiers that faced criminal charges for their opposition to
US wars. We discussed Bradley Manning's case earlier in this
interview, but can you please tell us about any other recent, ongoing
cases that have begun since the publication of your book in 2009? How
can our readers best support these soldiers?
DJ: Most of the cases I followed that took place after my book was
published have been completed: time was served by the soldiers, and
then they were released into freedom from the military. Two cases of
this type really stand out: Victor Agosto and Travis Bishop. Both of
these men stood up and refused to be deployed, were court-martialed,
served their time and are now free.
There will be more to come as these occupations persist. A group to
follow that regularly supports these resisters is Courage To Resist.
They are based in Oakland, California, and are run by Jeff Paterson,
himself a resister to the first Gulf War. They do a great job of
tracking resisters and what folks can do to support them. Support
includes donations, but also making phone calls, writing letters and
other forms of activism.
A3N: In the months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the
antiwar movement in the US was relatively strong, but since the
invasion began, the antiwar movement seems to have lost considerable
momentum and strength. On a practical level, what do you think the US
antiwar movement needs in order to be reenergized and finally end these wars?
DJ: At the risk of sounding like a cynic when I feel I'm making an
honest assessment, I don't feel there will be a mass organization of
an antiwar movement. We already live in a police state. What is left
of the antiwar movement is completely infiltrated and is being torn
apart by sectarianism and profiteering, or the peace-industrial complex.
In addition, I feel that the main reason for the failure of the
antiwar movement is that most folks involved in it still believe they
can work within the system to generate change, when the system is
completely corrupted already. By "system," I mean the federal
government. That apparatus is broken beyond repair. It is completely
corrupted and needs to be dissolved. Thus, any movement that seeks to
work within the parameters set by the system - such as weekend
permitted demonstrations, thinking you can effectively pressure your
representative, etcetera - is doomed before it begins, because it is
still playing by the rules set out by those in power. Rules guarantee
never to jeopardize the loss of power by those who hold it.
Only truly radical actions - those meant to subvert the system and
shut it down to a point where business as usual is impossible until
demands are met - are all that is left.
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