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This is getting scary, folks!

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Offline Dunrobin

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I normally would post a story like this in Dunrobin's Rants, but this is too important to be overlooked or dismissed as a "rant."  Please read this through, and tell me what you think it means for our future.

The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again

By Greg Palast

05/12/06 -"ICH" - -I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.

This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?

ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.

I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.

And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope(s) to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.

And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.

"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.

But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.

"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.

It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.

The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.

But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.

And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.

Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War, out June 6. You can order it now.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

SOURCE:  Information Clearing House


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This doesn't scare me much, since I avoid communicating by hard-wired phones as much as I can.

Still, this "data harvesting" by the U.S. Government is something that should not be ignored. Ignore it at your own peril... Nazism?  "It Can't Happen Here."

Write or e-mail your so-called "representatives" and demand that this criminal eavesdropping be stopped, right now!

Cite The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution— if any lousy, freeloading bureaucrat asks you for "authority."

 >:(

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

 [cool]





Offline Dunrobin

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What has become of Americans?
Paul Craig Roberts


May 9, 2006

Imagine knocking on America's door and being told, "Americans don't live here any longer. They have gone away." But isn't that what we are hearing, that Americans have gone away? Alan Shore told us so on ABC's "Boston Legal" on March 14:

"When the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out not to be true, I expected the American people to rise up. They didn't.

Then, when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was revealed that our government participated in rendition, a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the American people would be heard from. We stood mute.

Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called terrorist suspects, locked them up without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.

And now, it's been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven't.

In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is we're okay with it all. Torture, warrantless search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without a fair trial or any trial, war on false pretenses. We, as a citizenry, are apparently not offended.

There are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact, there's no clear indication that young people even seem to notice.

The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest. Stop for a second and try to fathom that. At a presidential rally, parade or appearance, if you have on a supportive t-shirt, you can be there. If you're wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be removed.

This! In the United States of America."

Readers tell me that Americans don't live here any more. They ask what responsible American citizenry would put up with the trashing of the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers, with wars based on deception, and with pathological liars in control of their government? One reader recently wrote that he believes that "no element of the U.S. government has been left untainted" by the lies and manipulations that have driven away accountability. So-called leaders, he wrote, "talk a great story of American pride and patriotism," but in their hands patriotism is merely a device for "cynical manipulation and fraud."

The Bush regime acknowledges that 30,000 Iraqi civilians, largely women and children, have been killed as a result of Bush's invasion. Others who have looked at civilian casualties with greater attention have come up with numbers three to six times as large. The Johns Hopkins study accounted for 98,000 civilian deaths. Patrick Cockburn, using more sophisticated statistical analysis, concluded that 180,000 Iraqis died as a result of Bush's invasion. The former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi says that Iraqi sectarian violence alone is claiming 50-60 deaths per day, or 18,000-22,000 annually, a figure that could quickly worsen. Some were killed by "smart bombs" that weren't very smart and dropped on hospitals, schools, and weddings. Others were mistaken for resistance fighters and killed. Still others were killed by spooked, trigger-happy U.S. troops.

Now comes a report in the online edition of Time magazine that U.S. Marines went on a rampage in the village of Haditha and deliberately slaughtered 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes. The Iraqis were still in their bed clothes, and 10 of the 15 were women and children.

The Marines turned in a false report that the civilians were killed by an insurgent bomb. But the evidence of wanton carnage was too powerful. Pressed by Time's collection of evidence, U.S. military officials in Baghdad opened an investigation. Time reports that "according to military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military's initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which will conduct a criminal investigation." [Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha? By Tim McGirk, Mar. 19, 2006] If this story is true, under Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush's leadership, proud and honorable U.S. Marines have degenerated into the Waffen SS. Those of us raised on John Wayne war movies find this very hard to take.

A fish rots from the head. Clearly, deception in the Oval Office is corrupting the U.S. military. One reader reported that on March 19 his local PBS station aired a program which discussed the deaths of two young American soldiers in friendly fire incidents similar to Pat Tillman's death. In each case, he reports, "elements within the military falsified reports and attempted to shift blame to either enemy combatants or allied (Polish) forces."

The neocons have yet to tell us the real reason for their assault on Iraq, which has so far produced 20,000 dead, maimed, and wounded U.S. soldiers, between 30,000 and 180,000 (and rising) dead Iraqis, and demoralized U.S. Marines to the point that they commit atrocities on women and children.

Would real Americans accept these blows for the sake of an undeclared agenda? Perhaps it is true that Americans don't live here any longer.

Dr. Roberts is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

SOURCE:  counterthink


Offline Dunrobin

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Further food for thought, gang.  More troops have been killed in the first three years of Iraq than were killed in the first three years of Vietnam.  In 1966, the Vietnam became a blood bath, with American and Vietnamese deaths skyrocketing until we finally had to pull out.  Now the Bush administration wants to escalate the war in the Middle East to include Iran, and the President has adamently refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike against the Iranians.

Who are the terrorists?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12999.htm


Offline Dunrobin

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Published on Saturday, April 29, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
One Excellent Reason Not to Join the Military: You May be Ordered to Kill Civilians
by Paul Rockwel
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The following article is adapted from: “Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military,” edited by Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, with an introduction by Cindy Sheehan, published by New Press.

    “A soldier who sees the humanity of the enemy makes a troubled and ineffective killer.
    -- Chris Hedges

When Marine Sergeant Jimmy Massey enlisted in the Marines, he never expected that he would be ordered to kill civilians. He enlisted in good faith, and he trusted his Commander-in-Chief to tell the truth, to follow the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law. He was even ready to risk his life for his country in the event that the United States faced a real or imminent attack.

In January 2003, Jimmy was deployed to Iraq. During the initial invasion he was involved in a number of “checkpoint killings,” the kind of atrocities that occur over and over today without fanfare or scandal.

A hard-core Marine, Jimmy was in charge of a platoon of machine gunners and missile men. It was their job to secure the road out of Baghdad. As bombs rained down on the ancient city of five million people, civilians fled in panic. There was chaos at the checkpoints.

“All Iraqis,” Jimmy told me in a recent interview, “were considered a menace.”

“One particular incident really pushed me over the edge. It involved a car with Iraqi civilians. We fired some warning shots, but the car did not slow down. So we lit ‘em up. Well, this particular vehicle we didn't destroy completely, and one gentleman on the ground looked up at me and said, ‘Why did you kill my brother? We didn’t do anything wrong.’ That hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Jimmy was involved in four more checkpoint tragedies.

Like thousands of his fellow Marines and soldiers, who also enlisted in good faith, Jimmy was trapped—trapped between atrocity and near-sedition. If he followed orders, he might commit war crimes. If he disobeyed orders, he put his own life and career in jeopardy .

Marines are trained to kill without remorse. But there are times in life when indoctrination, reprisals, threats of humiliation, all fail to erase that inner feeling that we are all God’s children. A Marine who recognizes the humanity of the people whose country is under occupation makes an ineffective killer. Repelled by the indiscriminate carnage, the visible suffering of the Iraqi people, who only deserved to be left alone by outside powers, Jimmy repudiated the war. He refused to participate in apparent war crimes. He defied authority, and his commander called him a coward and put him under a “kind of house arrest.” Jimmy, a real fighter, eventually won his honorable discharge.

At his home in North Carolina, Jimmy says the U.S. military is committing war crimes. “Yes, I killed innocent people for my government. And for what? I feel like I’ve had a hand in some sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed, ashamed about it....I spend long hours speechless and looking at the wall, seeing nothing but images of dead Iraqis.”

The Pressure to Kill Civilians

Like Jimmy Massey, Darrell Anderson is fighting the dark ghosts of atrocity. A 22-year-old GI from Lexington, Kentucky, who won a purple heart after he was wounded, Anderson was stationed at a checkpoint near a police station in Baghdad, when a speeding car swerved in his direction. Darrell said he received orders to shoot. There was a family—two children, a man and his wife—in the car. Darrell’s buddies screamed: “Shoot! Why don’t you shoot? Why don’t you shoot?”

According to Darrell, he simply could not pull the trigger of his M-16. “The car posed no threat,” he told me.

“My superior came over and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Look, there’s children in the back. It’s a family. I did the right thing. It’s wrong to fire in this situation.’ My superior told me: ‘No, you did the wrong thing. You will fire, next time, or you will be punished. That’s our orders.’”

There is constant pressure to kill Iraqi civilians, Anderson said. “At traffic stops we kill innocent people all the time. If you are fired on from the street, you are supposed to fire on everybody that is there. If I am in a market, I shoot people who are buying groceries.”

The indiscriminate use of artillery is a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which state (Part IV, Article 48):combatants “shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants, between civilian objects and military objectives and, accordingly, shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

Darrell Anderson said he was riding in his self-propelled Howitzer when he was ordered to fire rounds into downtown Najaf in response to a mortar attack. Artillery rounds are filled with little BBs or shrapnel. Like cluster bombs, the “kill-ratio” is wide, and bystanders are covered in the blanket of destruction. Under orders, Darrell said, “we fired about 70 or 80 rounds. My buddies came back and said, ‘We killed a lot of people.’ About a hundred civilians. They were just people downtown. Killing downtown civilians is a typical incident.”

I remember watching old World War II films where Nazis in Poland or Czechoslovakia would call civilians into the street, line them up, and threaten reprisals if they did not yield vital information. Occupiers need intelligence, but local natives rarely give information voluntarily. From the U.S. raids on hamlets in Vietnam, French raids in the Casbah in Algeria, to the ongoing door-to-door raids in Iraq, the main features of imperial occupations have never changed.

Darrell was involved in numerous nighttime raids on Iraqi homes. “When we raid homes in the middle of the night,” Darrell explains, “twenty guys blow through the house at gunpoint, and it’s pretty terrifying for all the Iraqi families. We kick down the doors or bash them with a sledgehammer. One team goes in to clear the bottom floor. The second team heads upstairs. The women are screaming and crying, the children are freakin' out, and the men ask us ‘Why, why, what have we done?’ We separate the women, and their men are handcuffed and taken away. Even if we are looking for a single person, all the men are considered enemy until proven otherwise.”

“Once we raided a home based on faulty information we got from a drunk. We paid him for the tip. We busted into a house and yanked some guy out and sent him to Abu Ghraib for torture….Sometimes we closed off the whole section of a city and raided a couple of hundred homes, door-to-door.”

Darrell described the almost ceaseless brutality of the occupation. “In downtown Baghdad, there were three guys going to their car. One Iraqi opened the door and reached inside. The guys in our Humvee—a machine-gunner and an NCO in charge—fired on the Iraqis. Our gunners said the Iraqis could have been going for weapons. So we just killed them. There were no weapons in the vehicle. Three innocent guys, and there was no investigation.”

Darrell compares Iraq to the tragedy of Vietnam, another American war in which unseen, distant commanders, whose own lives were never in danger, sent vulnerable young men and women into situations where war crimes become an everyday feature of military conduct. “Baghdad is in rubble,” he said. “The big buildings were blown up. Many were targets, and houses in Najaf are blown to pieces.”

Today Darrell is a war-resister. He left the military and escaped to Canada, where he is seeking political asylum. “I can’t go back to the war. If I return to Iraq, I have no choice but to commit atrocities. And I don’t want to kill innocent people.”

Breaking Through Denial

Aidan Delgado, an Army Reservist in the 320th Military Police Company, witnessed horrific atrocities in Iraq. He served as a mechanic from April 2003 to April 2004, and he was stationed at Abu Ghraib for six months.

I first met Delgado at a high school in Northern California, where he presented graphic images of the U.S. occupation. “If you’re old enough to go to war,” Delgado said to the seniors, “you’re old enough to know what goes on. I want to let you know what you are signing on for if you enlist.”

“It was common practice,” his narrative began, “to set up blockades. The Third Infantry would block off a road. In advance of the assaults, civilians would flee the city in panic. As they approached us, someone would yell: ‘Stop, stop!’ In English. Of course many couldn’t understand. Their cars were blown up with cannons, or crushed with tanks. Killing non-combatants happened routinely, not only with the Third Infantry, but the First Marines. On an MSNBC report last week, they dug out a father, mother and her six children. The killing of civilians is still going on today.”

Delgado’s experiences at Abu Ghraib turned him against the entire war. His duties at the prison led him to discover that most of the prisoners had never been insurgents. (According to the May 4th 2004 Taguba Report on Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the vast majority of the 4000-6000 detainees never committed acts against U.S. forces.)

The living conditions at the prison were inhumane. Behind barbed wire, the prisoners launched a protest that got rough. Rocks were thrown. “The guards asked permission to use lethal force, and they got it,” Aidan said. “They opened fire on the prisoners with the machine guns. They shot twelve and killed three. I talked to one guy who did the killing. He showed me grisly photographs and bragged about the results. ‘Look, I shot this guy in the face,’ he said. ‘See, his head is split open.’ He talked like the Terminator. I was stunned and said, ‘You shot an unarmed man behind barbed wire for throwing a stone.’ He said to me, ‘Well, I said a prayer, and I gunned him down.’ There was a complete disconnect between what he had done and his morality. He was the nicest guy, a family man, a courteous, devout Christian.”

When Delgado finished his high school presentation, I saw a student who looked almost ill in the back row. I later learned that, a day earlier, he had enlisted in the Army.

Delgado challenged the students to confront the issue of atrocity, to overcome denial, to consider the military, not as a career, or an opportunity, but as a way of life that claims and smothers souls .

The reality of torture and other war crimes presents a moral challenge to all young men and women considering a career in military service. Under the impact of Delgado’s testimony, the high school students began to wonder: “Will I be ordered to commit atrocities or war crimes, to carry out policies against my own religion and conscience, deeds that I may regret for the rest of my life?”

Moved by Delgado’s narrative, I myself began to reflect on past abuses in American military history. I recall the anguish of Paul Meadlo’s mother when she discovered that her son committed atrocities at My Lai. Her cry of pain became a headline in the November 30, 1969, New York Times: “I sent them a good boy; they made him a murderer.” And she wanted to know: What did the military do to her son? Policies from Command

War crimes in Iraq are not mere aberrations. They emanate from official policies regarding the aims and conduct of the occupation .

It is official policy, for example, to use cluster bombs in populated areas. Soldiers and Marines merely carry out the policy.

It was official policy, under Operation Iron Hammer, to put barbed wire around villages, to bulldoze crops, to bomb homes, and to hold families in jail until they released insurgent information. (Patrick Cockburn, “U.S. Troops Bulldoze Crops,” Counterpunch, October 14, 2003). In his attempt to justify the punitive expedition, Captain Todd Brown, Company Commander of the 4th Infantry Division, stated, “You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force—force, pride, and saving face.” (New York Times, December 7, 2003)

It was official policy to level Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people, as an act of collective punishment. American commanders openly declared that Fallujah needed to be taught a lesson. Commanders ordered the use of 500-pound bombs that are utterly indiscriminate in their effects. No type of building—mosques, homes, medical facilities—was exempt from aerial destruction. At a mass burial of dead Iraqis, Captain P.J. Batty stated: “Everyone needs to understand there are consequences for not following the Iraqi government.” (Associated Press, November 16, 2004. Also CNN, Nov. 16).

In her 2005 book, ONE WOMAN’S ARMY, the Commanding General of Abu Ghraib, Janis Karpinski, exposes the connections between the use of torture at Guantanamo, in Afghanistan and Cell blocks One and Two at Abu Ghraib. Major General Geoffrey Miller, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played key roles in the preparation and execution of torture policy .

While Karpinski does not excuse the acts of reservists at Abu Ghraib, she reminds us that young Americans face prison time for following orders, while those who actually authorized the use of dogs, hooding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and isolation—techniques of torture—avoid accountability for the consequences of their own decisions. During the Abu Ghraib scandal, neither Rumsfeld, Miller, Gonzales—not one top official or commander stepped forward to share responsibility with the reservists. In essence, Karpinski makes clear, American commanders left their soldiers in the lurch.

Every American youth who considers military enlistment needs to take a close look at military “justice.”

Not only are American Marines, reservists, and soldiers expected to follow unlawful orders, they are also expected to bear life-long burdens of shame, guilt, and legal culpability for the arrogance of their own commanders—who dispense life and death from an office computer. Even before the invasion of Iraq in April 2003, more than six hundred U.S. veterans signed a “Call to Conscience,” expressing remorse for past war crimes. “As troops,” they wrote, “in the last Gulf War we were ordered to murder from a safe distance. We remember the road to Basra where we were ordered to kill fleeing Iraqis. We bulldozed trenches, burying people alive.”

Once a student makes that fateful decision to enlist in the U.S. military today—once an individual, through basic training, is conditioned to kill without remorse, to become an occupier in a country where insurgents are indistinguishable from neighbors, friends, and family in their own homeland—it is too late to turn back. As war-historian Gwen Dyer writes: “Men will kill under compulsion—men will do almost anything if they know it is expected of them and they are under strong social pressure to comply.”

“Only exceptional people can resist atrocity,” writes psychiatrist Robert Lifton in Superpower Syndrome. Jimmy Massey, Darrell Anderson, Aidan Delgado and scores of other war-resisters are exceptional men and women. When they enlisted, they only wanted to serve their country. They hoped to make a difference. But the military transported them beyond the rule of law, turning them into occupiers of Iraq, not defenders of democracy. These war-resisters fought back and broke the military code of silence.

Americans can hold on to their humanity, to be sure. But only by recognizing the humanity, not only of Arab peoples, but of all peoples who have a right to self-determination like ourselves.

Refusing to enlist is more than a career decision. It is a moral and political act, a contribution to the burgeoning, international movement for a better, more peaceful world. It is an affirmation of the sacredness of life and the dignity of all humanity.

Paul Rockwell is a columnist for In Motion Magazine.

SOURCE



I was lucky; when I joined the Army back in 1972, the Vietnam War was winding down, and I never had to serve in a combat situation.  I knew quite a few guys that had been in Vietnam, however, and they were all reluctant to talk about their experiences in the field.  (More than happy to talk about the drugs they scored, or the whores in Saigon, etc., but not about combat actions, usually.)

“Men will kill under compulsion—men will do almost anything if they know it is expected of them and they are under strong social pressure to comply.”

And when things start really falling apart here at home, the bastards in Washington undoubtedly intend to use these troops the same way here, against us.  They are training them to be insensitive to the idea of killing civilians (a process begun during Lincoln's War.)

Scared yet?  Were are we heading, gang?  What are we walking blindly, submissively into?


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They are training them to be insensitive to the idea of killing civilians (a process begun during Lincoln's War.)

As a matter of record, it was General Sherman (of "Lincoln's War"), during the Civil War, that introduced the concept of TOTAL WAR to Americans (whether "Yankee" or "Rebel"), such as the likes that are described above. The idea is certainly not new, but the "new" part is (according to the reading above) that we are in for another round of the same warfare tactics on our own soil from our own government without a clearly defined "enemy". This oratory seems to indicate that our fair USA is destined to fall just as the Great Roman Empire did, humpty-zillion years ago, but in a much compressed time frame. Then another "world power" or two will seize the reigns and lead us hither-and-yon just as we did for a few centuries, and so-on, and so-on, ...
The tacks won't come out! Well, they went in ... maybe they're income tacks.