GI SPECIAL 3D55 25/12/05

thomasfbarton@earthlink.net Print it out: color best. Pass it on.

Photo and caption from the I-R-A-Q (I Remember Another Quagmire) portfolio of Mike Hastie, US Army Medic, Vietnam 1970-71. (For more of his outstanding work, contact at: hastiemike@earthlink.net T

“A High Level Of Racism In The Famed “Fighting 69th”
“Two Innocent People Killed, And It Was Just Covered Up”
“The War Is Out Of Control”

December 2005 BY JANE LaTOUR, Public Employee Press [Excerpts]

[S]gt. Matthew Zephyr feels at times “that the government is clueless as to why we are out there.”

And Staff Sgt. Iraida Velasquez believes, “The war is out of control and the president doesn’t seem to have any idea as to how to get out of there.”

Other soldiers have voted with their feet, opting not to re-enlist. Local 1070 member Hawa Barkon’s son, Army Specialist Jukue Sieh, “got out last year after he returned home,” said Barkon. “He had wanted to stay in the military and make a career of it, but with the war, he decided not to re-enlist.”

Staff Sgt. Anthony Hernandez served as a combat medic with the 69th Infantry Division until he was injured and flown out. The Local 371 member offers a troubling portrait of problems in the military.

After serving for 17 years, he was “surprised and shocked” to experience a high level of racism in the famed “Fighting 69th.”

He described instances such as black soldiers forced to work excessive hours without breaks and punishments imposed on soldiers of color for small offenses, while white soldiers were treated differently.

“Most of the soldiers were ready to fight the war,” he said. “They were not ready for the racism.”

Anti- Arab bias is also part of his indictment of the military.

“Many soldiers have a negative attitude toward the Iraqi people. Here we are walking into other people’s country with a bad attitude!

There was an accidental shooting and it was covered up,” he added. “They didn’t even offer any aid to the injured. Two innocent people killed, and it was just covered up,” he said in disgust.

Do you have a friend or relative in the service? Forward this E-MAIL along, or send us the address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly. Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the war, at home and inside the armed services. Send requests to address up top.

IRAQ WAR REPORTS

US Soldier Killed In North Iraq

24 December 2005 Focus Information Agency

Baghdad: A US soldier has been killed in the north part of Iraq this evening, AFP reports. A grenade blast during a routine operation is what has reportedly caused the death of the US soldier.

TROOP NEWS

Huge Drop In African-Americans Enlisting In The Military

Dec. 20, 2005 BY DREW BROWN, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Fewer African-Americans are joining the Army, a trend likely to make it harder to keep the all-volunteer military at full strength.

The percentage of African-Americans among all those who signed up for active-duty Army service fell from 24 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2005, according to Army statistics. That’s the lowest percentage since 1973, when the draft ended and the all-volunteer military began, say David R. Segal and Mady Wechsler Segal, sociologists with the University of Maryland’s Center for Research on Military Organization.

In the past, African-Americans have enlisted at higher rates than their overall percentage of the U.S. population, which was 12.9 percent in the 2000 census.

S. Douglas Smith, a spokesman for Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., pointed out that recruiting is down, not just for African-Americans, but for all groups. This year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by more than 6,600 new enlistees, the first time it has missed an annual recruiting target since 1999.

According to a report titled “U.S. Military Image Study” commissioned last year by the Army, African-Americans who viewed the military favorably decreased from 22 percent in November 2003 to 11 percent in November 2004.

Compared with other ethnic groups, African-American youths are also the least supportive of the war in Iraq, the least likely to believe that the war was justified and the most disapproving of the U.S. government’s handling of foreign affairs, researchers found.

The study also found that black adults are less likely than adults in other ethnic groups to recommend military service to youths, in part because of the war.

% For Cutting Iraq Troops Goes Up Again

December 24, 2005 Angus Reid Global Scan, Source: TNS / Washington Post / ABC News

Do you think the number of U.S. military forces in Iraq should be increased, decreased, or kept about the same?

Dec. 2005 Nov. 2005

Increased 9% 15%

Decreased 52% 47%

Kept about the same 36% 36%

No opinion 3% 3%

Marine Refuser From 40 Years Ago Faces Court Martial:

Vets Plan Protests In Support Of Jerry Texiero On Or Near Camp Lejeune In The Next Few Weeks

Jerry Texiero

December 24, 2005 Citizen Soldier

More info: Tod Ensign, Citizen Soldier (212) 679-2250, citizensoldier1@aol.com

Jerry Texiero, 65, of Tarpon Springs, FL, refused orders to deploy to Vietnam in July 1965. His decision was based on his opposition to U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

For the next four decades, Jerry lived peacefully, spending the last twenty years in Tarpon Springs, FL. There, he ran a business that dealt in classic cars and more recently sold boats at a shipyard. Jerry had been placed on probation for a larceny conviction which, he claims, arose from the corrupt dealings of a partner in the classic car business. (Jerry later scrupulously repaid customers for their losses).

In August, 2005, a Marine AWOL apprehension unit working in the Pentagon discovered Jerry’s current status when it used FBI files to match personal data from his Florida conviction with his military file. He was arrested as an AWOL by local police on August 14 and placed in solitary confinement in the Pinellas County (FL) jail.

On December 14, 2005 Jerry was sent to the Marine brig at Camp LeJeune, N.C. Marine officials have told Jerry’s supporters that it is weighing a court martial for desertion, which could result in a five year prison sentence.

Citizen Soldier Legal Director, Tod Ensign has written Lejeune Commanding General Dickinson asking; “Why are scarce Marine resources being squandered on the prosecution of a senior citizen who’s only ‘crime’ is refusing to fight a war that today is universally discredited? Or is the Corps warning Marines in Iraq that they will pursue deserters to the grave?”

Concerned citizens may want to support Jerry by letting Members of Congress know about this case and by directly protesting to either: Base Commander Major General Robert Dickinson, or Colonel Wunder, Staff Judge Advocate, at (910) 451-1113 (base locator) or write to either at: PSC Box 2004, Camp LeJeune, N C 28542

Vietnam veterans and others plan to organize lawful protests in support of Jerry and all resisters on or near Camp LeJeune in the next few weeks.

Blair Visits The Troops For Christmas

[Thanks to Z, who sent this in.]

IRAQ RESISTANCE ROUNDUP

Assorted Resistance Action

12/24/2005 Agence France Presse

Three policeman were killed by a booby-trapped motorcycle in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad and another policeman was killed in Mosul, in the far north of the country.

Another attack in the capital saw an off duty security guard of the justice ministry fall under a hail of bullets.

DUBAI – The captors of a Jordanian driver who was seized in Baghdad gave Amman authorities a three-day ultimatum on Friday for his release, according to a video broadcast on the Al-Arabiya satellite channel.

The hostage, a driver for the Jordanian ambassador to Iraq, was snatched in southern Baghdad on Tuesday and was shown in the video surrounded by three armed men wearing masks.

The kidnappers demanded the release within three days of an Iraqi woman suspected of involvement in triple deadly bomb blasts in Amman on November 9, but did not specify what would happen if their demands were not met.

In the brief video, the hostage identified himself as “Mahmud Salman Saaidiyat, an employee of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, captured Tuesday by a group of mujahedin.”

Saaidiyat, speaking on behalf of his captors, asked “the Jordanian government to recall its diplomatic bureau in Iraq and not cooperate with this illegitimate government.”

The captors did not identify themselves, though a sign reading “The Unity of Falcons” was visible in the video.

The kidnapping prompted Jordan on Tuesday to announce that it was considering relocating its staff from the embassy, hit by a deadly car bomb two years ago that killed 14 people and wounded 40.

Jordanian Prime Minister Maaruf Bakhit said the government was “seriously examining the transfer of embassy employees either to the Jordanian military field hospital in Fallujah or in the Green Zone.”

Jordan briefly moved its staff to the Fallujah field hospital after the August 2003 attack before relocating them to a house in the upscale west Baghdad neighborhood of Mansur.

Jordan has named a new ambassador, Ahmad Lawzi, to Iraq but he has yet take up his post in Baghdad where the embassy is being run by charge d’affaires Suleiman Arabiyat.

IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE RESISTANCE
END THE OCCUPATION

FORWARD OBSERVATIONS

“What Would Really Compel The Bush Administration To Get Out Of Iraq, The One Thing, Is A Rebellion In The Military”

Nov.-Dec. 2005, Howard Zinn interviewed by Tomdispatch, Human Quest [Excerpts]

TD: I want to return for a moment to Cindy Sheehan. By the last years of the Vietnam War, the American military was almost incapable of fighting and, though there were military families against the war, the main resistance to the war was by then coming from draft-age soldiers themselves.

Now we have an all-volunteer army; we know that morale is sinking and that there are specific cases of resistance; refusals to return to Iraq, for instance, within the military, but most of the resistance this time seems to be coming from the families of the soldiers. I wonder whether there’s any historical precedent for that?

Zinn: I don’t know of any previous war where something like this happened in the United States anyway.

The closest you might get would be in the Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of soldiers rioted because their husbands were dying and the plantation owners were profiting from the sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for civilians to eat.

ln the case of the Soviet Union, though, there may be a closer parallel. Russian mothers protested the continuing war in Afghanistan, their Vietnam. I don’t know how strong a part that played in the Soviet decision to withdraw.

In the Vietnam era we had gold star mothers against the war, but nothing like this and I think you’ve pointed to the reason. The GIs in Iraq are not in the same position the draftees were in, although I have to temper that by noting that a lot of the resistance in the Vietnam War came from people who had enlisted in the Army.

And, in a certain sense, there are also draftees in this war, people who didn’t sign up to fight, or National Guards and Reserves who didn’t expect to go to war. You might say that they had been drafted.

Still, because it’s a largely all-volunteer army, the protesting has been left to the parents in an unprecedented way.

Their children just aren’t in a position to protest as easily, and yet I think there’s going to be more and more GI protest as the war goes on.

That’s inevitable.

I imagine, there’s no way of proving this, that there’s already a lot more subterranean protest and disaffection in the military than has been reported, maybe much more than can be reported because it’s probably not visible.

When I try to think of what would really compel the Bush administration to get out of Iraq, the one thing is a rebellion in the military.

David Cortright (author of Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During The Vietnam War) believes that what happened to the military in Vietnam was the crucial factor in finally bringing the United States out of Vietnam.

“Soon Few Would Care About Higher Authority As An Unauthorised And Illegal Truce Bubbled Up From The Ranks”

The high command ordered the line command to stop the fraternisation. Few line officers did or could. The truce momentum could not be arrested. Deliberate or accidental breaches of the tacit truce failed to undermine it. Stray shots were resolved by an apology. If ordered to shoot at unarmed soldiers, soldiers aimed deliberately high.

February 13, 2002 REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON, Green Left Weekly

Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce
By Stanley Weintraub, The Free Press, 2001, 206 pages

It was the war that was supposed “to be over by Christmas”. It very nearly was.

A spontaneous soldiers’ truce broke out along the Western Front on Christmas Eve 1914, four months after the start of hostilities.

“Peace on Earth”, “goodwill to all men”; British, French and German soldiers took these usually hypocritical Christmas sentiments for real and refused to fire on the “enemy”, exchanging instead song, food, drink and gifts with each other in the battle-churned wastes of “no-man’s land” between the trenches.

Lasting until Boxing Day in some cases, the truce alarmed the military authorities who worked overtime to end the fraternisation and restart the killing.

Stanley Weintraub’s haunting book on the “Christmas Truce” recounts through the letters of the soldiers the extraordinary event, routinely denigrated in orthodox military histories as “an aberration of no consequence”, but which was, argues Weintraub, not only a temporary respite from slaughter but an event which had the potential to topple death-dealing governments.

With hundreds of thousands of casualties since August from a war bogged down in the trenches and mud of France, soldiers of all countries were tired of fighting. There had already been some pre-Christmas truces to bury the dead rotting in “no-man’s land” but these truces had needed the approval of higher authority.

“Soon”, however, “few would care about higher authority” as an unauthorised and illegal truce “bubbled up from the ranks”.

The peace overtures generally began with song. From German trenches illuminated by brightly lit Christmas trees would come a rich baritone voice or an impromptu choir singing Silent Night (Stille Nacht). Other carols and songs floated back and forth over the barbed wire. A German boot tossed into the British trenches exploded with nothing more harmful than sausages and chocolates. Signs bearing “Merry Christmas” were hung over the trench parapets, followed by signs and shouts of “you no shoot, we no shoot”.

The shared Christmas rituals of carols and gifts eased the fear, suspicion and anxiety of initial contact as first a few unarmed soldiers, arms held above their heads, warily ventured out into the middle to be followed soon by dozens of others, armed only with schnapps, pudding, cigarettes and newspapers.

The extraordinary outbreak of peace swept along the entire front from the English Channel to the Switzerland border. Corporal John Ferguson, from the Scottish Seaforth Highlanders shared the pleasant disbelief: “Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill”.

Uniform accessories (buttons, insignias, belts) were swapped as souvenirs. Christmas dinner was shared amongst the bomb craters. A Londoner in the 3rd Rifles had his hair cut by a Saxon who had been his barber in High Holborn. Helmets were swapped as mixed groups of soldiers posed for group photographs.

Some British soldiers were taken well behind German lines to a bombed farmhouse to share the champagne from its still intact cellar. Soccer matches were played in ‘no-man’s land’ with stretchers as goalposts. Bicycle races were held on bikes with no tyres found in the ruins of houses. A German soldier captivated hundreds with a display of juggling and magic. “You would have thought you were dreaming”, wrote captain F. D. Harris to his family in Liverpool.

Sergeant Lange of the XIX Saxon Corps recounted how, when ordered on Boxing Day to fire on the 1st Hampshires, they did so, “spending that day and the next wasting ammunition in trying to shoot the stars down from the sky”. By firing in the air, as the sergeant noted with approval, they had “struck”, like the class-conscious workers they were in civilian life. They had had enough of killing.

Military authorities feared fraternization: a court-martial offence, punishable by death, it weakens “the will to kill”, “destroys the offensive spirit”, saps “ideological fervour” and “undermines the sacrificial spirit” necessary to wage war. It was politically subversive: “A bas la guerre!” (”Down with the war!”) from a French soldier was returned with “Nie wieder Kreig! Das walte Gott!” (”No more war! It’s what God wants!”) from his Bavarian counterpart.

After “mucking-in” with British soldiers, a German private wrote that “never was I as keenly aware of the insanity of war”.

Soldiers reasserted their shared humanity: Private Rupert Frey of the Bavarian 16th Regiment wrote after fraternising with the English that “normally we only knew of their presence when they sent us their iron greetings”. “Now”, we gathered, “as if we were friends, as if we were brothers. Well, were we not, after all!”.

If ordinary soldiers acted on these sentiments, a big danger loomed for governments and the ruling class.

If left to themselves, the soldiers would have been home from the shooting war by Christmas all fired up for the class war at home. As Weintraub says, “many troops had discovered through the truce that the enemy, despite the best efforts of propagandists, were not monsters. Each side had encountered men much like themselves, drawn from the same walks of life: and led, alas by professionals who saw the world through different lenses”.

Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator, who had turned from jingoistic imperialism to spiritualism after the death of his son in the war, shot an angry glance to military and civil authority: “those high-born conspirators against the peace of the world, who in their mad ambition had hounded men on to take each other by the throat rather than by the hand”.

The high command on both sides were desperate to restart “the war that had strangely vanished”.

Replacement troops with no emotional commitment to the truce were rushed in. The 2nd Welsh Fusiliers who had not fired a shot from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day were relieved without notice, an exceptional practice. Sometimes threats were necessary: when German officers ordered a regiment in the XIX Saxon Corps to start firing and were met with replies of “we can’t, they are good fellows”, the officers replied “Fire, or we do, and not at the enemy!”.

To prevent further spontaneous truces after 1914, the British high command ordered slow, continuous artillery barrages, trench raids and mortar bombardments: immensely costly of lives but effectively limiting the opportunities for fraternisation for the rest of the war.

To discourage others, conspicuous disciplinary examples were made of individuals. For organising a cease-fire to bury the dead, which was followed by half an hour of fraternisation in “no-man’s land” with no shooting for the rest of Christmas Day 1915, Captain Iain Colquhoun of the 1st Scots Guard was court-martialled. Merely reprimanded, the message was nevertheless clear for career-minded British officers.

Tougher medicine was needed when French soldiers refused to return to the trenches at Aisne in May 1917: 3427 courts-martial and 554 death sentences with 53 executed by firing squad were necessary to crank-start the war on this sector of the French front.

Repression from above won the day against the Christmas Truce of 1914 but it was the lack of soldiers’ organisation from below that stifled the potential for turning the truce into a movement to stop the war.

On the eastern front, on the other hand, fraternisation and peace were Bolshevik policy and in Germany, it was mutinies by organised sailors and home-based soldiers, which finally put paid to Germany’s war effort.

Weintraub has resurrected a beautiful moment in history, made all the more beautiful in the darkness of the carnage that was to follow when four more years of war took the lives of 6000 men a day.

Far from a “two-day wonder”, the Christmas truce “evokes a stubborn humanity within us”. As folksinger John McCutcheon put it in his 1980s ballad Christmas in the Trenches, the war monster is a vulnerable beast when the common soldier realises that “on each end of the rifle we’re the same”.

The Myth Of Our “All-Volunteer” Army:
“Here We Are Today, With About Half Of Our 160,000-Strong Army, FORCED To Be In Iraq”

From: Ward Reilly, Veterans For Peace
To: GI Special
Sent: December 24, 2005
Subject: The Myth Of Our “All-Volunteer” Army

We have an “all-volunteer” Army, right? Wrong!

Anything but: over 50% of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had NO plan to be in the military full-time. Much less serving multiple-tours in the Middle East.

Hardly a “volunteer Army”.

Having been a part of the anti-war movement since before the “war” with Iraq started, I can attest to the fact that what was sorely missing before this year was the “youth of America.” Our meetings and marches were dominated by Viet Nam era citizens, and some of the students that did come to our early meetings quickly got bored with hanging around with an older generation, understandably, especially AFTER Bush said “bombs away” on March 19th, 2003.

Meetings are tedious. As much as we encouraged and recruited, we had very little luck in drawing the youth of our nation into the movement in large quantities.

In an effort to figure out and fix this problem, I had been asking the students I encountered, including my own two sons, why they weren’t more “concerned and involved” with our invasion of (innocent) Iraq and Afghanistan. The most common answer to my query was usually “it’s an all volunteer army, and nobody forced them to go.” Wrong again.

In general, there was a lack of knowledge at all about the realities of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld All-Volunteer Army.

In 2002, 2003, and 2004, not a single student I asked had heard of “stop loss”, the “I R R”, nor did any of them seem to realize that National Guardsmen and Reservists had, in desire and design, signed contracts to serve this nation actively for (ONLY) thirty-eight days a year, by way of one weekend a month, and two weeks in the summer, totaling those thirty-eight days.

NONE had signed up for 365 days a year.

NONE!

In return, they would receive college and medical benefits, which are the main reasons many/most had joined. They had agreed to serve for 38 days a year, ONLY.

Since WWII ended in 1945, the Guard and Reserve had been a safe-haven for those that DID NOT want to be full-time soldiers, or in war, as active-duty military personnel.

That included the entire Viet Nam War period, during which the “NGs and Reservists” were sort-of harassed in boot camp and AIT, but they got the “last laugh”, as they all went home after AIT, and the rest of us were stuck for X amount of years, usually two or three, and we were usually sent overseas, as I was.

Most, if not all, of the men and women that sign-up for the Guard or Reserve knew that there would be a remote possibility that they could, at some point, be activated, but they had the recent-past history of the Guard and Reserve to assure them that this would NOT happen, as during Viet Nam, when those types of service were a constant safe haven.

Just ask “Dubya” Bush, who was admitted into the Texas Air National Guard, after waiting only a couple of days to be accepted, even though it took about two years, if you were an “average Joe” lucky enough to even get on the list, to join the TANG. He KNEW he wasn’t going to war.

What do most GI knows about legal contracts and the “fine print” that might be on them? Very little, that’s what. If they were lawyers, they wouldn’t be in the Guard.

And so it was, NGs and Reservists, for the most part, were kept from war, until the Bush family came into power and formulated their plan to “use” the NG and Reserve in their war-plans. The beginning of the end of an all-volunteer Army was put into place, and here we are today, with about half of our 160,000-strong army, FORCED to be in Iraq.

A group of women and men that had NO INTENTION of being full-time soldiers, much less serving repeated tours-of-duty in the heat and sand-hell in the Middle East, 365 days a year, in an unjust “war”.

These heroic men and women have been screwed, and they are starting to speak out angrily against the “war” and their treatment, because NGs and Reservists do not get the same benefits that regular-army soldiers get after they come home, and they did not want to be full-time troops.

Just ask the members of “Iraq Veterans Against the War” (IVAW), Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), or “Military Families Speak Out” (MFSO), for example. Those are just three of the national groups that have organized against the war(s), organizations consisting of military Veterans that were in the Middle East.

On top of the full-time activation of our National Guard and Reserve forces, the military has added two more groups of victims, and their mastery of military misuse and abuse, via “stop loss” and the “IRR”, continues today.

“Stop Loss”, another CIC-Bush program, this time effective September 13, 2003, was first used by Bush 1, during “Desert Storm”, but that “war” lasted about 3 days, as far as ground troops were concerned, and therefore did not have the same effect or breadth it has today in Iraq and Afghanistan. It essentially allows the military to force you to stay in the military PAST the day you signed on to serve through.

Forced military duty is what it is. Forced, not volunteer. Forced servitude in our “all-volunteer” Army.

Very few, if ANY, active duty personnel were told about the “stop loss” provisions in their contracts by military recruiters. It’s bad enough to survive a tour in a war, without being FORCED to stay longer than when you thought that your service time was up, or to be forced back for another tour. All Volunteers? Hardly.

Then there is the “IRR”. Again, this is a vast pool of citizen-soldiers that signed on to NOT be full-time soldiers, but rather to do a minimal military duty, in return for benefits, such as school-money, PX privileges and health care. Today many thousands of our IRR “volunteers” are now sitting in the desert as full-time soldiers, in war-time. Most of these troops thought their military commitment was finished, but they were re-called into active duty.

Many of these troops are now losing their homes, jobs, and even families, besides their (chosen) civilian life, because they did not dream of being on active duty at all, much less for years at a time, and they simply did not think they would be activated to full time status.

The other main reason that it took a while for the youth of the U.S. to become involved in stopping the war(s), is that there is no Draft, and therefore no threat to be forced into “war”. That, combined with the fact that the economy is so bad, leaves few students with the time it takes to be activists. Most students have one or two jobs just to survive, besides the time school takes, because of the ever-rising cost of rent, tuition, books, utilities, and insurance.

Who has time to do all of that, AND organize against the well-planned assault on our Guard and Reserve in the form of “wars” with Iraq and Afghanistan? Who has time to fight for our “Bill Of Rights,” when they are barely surviving in the real world?

The USA PATRIOT Act completely negates 8 of the amendments in the Bill Of Rights, according to the ACLU, and the neocons like things just the way they have made them. We are living in a Police State, plain and simple. The White House is living “above the law”, just as the Nixon Administration was. It is time for them to face their crimes against ALL of us, and to be punished. Wake up, America, or we won’t have a country sooner than you can imagine.

The “all volunteer” Army is simply another LIE told by the neocons. Half of the troops serving in the Middle East DID NOT want to be full-time soldiers. The “all-volunteer” Army is just a myth, with no basis in truth at all.

We now have a “slave army” in the Middle East, nothing more, nothing less. And they have to face the people that we have poisoned and maimed with Depleted Uranium and Napalm, every day, until WE bring them home.

If we can re-build the nation of Iraq, a nation we have wrecked, then we can also re-build New Orleans with the same troops and money. Our NG and Reserve troops will GLADLY serve us here.

Stop The War, NOW! Troops Home NOW! Katrina Blows, but the Neocons SUCK!

What do you think? Comments from service men and women, and veterans, are especially welcome. Send to contact@militaryproject.org. Name, I.D., withheld on request. Replies confidential.

REALLY BAD PLACE TO BE:
BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW

11.18.05: A flare illuminates a neighborhood held by insurgents as a US marine fires near the town of al-Qaim. (AFP/Patrick Baz)

OCCUPATION REPORT

GEORGE BUSH AND THE U.S. EMPIRE SEND HOLIDAY GREETING AND GIFTS TO THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ:

FOR THE KIDS:

AND HERE’S SANTA!!!

Traitors R’Us Enjoy Saddams’ Gold Plated Furniture

The traitor Rumsfeld, left, meets with his loyal servant, Iraqi collaborator Ibrahim al-Jaafari in Baghdad, Dec. 23, 2005. (AP Photo/Jim Young, Pool)

But Rumsfeld’s Been There Before

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, Baghdad, December 20, 1983.

OCCUPATION ISN’T LIBERATION
BRING ALL THE TROOPS HOME NOW!

OCCUPATION PALESTINE

Palestinian Terrorist, Cleverly Disguised As Poor Laborer, Tied To Donkey And Dragged To Death

23/12/2005 By Gideon Levy, Haaretzdaily.com

On Sunday morning of last week Mahmoud Shawara, a laborer, mounted his mule and set out from his home in the village of Nuaman to look for work in the neighboring village of Umm Touba.

At about 9 A.M., he was arrested by a Border Police unit that detains workers who do not have an entry permit to Israel every morning.

The Border Police ordered Shawara to get into their jeep. He refused. He did not want to leave his mule unattended.

At 9:30 his brother saw him for the last time, healthy and sound.

At 4 P.M. a resident of Umm Touba named Mohammed Hamadan noticed a mule galloping toward the village and dragging something behind it. From a distance, Hamadan thought it might be scrap metal.

As the mule came closer, Hamadan saw that it was dragging an injured, battered man.

The mule, he says, was galloping down the slope and looked frightened. He stopped the animal and then discovered that the person being dragged across the ground was Mahmoud Shawara, from the neighboring village, whom he knew well.

Shawara’s left hand was roped to the mule’s neck. He was unconscious and barely breathing. His skull and face were smashed on the left side and blood was pouring from him. He managed to utter a few broken, unclear words or parts of words and then stopped breathing.

Hamadan untied Shawara, laid him on the ground and pressed on his chest to restart his breathing. He then summoned an ambulance from the clinic of the Meuhedet health maintenance organization in the village. Shawara was taken to Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, where he was admitted to the neurosurgical section of the intensive care unit. At the end of the week, during which he did not regain consciousness, Shawara died of his wounds. He was 43, a laborer and the father of nine children, who went to look for work in the neighboring village.

How was Shawara killed? Did the Border Police abuse him physically and tie him to the animal and then spook it, bringing about his death from blows to his head from rocks as the animal lurched down the hill? Was he beaten and then tied to the mule, which was then sent on its way?

Or is the Justice Ministry’s Police Investigations Department correct in claiming that this was a riding accident: Shawara tied himself to the mule, fell off it and was seriously injured.

People in Nuaman told us this week that the Border Police regularly tie people who are “illegally present” in Israel (shabahim) to their animals.

We will cite the testimony of another Palestinian worker who was tied to his donkey by Border Policemen a few weeks ago as he lay on the ground, face down, with his hands tied behind his back and a cinderblock on his back, placed there by the Border Police.

Between Nuaman and Umm Touba, two peaceful villages above a spectacular valley, lies the dragging strip.

Close-up of the horror: the face of the dead man is smashed. Shawara’s body lies on the floor in his house, covered by a Palestine flag and a sheet from Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem (even though he died in Hadassah). The house, an “illegal structure,” has no roof, lest it be demolished by Israel. A blue canvas covers the home to protect against the elements.

It is afternoon, a few minutes before the funeral procession is to begin, on Sunday of this week. Someone places a Hamas flag on the deceased, over the Palestinian flag and the Shaare Zedek sheet. The women of the family are crying inconsolably; the firstborn daughter, Kauther, 24, is about to faint. Before the body is taken from the room, the face is, unusually, covered, in order to conceal the injuries. The governor of Bethlehem, Salah Taamri, is standing outside with all the local dignitaries. The funeral is restrained, difficult. There is only one extremist outcry: “Ya, Jew, ya pig, we will stomp you underfoot.”

The villagers are convinced that Shawara was killed by the Border Police. But when a Border Police jeep suddenly shows up in the middle of the funeral, for a quick, provocative look, the restraint is maintained. This is the way of the hill people: they are sparing of speech and very apprehensive. Nuaman lies on the open road to Jerusalem, between Bethlehem and the Israeli capital, east of the Har Homa neighborhood, in a place where the separation wall has not yet been completed. The Border Police are here every day and people are afraid to talk.

Exactly a week earlier, Shawara set out from his home for the last time. His brother, Daoud, left his home at about 7:30, on foot, making for Umm Touba, which lies within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, and where there is sometimes work to be had in construction or farming. Daoud relates that after a short time, a Border Police jeep arrived and arrested him and the other laborers, six in all, who had set out from the village. None of them had a permit to work in Israel.

Not long afterward Mahmoud arrived, too, riding his mule. He too was on the way to look for work, as was his daily custom.

The Border Police detained him, too. They confiscated the orange ID cards of everyone in the group and ordered them to go to the police station in Talpiot, in the southern part of Jerusalem. After some negotiation, Daoud says, the Border Police took them to the station in the jeep.

Mahmoud refused to get into the jeep, saying he could not leave the mule by itself in the open. An argument broke out, but the Border Police did not use violence against Mahmoud, says his brother Daoud. Daoud was taken away in the jeep and his brother remained behind with the mule and the Border Policemen who stayed with him. After a brief interrogation and after signing an undertaking not to enter Umm Touba again, Daoud and the others were taken to the new Rachel checkpoint, at Rachel’s Tomb, by the entrance to Bethlehem, and sent on their way.

Daoud never saw his brother alive again. Arriving back in the village at about 12:30 P.M., he was unable to find Mahmoud. It is a small village of 170 residents, one fatality until last week, stone houses on the edge of a spectacular valley in the east, the Har Homa settlement in the west. They are Bedouin, members of the Taamra tribe.

At 4 P.M. Mohammed Hamadan saw the galloping mule, leaving behind a cloud of dust. It was making its way along the trail that goes down to Umm Touba, which is flanked on both sides by piles of garbage. We are now walking along the path from Nuaman to Umm Touba, a trail which the mule followed, at least in part. It is a rocky trail.

A few hundred meters separate the place where Shawara was arrested from the place where he was discovered tied to the mule.

Six and a half hours separate the time at which Shawara’s brother saw him alive and well and the time he was discovered tied to the mule. No one knows what happened in those hours.

Hamadan is now looking for signs of blood on the trail followed by the mule, but the rain has apparently washed everything away. He saw no wounds on Mahmoud’s body, only on the shattered left side of his head. He was tied to the mule by a rope of black cloth. Here is where he stopped the mule, grabbing its reins, on the slope. The workers in the adjacent warehouse for construction materials also saw the event. The owner of the business, Ahmed Abu Their, was the one who called the ambulance. He says that he saw Mahmoud tied to the mule but was afraid to approach.

The men, their faces grim, are sitting on the ridge and waiting for the ambulance to bring the body from Hadassah. The women, in black, are sitting in the shadow of the dead man’s home and keening. Young people fly Palestinian flags on the roofs of the houses and on the fence of the cemetery that lies below the village.

The convoy is approaching from the valley, the Palestinian ambulance in front with red lights blinking. An Israeli army jeep watches from afar, parked on the security road that was paved along the separation wall that is being built as the “Jerusalem envelope.”

No one in the village knows where the border lies here between “the territories” and “Jerusalem.” When the wall is completed, it will all become clear. In Nuaman only one resident has a Jerusalem ID card (blue); everyone else is “territories.” Neighboring Umm Touba is “Jerusalem” but not all its residents have blue cards, either. A man next to me wipes away a tear. The body is taken from the ambulance into the house. Inside the deceased’s face is uncovered, the face of a peasant, mustachioed and wounded, and is immediately covered.

The village’s lawyer, Daoud Darawi, who works in the Palestine branch of Defense for Children International (DCI) in Ramallah, is demanding an international investigation of the circumstances of Shawara’s death.

“They did to him what the whites did to Indians in America,” he says.

He tells about two similar cases. In the nearby village of Dar Salah, Border Police in a jeep struck a donkey on which Walid Amiya was riding, knocking him to the ground. He survived. In nearby Wadi al-Humos, they tied Maamoun Abu Ali to his donkey and tried to send the animal on its way. He too survived. (We will come back to him later.)

According to attorney Darawi, the Border Police have been in the area for about a month. Since their arrival, cases of abuse of laborers looking for work in the neighboring village have increased. ”Come one day at 5 A.M. and you will see what goes on here every day with the Border Police,” the lawyer says. Mahmoud Shawara’s family filed a complaint with the Police Investigations Department (PID).

The Justice Ministry spokesman, Yaacov Galant, said this week on behalf of the PID, “Our best investigations, which we conducted from the moment the complaint was received until last Friday afternoon, indicate that there is no connection between the activity of the Border Police and the injury and death of the individual. Apparently he was warned about the mule, told not to ride it. It was a wild mule. Apparently he mounted it, rode it and also tied himself to it.” Has the investigation been thoroughly concluded? Galant promised to check and get back to me.

A short time later: “At the moment there is nothing new. We have not gotten one testimony that would connect the Border Police (to the event). We will be happy to receive other testimonies. In the meantime, no one can point to a specific connection between the Border Policemen and the case.”

Maamoun Abu Ali is a construction worker on a building that is going up in the Doha neighborhood in the southern section of Bethlehem. We tracked him down on Tuesday of this week. A smiling bachelor of 20, he still carries the scars of his encounter with the Border Police in the valley below Nuaman.

Abu Ali is from the neighboring village of Abadiya. About two months ago, during Ramadan, he was riding his donkey on the way to nearby Wadi Humos to buy a chicken for the break-fast meal at Shahar’s butcher shop. It was slightly after midday. Suddenly a Border Police jeep pulled up next to him. ”Where are you going?” Abu Ali was asked, and he replied, “To buy a chicken.” The Border Police checked the items the donkey was carrying and then examined Abu Ali’s papers. A shabah. Bingo.

With the animal’s reins they tied Abu Ali’s hands behind his back and made him lie on his stomach on the ground, face down. The Border Police like to “punish” the shabahim they catch.

Abu Ali relates that they placed a cinderblock on his back and then whipped the donkey to make it walk. Abu Ali’s donkey is old and stubborn, or maybe he only obeys his master,- whatever the case, it refused to budge.

Abu Ali says he also pulled with his bound hands, so the donkey would not move. It is not difficult to guess what would have happened if the donkey had panicked and started to gallop, with Abu Ali lying face down, hands tied behind his back to the animal. At one point one of the Border Policemen also stood on Abu Ali’s back, one foot on him and one foot on the cinderblock, to put pressure on him.

The abuse went on for about a quarter of an hour, Abu Ali says.

Finally the Israeli troops gave up trying to make the stubborn donkey move and ordered Abu Ali to get up. They spoke Arabic. Abu Ali says that one of them covered his eyes with his hands and another struck him once in the face with a stone. He still has a scar on the right side, below his lip. They threatened him, saying that “if he wandered around here again, he would be killed.”

They then sent him on his way. Abu Ali did not file a complaint with the Police Investigations Department. He wanted to complain to the Palestinian police and have them pass on the complaint, but was dissuaded from doing so by the policeman in his village, who told him, “People are getting killed here, so be thankful that you’re alive and healthy.”

“Let us tell the world what they are doing to us, about the disgusting occupation we live under,” the elderly Mohammed Abu Ranar Adum, one of the village headmen, says in his eulogy.

The funeral is about to disperse in silence.

In the shade of the olive trees, at the edge of the village, on the brink of the valley, stands the mule, tied to a tree.

A brown, strong animal. When we approach to take its photograph, the mule shows signs of panic, turns its head aside and tries in vain to break loose.

MORE:

“The Donkey Procedure”

[Thanks to The Other Israel for posting. To subscribe, contact: otherisr@actcom.co.il]

23/12/2005 By Haaretz Editorial, Haaretz

In today’s Haaretz Magazine, Gideon Levy tells the story of Mahmoud Shawara, a 43-year-old father of nine, who left for work on his donkey one day from his house in the village of Nuaman, near Bethlehem, was arrested by border policemen, and, after he refused to accompany the soldiers without his donkey, was tied to the donkey.

The frightened donkey then galloped toward the village; Shawara sustained serious injuries all over his body, and ultimately died in great pain in the hospital to which he was taken by eyewitnesses.

Although the Department for Investigating Policemen found no relationship between the border policemen’s behavior and Shawara’s death, testimony indicates that this is an abusive practice well known to Palestinians. It even has a nickname: “the donkey procedure.”

Earlier this month, Amira Hass reported on Taher Odeh, 14, who was released from the hospital where he was being treated for gunshot wounds, and immediately afterward underwent 24 hours of abuse in a military police facility until he was freed and sent home.

These two stories from the past month join a long list of reports in all the media outlets about settlers chopping down Palestinians’ olive trees, something that has been going on without interference since April.

Even though another 100 olive trees were cut down this week, and even though 15 complaints were filed to the police, and even though, in total, we are talking about property destruction amounting to thousands of trees in the northern West Bank, the law enforcement agencies have yet to make any effort to locate the settlers responsible, and no arrests have been made.

The prime minister, Knesset members and ministers have not made their voices heard, and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who is in charge of preventing all the incidents and abuses described here, has not even bothered to explain what he has done to correct even a fraction of this injustice.

[To check out what life is like under a murderous military occupation by a foreign power, go to: <www.rafahtoday.org>www.rafahtoday.org The foreign army is Israeli; the occupied nation is Palestine.]

DANGER: POLITICIANS AT WORK

The Traitor Bush Approved Huge Spying Program:
NSA Files Bigger Than White House Said:
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove From Telephones And Internet

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

December 24, 2005 By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN, The New York Times Company

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 – The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages.

This so-called “pattern analysis” on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

“All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there’s been much more active involvement in that area,” said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Several officials said that after President Bush’s order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States’ communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries.

But the N.S.A.’s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency’s operational capability, according to current and former government officials.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant.

“If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you’re really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data,” he said.

Got A Tattoo?
Ever Eaten Shrimp?
The Death Penalty For You!

November-December, By James A. Everett, The Human Quest [Excerpts]

Leviticus 18:22, which is a part of the “Holiness Code,” [beloved of far right politicians] condemns a man “who lies with a male as with a woman.”

A little later on in Leviticus 20:13 it orders the death penalty for this and many other acts such as adultery, eating seafood without fins, getting a tattoo, or wearing clothes made out of two different fabrics.

Leviticus also gives meticulous instructions regarding whom it is okay to enslave.

Wolfson points out, “Clearly some picking and choosing is required, and every religion does so.”

The last passage invoked to justify anti-gay sentiments is from the New Testament, Romans 1:27.

In some translations it appears to have Paul saying that God will punish people who do not worship properly by confusing their sexual identities so that men sleep with men and women sleep with women.

Bishop Spong says he has a hard time imagining anyone worshipping a capricious and egocentric deity who would say, “If you don’t worship me properly, I will turn you into gays and lesbians.”

As anyone who reads history knows, the Bible has been used to support a belief in polygamy, the right to hold slaves, the divine right of kings, women being inferior to men, etc.

In this regard U.S. Representative Jim McDermott of Washington state put the following widely circulated email into the Congressional Record describing what a Federal Biblical Marriage Amendment might look like:

1. Marriage shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. From Genesis 29:17-28.

2. Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. II Samuel 5:13 and II Chronicles 11:21.

3. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. Deuteronomy 22:13.

4. Marriage of a believer and a nonbeliever shall be forbidden. Genesis 24:3.

5. Finally, it says that since there is no law that can change things, divorce is not possible and if a married man dies, his brother must marry his sister-in-law. Genesis 38:8 and Matthew 22:24.

Student Lied About Government Harassment

[Thanks to Phil G, who sent this in.]

12.24.05 By AARON NICODEMUS, Standard-Times staff writer

NEW BEDFORD — The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for “The Little Red Book” by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story.

The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.

Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false.

But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard Times, the student added new details.

The agents had returned, the student said, just last night. The two agents, the student, his parents and the student’s uncle all signed confidentiality agreements, he claimed, to put an end to the matter.

But when Dr. Williams went to the student’s home yesterday and relayed that part of the story to his parents, it was the first time they had heard it. The story began to unravel, and the student, faced with the truth, broke down and cried.

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