DISSENT SPREADS
THROUGH U.S. MILITARY RANKS
bY jOHN cATALINOTTO
May 27,
2007 8:22 AM
Growing anger over the U.S. war in Iraq and growing
understanding that the occupation is a complete failure
are spreading through all ranks of the U.S. military.
This dissidence shows itself in different ways among the
rank-and-file troops and among the lifers and officers.
But from an increase of angry letters to anti-war
publications like GI Special to an increase of
courts-martial, the signs of resistance are growing.
On May 18, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Diaz was
sentenced after having been found guilty by a U.S. Navy
court-martial of what the Navy considered a serious
crime. While he faced a possible 14 years in prison, the
19-year Navy veteran’s sentence was six months
confinement with pay and removal from the Navy, the
officer equivalent of a less-than-honorable discharge.
Diaz was last assigned to investigate alleged
abuses of prisoners at Guantánamo, that piece of Cuban
territory the U.S. still occupies illegally. Washington
has held prisoners of war grabbed in Afghanistan in 2002
and others it considers "terrorists" for the
past four-five years at Guantánamo under
concentration-camp conditions.
Following orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
the U.S. had flouted international law and refused to
release the names of the prisoners. Some legal scholars
consider Rumsfeld guilty of war crimes for issuing these
orders. Diaz, concerned about this abuse of human rights,
sent, along with a Valentine’s card in February
2005, a list of the names of those prisoners to civil
liberty attorneys in New York. "My oath as a
commissioned officer is to the Constitution of the United
States,’’ Diaz said. "I’m not a
criminal. I had observed the stonewalling, the obstacles
we continued to place in the way of the attorneys,’’
Diaz told the media before his sentencing. "I knew
my time was limited. ... I had to do something.’’
Many, perhaps a majority even here in the U.S., would
consider Diaz a hero for doing that something. (See www.militaryproject.org). Regarding
other heroic military resisters, Spc. 4 Augustín Aguilar
was recently released from military prison in Germany and
returned to his home in California on May 10. He had been
held eight months as a prisoner of conscience after he
had gone AWOL as part of his refusal to redeploy to Iraq.
According to the group Courage to Resist (www.couragetoresist.org),
Aguilar
since May 10, "has shared his story of resistance at
community gatherings in Sacramento, Carmel, and San
Francisco. Highlights of Agustín’s first week as an
anti-war activist also included presentations to day
laborers, farm workers and their families in Stockton,
and high school and college students in Watsonville."
Far from being isolated or ostracized for his anti-war
action, Aguilar was welcomed into a community of war
resisters that includes Robert Zebala, Pablo Paredes and
Camilo Mejía along with many Iraq war veterans who are
now speaking out at anti-war gatherings and who get a
popular reception. Another war resister, Lt. Ehren
Watada, whose court-martial is still pending after the
military unilaterally decided to declare his first trial
a mistrial last February, has now had the court-martial
postponed once more. At first scheduled for June 23 at Ft.
Lewis, the trial is now on hold until it is determined if
re-starting the trial would mean that Watada faced
"double jeopardy." It is still possible that
the Army will be forced to drop charges on Lt. Watada,
the first officer to refuse duty in Iraq.
New trial at Fort Drum
A soldier in the 10th Mountain Division, a unit whose
home base is Fort Drum in upstate New York and which is
now breaking into homes in Baghdad, is facing a bad
conduct discharge and a year in prison for going AWOL. On
May 16 the Army announced that Spc. Eugene Cherry’s
court-martial will begin June 25. Cherry has medical
documentation that he suffers from post-traumatic stress
disorder. He says he is being court-martialed because he
went home to Chicago for help after the Army failed to
provide him with adequate treatment. "They don’t
want the liability so they deny I have a problem, and
because I tried to help myself, now they want to make me
a criminal," Spc. Eugene Cherry said in a telephone
interview from Fort Drum with the Associated Press.
Cherry told his doctor that during his tour in Iraq as a
medic, the most disturbing event he witnessed happened
when an Army ordnance team tried to blow up a minivan it
found loaded with explosives and flammables. The
explosion flattened a three-story apartment building
nearby, injuring residents. Cherry tried to help an Iraqi
woman he found face down. When he turned her over, he
found half her face was blown off. That’s when the
bad dreams and depression started, Cherry says. (See www.differentdrummercafe.org). Horror at
the war and U.S. actions aren’t the only forces
driving military dissidence. There is also the
realization that the U.S. is losing the war.
Some U.S. officers in Iraq assigned to work with puppet
Iraqi troops have objected to the troops’ arresting
Iraqi civilians who apparently had committed no crime,
nor had they even committed an act that the U.S.
occupiers could consider a crime. One U.S. officer was
recently reprimanded by a U.S. general when he released
35 prisoners he believed had been arrested without good
reason. Some of these U.S. officers consider the
imprisonment of innocent civilians a war crime they want
no responsibility for. Plus they consider it
counter-productive.
Even the admiral has misgivings
Some of the top officers, who normally have no trouble
ordering strategic bombing strikes that will cause
hundreds of thousands of casualties, and who certainly
have no moral compunctions about starting a war, are
beginning to balk at following Bush administration
leadership. An Inter Press Service story released May 19
reports that Admiral William Fallon, chief of CENTCOM and
a Bush appointee himself, expressed "strong
opposition in February to an administration plan to
increase the number of carrier strike groups in the
Persian Gulf from two to three and vowed privately there
would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of
CENTCOM, according to sources with access to his
thinking."
According to this unnamed source, Fallon said that he was
not alone, and that, "There are several of us trying
to put the crazies back in the box." This statement,
publicized a week after Vice President Dick Cheney
threatened war with Iran from the deck of an aircraft
carrier in the Gulf off the coast of that country, and
about the same time that Iraq war architect Paul
Wolfowitz was forced to resign from heading the World
Bank, has the ring of truth even if there is no easy way
of checking it. Fallon is a loyal officer of U.S.
imperialism, whose class interests and privileges are
tied to U.S. military domination of the world. His words—assuming
the IPS report is true—reflect the skepticism among
the ruling class for the Bush administration’s
leadership. They reflect the impact of four years of
heroic Iraqi resistance that has stalemated the U.S.
attempt to dominate that country.
In a different way, the Iraqi resistance has stimulated
the honest dissidence and refusal to participate in war
crimes expressed by the lower ranking officers and
enlisted persons. The signs that this dissidence is
growing and spreading in the Armed Forces are the best
news for those who want to end the ugly and criminal
occupation of Iraq.
E-mail: jcat@workers.org
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:: Article
nr. 33205 sent on 28-may-2007 08:11 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=33205Dissent spreads through U.S.
military ranks. Fragging of gung ho officers on the way
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