PTSD and the Military : Soldiers Go AWOL to Get Help

Photo illustration by Jennifer Clampet / USAG Wiesbaden Public Affairs.
Military health care inadequate:
GI's go AWOL for PTSD treatment

By Dahr Jamail / December 13, 2009

MARFA, Texas -- With a military health care system over-stretched by two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more soldiers are deciding to go absent without leave (AWOL) in order to find treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Eric Jasinski enlisted in the military in 2005, and deployed to Iraq in October 2006 as an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army. He collected intelligence in order to put together strike packets -- where air strikes would take place.

Upon his return to the U.S. after his tour, Jasinski was suffering from severe PTSD from what he did and saw in Iraq, remorse and guilt for the work he did that he knows contributed to the loss of life in Iraq.

"What I saw and what I did in Iraq caused my PTSD," Jasinski, 23, told IPS during a phone interview, "Also, I went through a divorce -- she left right before I deployed -- and my grandmother passed away when I was over there, so it was all super rough on me."

In addition, he lost a friend in Iraq, and another of his friends lost his leg due to a roadside bomb attack.

Upon returning home in December 2007, Jasinski tried to get treatment via the military. He was self-medicating by drinking heavily, and an over-burdened military mental health counselor sent him to see a civilian doctor, who diagnosed him with severe PTSD.

"I went to get help, but I had an eight hour wait to see one of five doctors. But after several attempts, finally I got a periodic check up and I told that counselor what was happening, and he said they’d help me... but I ended up getting a letter that instructed me to go see a civilian doctor, and she diagnosed me with PTSD," Jasinski explained, "Then, I was taking the medications and they were helping, because I thought I was to get out of the Army in February 2009 when my contract expired."

As the date approached, a problem arose.

"In late 2008 they stop-lossed me, and that pushed me over the edge," Jasinski told IPS, "They were going to send me back to Iraq the next month."

During his pre-deployment processing "they gave me a 90-day supply of meds to get me over to Iraq, and I saw a counselor during that period, and I told him "I don’t know what I’m going to do if I go back to Iraq."

"He asked if I was suicidal," Jasinski explained, "and I said not right now, I’m not planning on going home and blowing my brains out. He said, ‘well, you’re good to go then.’ And he sent me on my way. I knew at that moment, when they finalized my paperwork for Iraq, that there was no way I could go back with my untreated PTSD. I needed more help."

SPC Eric Jasinski suffers from severe PTSD.
When Jasinski went on his short pre-deployment leave break, he went AWOL, where he remained out of service until December 11, when he returned to turn himself in to authorities at Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas.

"He has heavy duty PTSD and never would have gone AWOL if he’d gotten the help he needed from the military," James Branum, Jasinski’s civilian lawyer who accompanied him to Fort Hood, told IPS. "This case highlights the need of the military to provide better mental health care for its soldiers."

Branum, who is also co-chair of the Military Law Task Force, added, "Our hope is that his unit won’t court-martial him, but puts him in a warrior transition unit where they will evaluate him to either treat him or give him a medical discharge. He’d be safe there, and eventually, they’d give him a medical discharge because his PTSD symptoms are so severe."

He’s turning himself in "because he is not a flight risk and wants to take responsibility for what he’s done," Branum stressed.

"It’s been a year, I want to get on with my life and go to college and become a social worker to help people," Jasinski said of why he is turning himself in to the military at this time. "I want to get on with life, and I don’t want to hide."

Kernan Manion is a board-certified psychiatrist, who treated Marines returning from war who suffer from PTSD and other acute mental problems born from their deployments, at Camp Lejeune -- the largest Marine base on the East Coast.

While he was engaged in this work, Manion warned his superiors of the extent and complexity of the systemic problems, and he was deeply worried about the possibility of these leading to violence on the base and within surrounding communities.

"If not more Fort Hoods, Camp Liberties, soldier fratricide, spousal homicide, we’ll see it individually in suicides, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, family dysfunction, in formerly fine young men coming back and saying, as I’ve heard so many times, ‘I’m not cut out for society. I can’t stand people. I can’t tolerate commotion. I need to live in the woods,’" Manion explained to IPS. "That’s what we’re going to have. Broken, not contributing, not functional members of society. It infuriates me -- what they are doing to these guys, because it’s so ineptly run by a system that values rank and power more than anything else -- so we’re stuck throwing money into a fragmented system of inept clinics and the crisis goes on."

"It’s not just that we’re going to have an immensity of people coming back, but the system itself is thwarting their effective treatment," Manion explained.

According to the Army, every year from 2006 onwards there has been a record number of reported and confirmed suicides, including 2009.

There has also been an escalation of soldier-on-soldier violence, as the November 5 shooting spree at Fort Hood by Major Nidal Hassan indicates. In 2008 there was also a record number of suicides for the Marine Corps.

Jasinski’s case is representative of a growing number of soldiers returning from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan who are going AWOL when they are unable to get proper mental health care treatment from the military for their PTSD.

A 2008 Rand Corporation report revealed that at least 300,000 veterans returning from both wars had been diagnosed with severe depression or PTSD.

Jaskinski’s experience with the military has inspired him to offer advice for other soldiers who need PTSD treatment but are not receiving it.

"Do not, do not let a 5-10 minute review by a military doctor determine if you go to Iraq," he told IPS. "Even if you have to pay out of pocket, go civilian to a doctor... the military mental health sector is so overwhelmed, they won’t take care of you. Go see a civilian, and hopefully that therapist will help you... even then I’m not sure that will help... but you have to take that chance."

When asked what he feels the military needs to do in order to rectify this problem, he said: "A total overhaul of the mental health sector in the military is needed... we had nine psychiatrists at our center, and that’s simply not enough staff, they are going to get burned out, after seeing 50 soldiers each in one day. We need an overhaul of the entire system, and more, good psychiatrists, not those just coming for a job, but good, experienced mental health professionals need to be involved."

Source / IPS

Thanks to Fran Hanlon / The Rag Blog

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John Ross : Days of Dementia in Obamalandia

The Zhu Zhu virtual hamster: Dementia in Obamalandia. Photo by Rex Larsen / The Grand Rapids Press.
On the loose in Obamalandia:
Days of Dementia ('Is the war over yet?')

Yes, Baracko, the economy is booming again for Chinese-made mechanical hamsters but homelessness is the real growth industry.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2009

TRINIDAD, CA. -- Each Friday afternoon since Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, my old friend Janine V. has been standing with Women In Black here near the 101 off-ramp as a silent reminder of the on-going Bush-Obama genocide in the Middle East.

In the early days of this heroic now-nearly eight year-old vigil, patriotic motorists, often on their way to the local Tsuri Indian Casino to swill at the Firewater Lounge, would hurl invectives and sometimes loaded beer cans at the women. But as the war settled into a daily grind and the U.S. body count climbed incrementally towards 5000, the insults and the beer cans diminished and a few locals now even honk their horns in support.

In the seven years that Trinidad Women In Black have held their ground by the off-ramp, the participants, never spring chickens to begin with, have grown older and one now suffers from dementia. Now when the women stand, she turns to Janine and often asks if the war is over yet?

Barack Obama's nationally televised December 1 declaration of renewed jihad against Al Qaeda's estimated 100 Afghan warriors that will elevate U.S. troop deployment to nearly a quarter of a million in Afghanistan and Iraq (plus another quarter million mercenary contractors) will keep Trinidad Women In Black in business for at least another decade.

The President's goal of "disrupting, dismantling, and destroying" the Taliban-Qaeda Axis of Evil is calculated to tickle America's terrorist nerve. As his grip on the wheel of state grows slack, Obama's presidency increasingly depends on harpooning "America's white whale" as Robert Wright recently dubbed Bin Laden in a New York Times op-ed piece. Al Qaeda's spiritual leader, a Frankenstein fabricated by Reagan's CIA, probably died years ago dragging his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass.

Robert Fisk notes that Obama-man's West Point kowtow to the generals parallels a similar Soviet troop build-up way back in 1980 that was designed to train Afghan security forces to confront the CIA-financed Muhajadeen. We all know how successfully that plan backfired.

With Blackwater loading up the drones in Pakistan, it's only a matter of months before General McCrystal marches into Pakistan to wipe out the Taliban's safe havens and the Commander-in-Chief puts another 50,000 boots on the ground to secure that nuclear-empowered nation against "international terrorism."

Factoring in another 120,000 "crusaders" bogged down in Iraq, Gates & Company is talking about a bigger army -- actually U.S. economic calamity has translated into box office business for Army and Marine recruiters who are filling out their quotas for the first time since the 9/11 rush to vengeance thanks to the American "downturn."

Predictably, the chickens keep coming home to roost. Major Nidal Hasan's November 5 homicidal rampage at Fort Hood, the most dastardly act of "Islamic terrorism" on U.S. turf since 9/11 as the Glenn Becks vomit, is indeed an ominous sign. Driven by years of hearing out the horror stories of returning soldiers, the Major, a military psychiatrist and a devout Muslim who recoiled at the thought of deploying to Afghanistan to kill other Muslims, created his own horror story. Fort Hood is home to such time bombs. In the month since Major Hasan opened fire with a weapon bought a few yards off base, at least two other Fort Hood soldiers have been killed in soldier-to-soldier violence.

In the first nine months of 2009, 10 soldiers have commited suicide on base -- 76 in all at Fort Hood since Bush and his cronies declared war on Iraq. Soldier suicides in 2009 will again set a record (over 140) as they have every year for the past four. Another 1000 members of the U.S. Army are thought to have attempted suicide -- numbers are not available for other branches of the armed forces.

Meanwhile, domestic violence is pandemic on military bases. During a visit to Fort Bragg North Carolina, the home of the Center for Special Forces and the much-redeployed 81st Airborne a couple of years ago, I was told of soldiers who returned home at noon and by nightfall had massacred their entire family -- local newspapers no longer ran the stories. Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Campbell Kentucky have the highest redeployment rates in the military.

The havoc that the Bush-Obama wars continue to wreck upon military families is of course a mere drop in the bucket of blood that these criminal aggressions have poured upon the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, a million of whose citizens have been slaughtered and maimed and exiled since 9/11. Despite the deadly outfall and the palpable suffering now so evident on the streets of America, Congress continues to allocate hundreds of billions of increasingly worthless greenback dollar bills to sustain this ghastly genocide.

I have been on my annual Day of the Dead pilgrimage to the land where my father croaked. I huddle in the kitchen hard by the carcass of this year's dead bird and try to divine the future from its picked-over bones. The task is not a thankful one. A full year after Obama's geyser of hope drenched North America from sea to stinking sea, the forecast is as bleak as a Cormac McCarthy novel. It's not just the venomous particulate drizzling from those few pulp mills and coal-burning plants that are still operating that batters the physical contours of our befouled lives.

Official unemployment is running 12.5% in California and 15% in Michigan but the real numbers are probably twice that if those who have given up looking for work or whose checks have run out or who are working part-time for less pay are counted into the mix. Despite Obama's scripted optimism that the "economy is growing again," there are currently six applicants for every job available and those in the know anticipate double-digit unemployment through 2012 -- the end of the world on the Mayan calendar.

A million more workers will soon have no income whatsoever when Congress, in an interlude of maximum callousness, fails to get around to extending their unemployment benefits while it debates the pros and cons of spending billions more that could nourish social lifelines to kill civilians on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. No dear, the wars are not over yet.

Thanksgiving 2009 was a particularly cruel season for the homeland. Fifteen percent of your fellow citizens -- one in every seven families -- are struggling to put food on the table if the mal gobierno's indicators are to be believed. According to the numbers, 17.5 million Americanos suffer "food insecurity," that is they have been forced to reduce their daily caloric intake at some point in the past year.

Such belt tightening has not much slimmed down the poor. The physique of poverty is now corpulence -- 34% of those living under the poverty line are considered obese and Precious is the new Miss America. And as with every set of stats cranked out by Obama's bean counters, those of darker hue suffer the brunt of deprivation -- 70% of those families who go to bed hungry every night are brown or black. Meanwhile, Wall Street, a gated community where white skin privilege is rewarded, is making a killing again.

The turkey bones yield apocalyptic visions of melting icebergs and Palin/Dobbs in the White House. The portents for this dynamic duo are particularly favorable. As the self-styled "rogue of the right" zooms to the top of the airport best-seller list, Lou Dobbs gloats that times are so tough for "illegal aliens" (read Mexicans) that they will soon be driven from the country -- impoverished families back in hardscrabble Michoacan and Oaxaca are now sending relatives stranded at the bottom of the Yanqui Depression money from home. Remittances from Mexican workers in El Norte, the lifeblood of the Mexican rural economy (10,000,000 Mexicans are dependent on them), dipped 35% this October.

To spice up this end-of-the-world scenario (2012 is boffo at the Multiplex), plague stalks the republic. The Center for Disease Control reports 6,000,000 case of H1N1 in 48 out of 50 states. The swine flu is spread exponentially by infected workers obligated to punch in and send their kids to school every day because they have no paid sick leave -- 40% of all U.S. workers suffer this affliction. Even those ostensibly covered do not stay home for fear that they will lose their jobs. The New York Times reports on one Wal-Mart worker sent home after he turned pale on the job and who fell gravely ill with the swine flu but failed to visit a doctor because he couldn't afford the co-pays on the mega-corps' health care plan.

Nonetheless, this worker's forced furlough may well have saved his life this past Black Friday when hordes of berserk consumers are wont to break down Wal-Mart doors and trample the help underfoot in their eagerness to spend money they do not possess. This year's toy to die for is a Chinese-made mechanical hamster at $17 a crack (one to a customer), a no-nuisance substitute for the real thing.

Yes, Baracko, the economy is booming again for Chinese-made mechanical hamsters but homelessness is the real growth industry. 2010 is expected to be a peak year for foreclosures -- business is percolating for the Flint, Michigan, sign maker in Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story who has landed a contract from local banks to churn out "Foreclosure" signs.

As evictions soar, the homeless overrun the shelters. Perhaps the cruelest twist of the holiday season was the 90-day jail sentence meted to an elderly rancher in San Luis, Obispo, California, for housing a score of homeless clean-and-sober vagrants on his property.

The mood of the country as the Yuletide season heaves into view is decked with dark resentment. One AP story reports that food stamp eligibility workers in Detroit fear for their safety. Irritated applicants herded into long lines that snake into the street throw chunks of concrete through the windows. The cops are called to control unruly clients.

The rule of thumb posits that hard times drive the underclass together. Class distinctions become viscerally clear and solidarity flows. But given American exceptionalism, this is not a likely trend in Obamalandia.

This is a nation where the Great Unwashed have been coerced by vulture consumerism that puts them at each other's throats over mechanical hamsters. American workers have become independent contractors battling with their neighbors over scraps. Most of us do not even know who lives on the other side of the sheetrock. Racism has raised the walls even more precipitously in this post-racialist year. Hate crimes are on a roll -- how about the thug who butchered a Florida Greek Orthodox priest because he thought he was a Muslim? President Obama is said to have spiked at nearly 400 death threats a day.

Recent revelations by those who purportedly speak for the Left have not been helpful. Moore's Capitalism seriously soft soaps criminal capitalism. The 1950s and '60s were hardly the working class paradise the filmmaker portrays -- strikers were beaten, workers were red-baited and blacklisted, black people dangled from poplar trees, fieldworkers were poisoned by the Agribiz kings. The bosses may have seemed like so many benevolent Scrooge McDucks to Moore when he was a lad growing up in a Catholic Caucasian industrial elite household but he is indeed spreading a white lie.

Michael Moore's egregious absolution of Barack Obama for his complicity in beefing up the fat cats while the rest of us grovel for carfare is Capitalism's most painful flaw. MM affirms that the Obamanator's candidacy so discombobulated the rulers that they threw gobs of money at him out of fear of what he represented and abracadabra he became the first Afro-American president of these United States.

We see Obama surrounded by jubilant throngs. We do not see the money. We see nothing about how the first Afro-American president feathered the nests of the Wall Street vultures. Nothing about the sleazy White House backroom deals with pharmaceutical industry creep Billy Tauzin to greenlight the steepest rise in prescription drug prices in 20 years as a prelude to Obamacare. Nothing about dishing up the whole enchilada to the insurance vampires so they can more commodiously gouge the aged and infirm.

Since I was diagnosed with liver cancer eight months ago (now in remission), I have accumulated a foot-high stack of bills and am dunned daily to pay off California-Pacific Medical Center to the tune of $34,000, nearly five times my yearly social security checks -- from which Medicare deducts a hundred bucks a month to allegedly cover my health needs.

Obama's health care pogram has never been about reforming a deformed system to treat the medically indigent. Obamacare was conceived to insure reelection and the health of the Democratic Party and the insurance tycoons. Let’s face it. We're all on the Jack Kevorkian health plan.

Another apostle of the Left I bumped into during my recent foray in Obamalandia was Amiri Baraka who as Leroi Jones I sometimes ran with back in the Village during the bebop '50s. Performing before a packed house in an auditorium named for a notorious San Francisco sweatshop at the main branch of the SF Public Library, Baraka read a love letter to Obama written soon after the election of the first Afro-American President and reviled those on the Left who continue to take to the streets to protest his tainted policies, as "infantile anarchists" and closet racists.

The former Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Stalinist poet laureate of New Jersey (a dubious distinction of which Amiri was stripped after claiming that 1400 "Hymies" employed at the World Trade Center stayed home on 9/11 day) raised eyebrows by hailing Obama's appointment of Rahm Emanuel, a member of the Israeli Defense Forces, as his chief of staff, a clever trick on the Zionists Baraka called it.

He urged his audiences to continue to vote vote vote for fork-tongued Democratic candidates. We have to grow the unlikely coalition that elected these charlatans! Other evasions and foolishness followed. Baraka was not much alarmed by his president's firing of Van Jones, the first Afro-American green jobs czar.

I was one of the first to take the mic for q's and a's. For 22 days prior to Obama's stirring inauguration on the Capitol mall, I pointed out, the Israelis had rained death down on Gaza, slaughtering 1400 civilians -- 360 more have died since -- and then the Zionists judiciously paused for Barack's historic oath-taking. Throughout this grotesque bloodletting, Obama (and Emanuel) remained stonily silent. All they had to say were three little words: Stop the Killing! Why had they not responded?

Barraka was irritated by my question and waved me away from the mic. Then poet Michael McClure pointed out that Amiri had not once mentioned the other elephant in the room, Afghanistan. "He's trying to get us out of there," the poet blathered. Sure, by sending in another 30,000 dead soldiers, we yodeled back.

"Is the war over yet?"

With Barack Obama calling the shots, and lefties like Michael Moore and Amiri Baraka defending him, the Trinidad Women In Black will all be slipping into dementia before the war is over.

["On The Loose In Obamalandia" is the first dispatch from the North American underbelly as John Ross embarks on a monster 2010 book tour presenting his latest cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption In Mexico City from sea to stinking sea. The author continues to seek midwest, southern, and east coast venues for late March and April. Any bright ideas? Write johnross@igc.org.]

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Harm's Way : Escalation and the GI Suicide Crisis

Mental health and the suicide rate:
Sending soldiers into harm's way

By Michael Anthony / The Rag Blog / December 4, 2009

President Obama recently stated that sending more troops into harm’s way in Afghanistan is a solemn decision -- one that he would not rush. As a veteran, I find the decision to send troops into harm’s way without an effective military mental health program in place beyond solemn. It’s deeply disturbing. Keeping soldiers mentally fit should be as important as keeping them physically fit.

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started, nearly 2,000 active-service soldiers have killed themselves, according to a report by the San Antonio Express-News earlier this year. Even more alarming is the fact that every day, five active-duty service members attempt suicide. In the past eight years, that means up to 14,000 have felt their life is not worth living.

The government doesn’t want you to know this. In the spring of 2008, CBS news journalist Armen Keteyian exposed a Veterans Administration cover up of suicide stats. The reporting revealed that every day, 18 veterans kill themselves and roughly 1000 attempt suicide each month. The VA’s head of Mental Health had claimed there were only 790 attempts in all of 2007, a far cry from the reality.

Among all veterans, over the eight years we’ve been at war in the Middle East, the statistics point out that roughly 50,000 have committed suicide, with upwards of 44,000 attempting suicide. These figures only represent data gathered since 2001; this has been an ongoing and persistent problem since Vietnam -- and the numbers go up each day.

Recently, the Army made a big deal about giving $50 million to fund a five-year research project on military suicide. In their book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, Linda J. Bilmes and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz figured the cost of the Iraq war at $12 billion a month. That means we spend more than $16 million an hour.

If you do the math, the $50 million that went to suicide research is what we spend every three hours in Iraq.

The day after Christmas this year will mark our 3,000th day at war. At this point, we’ve heard a lot about suicide bombers, but what about suicide? Regardless of anyone’s feelings about our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, these soldiers deserve much more than three hours of our time.

[SPC Michael Anthony is the author of Mass Casualties: A Young Medic’s True Story of Death, Deception and Dishonor in Iraq (Adams Media, October 2009). The book is drawn from the personal journals of SPC Anthony during his first year of service in Iraq.]

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Fort Hood and the Prophetic 'IF'

These battle-weary troops from the 1st Air Cav had just staged a "combat refusal" at the PACE firebase in Vietnam. There were also countless instances of "fragging" against officers by Vietnam GI's. Photo from NAM - The Story of the Vietnam War (Issue 8).
How will the community respond?
Fort Hood and the Prophetic 'IF'

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / November 25, 2009

One reader wrote me to ask: "What effect will the Ft. Hood shootings have on the American public's perception of Islam?" That question asks us to be foretellers, fortune tellers, to predict. But The Shalom Center has had the holy chutzpah to call ourselves a "prophetic voice," and that voice is about "forth-telling," not foretelling. About “If,” not “will.”

The Prophets spoke always with an "if" -- "IF the community chooses to oppress its workers into slaves, then the owners will themselves become slaves to Babylonia; IF the slave-owners will free their slaves, they will be freed from the yoke of Babylonia." (That was Jeremiah, as the Babylonian Army besieged Jerusalem, speaking forth a challenge, at once a warning and a promise, to the conventional practices and power structures of his society.)

From that perspective, the Prophetic question today should be a challenge to power and convention: "What effect should the Ft. Hood shootings have on the American public's perception of the Afghanistan War?"

For anyone who lived through the Vietnam War, Fort Hood recalls the epidemic of "fragging" late in the war -- that is, enlisted men throwing fragmentation bombs at the officers who were ordering them into hopeless, senseless battle.

In Fort Hood, if the reports and claims from the police and military are correct (we already know that a number of falsehoods were reported as facts), an officer, a physician, trained to heal traumatized people from the maiming of their souls, was refused an exit from the soul-destroying prison he begged to leave.

If the reports are accurate, it seems that he broke, choosing murder rather than the nonviolent forms of resistance he might have chosen. In that sense he replicated the violence of the war he abhorred and the violence that kept him in the Army against his will –- replicated the violence instead of resisting it in a deeper way.

One of the reasons that "fragging" came near the end of the Vietnam War is that the epidemic of fragging signaled to the higher officer corps that they had better end the war. Coming on top of more and more evidence that the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan is itself multiplying the violent resistance it claims to suppress, the Fort Hood murders should signal the American public and its military and civilian leadership to take off the hoods we have put over our own eyes, see the truth, and take our soldiers out from Afghanistan.

If -- IF, the Prophetic word -- If we seriously want to help grow a grassroots democracy there, we might send teams of women from American community banks to provide grassroots microloans to those who are prepared to use them, especially including women, while abandoning the self-destructive effort to impose democracy with Predators. Then Fort Hood might help Americans grow into a new relationship with the hundreds of millions of Muslims who seek to shape their own futures in peace.

IF instead the American public chooses to define Fort Hood as proof that Islam is a world of hatred, then the cage of violence that some Muslims, some Christians, some Jews, some Hindus are helping build will clang shut upon us all .

IF.

Shalom, salaam, shantih, peace,

Arthur

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center and is co-author of The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling, Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy.]

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A Morally Bankrupt Military : Spc. Alexis Hutchinson and Pvt. Paul Rich

Army Spc. Alexis Hutchinson. Below, Alexis with son Kamani Hutchinson. Photos from Oakland Tribune.
U.S. Army:
Infant to protective services, mom to Afghanistan

By Dahr Jamail / November 16, 2009

See 'Morally bankrupt military: When soldiers and their families become expendable,' by Dahr Jamail, Below.

VENTURA, California -- U.S. Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother, is being threatened with a military court-martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan, despite having been told she would be granted extra time to find someone to care for her 11-month-old son while she is overseas.

Hutchinson, of Oakland, California, is currently being confined at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, after being arrested. Her son was placed into a county foster care system.

Hutchinson has been threatened with a court martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, Nov. 15. She has been attempting to find someone to take care of her child, Kamani, while she is deployed overseas, but to no avail.

According to the family care plan of the U.S. Army, Hutchinson was allowed to fly to California and leave her son with her mother, Angelique Hughes of Oakland.

However, after a week of caring for the child, Hughes realised she was unable to care for Kamani along with her other duties of caring for a daughter with special needs, her ailing mother, and an ailing sister.

In late October, Angelique Hughes told Hutchinson and her commander that she would be unable to care for Kamani after all. The Army then gave Hutchinson an extension of time to allow her to find someone else to care for Kamani. Meanwhile, Hughes brought Kamani back to Georgia to be with his mother.

However, only a few days before Hutchinson's original deployment date, she was told by the Army she would not get the time extension after all, and would have to deploy, despite not having found anyone to care for her child.

Faced with this choice, Hutchinson chose not to show up for her plane to Afghanistan. The military arrested her and placed her child in the county foster care system.

Currently, Hutchinson is scheduled to fly to Afghanistan on Sunday for a special court martial, where she then faces up to one year in jail.

Hutchinson's civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, told IPS, "The core issue is that they are asking her to make an inhumane choice. She did not have a complete family care plan, meaning she did not find someone to provide long-term care for her child. She's required to have a complete family care plan, and was told she'd have an extension, but then they changed it on her."

Asked why she believes the military revoked Hutchinson's extension, Sussman responded, "I think they didn't believe her that she was unable to find someone to care for her infant. They think she's just trying to get out of her deployment. But she's just trying to find someone she can trust to take care of her baby."

Hutchinson's mother has flown to Georgia to retrieve the baby, but is overwhelmed and does not feel able to provide long-term care for the child.

According to Sussman, the soldier needs more time to find someone to care for her infant, but does not as yet have friends or family able to do so.

Sussman says Hutchinson told her, "It is outrageous that they would deploy a single mother without a complete and current family care plan. I would like to find someone I trust who can take care of my son, but I cannot force my family to do this. They are dealing with their own health issues."

Sussman told IPS that the Army's JAG attorney, Captain Ed Whitford, "told me they thought her chain of command thought she was trying to get out of her deployment by using her child as an excuse." '

Major Gallagher, of Hutchinson's unit, also told Sussman that he did not believe it was a real family crisis, and that Hutchinson's "mother should have been able to take care of the baby".

In addition, according to Sussman, a First Sergeant Gephart "told me he thought she [Hutchinson] was pulling her family care plan stuff to get out of her deployment".

"To me it sounds completely bogus," Sussman told IPS, "I think what they are actually going to do is have her spend her year deployment in Afghanistan, then court martial her back here upon her return. This would do irreparable harm to her child. I think they are doing this to punish her, because they think she is lying."

Sussman explained that she believes the best possible outcome is for the Army to either give Hutchinson the extension they had said she would receive so that she can find someone to care for her infant, or barring this, to simply discharge her so she can take care of her child.

Nevertheless, Hutchinson is simply asking for the time extension to complete her family care plan, and not to be discharged.

"I'm outraged by this," Sussman told IPS, "I've never gone to the media with a military client, but this situation is just completely over the top."

Source / IPS

Fort Bragg, N.C. The flowers are a nice touch. Photo by Gerry Broome / AP.
Morally bankrupt military:
When soldiers and their families become expendable

By Dahr Jamail / November 11, 2009

The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as “nondeployable for medical reasons” have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.

The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma, coupled with ongoing harassment about his being a Muslim. This, along with other factors, contributed towards Hasan falling into a desperation so deep he was willing to slaughter fellow soldiers, and is indicative of fissures running deep into the crumbling edifice upon which the US military stands.

The case of Pvt. Timothy Rich also demonstrates the disastrous implications of the apathetic attitude of the military toward its own. Not dissimilar from Major Hasan, who clearly would have benefited from treatment for the secondary trauma he was experiencing from his work with psychologically wounded veterans, one of the main factors that forced Private Rich to go absent without leave (AWOL) was the failure of the military to treat his mental issues.

Rich told Truthout, “In my unit, to go to sick call for mental health was looked down upon. Our acting 1st Sergeant believed that we shouldn’t have mental issues because we were too ‘high speed.’ So I was afraid to go because I didn’t want to be labeled as a weak soldier.”

What followed was more harrowing.

The other problems arose when I brought my girlfriend down to marry her. My unit believed her to be a problem starter so I was ordered not to marry her, taken to a small finance company by an NCO and forced to draw a loan in order to buy her a plane ticket to return home. They escorted her to the airport and through security to ensure that she left. Once the NCO left she turned around and hitchhiked back to Fort Bragg.

Before the unit could discover us, we went to the courthouse and got married. We were then summoned by my Commander, Captain Jones, to his office and reprimanded. He called me a dumb ass soldier and a shit bag for marrying her and told my wife that she was a fool to marry someone as stupid as me. Members of my unit started referring to me as Pvt. Bitch instead of Pvt. Rich. The entire episode caused a lot of strain in our relationship. Unable to cope with all this, I bought two plane tickets and went AWOL with my wife.

Rich was later apprehended when a federal warrant was issued against him. After 11 days in a country jail, he was transported back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. On August 17, 2008, he was wrongly assigned to Echo Platoon that was part of the 82nd Airborne, whereas his unit was part of the 18th Airborne.

Rich recollects, “I was confused when they assigned me to the 82nd. I was dismissed as a liar when I brought this up with my NCO Sgt Joseph Fulgence and my commander, Captain Thaxton. I ended up spending a year at Echo before being informed that I was never supposed to have been in the 82nd.”

At Fort Bragg, he was permitted to seek mental health treatment and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychosis, insomnia and a mood disorder. This, however, did not stop his commander from harassing him. His permanent profile from the doctor restricted him from being on duty before 0800 (8 a.m.) hours, but his commander, Sergeant Fulgence, dismissed the profile as merely a guideline and not a mandatory directive.

The soldier was accused of using mental health as a pretext to avoid duty. So, Rich was up every morning for first formation at 0545 (5:45 a.m.). It wasn’t until he refused to take his medication because it made him groggy in the morning that his doctor called his commander and settled the matter. By then, Rich had already been forced to violate his profile for six months.

During this period, his mental health deteriorated rapidly. The combined effect of heavy medication and restrictions on his home visits resulted in his experiencing blackouts that led him to take destructive actions in the barracks. When he was discovered talking about killing the chain of command, he was put on a 24-hour suicide watch that seemed to have served little purpose, because on August 17 he was able to elude his guards and make his way to the roof of his barracks.

“I climbed onto the roof of the building and sat up there thinking about my family and my situation and decided to go ahead and end my suffering by taking a nose dive off the building,” Rich explained to Truthout.

His body plummeted through the air, bounced off a tree, and he landed on his back with a cracked spine. The military gave him a back brace, psychotropic drugs and a renewed 24-hour suicide watch, measures as effective in alleviating his pain as his failed suicide attempt.

When Truthout contacted him just days after his failed suicide attempt, a fatigued Rich detailed his hellish year-long plight of awaiting a discharge that never came.

I want to leave here very bad. For four months they have been telling me that I’ll get out next week. It got to the point that the NCOs would tell me just to calm me down that I’d be going home the next day. They went as far as to call my wife and requesting her to lie that she was coming to get me the next day. I eventually stopped believing them. I didn’t see an end to it, so I figured I’d try and end it myself.

The noncommissioned officers in his barracks thought it was hilarious that Rich had jumped, and he was offered money for an encore that could be videotaped.

At the time he was in a “holdover” unit, comprised mostly of AWOL soldiers who had turned themselves in or had been arrested. Others in his unit had untreated mental health problems like him or were suffering from severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from deployments in Iraq and or Afghanistan.

According to Rich, every soldier in his platoon was subjected to abusive treatment of some kind or the other. “It even got to the point when our 1st Sergeant Cisneros told us that if it were up to him we all would all be taken out back and shot, and that we needed to pray to our gods because we were going to pay (for our actions).”

Tim’s wife Megan had to bear his never-ending ordeal in equal measure. She witnessed the military’s callousness up close. She informed Truthout,

Since February of this year, Tim’s unit had been telling him he would be out in two weeks. After two weeks when he asked, they would repeat the same thing. At times he would get excited and start packing his belongings and I would try to figure out how to get him home to Ohio. He would call me crying in relief because he thought we were going to be together again real soon. The military forced me to lie to him too. When he realized they did not mean to release him he grew very destructive during his black out spells. Eventually he simply gave up on coming home.

Megan first realized there was a problem with the way the military was treating her husband when she noticed him doing and saying things that were out of character for him, like apologizing for not being a good husband and father and being openly suicidal. He had also begun to self-medicate with alcohol, an increasing trend among soldiers not receiving adequate mental-health treatment from the military.

She revealed to Truthout,

He had quit for the girls and me but it seems like he could not handle the stress and needed an escape. This caused a huge problem between us and we began to argue about it. He became severely depressed, pulled away from me, and started to do things he normally doesn’t do, such as giving away his money and belongings, and telling the recipients that he wouldn’t need those things in hell.

She sensed that her husband would be in trouble if he were to stand up for himself, so she began to advocate on his behalf. Her attempts to do so met with fresh abuse from his commanders. The chain of command banned her from the company barracks and had her escorted off post. The couple was commandeered into Sergeant Fulgence’s office where they were chastised. The sergeant referred to Megan as “a bad mother” and “a bitch.” When Megan attempted to leave the office in protest, the sergeant ordered her to stay and listen to what he had to say.

This was followed by an encounter with the commander of the platoon, Commander Thaxton. The commander in this case ordered Tim to shut up, and threatened him with confinement. He demanded that Megan explain what kind of mother would bring her child to a new location without a place to live. She tried telling him that the AER loan was for her to come to Fort Bragg since they had lost their house after Tim’s arrest and loss of job.

Although the paperwork for the loan clearly stated that it was for her travel, food and lodging at Fort Bragg, the commander insisted it was for an apartment. When Tim intervened to say that the $785 would not be sufficient to pay rent and bills, especially since he wasn’t being paid his wages and his wife couldn’t work because of the baby, and according to Tim, both Sergeant Fulgence and Captain Thaxton “had a nice laugh over that” and dismissed the duo, referring to them as “juvenile dumb-asses.”

After Tim returned from being AWOL and was brought up on charges, he went through 706 (a psychology board) that declared him mentally incompetent at the time of his being AWOL. It took a painfully long amount of time for the charges to be dismissed without prejudice. The soldier believes that his superiors deliberately refused to do the requisite paperwork for his clearance and subsequent resumption of his pay.

He told Truthout,

Every time I came on base I got arrested even though I was on active duty again. Then my wife and I got an AER loan for her to come down to Fort Bragg. When she got there and my pay continued to be withheld, the AER money ran out and my wife and child had to sleep in the van we owned. When my unit found out they called the Military Police and ordered me to give custody of my daughter to my father.

When Tim refused to do that, they punished him by confining him to the barracks and barring his wife from entering the base. To add insult, the chain of command took away his van keys and said that neither he nor Megan was allowed use it.

The nightmare ended when the military finally released Pvt. Timothy Rich, and by default, Megan. He was discharged and “allowed” to enter the ranks of US citizens searching for jobs and health care. Their traumatic journey to that starting point is what distinguishes them from their civilian counterparts.

Rich’s advice to anyone thinking of joining the military today: “Don’t join. Everything they advertise and tell you about how it’s a family friendly army is a lie.”

Sgt. Heath Carter suffered a similar fate at the hands of an indifferent military command. Upon return from the invasion of Iraq, he discovered that his daughter Sierra was living in an unsafe environment in Arkansas under the care of his first wife, who had full custody of the child. Heath and his new wife, Teresa, started consulting attorneys in order to secure custody of Sierra, who also suffered from a life-threatening medical condition.

Precisely during this time, the military chose to keep changing Carter’s duty station from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, then to Fort Stewart, Georgia. Not only did these constant transfers make it difficult for Carter to see his daughter, they also reduced his chances of gaining custody of Sierra. Convinced that this was a matter of life and death for his daughter, he requested compassionate reassignment to Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, about two hours from his first wife’s home in Arkansas.

His appeals to the military command, the legal department, chaplain and even to his congressman failed, and the military insisted that he remain at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Having run out of all available avenues, in May 2007 he went AWOL from Fort Stewart and headed home to Arkansas where he fought for and won custody of Sierra, and was able to literally save her life by obtaining needed medical care for her.

However, on January 25 of this year, Carter was arrested at his home by the military police, who flew him back to Fort Stewart where he has been awaiting charges for the past eight months. Being a sergeant, he is in a regular unit and not in a holdover, but that does not help his cause. Initially, his commander told him it would take a month and a half for him to be sent home. Several months later, it was decided he would receive a court-martial.

Carter feels frustrated,

Now I have to wait for the court martial. It’s taken this long for them to decide. If we had known it would take this long, my family could have moved down here. Every time I ask when I’ll have a trial, they say it is only going to be another two weeks. I get the feeling they are lying. They have messed with my pay. They’re trying to push me to do something wrong.

His ordeal has forced Carter to reflect on the wars. He admits that, although his original reason for going AWOL was personal and he had otherwise been proud of his missions, he sees things in Iraq differently today. “I don’t think there is any reason for us to be there except for oil.”

Yet, both Private Rich and Sergeant Carter were offered deployments to Afghanistan amid their struggles. It is soldiers like these that the military will use to fill the ranks of the next “surge” of troops into Afghanistan, which at the time of this writing, appears to be as many as 34,000 troops.

The stage is set for more tragic incidents like the recent massacre at Fort Hood.

[Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years. This report was originally published by Truthout.]

Source / Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches

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Neo-Nazis : You're in the Army Now

Iraq veteran Forrest Fogarty sailed through recruitment despite his neo-Nazi tattoos. Photo by Matt Kennard / salon.com.
Neo-Nazis are in the Army now

Why the U.S. military is ignoring its own regulations and permitting white supremacists to join its ranks.

By Matt Kennard / June 15, 2009

On a muggy Florida evening in 2008, I meet Iraq War veteran Forrest Fogarty in the Winghouse, a little bar-restaurant on the outskirts of Tampa, his favorite hangout. He told me on the phone I would recognize him by his skinhead. Sure enough, when I spot a white guy at a table by the door with a shaved head, white tank top and bulging muscles, I know it can only be him.

Over a plate of chicken wings, he tells me about his path into the white-power movement. "I was 14 when I decided I wanted to be a Nazi," he says. At his first high school, near Los Angeles, he was bullied by black and Latino kids. That's when he first heard Skrewdriver, a band he calls "the godfather of the white power movement." "I became obsessed," he says. He had an image from one of Skrewdriver's album covers — a Viking carrying a staff, an icon among white nationalists — tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after he had another white power symbol, a Celtic cross, emblazoned on his stomach.

At 15, Fogarty moved with his dad to Tampa, where he started picking fights with groups of black kids at his new high school. "On the first day, this bunch of niggers, they thought I was a racist, so they asked, 'Are you in the KKK?'" he tells me. "I said, 'Yeah,' and it was on." Soon enough, he was expelled.

For the next six years, Fogarty flitted from landscaping job to construction job, neither of which he'd ever wanted to do. "I was just drinking and fighting," he says. He started his own Nazi rock group, Attack, and made friends in the National Alliance, at the time the biggest neo-Nazi group in the country. It has called for a "a long-term eugenics program involving at least the entire populations of Europe and America."

But the military ran in Fogarty's family. His grandfather had served during World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and his dad had been a Marine in Vietnam. At 22, Fogarty resolved to follow in their footsteps. "I wanted to serve my country," he says.

Army regulations prohibit soldiers from participating in racist groups, and recruiters are instructed to keep an eye out for suspicious tattoos. Before signing on the dotted line, enlistees are required to explain any tattoos. At a Tampa recruitment office, though, Fogarty sailed right through the signup process. "They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo, and I made up some stuff, and that was that," he says. Soon he was posted to Fort Stewart in Georgia, where he became part of the 3rd Infantry Division.

Fogarty's ex-girlfriend, intent on destroying his new military career, sent a dossier of photographs to Fort Stewart. The photos showed Fogarty attending white supremacist rallies and performing with his band, Attack. "They hauled me before some sort of committee and showed me the pictures," Fogarty says. "I just denied them and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch." He adds: "They knew what I was about. But they let it go because I'm a great soldier."

In 2003, Fogarty was sent to Iraq. For two years he served in the military police, escorting officers, including generals, around the hostile country. He says he was granted top-secret clearance and access to battle plans. Fogarty speaks with regret that he "never had any kill counts." But he says his time in Iraq increased his racist resolve.

"I hate Arabs more than anybody, for the simple fact I've served over there and seen how they live," he tells me. "They're just a backward people. Them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I'm concerned. Their customs, everything to do with the Middle East, is just repugnant to me."

Because of his tattoos and his racist comments, most of his buddies and his commanding officers were aware of his Nazism. "They all knew in my unit," he says. "They would always kid around and say, 'Hey, you're that skinhead!'" But no one sounded an alarm to higher-ups. "I would volunteer for all the hardest missions, and they were like, 'Let Fogarty go.' They didn't want to get rid of me."

Fogarty left the Army in 2005 with an honorable discharge. He says he was asked to reenlist. He declined. He was sick of the system.

Since the launch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has struggled to recruit and reenlist troops. As the conflicts have dragged on, the military has loosened regulations, issuing "moral waivers" in many cases, allowing even those with criminal records to join up. Veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder have been ordered back to the Middle East for second and third tours of duty.

The lax regulations have also opened the military's doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and gang members — with drastic consequences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with crimes inside the military, and others have been linked to recruitment efforts for the white right. A recent Department of Homeland Security report, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," stated: "The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today." Many white supremacists join the Army to secure training for, as they see it, a future domestic race war. Others claim to be shooting Iraqis not to pursue the military's strategic goals but because killing "hajjis" is their duty as white militants.

Soldiers' associations with extremist groups, and their racist actions, contravene a host of military statutes instituted in the past three decades. But during the "war on terror," U.S. armed forces have turned a blind eye on their own regulations. A 2005 Department of Defense report states, "Effectively, the military has a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt … they are likely to be able to complete their contracts."

Carter F. Smith is a former military investigator who worked with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command from 2004 to 2006, when he helped to root out gang violence in troops. "When you need more soldiers, you lower the standards, whether you say so or not," he says. "The increase in gangs and extremists is an indicator of this." Military investigators may be concerned about white supremacists, he says. "But they have a war to fight, and they don't have incentive to slow down."

Tom Metzger is the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and current leader of the White Aryan Resistance. He tells me the military has never been more tolerant of racial extremists. "Now they are letting everybody in," he says.

The presence of white supremacists in the military first triggered concern in 1976. At Camp Pendleton in California, a group of black Marines attacked white Marines they mistakenly believed to be in the KKK. The resulting investigation uncovered a KKK chapter at the base and led to the jailing or transfer of 16 Klansmen. Reports of Klan activity among soldiers and Marines surfaced again in the 1980s, spurring President Reagan's Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, to condemn military participation in white supremacist organizations.

Then, in 1995, a black couple was murdered by two neo-Nazi paratroopers around Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The murder investigation turned up evidence that 22 soldiers at Fort Bragg were known to be extremists. That year, language was added to a Department of Defense directive, explicitly prohibiting participation in "organizations that espouse supremacist causes" or "advocate the use of force or violence."

Today a complete ban on membership in racist organizations appears to have been lifted — though the proliferation of white supremacists in the military is difficult to gauge. The military does not track them as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members. But one indication of the scope comes from the FBI.

Following an investigation of white supremacist groups, a 2008 FBI report declared: "Military experience — ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces — is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement." In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans. Most of them were associated with the National Alliance and the National Socialist Movement, which promote anti-Semitism and the overthrow of the U.S. government, and assorted skinhead groups.

Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its numbers don't include the many extremist soldiers who have managed to stay off the radar. But its report does pinpoint why the white supremacist movements seek to recruit veterans — they "may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intelligence or apply specialized training in weapons, tactics, and organizational skills to benefit the extremist movement."

In fact, since the movement's inception, its leaders have encouraged members to enlist in the U.S. military as a way to receive state-of-the-art combat training, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, in preparation for a domestic race war. The concept of a race war is central to extremist groups, whose adherents imagine an eruption of violence that pits races against each other and the government.

That goal comes up often in the chatter on white supremacist Web sites. On the neo-Nazi Web site Blood and Honour, a user called 88Soldier88, wrote in 2008 that he is an active duty soldier working in a detainee holding area in Iraq. He complained about "how 'nice' we have to treat these fucking people … better than our own troops." Then he added, "Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come." Another poster, AMERICANARYAN.88Soldier88, wrote, "I have the training I need and will pass it on to others when I get out."

On NewSaxon.org, a social networking group for neo-Nazis, a group called White Military Men hosts numerous contributors. It was begun by "FightingforWhites," who identified himself at one point as Lance Cpl. Burton of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company, but then removed the information. The group calls for "All men with military experience, retired or active/reserve" to "join this group to see how many men have experience to build an army. We want to win a war, we need soldiers." FightingforWhites — whose tagline is "White Supremacy will prevail! US Military leading the way!" — goes on to write, "I am with an infantry battalion in the Marine Corps, I have had the pleasure of killing four enemies that tried to kill me. I have the best training to kill people." On his wall, a friend wrote: "THANKS BROTHER!!!! kill a couple towel heads for me ok!"

Such attitudes come straight from the movement's leaders. "We do encourage them to sign up for the military," says Charles Wilson, spokesman for the National Socialist Movement. "We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government." Billy Roper, of White Revolution, says skinheads join the military for the usual reasons, such as access to higher education, but also "to secure the future for white children." "America began in bloody revolution," he reminds me, "and it might end that way."

When it comes to screening out racists at recruitment centers, military regulations appear to have collapsed. "We don't exclude people from the army based on their thoughts," says S. Douglas Smith, an Army public affairs officer. "We exclude based on behavior." He says an "offensive" or "extremist" tattoo "might be a reason for them not to be in the military." Or it might not. "We try to educate recruiters on extremist tattoos," he says, but "the tattoo is a relatively subjective decision" and shouldn't in itself bar enlistment.

What about something as obvious as a swastika? "A swastika would trigger questions," Smith says. "But again, if the gentlemen said, 'I like the way the swastika looked,' and had clean criminal record, it's possible we would allow that person in." "There are First Amendment rights," he adds.

In the spring, I telephoned at random five Army recruitment centers across the country. I said I was interested in joining up and mentioned that I had a pair of "SS bolts" tattooed on my arm. A 2000 military brochure stated that SS bolts were a tattoo image that should raise suspicions. But none of the recruiters reacted negatively, and when pressed directly about the tattoo, not one said it would be an outright problem. A recruiter in Houston was typical; he said he'd never heard of SS bolts and just encouraged me to come on in.

It's in the interest of recruiters to interpret recruiting standards loosely. If they fail to meet targets, based on the number of soldiers they enlist, they may have to attend a punitive counseling session, and it could hurt any chance for promotion. When, in 2005, the Army relaxed regulations on non-extremist tattoos, such as body art covering the hands, neck and face, this cut recruiters even more slack.

Even the education of recruiters about how to identify extremists seems to have fallen by the wayside. The 2005 Department of Defense report concluded that recruiting personnel "were not aware of having received systematic training on recognizing and responding to possible terrorists" — a designation that includes white supremacists — "who try to enlist." Participation on white supremacist Web sites would be an easy way to screen out extremist recruits, but the report found that the military had not clarified which Web forums were gathering places for extremists.

Once white supremacists are in the military, it is easy to stay there. An Army Command Policy manual devotes more than 100 pages to rooting them out. But no officer appears to be reading it.

Hunter Glass was a paratrooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, near Fort Bragg. "In the early 1990s, the military was hard on them. They could pick and choose," he recalls. "They were looking for swastikas. They were looking for anything." But the regulations on racist extremists got jettisoned with the war on terror.

Glass says white supremacists now enjoy an open culture of impunity in the armed forces. "We're seeing guys with tattoos all the time," he says. "As far as hunting them down, I don't see it. I'm seeing the opposite, where if a white supremacist has committed a crime, the military stance will be, 'He didn't commit a race-related crime.'"

In fact, a 2006 report by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command shows that military brass consistently ignored evidence of extremism. One case, at Fort Hood, reveals that a soldier was making Internet postings on the white supremacist site Stormfront.org. But the investigator was unable to locate the soldier in question. In a brief summary of the case, an investigator writes that due to "poor documentation," "attempts to locate with minimal information met with negative results." "I'm not doing my job here," the investigator notes. "Needs to get fixed."

In another case, investigators found that a Fort Hood soldier belonged to the neo-Nazi group Hammerskins and was "closely associated with" the Celtic Knights of Austin, Texas, another extremist organization, a situation bad enough to merit a joint investigation by the FBI and the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. The Army summary states that there was "probable cause" to believe the soldier had participated in at least one white extremist meeting and had "provided a military technical manual … to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets."

Out of four preliminary probes into white supremacists, the Criminal Investigation Command carried through on only this one. The probe revealed that "a larger single attack was planned for the San Antonio, TX after a considerable amount of media attention was given to illegal immigrants. The attack was not completed due to the inability of the organization to obtain explosives." Despite these threats, the subject was interviewed only once, in 2006, and the investigation was terminated the following year.

White supremacists may be doing more than avoiding expulsion. They may be using their military status to help build the white right. The FBI found that two Army privates in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had attempted in 2007 to sell stolen property from the military — including ballistic vests, a combat helmet and pain medications such as morphine — to an undercover FBI agent they believed was involved with the white supremacist movement. (They were convicted and sentenced to six years.) It found multiple examples of white supremacist recruitment among active military, including a period in 2003 when six active duty soldiers at Fort Riley, members of the Aryan Nation, were recruiting their Army colleagues and even serving as the Aryan Nation's point of contact for the state of Kansas.

One white supremacist soldier, James Douglas Ross, a military intelligence officer stationed at Fort Bragg, was given a bad conduct discharge from the Army when he was caught trying to mail a submachine gun from Iraq to his father's home in Spokane, Wash. Military police found a cache of white supremacist paraphernalia and several weapons hidden behind ceiling tiles in Ross' military quarters. After his discharge, a Spokane County deputy sheriff saw Ross passing out fliers for the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

Rooting out extremists is difficult because racism pervades the military, according to soldiers. They say troops throughout the Middle East use derogatory terms like "hajji" or "sand nigger" to define Arab insurgents and often the Arab population itself.

"Racism was rampant," recalls vet Michael Prysner, who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. "All of command, everywhere, it was completely ingrained in the consciousness of every soldier. I've heard top generals refer to the Iraq people as 'hajjis.' The anti-Arab racism came from the brass. It came from the top. And everything was justified because they weren't considered people."

Another vet, Michael Totten, who served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne in 2003 and 2004, says, "It wouldn't stand out if you said 'sand niggers,' even if you aren't a neo-Nazi." Totten says his perspective has changed in the intervening years, but "at the time, I used the words 'sand nigger.' I didn't consider 'hajji' to be derogatory."

Geoffrey Millard, an organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War, served in Iraq for 13 months, beginning in 2004, as part of the 42nd Infantry Division. He recalls Gen. George Casey, who served as the commander in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, addressing a briefing he attended in the summer of 2005 at Forward Operating Base, outside Tikrit. "As he walked past, he was talking about some incident that had just happened, and he was talking about how 'these stupid fucking hajjis couldn't figure shit out.' And I'm just like, Are you kidding me? This is Gen. Casey, the highest-ranking guy in Iraq, referring to the Iraqi people as 'fucking hajjis.'" (A spokesperson for Casey, now the Army Chief of Staff, said the general "did not make this statement.")

"The military is attractive to white supremacists," Millard says, "because the war itself is racist."

The U.S. Senate Committee on the Armed Forces has long been considered one of Congress' most powerful groups. It governs legislation affecting the Pentagon, defense budget, military strategies and operations. Today it is led by the influential Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain. An investigation by the committee into how white supremacists permeate the military in plain violation of U.S. law could result in substantive changes. I contacted the committee but staffers would not agree to be interviewed. Instead, a spokesperson responded that white supremacy in the military has never arisen as a concern. In an e-mail, the spokesperson said, "The Committee doesn't have any information that would indicate this is a particular problem."

[Editor's note: Research support for this article was provided by the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.]

Source / salon.com

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Memorial Day 2009 : Ashes, Stones and Flowers

In Memory of All Victims of War and Terrorism:
Ashes, Stones, and Flowers

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Rev. Patricia Pearce
The Rag Blog / May 25, 2009


For vibrant lives suddenly and shamelessly sacrificed, we lift up the ashes of our loss,
O Source of Life.

For the lives that continue, haunted forever by the pain of absence, we lift up the ashes of our remorse,
O Wellspring of Compassion.

For the conflagration of flames and nightmare images forever seared into our memories, we lift up the ashes of our pain,
O Breathing Spirit of the World.

For the charred visions of peace and the dry taste of fear, we lift up the ashes of our grief,
O Infinite.

For all the deaths that have been justified by turning the love of God or country into fanatical arrogance, we lift up the ashes of our shame,
O God.

As we cast these ashes into the troubled water of our times, Transforming One, hear our plea that by your power they will make fertile the soil of our future and by your mercy nourish the seeds of peace.

The people recite the names of the dead.

The people cast the ashes in silence into the river [or a bowl of water].

For the ways humanity pursues violence rather than understanding, we lift up the stones of our anger,
O Breathing Spirit of the World.

For the ways we allow national, religious and ethnic boundaries to circumscribe our compassion, we lift up the stones of our hardness,
O Wellspring of Compassion.

For our addiction to weapons and the ways of militarism we lift up the stones of our fear,
O Source of Life.

For the ways we cast blame and create enemies we lift up the stones of our self-righteousness,
O God

As we cast these stones into this ancient river, Transforming One, hear our plea:

Just as water wears away the hardest of stones, so too may the power of your compassion soften the hardness of our hearts and draw us into a future of justice and peace.

The people recite the names of the dead.

The people cast the stones in silence into the river [or a bowl of water].

For sowing seeds of justice to blossom into harmony, we cast these flowers into the river,
O Source of Peace.

For seeing clearly the many rainbow colors of humanity and earth, we cast these flowers into the river,
O Infinite.

For calling us to life beyond our grieving, we cast these flowers into the river,
O Breathing Spirit of the World.

As we cast these flowers into this ancient river, Transforming One, hear our plea:

Just as water births life in a desert and gives hope to the wounded, so too may the power of your nurturing renew our commitment to peace.

The people recite the names of the dead.

The people cast the flowers in silence into the river [or a bowl of water].

Litany by Rev. Patricia Pearce, pastor of Tabernacle United Church, Philadelphia, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of The Shalom Center.

A shorter version of this litany was originally written by Rev. Pearce for "Eleven Days in September," a project for peace-oriented observance of the first anniversary of 9/11 that was initiated by The Shalom Center in 2002. The litany was expanded and revised by Rabbi Waskow for Veterans Day 2003. This version was used by the National Council of Churches in Washington DC, Philadelphia, and elsewhere on Memorial Day, 2004, as part of the interfaith memorial services of grief, repentance, and transformation.

The litany requires either actually standing at a running river or a lake, or if that is not feasible bringing a large basin of water into the center of a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple. It also requires having a list of names of people of various countries who have died and are dying as victims of war and terrorism.

Blessings of shalom, salaam, peace.

The Rag Blog

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Ralph Solonitz : Memorial Day

Political cartoon by Ralph Solonitz / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2009.
[Ralph Solonitz' cartoons also appear at MadasHellClub.net.]
The Rag Blog

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New Reports : Did KBR Poison GIs in Iraq?

Welder testing for hexavalent chromium. Photo by Orbital Joe.
In 2003, James Gentry and his men were responsible for guarding a KBR-run power plant. The soldiers were stationed there for months before being informed that the site was contaminated with a chemical known as hexavalent chromium.

By Paul Riechkoff / January 9, 2009

James Gentry served his country honorably as a battalion commander in Iraq. Now, he is dying of a rare form of lung cancer. And he's not the only one. A troubling number of troops in Gentry's Indiana National Guard unit have bloody noses, tumors and rashes. And tragically, one soldier has already died.

New reports suggest these injuries may be the result of exposure to toxins at a KBR-run power plant in Southern Iraq. In 2003, James and his men were responsible for guarding that plant, and protecting KBR's employees. The soldiers were stationed there for months before being informed that the site was contaminated with a chemical known as hexavalent chromium.

Hexavalent chromium is a deadly carcinogen. It's the same toxin that Erin Brockovich became famous for campaigning against. James believes that it was the inhalation of this chemical that caused his cancer, and the other rare illnesses among the Guardsmen who served at the plant.

But this is not just some sad story about accidental chemical exposure. This is a question of responsibility. CBS News has uncovered evidence that KBR may have known about the contamination at the power plant months before it took any action to inform the troops stationed there.

If the CBS story is proven true, checks need to be written, contracts should be cancelled, and heads must roll. James signed up to serve his country, and he was told to protect KBR contractors. He did his job. But it doesn't seem like KBR did theirs. If the company neglected to take quick and decisive action, it must be held responsible for the months of avoidable toxic exposure that may be taking the lives of American servicemembers.

From burn pits to power plants, we are hearing more and more about troops who have been exposed to toxins while serving our country overseas. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana has announced that he will reintroduce legislation to create a medical registry for military personnel exposed to toxins. That's a vital first step towards discovering the full extent of toxic exposure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is critical to preventing a replay of the Agent Orange situation after Vietnam.

We need real answers from KBR. And so far, the company has denied any wrongdoing whatsoever. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will stand behind our brothers and sisters in demanding accountability. The veterans' community will fight back, and we need everyone's help. Add your name to IAVA's petition, and tell KBR to come clean now. KBR must tell Congress and the American people what they knew, and when they knew it. James Gentry and his fellow soldiers deserve the truth.

[Paul Rieckhoff, 33, is the Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). A non-partisan non-profit group with over 100,000 members around the world, IAVA was founded in 2004 and is America’s first and largest Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans organization. Rieckhoff was a First Lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in the Iraq war from 2003-2004. He is now a nationally recognized authority on the war in Iraq and issues affecting troops, military families and veterans.]

Source / The Huffington Post

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Casey Porter : Stop-Lossed in Iraq

Eddy Porter holds a photo of his son, U.S. Army Spc. Casey Porter, who is returning for his second tour of duty in Iraq under the Department of Defense's "Stop-Loss" program. Photo by Ronald W. Erdrich / Abiline Reporter-News.
Casey Porter : They're selling us a bill of goods.
By Richard Whittaker / October 14, 2008

It's always a good day at Newsdesk when Casey Porter calls, not least because it means that he's still alive and in one piece. That's not hyperbole, because Porter is currently in Iraq, one of the many US military personnel on the bad end of the bad deal known as stop-loss.

But in making the best of a bad day, Porter runs his own YouTube channel about his experiences in-country and what it's really like on the ground.

The co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against The War's Fort Hood ([near Kileen, Texas] branch called to give a heads-up about his latest video (which he's still editing) about the remarkable world of commercial concessions on military bases. Troops coming back off combat missions are confronted by officially-sanctioned car dealers and jewelry firms that get them to part with their small salaries for pretty gewgaws.

"They don't have any financial discipline and they're not making good money, but it's still better money than they've ever had," said Porter, who once had a vendor try to sell him an $865 watch at a forward operating base. "We show the tricks and corruption in getting soldiers to spend their money."

So why is this allowed to happen? Well, first off, the stores with the concessions are the same stores that supply the US military itself ("A mile away from open combat missions, there's high-end stores," said Porter. "If you walk into there, and you look at the video, you would think you were back in the states, except for the guys in miitary uniforms with guns.") As for what the military gets, well, Porter put it bluntly: "A broke soldier is a re-enlisting soldier."



Source / Austin Chronicle

Casey Porter and 'Stop-Loss'

'Critics of the policy have dubbed it a backdoor draft that forces service personnel into extending their service.'
By Celinda Emison

[The following article about Casey Porter of Austin -- filmmaker and co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War at Fort Hood -- and the army's stop-loss program, first ran in the Abilene Reporter-News on March 22, 2008.]

U.S. Army Spc. Casey Porter is depressed and angry because he is on his way back to a war zone.

Porter, 28, of Austin, is embarking on his second tour of duty in Iraq and is one of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers who have been ordered to continue their service in the Army due to a policy reinstated in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks called "Stop Loss."

"I feel stabbed in the back," Porter said in an e-mail message from Kuwait earlier this week.

Stop Loss is a program which allows the military to temporarily halt all voluntary separations and retirements during times of war, deployments or national emergencies. The Army has issued a Stop Loss in conjunction with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Stop-Loss" is also the name of a new fictional movie that opens Friday. But for Casey Porter and more than 81,000 other soldiers, the policy is all too real.

Porter signed up for a four-year stint in 2004, after which he planned to go to college. Porter's stint was to end Jan. 21 of this year, but as the date approached, he started to worry.

"I thought Stop Loss would be coming, but didn't get orders until two months before I was going to get out," said Porter, who is now in Kuwait waiting to be sent back to Iraq within the week for another 15 months.

The Policy

Under the policy, soldiers who normally would leave when their commitments expire must remain in the Army, starting 90 days before their unit is scheduled to depart, through the end of their deployment and up to another 90 days after returning to their home base. The policy applies to all branches of the military, but currently is most used by the Army and National Guard.

"When a unit receives an alert order, we apply Stop Loss to that unit," said Col. Bill Meehan of the Texas National Guard headquarters in Austin. "The No. 1 issue is whether the unit can do its mission. If you need 10 truck drivers for a mission, and you have 50, then there is some flexibility there. If it is the other way around, then there is obvious concern."

Meehan said a number of units from the Texas National Guard are under Stop Loss orders. When a unit is under Stop Loss orders, there is an appeals process, he said.

"And it has been used occasionally over the past five years," Meehan said. "We hear appeals on an individual basis. We want everyone to know we are concerned about the welfare of our soldiers and their families, and listening to our soldiers is what we are all about."

Some military personnel say they are very aware that signing up for four years could mean eight years with reserve time and the possibility of Stop Loss orders.

Corp. Glynn Willson, 24, a Marine who is about go from Okinawa, Japan, to Iraq, said he knew about Stop Loss when he enlisted five years ago.

"When I enlisted, they (recruiters) made it very clear that I have eight years of obligated service," Willson wrote in an e-mail from Japan. "If I serve that whole eight years active duty, then once I'm done, I'm done for good. But I am serving five years active duty. After I get out of the Marines in September, I'll be a civilian, but they can still call me back up for up to 3 years. I know several people that this has happened to."

Willson points out that so far, he is not under Stop Loss orders, but said if it does happen to his unit, he will fulfill his obligation.

"If I get Stop-Lossed in September, it means that I am still an active-duty Marine, and I am still a part of my current unit. I go back to work as usual, until the Stop Loss is revoked," Willson said. "For someone to go AWOL (Absent Without Leave) over something so trivial is selfish. They are thinking about only themselves. It's not about just you, it's about the men and women standing next to you; that's why you do what you need to do. Not for personal gain, but for your brothers and sisters in uniform. If a unit gets a Stop Loss and someone goes AWOL, think what that does for morale. Also, that person is not there doing his job, so everyone has to work harder to make that up."

A father's plight

Critics of the policy have dubbed it a backdoor draft that forces service personnel into extending their service at least 18 months after their contracts are up. And theoretically they could face Stop Loss orders again.

Casey Porter's father, Eddy, 61, a Vietnam veteran drafted in 1966 who lives in Abilene, believes the Stop Loss policy is wrong, especially with volunteers.

"Back then, (during Vietnam) if more men were needed, they were drafted," the elder Porter said. "This is what I call a 'selective draft.'"

Eddy Porter, who retired from teaching high school in Austin three years ago, remembers when his son told him he wanted to serve in the military.

"He comes from a military family, and at the time I told him it would be a good start to his life," he said. "Had I known about the policy, I would've suggested he do something else."

For several years before Eddy Porter retired from teaching, he routinely encouraged his students to talk to recruiters who visited the school.

"Then I began to learn that they were promising these students training and scholarship money," Porter said. "Then once they signed up, the commitment was one-sided, and the students felt they had been lied to. I quit allowing the recruiters in my classroom after that."

Since Stop Loss was reinstated in 2001, numerous soldiers have challenged the policy in court, but in most cases, the military's policy has been upheld.

When Eddy Porter found out about the policy, he began writing congressmen and senators, and pointed out that Casey was now his only son. (Another son died from complications from diabetes.)

"I got a letter back from the Inspector General which basically said due to the global war on terror, we have to manage our all-volunteer army differently than in other conflicts," Eddy Porter said.

Eddy Porter also contacted the office of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, a member of the Senate Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee.

"Sen. Hutchison is grateful for the dedication and sacrifice of our military personnel and their families," Hutchison spokesman Matt Mackowiak said. "The Defense Department has assured Sen. Hutchison that they will review the need for Stop Loss restrictions on a monthly basis and only redeploy service members when it is absolutely necessary for our national security."

Weeks before receiving his most recent orders to return to Iraq, Casey Porter formed a chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War at Fort Hood.

"We want everyone to know, we are not against the soldiers at all," Casey Porter says in a recent video on YouTube.

"We are against the war."

Abilene Reporter-News

See Casey Porter interview on Democracy Now about the military's policy of "Stop-Loss" / July 11, 2008

Also see Casey J Porter Breaks the Lob-Bomb Story! by Jimmy Higgins / Fire on the Mountain / July 12, 2008

Thanks to Debbie Russell / The Rag Blog

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