Category Archives: military

add another name to the heroes list

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Major David Frakt was until this month one of those military lawyers I referenced cryptically last fall, who have been saving the Constitution every day at Guantanamo: quietly, bravely saying no to orders and procedures they found illegal. I first learned about these folks two years or so (!) ago, from crack attorney Bridget Wilson; I thought I’d have to go through back channels to find one willing to come forward and be in my book. I knew they belonged in Ain’t Marching, and didn’t want their stories as forgotten as those of WORMS ((We Openly Resist Military Stupidity), those Air Force linguists stationed in Asia who quietly refused to assist during the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong.

As it turned out, no such search was needed.

Torture has a way of raising the volume.

Major Frakt, a judge-advocate general serving at Guantanamo, volunteered for the hazardous duty of defending Mohammed Jawad, a detaineee accused of the attempted murder of two US soldiers in Afghanistan in 2002.

Jawad was sixteen years old when captured; by the time he was brought before a military tribunal this spring, he had been subjected to 14 consecutive days of sleep deprivation. So instead, Frakt filed a request that the charges be dismissed:

“Our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment. . . As a matter of policy the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”

With these fateful and ill-advised words, President Bush, our Commander-in-Chief, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, started the U.S. down a slippery slope, a path that quickly descended, stopping briefly in the dark, Machiavellian world of “the ends justify the means,” before plummeting further into the bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of “anything goes,” of torture. It was a path that led inexorably to the events that brings us here today, the pointless and sadistic treatment of Mohammad Jawad, a suicidal teenager.

If you have time, listen to Frakt speak to PRI on July 4th, about how his action fulfilled his vow to defend the Constitution. At the very least, go read his full statement. Then add him to the list, from Donald Duncan to Hugh Thompson to Antonio Taguba: career military folks, with a lot to lose by speaking out but did so anyway. They may need their own chapter in the book, though I suspect they’ll shine just as well as part of each war’s own story.

is that an organizer’s hand I see behind the curtain?

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I should have realized last month, when I noticed that stream of articles about private equity and affordable housing, that some serious organizing had taken place to get their attention. Though god knows any reporter would have noticed the trend if s/he looked,it appears probable that behind that curtain were two fearless and dedicated advocacy groups,  the Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development (whose director, the terrifyingly brilliant Benjamin Dulchin, was quoted by the Times) and Tenants and Neighbors, whose campaign on the subject is linked above.

I’m the opposite of surprised, of course. Social movements don’t bloom overnight, and most reporters are  too deep in that signature mix of lazy, stressed and mad busy, unless organizers make us see it.

TADN’s campaign’s main page has much to offer, including a handy step-by-step explanation of the process:

1. Entrepreneur identifies a building as an “underperforming or “underutilized” asset. This means that the income that the building produces is significantly lower than it could be – because people with low and moderate incomes are living there instead of people with higher incomes, who could pay higher rent.

2. Entrepreneur obtains “equity capital” by promising other investors a high rate of return – generally 20 percent a year. Investor then obtains “leverage” by borrowing more money – six to ten times more – from banks or other lenders.

3. Entrepreneur buys the building and begins working to increase its income. Often the entrepreneur and the equity investors are willing to see income go down – or even to lose money – for a few years before it actually goes up. * In the case of a Mitchell-Lama buyout, this enables them to immediately suffer the loss of subsidies, along with huge interest payments on the borrowed money, while waiting for rental income to increase over a period of years as the original tenants move out and new tenants move in and begin paying higher rents.

4. If the entrepreneur is a private equity group, it will sell the building to a new investor after three to five years – as soon it can show that the property’s income is going up enough to justify a significantly increased price. Other entrepreneurs may prefer to sell or to continue to own and operate the building. Either way, many or most of the original tenants must be replaced with higher-income people by this point, or the investment will be judged a failure.

If the legislators roused by all this actually do something, Dulchin’s and TADN’s organizers will be the Rosa Parks of this corner of the scene. Or perhaps, even, the Bayard Rustins, given their smart use of language. I wish I’d been smart enough to come up with the term “predatory equity, ” and cheer the polite use of the term “entrepeneur.” God knows most tenants use words with far fewer syllables, and to a far more explosive effect.

no hiroshima, no bhopal – instead a hunger strike

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I read about this hunger strike by author Indra Sinha in this week’s Guardian – the first time, for a while, that I’ve thought about Bhopal.

Like many Americans I first heard the name of the city in Madhyra Pradesh in 1984, when news hit the wires that a Union Carbide plant there was causing terrible casualties. Twelve years later, I built a visit to the city into my weird three-week Indian trip, one which forfeited tourist highlights like Goa and the Taj Mahal for offbeat destinations like Faizabad (site of many famed Hindu-Muslim riots) and Bhopal. I arrived there, in 1996, on the morning of my thirty-fourth birthday; by the end, I was ready to write: “I have been to hell and it is called Bhopal.”

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Part two, notes from Winter Soldier on the Hill

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“You’re telling us that what we’re doing there is bloodying our hands,” Representative Maxine Waters told members of Iraq Veterans Against the War halfway through Thursday’s hearing, also known as Winter Soldier on the Hill.

Waters added that much of the information she was hearing was new, and that it felt truer than all the administration’s happy-talk about Iraq, all the hopeful phrases meant to encapsulate this or that stage of the war. After ” shock and awe, last throes, clear and hold, the surge,” she said, “We have had enough.”

As I reported in part one, by then the handful of House members at the informal session had heard first-hand accounts of kicking in doors, shoot-first policies, abuse of detainees and other hazards of occupation. All had been laced with searing self-criticism on the soldiers’ part, as when Geoffrey Millard described soldiers’ racism and others said that many “did not have any intent of helping the Iraqis.” They had also heard Millard voice IVAW’s three demands: immediate withdrawal of troops, full health care for all troops upon return, and reparations to the Iraqi people for the spoliation of their country.

The veterans were also frank about their internal wounds. Many, like Kristofer Goldsmith, had attempted suicide; many, perhaps most, others had “self-medicated” with alcohol or drugs. Yet those same effects could make one ineligible for VA healthcare or the GI Bill, they noted, depending on branch of service or the language of your discharge. Kristofer Goldsmith, once a boy scout dreaming of becoming a soldier, said that his general discharge blocks him from education benefits; Millard, despite nine years of service, was ineligible because all of his service was with the National Guard. “We’ll fix that,” said Rep. Waters. “We have to.”

Perhaps appropriately for International Conscientious Objector Day, many spoke frankly of what they called the “dehumanization” inherent in current military training. Goldsmith described the perhaps immortal basic-training moment when the drill sergeant screams, “What makes the grass grow?” and expects to hear, “Blood, sergeant! Blood makes the grass grow!” As the link indicates. that phrase is already the title of a film about resisters from the first Gulf War. When I interviewed one star of that film, Aimee Allison, she described that chant as a turning point for her in 1991, which began her realization that she was a CO.

Another soldier on the panel  described watching a commander belittle someone undergoing that realization, using irrelevant hypothetical questions such as: What would you do if Al Qaeda went in and raped your wife, murdered your children, etc? The soldier looked up and asked why the commander would ask such a question: “Do we do that to them?”

After taking a break to vote on the war funding bill (with a surprising result, as it turned out, the committee began to ask the vets many questions— some personal, many policy-oriented.

Asked about the effects of the Abu Ghraib scandal on their work, the veterans were sober. “I was manning a checkpoint the day it broke,” said Adam Kokesh, and he wondered what it made him seem to the Iraqis meeting his eyes. James Gilligan said that detainee treatment overall has damaged any relationship possible with ordinary Iraqis: “ When you meet an Iraqi teenager on the street,” he said, “they know what their cousins, their uncles have been through” at the hands of the U.S. military. “That makes it hard.”

I confess I didn’t keep adequate notes on many of the policy discussions, especially when Woolsey and the others asked the vets to administration talking points, such as The surge is working, or We’re fighting Al Qaeda, or If we pull out now there will be chaos. To the last, Adam Kokesh said simply: ““Every specter we raise increases the longer we’re there,” meaning that each day of occupation increases terrorism and the prospect of a bloodbath.

Captain Luis Carlos Montalvan – whose testimony was the most blatant in blaming  specific generals, including the media rock star General David Petraeus, for much of the current chaos — was equally damning about “a misconception that staying in Iraq is vital to our national security interests…an assumption made time and time again by people at the highest echelons” that the occupation should continue “with no end state in sight.”

In any event, Montalvan said, while it may not be pretty, “my belief is that will force the hand of the sectarian forces to work things out on their own.”

Immediately after the hearing, active-duty Sergeant Mathis Chiroux publicly declared his refusal to deploy to Iraq, which event became the lede in most news stories about the day (including this terrific piece by my friend Karin at Agence-France Press). But to me, the real news came toward the end of the hearing itself, when Rep. Watson pledged to bring the veterans back to more formal House committees, such as Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security. There, she said, they would have an opportunity to testify under oath, something neither the 1971 Winter Soldiers or those testifying in March had done. “Are you willing to return,” she asked each in turn, and to bring documentation to support their testimonies?

Nothing, of course, was said about bringing the group before the Senate. I wonder if that will happen eventually — and whether the dissension among the Senate’s Vietnam veterans, limned so well in this week’s piece about John McCain‘s war, will be eased or intensified when they hear it.

Notes from Winter Soldier on the Hill, part one

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“I joined the military to kill Iraqi people,” Kristofer Goldsmith said softly in a Congressional hearing room on Thursday.

The slim young veteran, his Mohawk pulled back from his head in a half-braid, kept his eyes focused forward as news photographers scurried under the table at which he sat, snapping photographs as he continued: ” I remember on September 12, 2001, looking up at the TV screen as a 16-year-old boy, saying we should use biological weapons and eliminate the threat in the Middle East.”

Goldsmith had already shown slides of himself as a ten-year-old Boy Scout who had always wanted to join the military, but soon he had segued to a succession of images of what he had witnessed in Iraq, from “presence patrols” designed to intimidate to an image of a man with smashed face. His last few images displayed a wall with an Arabic inscription: Welcome America to the second Vietnam War.

Goldsmith was only one of ten veterans testifying before the House Progressive Caucus, designed to give legislators a taste of last March’s Winter Soldier testimony. At the event, billed as Winter Soldier on the Hill (C-SPAN video at the top link here), ten members faced the caucus, which on budget day amounted mostly to a trio of antiwar women Democrats: Lynn Woolsey, Diane Watson, and Sheila Jackson Lee.

It was May 15 — International Conscientious Objector Day, marked by Congress mostly in reverse. A Foreign Affairs Committee briefing on “Empowering the Soldier Through Technology” featured flashy brochures on the newest Stryker vehicle. Walking through the first floor of the Rayburn Office Building, I was almost blinded by the ribbons and medals on the brass showing off the new hardware.

But upstairs, soldiers who had seen combat far more recently were honoring both the day, even if they weren’t themselves CO’s, and their own pledge upon enlistment to protect the Constitution.

I sat behind the testimonial table, where the row of dark suits most had chosen gave the event a somber feel, like kaddish or a memorial. And their testimonies, describing alleged war crimes, felt similarly somber, blaming equally their own participation, command neglect, and Congressional endorsement of the occupation.

Jason Lemieux — a sweet-faced young blond whose slight build belies his strength — described “firefights in which the rules of engagement were routinely ignored.” “Unit loyalty and cameraderie,” he said, combined with “an emphasis on minimizing short term casualties,” to create an atmosphere in which troops were authorized “on numerous occasions, to shoot any Iraqi that seems suspicious,” and were told that “the command will take care of you.” (Such emphasis on taking care of one another, sometimes overriding concern for civilians, perhaps the dark side of the terribly romantic, Achilles-Patroclus soldier-bond described in such detail by Jonathan Shay.)

When Lemieux submitted incident reports showing “use of excessive force,” he said, commands either downplayed them or, in one case, actually altered the numbers.

In Tal Afar, now praised by President Bush as a great Army success, “ more innocent civilians were injured and killed by Americans than by the enemy,” said Army scout Scott Ewing, his face blank. Ewing described arriving at homes in Tal Afar that had just been blasted by Apache helicopters: “One little boy pointed to his chest,” he said. “We tried to bandage their wounds,” he said softly.

Ewing also showed a slide of a trashed home, from a day when “thousands of of soldiers were ordered to search aggressively” for weapons. Following orders, the troops kicked down doors, smashed computers, and ripped bedsheets. (In the back of the room Aaron Glantz, reporting for Democracy Now, remarked: “It looks like there’s been an armed robbery.”) Overall, said Ewing, “trashing people’s homes did not win us friends in Tal Afar.”

Part of what made this all possible, the vets said, was racism/dehumanization: a previous generation’s “gook” become “hajji,” and thus other and expendable. Geoffrey Millard, of IVAW’s D.C. chapter, showed a slide of a sedan blasted into fragments at a checkpoint; his commander, he said, had brushed it off, saying: “if these fucking hajjis learned to drive that wouldn’t happen.” He has tried, he added, to reason with his peers, for whom “KBR employees who made our food, they became hajjis.. I actually heard a guy say, I’m going over to that hajji shop to get a hajji DVD from these hajjis.” It was hard, he said, to get soldiers to see why that was wrong.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about the soldiers’ awareness of their own trauma, about the committee’s response to all this, and just a few of my own reflections. But right now, I’m haunted by the opening sentence of Millard’s statement, which feels a little like a warning of what could continue indefinitely.

“In Iraq, a year becomes a month, a month becomes a day that repeats over and over and over,” Millard said.

a villanelle for betrayal

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I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to note this piece by the incredible Col. Ann Wright. Its title skittered over military history listservs, but in question form — Is There an Army Cover-Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers? — that made it appear academic, and not the rigorous prosecutorial brief that it is.

When you talk to military rape survivors, and their families, they are usually more anxious to describe not what their attacker did but what their command did or did not do. With the military mission top priority, commands often stint prosecutions (which require scarce investigative resources and the risk of losing soldiers esteemed by their peers). This was true in peacetime, when I wanted to write a book called “Twice Betrayed,” about the way victim/survivors felt about that fact. To them, the second betrayal cut longer than the first.

More brilliant journalists than I have kept on that case throughout this war; Wright’s piece is a careful reminder not to look away. To me, to whom so much is painfully familiar, it reads like a villanelle: a poem whose themes resound more and more with each echo.

I’ve reproduced below some of the villanelle-bits of Wright’s brief that highlight the double betrayal (go to the piece for the supporting facts)

The Army attempted several explanations, but each was debunked by Mrs. Priest and by the 800 pages of materials provided by the Army itself. The Army now says Tina used her toe to pull the trigger of the weapon that killed her. The Army never investigated Tina’s death as a homicide, but only as a suicide.

Rape charges against the soldier whose sperm was found on her sleeping bag were dropped a few weeks after her death. He was convicted of failure to obey an order and sentenced to forfeiture of $714 for two months, 30 days restriction to the base and 45 days of extra duty.

—

The person identified in the diary as the rapist was charged by the Army with rape after her death. Many who knew her did not believe she shot herself, but there is no evidence of a homicide investigation by the Army.

—-

The sergeant pleaded guilty to drinking in a war zone, drunken driving and consensual sodomy with an underage, incapacitated junior soldier to whom he had supplied alcohol. A military judge ruled McKinney’s death was an accident and the sergeant was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment, demotion to private, but he would not be discharged from the Army.

—

Peterson reportedly objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners and refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Members of her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Peterson objected to. The military says all records of those techniques have now been destroyed. … She was also sent to suicide-prevention training. On the night of September 15, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle. Family members challenge the Army’s conclusion.

—–

Col. Wright is a heroine in my book (literally), who gave up a lifetime career when the Iraq war made contined honorable service untenable. Her editorials should be being published by the Times (or at least the Huffington Post), not relegated to the essential but marginalized Truthout.

neither soldier nor civilian

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Yesterday, I went to a benefit performance of the Off- Broadway show “The Castle,” in which four former inmates tell their stories and praise The Fortune Society. For 40 years, the society has worked on such folks’ behalf, and ten years ago bought the castle where this movie was filmed and turned it into a halfway house. The group’s director, Jo Ann Page, told me last week that the play felt like a return to the origins of the group, born of founder David Rothenberg’s play “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” “David was saying, ‘look—we started on Broadway, now we’re back almost on Broadway!’ And meanwhile, one of the players was saying, ‘Last year I was in lockup. Now I’m Off-Broadway!’”

The play itself is a touch didactic – while Variety called it “immensely eloquent,” the Times said drily, “This is theatre verging on a public service announcement” – but it made me think about something I’d noticed since I first started covering prison stuff: the extent to which these ex-offenders reminded me of so many of the GI’s I used to counsel. Serious people, who’ve been through something I can’t claim to share (and likely wouldn’t want to).

That impression was redoubled last night by a conversation I had with the wife of one of the leads in the play, herself a graduate of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. After we bonded talking about a friend of hers I’d written about, she spoke of some programs at the prison that had been restored with the help of “some civilians.” I’d not known that former prisoners also talked about “civilians.”

“Are you a veteran?” hotline callers used to ask me, back in the day. “You just seem like you understand.” Not a soldier, I would reply softly, but maybe not quite a civilian either. Maybe my task as a writer is to hover in that not-quite-civilian zone. Because, as my brilliant friend Jine pointed out a few weeks ago, the most important thing journalists can do is not the stories we tell, but that we listen.

yearning for the engineers?

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My friend Lily was one of the first on the net with this story you might have seen on CNN — the first, that is, after the dad whose desperation threw on Youtube the substandard housing contractors had built at Fort Bragg:

The screen capture to the left is a soldier plunging a clogged bathroom drain, on a bathroom floored filled with inches of standing water and raw sewage. Ft. Bragg’s living conditions, at least as shown in this video by a suitably outraged father, bring to mind those at Walter Reed, profiled by the reporting team at the Washington Post last year. The Fayetteville Observer has weighed in with an article on the conditions at Fort Bragg, prompted by the release of this video, and they’re asking for answers, too. Do yourself a favor and watch what one citizen journalist did to document the conditions facing some returning military. We are not remotely giving them the care that they deserve. And it’s shameful that public pressure has to be brought to bear, by videos like this, before conditions are improved for returning servicemembers.

Others drew connections to last week’s GAO report on the outsourcing of Iraq reconstruction, also know to some as why we went to war in the first place:

In addition, the audit said many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not. In one case, the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. in 2004 to construct a $50 million children’s hospital in Basra, only to “essentially terminate” the project in 2006 because of monthslong delays.

But rather than terminate the project, U.S. officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. As a result, a U.S. database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete “when in fact the hospital was only 35 percent complete when work was stopped,” said investigators in describing the practice of “descoping” as frequent.

But how do we get this stuff done without hiring someone to do it? I hear you cry in agony. But here’s where the history slut comes in: we seem to have forgotten what was learned from costly wars in earlier centuries, that outsourcing war doesn’t work. Those underfed, mutinying troops I talked about from the Revolution were supplied by private companies, who couldn’t keep up with the demand.

That’s why when we had to get serious, during World War II, whole companies of the U.S. Army were only about building stuff — not the defense plants, but literally putting supplies together right in theatre. I learned about this when reading about the great wartime journalist Ernie Pyle. As his biographer notes, Pyle spent weeks with the Army 75th Ordnance Company, which made

…trucks and tanks and supplied the ammunition, for though “the layman doesn’t hear much about [it] … the war couldn’t keep going without it,” [Pyle wrote.]….It was a grievous distortion to imply, as all newspapers did, that the only parts of the war that mattered were the high commands and the line of battle. All the tankers and riflemen and bombardiers put together made up only the sharp point of a long, long spear constructed of signalmen, cooks, quartermasters, engineers, drivers and clerks.

Now, that long spear’s been subcontracted to KBR and its spinoff subs, who are too busy counting their money to evaluate whether the job they were hired to do is well done. Or even done.

I better stop writing before I start talking about this film, which is about the thousands of Asian employees those companies are busy retaining, and endangering, in Iraq. These are the days of miracle and wonder only in the Paul Simon sense – I have to take myself to the last line of that song.

24 hours of irony?

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Two quick bits, since I’m otherwise mostly in the 19th century today:

First, Anthony Lane gave me a new catchphrase this week, in his New Yorker review of 88 Minutes:

Avnet is setting a noble example here: if all movies were named after their running times, Hollywood would instantly become a brisker place. Would Peter Jackson have dared to put us through a Tolkien trilogy called “Nine and a Quarter Hours of Elves”? I don’t think so.

I now never have to use the phrase “Lord of the Rings” again. In Lane’s honor, I will only use his alternate title. Including for the books.

But that’s not the ironic part. That happens in July, when this happiest? place on earth opens.

davy crockett, whose name should be on a casino

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Miraculously, I’ve somehow managed to spend much of my weekend on the book, thinking less about current controversies —including super-burning issues like this week’s Rand study documenting this country’s ongoing betrayal of new veterans — than about those of 1830: how long slavery should last, and what to do about the pesky presence of the original inhabitants of this continent. And I found a surprising new veteran character for the book: Davy Crockett, emblazoned in popular culture with a rifle and a coonskin cap, who killed many Indians in Andrew Jackson’s first wars.

To my surprised delight, I found that Crockett, then a Congressman from Tennessee, stood up to Jackson years later, when the then-president asked for formal endorsement of his policy of moving all Indians across the MIssissippi:

Soon after the commencement of [my] second term, [Jackson’s] famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill was brought forward, and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself. They said this was a favorite measure of the president,and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might; that I was willing to go with General Jackson in every thing that I believed was honest and right; but, further than this, I wouldn’t go for him, or any other man in the whole creation I had been elected by a majority of three thousand five hundred and eighty-five votes, and I believed they were honest men, and wouldn’t want me to vote for any unjust motion, to please Jackson or any one else; at any rate, I was of age, and was determined to trust them. I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment.

Crockett’s faith in his voters may have been misplaced; he was soon returned to civilian life, a fate he’d foreseen from the beginning: “ I know’d well enough,though, that if I didn’t ” hurra ” for [the President’s] name, the hue and cry was to be raised against me, and I was to be sacrificed, if possible.”

While Crockett didn’t then join fellow veterans Noah Worcester and Wiliam Ladd in their American Peace Society, instead taking the opposite stance and dying fighting for slavery at the Alamo, his vote against removal still counts for something. I’m still working to tease out how much, in this alchemists’ brew of dissent that I’m tracking. But I wonder how many deserters from subsequent wars traded stories about the frontiersman who stood up to a president.

By the way, before some random historian finds this and slams me: I know Andrew Jackson didn’t come up with the idea of removal. Sweet old Tom Jefferson had conceived of such tactics fifteen years earlier, should his chosen strategy of creating a red/maroon Generation Debt fail:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and the influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. . . . They will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.

In other words, Jefferson provided the ideology, Jackson the means, and reckless Western governments an incomplete Final Solution.

Thinking about all this, the poetry of white people pouring away their life savings at Indian-owned casinos comes clearer; I should probably mind less my parents going to Foxwoods in formerly Pequot Connecticut, or Mohegan Sun farther east. Though I understand the reluctance of William Penn’s city to want to allow a similar payback on their soil.