There never was a good war or a bad peace. ~Ben Franklin
The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Sept 2009
Truth in Recruiting - "Don't Believe the Hype!"
lead story:
Two guests from C-R outfit in Dallas/Ft. Worth share their success strategies with the OCC
— counter-recruitment workshop in Oklahoma City, hosted by Oklahoma Center for Conscience
— "Peaceful Vocations," the Texas-based counter-recruitment organization, is online: http://www.peacefulvocations.org/
Schools in NC let Quakers pitch counter-recruitment
— a Quaker peace activist is granted her request for access to high school students so she can warn them about joining the military
— For years, Sally Ferrell had been asking permission to talk to students about alternatives to joining the military
related story:
Veterans start over as colleges ignore experience
— College-bound veterans find it's back to basics as schools ignore years of military experience
— Military experience considered useless by some university admissions boards
fact:
At least one in five colleges and universities in the U.S. do not give academic credit for military experience.
related story:
Vets shred uniforms to heal through art
— The Combat Paper Project, a Vermont-based collective of combat vets who became artists after leaving the military, has spent the past year holding coast-to-coast workshops aimed at teaching former service members to help themselves by recycling fatigues into artwork.
file under: active-duty resistance
New video promoting "Under the Hood Cafe" (close to Ft. Hood, TX): "The Resistors," by Casey J Porter
— includes interview footage with Spc. Victor Agayo, conscientious objector refusing to deploy to Afghanistan
— "Under the Hood" is also mentioned in this story about Sgt. Travis Bishop, inspired by Agayo's example: http://www.truthout.org/081209A
— video link: http://www.vimeo.com/5901045
quote: "Soldiers and civilians work together to create balance and support each other where the Army fails."
Report Card on Obama's Sec'y of Education, Arne Duncan
— the Military-Corporate Bias in Chicago-area schools under the now National Secretary of Education
— Student outcomes in the Chicago School District prove that it is a poor model to follow
facts & figures:
As CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan he personally oversaw the attempted closing of 20 Chicago public schools in low-income neighborhoods of color in 2004.
Chicago's fourth and eighth graders ranked, with only one exception, in the bottom half of all districts nationwide in math, reading, and science in 2003, 2005 and 2007. In addition, from 2004 to 2008, the Chicago Public Schools district failed to make "adequate yearly progress."
Chicago is the most militarized school district in the nation. Chicago Public Schools has five military high schools, more than any city in the nation, and 21 "middle school cadet corps" programs. All but one of the military high schools are in African American communities, and all the middle school cadet programs are in overwhelmingly black or Latina/o schools
quote:
A call to abolish ROTC, to help end American Imperialism
"Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools."
~Chalmers Johnson
from the archives
Lyrics to "Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die" by Country Joe McDonald
— standing ovation at Woodstock, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBdeCxJmcAo
excerpt: '"Come on mothers be the first ones on your block, to have your boy come home in a box"
page two:
The Hell of War Comes Home: Newspaper Series Documents Murder, Suicide, Kidnappings by Iraq Vets
A startling two-part series published in the Gazette newspaper of Colorado Springs titled “Casualties of War” examines the difficulty of returning to civilian life after being trained to be a killer.
— Democracy Now! does an interview with the reporter who broke the story and gets the Army’s response to the list of atrocities committed by Iraq veterans on U.S. soil, as laid out by Dave Philips, in his newspaper articles.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/30/the_hell_of_war_comes_home
file under: arbitrary imprisonment
Conscientious Objector Sentenced to 12 months
— Another Fort Hood TX soldier was sentenced more harshly for his stance as a conscientious objector
— Sgt. Bishop believes all war is wrong, after religious conversion experience; seeking legal status as a CO
sidebar
U.S. Apache Helicopter Kills Cucumber Farmers in Afghan Village
— file under: increasingly aerial occupation
related story:
US Copter Opens Fire on Afghan Medical Clinic
file under: war crime committed by U.S. forces
quote:
Air cadet programs appeal to the psychotic
“Every boy in this society grows up wanting to fly a fighter jet –wouldn't it be fun?-- but you gotta be a murderer to fly one -- is the only catch.
~Scott Horton, the host of antiwar.com radio
http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/08/01/eric-stoner/
backpage:
analysis:
The Secret Shame of our Empire of Bases
by Chalmers Johnson
The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Sept 2009
lead story
"Peaceful Vocations" uses court case precedents set in other states to institute effective counter-recruitment presence in North Texas
Two guests from C-R outfit in Dallas/Ft. Worth share their success strategies with the OCC, in Oklahoma City
Event hosted by the Oklahoma Center for Conscience, held Aug 10, 2009
by T. Nuspl, for the Tulsa Peace Fellowship
Ft Worth - Peaceful Vocations, the counter-recruitment outfit, is making visits to each public school in its area at least twice per year, plus attending college recruiting days on school grounds. Peaceful Vocations has used the law, and the decisions by various courts in the U.S., to uphold and put into practice its right to have the same degree of access to high school students as do military recruiters. It is a long held complaint among counter-recruitment task forces across the nation, associated with peace groups such as the Oklahoma Center for Conscience, that the so-called "No Child Left Behind" legislation enacted under the Bush-Cheney administration gave military recruiters a privileged degree of access that was both unjust and unfair to the students targeted for recruitment.
According to one member of Peaceful Vocations, their campaign to get counter-recruitment booklets in to ALL of the schools in their district, as well as pamphlets responding to the hype used by recruiters to inveigle students into joining up, was a long-term struggle.
"This is the hardest work you will ever do," said Yvette Richardson, a U.S. Army veteran involved in the coordination of Peaceful Vocations.
In addition to visits to school grounds, Peaceful Vocations also engages in weekly events with community service groups, such as providing back-to-school packets that include the essential "Opt Out" form, so that students who object to having their personal details and private contact information divulged to military recruiters can use an official means of redress, to prevent their school administrators from handing over the private information to the recruiters. Peaceful Vocations has its spokespersons speak at rallies, such as at the recent Cesar Chavez parade, and they march purposefully right behind the ROTC contingent in such parades. Their large 5' x 10' banner "BOOKS NOT BOMBS" is often visible at community events, in parks, and in various other public spaces. In particular, the outfit is often invited to community events hosted by Hispanics, Native Americans, or African Americans, groups that are often targeted as part of the poverty draft. Boys & Girls clubs have also invited Peaceful Vocations to speak in about 15 districts.
Essential to the successes of Peaceful Vocations, according to Yvette Richardson and Diane Wood, a retired Registered Nurse also involved in coordinating the group, is a ruling made in the U.S. Ninth District Court. In San Diego, a counter-recruitment outfit called the Committee to Opposing the Military Draft was granted a huge civil rights victory, in a recent court case in their district. The watershed decision stated that groups presenting alternatives to the misinformation provided by military recruiters had a right to provide their views on school grounds, in opposition to the recruiters attempting to prey on high school students.
Although the decision was binding for that district only, the Ninth District's decision has become a precedent for courts in five or six other districts. School attorneys are now aware of this watershed decision. As a result, in an understanding reached with public school districts in North Texas, Peaceful Vocations is able to have access to school grounds and talk to students every time that a military recruiter makes a presentation in a school, to distribute its literature wherever pro-recruitment propaganda is deposited with school counsellors, as well as to place posters side by side with any pro-recruitment poster that is found on school grounds.
The school boards have determined that the principals of individual schools are obliged to allow the counter-recruiters into their schools, as per the terms of the law. In theory, should a recruiter attempt to pull a student out of a class session in order to give them the "hard sell," a group like Peaceful Vocations should be given a chance to provide the antidote to the misinformation that the recruiter may have provided, in the interest of having students make fully-informed decisions about their futures.
In a success particular to North Texas, Peaceful Vocations discovered that schools were allowing posters for recruiting purposes that had both machine guns and/or pistols on display, contrary to district rules about posters in hallways and counseling offices on school grounds. Now there are no guns in any military displays on school grounds, in the schools where Peaceful Vocations is vigilant. This is a far cry better than other school districts, such as in Oklahoma, where so-called instructors are tolerated who even bring mock guns into the classroom.
In addition to community activists and veterans, Peaceful Vocations also has the cooperation of the students themselves. With the help of intrepid students, Peaceful Vocations is able to report back to the school board about violations committed on school grounds by military recruiters and/or JROTC "instructors." With the help of students, Peaceful Vocations hopes to emphasize the need to de-militarize area public schools. Students have the right to organize groups on school grounds for the express purpose of de-militarizing their respective schools. Peaceful Vocations means to be a resource for such students.
Among plans for the immediate future, Peaceful Vocations will be hosting "Back-to-School" "Opt-Out Parties" for students enrolled in Ft. Worth area schools.
byline: T. Nuspl is President (2009) of the Tulsa Peace Fellowship. He is also a member of the TPF counter-recruitment task force designed to provide alternative information to counter the propaganda provided by DoD and Pentagon advertisements and/or by recruiters targeting youth, in particular high school students susceptible to joining up without a full understanding of the risks and the downfalls involved in being part of the U.S. military machine. He has also presented counter-recruitment information to college-level students.
© Tony Nuspl 2009
School lets Quaker counter recruiting pitches
By Mike Baker - The Associated Press
Posted Aug 12, 2009
RALEIGH, N.C. — A rural North Carolina school district with a proud military tradition has surrendered to a Quaker peace activist’s request for access to high school students so she can warn them about joining the military, attorneys said Wednesday.
For years, Sally Ferrell had been asking permission to talk to students about alternatives to joining the military. The Wilkes County School Board had denied her access, even though military recruiters are typically allowed in schools.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that Ferrell’s plight was a matter of free speech, said attorneys reached a settlement this week with school officials granting the group, North Carolina Peace Action, the same opportunities as military recruiters.
Ferrell said in a statement she looks forward to providing job-related information. She has previously touted AmeriCorps and other alternatives to the military.
The government-funded AmeriCorps offers a range of volunteer opportunities including housing construction, youth outreach, disaster response and caring for the elderly. Most participants receive an annual stipend of slightly less than $12,000 for working 10 months to a year.
In part, the agreement puts new restrictions on all types of recruiters. Instead of allowing recruiters to set up a table in the cafeteria to meet the students directly, Superintendent Stephen Laws said they will instead meet only with students who specifically sign up to hear about opportunities.
“We’re extremely pleased with the agreement, and we’re excited about moving on,” Laws said.
Recruiters have been relying more heavily on high schools to help fill the ranks of the all-volunteer military. Thousands of people like Ferrell have responded with counter-recruiting groups, saying the military often gives misleading information.
Activists have complained the military often targets high schools in poor and rural areas, where graduating students have limited options. Wilkes County, on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 50 miles west of Winston-Salem, has been hurt by the exodus of manufacturing jobs. Its June unemployment rate was 13.2 percent.
Ferrell first approached the school district in 2005, but Laws denied access. Two years later, the group reached an agreement with the school board allowing Ferrell in the high schools, but Laws revoked that privilege shortly after.
“We allow recruiters into the schools to recruit for post-high school opportunities. But she wasn’t offering that,” he said last year.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/08/ap_military_schools_recruiter...
related story:
Veterans start over as colleges ignore experience
College-bound veterans find it's back to basics as schools ignore years of military experience
Alan Scher Zagier, AP News
Aug 20, 2009
Twelve years of military service left Donald Spradling highly trained in satellite imagery, nuclear engineering and foreign intelligence analysis. None of that made a difference to the University of Missouri.
Nearly half a million veterans are expected on college campuses this year as part of the new GI Bill. The surge is leading to a call for schools to re-examine their policies of declining to grant college credit for military training and service.
An estimated one in five colleges and universities do not give academic credit for military education, according to a recent survey of 723 schools by the American Council on Education that is believed to be the first systematic measure. Even more of the schools, 36 percent, said they don't award credit for military occupational training.
For Spradling and others, that can mean spending more on tuition, stretching financial aid or GI Bill scholarships and delaying their entry into the work force.
At Boston College, a private school, the standard has always been to accept credit only for institutions of higher education, said school spokesman Jack Dunn.
"That holds true for members of the armed forces as well," he said.
Many college-bound veterans said military recruiters often offer an unrealistic portrayal of what awaits in academia, suggesting their military coursework and training will count for college credit.
Army veteran Michael McIntosh noted that Missouri's policy meant he could not use his experience jumping from planes as part of an airborne unit to fulfill a physical education requirement — even as other students could enroll in scuba diving or similar pursuits.
"I would have liked for them to at least acknowledge it," he said. "It might have been a military education, but it was still a lot of work and a lot of training."
http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/08/20/veterans-start-over-as-colleges-...
Vets shred uniforms to heal through art
By Russ Bynum - The Associated Press
Posted : Saturday Aug 8, 2009
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Tired of taking pills prescribed to suppress his pain, Zach Choate decided to wrestle head-on with the trauma that followed him home from Iraq. He began by using a razor to shred his Army uniform to bits.
“I’m hoping I come out of this a little more whole, a little bit more at peace,” said Choate, who was a gunner in the 10th Mountain Division. “I’m not an anti-war, anti-military person. This is just me fixing me.”
He chopped his camouflage jacket into inchlong strips. He diced the American flag patch on its right shoulder, along with a prescription for sleeping pills he found in a pocket. Even the Purple Heart ribbon Choate earned after being wounded by a roadside bomb got torn into tiny threads.
The 25-year-old soldier from Cartersville joined a handful of Iraq veterans at a Savannah art studio last week to destroy uniforms that had become painful reminders of their combat experience, using them to create something new.
The young vets mixed the jigsaw pieces with water and beat them into pulp to make sheets of paper — blank canvasses on which they could write, paint or screen images to tell their personal war stories.
The Combat Paper Project, a Vermont-based collective of combat vets who became artists after leaving the military, has spent the past year holding coast-to-coast workshops aimed at teaching former service members to help themselves by recycling fatigues into artwork.
Drew Cameron, who became opposed to the Iraq war after serving in an Army artillery unit during the 2003 invasion, started the group after moving to Burlington, Vt., where he learned paper making from a local artist while also becoming active with Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Cameron, 27, saw it as a way reach out to other Iraq veterans haunted by memories of friends slain in battle and men they had killed, wounded physically and psychologically by bomb and mortar explosions, and struggling to direct their own lives after years of being told what to do by the military.
“I just want to cut this thing into a million pieces,” said Jason Hurd, tearing the seams of the desert camouflage jacket he wore in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 with the Tennessee National Guard.
After spending 10 years in the military, the 29-year-old from Savannah said destroying his uniform was a way of proving that his life is now his own. He says he hasn’t shaved or cut his hair since leaving the Guard two years ago.
“When you hold these strips in your hand, you think about all the times you ironed it and spit polished your boots — all that was something the Army made you do,” Hurd said. “This is my uniform now. I’m not Army property anymore, and neither is it.”
The vets dunked their uniform scraps into water swirling through a belt-driven machine that beat the mixture into pulp before being drained into 18-gallon tubs. The pulp was sifted through a screen into sheets of paper, then carefully smoothed and stuck onto the windows outside to dry in the summer heat.
The finished paper is thick, almost like cardboard, with an olive-gray color accented by fine threads of red, blue and purple from any awards and decorations the former soldiers add.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/08/ap_combatart_080609/
The Duncan Doctrine
The Military-Corporate Bias of the New Secretary of Education
By Andy Kroll, Jan 2009
President-elect Barack Obama named Arne Duncan, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools system (CPS), as his nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education. He was also regularly hailed as a "reformer," fearless when it came to challenging the educational status quo and more than willing to shake up hidebound, moribund public school systems.
Yet a closer investigation of Duncan's record in Chicago casts doubt on that label.
Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan's belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago's school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he's started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.
The Militarization of Secondary Education
Today, the flagship projects in CPS's militarization are its five military academies, affiliated with either the Army, Navy, or Marines. All students -- or cadets, as they're known -- attending one of these schools are required to enroll as well in the academy's Junior ROTC program. That means cadets must wear full military uniforms to school everyday, and undergo daily uniform inspections. As part of the academy's curriculum, they must also take a daily ROTC course focusing on military history, map reading and navigation, drug prevention, and the branches of the Department of Defense.
In addition, military personnel from the U.S. armed services “teach” alongside regular teachers in each academy, and also fill administrative roles such as academy "commandants." Three of these military academies were created in part with Department of Defense appropriations -- funds secured by Illinois lawmakers -- and when the proposed Air Force Academy High School opens this fall, CPS will be the only public school system in the country with Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps high school academies.
Encouraging students to be critical thinkers, to question accepted beliefs and norms, remains key to a teacher's role at any grade level. The military's culture of uniformity and discipline, important as it may be for an army, hardly aligns with these pedagogical values.
Of no less concern are the types of students Chicago's military academies are trying to attract. All of CPS's military academies (except the Rickover Naval Academy) are located in low-income neighborhoods with primarily black and/or Hispanic residents. As a result, student enrollment in the academies consists almost entirely of minorities. Whites, who already represent a mere 9% of the students in the Chicago system, make up only 4% of the students enrolled in the military academies.
There is obviously a correlation between these low-income, minority communities, the military academies being established in them, and the long-term recruitment needs of the U.S. military. The schools essentially function as recruiting tools. Before the House Armed Services Committee in 2000, the armed services chiefs of staff testified that 30%-50% of all Junior ROTC cadets later enlist in the military. Organizations opposing the military's growing presence in public schools insist that it's no mistake the number of military academies in Chicago is on the rise at a time when the U.S. military has had difficulty meeting its recruitment targets while fighting two unpopular wars.
It seems clear enough that, when it comes to the militarization of the Chicago school system, whatever Duncan's goals, the results are likely to be only partly "educational."
When measured on a national scale, Duncan's record looks a lot less impressive. In comparison to other major urban school districts (including Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C.) in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or "The Nation's Report Card," Chicago fourth and eighth graders ranked, with only one exception, in the bottom half of all districts in math, reading, and science in 2003, 2005 and 2007. In addition, from 2004 to 2008, the Chicago Public Schools district failed to make "adequate yearly progress" as mandated by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act.
Public education is not meant to be a win-lose, us-versus-them system, nor is it meant to be a recruitment system for the military -- and yet this, it seems, is at the heart of Duncan's legacy in Chicago, and so a reasonable indication of the kind of "reform" he's likely to bring to the country as education secretary.
byline: Andy Kroll is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a student at the University of Michigan.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175022/andy_kroll_will_public_educa...
for more on the Military-Corporate Bias in Chicago-area schools under Duncan, please see:
The Chicago Model & Obama and Duncan's Education Policy: Like Bush's, Only Worse
By Danny Weil
http://www.counterpunch.com/weil08242009.html
TPF editorial: The counter-recruitment task force of the Tulsa Peace Fellowship certainly bemoans the fact that, under an Obama administration, save effective organized opposition, the so-called "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) legislation is not being repealed, as an error in policy direction committed under the Bush regime. The Orwellian newspeak of this legislation's name and the privileges it grants to military recruiters preying upon students during school hours betray the true intention of the federal education department: to keep the poverty draft in place, by denying a proper education to Blacks and Hispanics living in poorer neighborhoods.
from the archives
Lyrics to "Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die"
by Country Joe McDonald
--standing ovation at Woodstock, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBdeCxJmcAo
"Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die"
by Country Joe McDonald
Come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
he's got himself in a terrible jam
way down yonder in Viet Nam so
put down your books and pick up a gun we're
gonna have a whole lotta fun
And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for
don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Viet Nam
And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates
ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee we're all gonna die
Come on wall street don't be slow
why man this war is a go-go
there's plenty good money to be made by
supplying the army with the tools of its trade
let's hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
they drop it on the Viet Cong
Come on generals, let's move fast
your big chance has come at last
now you can go out and get those reds
cos the only good commie is the one that's dead and
you know that peace can only be won when we've
blown 'em all to kingdom come
Come on mothers throughout the land
pack your boys off to Viet Nam
come on fathers don't hesitate
send your sons off before it's too late
and you can be the first ones on your block
to have your boy come home in a box
The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Sept 2009
page two
The Hell of War Comes Home: Newspaper Series Documents Murder, Suicide, Kidnappings by Iraq Vets
A startling two-part series published in the Gazette newspaper of Colorado Springs titled “Casualties of War” examines a part of war seldom discussed by the media or government officials: the difficulty of returning to civilian life after being trained to be a killer. The story focuses on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment. Soldiers from the brigade have have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. The Army unit’s murder rate is 114 times the rate for Colorado Springs.
--Democracy Now! does an interview with the reporter who broke the story and gets the Army’s response to the list of atrocities laid out by Dave Philips, in his articles.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/30/the_hell_of_war_comes_home
TPF editorial comment: Why didn't the Army court martial Kenneth Eastridge for the 80 murders he committed of Iraqi civilians?
related story:
Another Soldier Refuses Afghanistan Deployment
Wednesday 12 August 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | r e p o r t
Sgt. Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad with the 3rd Signal Brigade, faces a court-martial this Friday for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. Bishop is the second soldier from Fort Hood in as may weeks to be tried by the military for his stand against an occupation he believes is "illegal." He insists that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposes on both moral and legal grounds and he has filed for conscientious objector (CO) status.
http://www.truthout.org/081209A
U.S. Apache Helicopter Kills Cucumber Farmers in Afghan Village
file under: increasingly aerial occupation
Source: CBC News
Posted: 08/06/09 9:01AM
Five farmers were killed by an air strike from Western forces, Afghan police said Thursday.
The farmers were loading cucumbers into a taxi in the rural Zhari district near Kandahar city when a military helicopter fired on them, said district police Chief Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi.
Sarhadi alleged the strike was conducted by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Officials will review footage from the Apache helicopter to determine what happened.
The repeated deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of foreign troops have caused deep resentment among Afghan people. President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called on foreign troops to halt air strikes and raids in Afghan villages.
http://news.aol.ca/article/afghan-farmers-killed-by-air-strike-poli...
related story:
US Copter Opens Fire on Afghan Medical Clinic
Injured Taliban 'Sought Treatment,' Leading to Attack
by Jason Ditz, August 27, 2009
US and Afghan forces, backed by a US Apache helicopter attacked a medical clinic in the Paktika Province of Afghanistan yesterday after receiving reports that a wounded Taliban commander had “sought treatment” at the facility.
Attacking a medical clinic, however, particularly when health care is in such short supply in rural Afghanistan, is likely to fuel resentment among locals. Likewise, the attack on a relatively minor Taliban commander when he was already injured and seeking medical treatment is probably going to raise further suspicions as the Afghan government continues to talk about reconciliation.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/08/27/us-copter-opens-fire-on-afghan-m...
The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Sept 2009
backpage
We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
excerpt from a longer article by Chalmers Johnson
31 July 2009
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:
"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults — 2,923 — and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior.
byline: Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).
Tulsa Peace Fellowship's counter-recruitment update/digest for Sept 2009
masthead
who we are:
The website for the Tulsa Peace Fellowship is:
www.tulsapeacefellowship.org
TPF meets monthly @ Peace House in Tulsa
inside the Unitarian Universalist church at 1314 N. Greenwood Ave, in Tulsa, close to corner of Pine & Greenwood, just north of the OSU-Tulsa campus
If you have not already done so, please join the new social networking tool for TPF on Ning, in lieu of TPFtalks on yahoogroups, which has fallen into disuse Thank you! You can check out our new tool here: http://tulsapeacefellowship.ning.com/ (new for 2009) Also still going strong: our announcement list on yahoo! tulsapeace@yahoogroups.com (since 2002) Go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/ and search for "tulsapeace"
Through its counter-recruitment task force, TPF is a member of the National Network in Opposition to the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) representing some 188 counter-recruitment groups in cities and towns across the country.
On the web: http://www.nnomy.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=v...
Tulsa Peace Fellowship is non-partisan, and is open to 3rd parties, progressives, Dems, libertarians, etc. TPF is the activist wing of the peace movement in Eastern Oklahoma "Waging Peace One Person at a Time".
Peace House-Tulsa is an incubator for peace and justice. The Peace House building can host a wide range of activities: classes, discussion groups, meditation, music-making, social gatherings, retreats, etc. While some activities may be limited by the size and amenities of this building, our imaginations need not be limited!
If you enjoyed this news digest and/or found this update useful, please consider making a donation of time, money, or effort to the Tulsa Peace Fellowship. Details on tax status available.
info for TPF counter-recruitment-- contact by phone 918 906 0828
The next regular meeting of the Fellowship will be held
on Thursday, Sept 10th 2009, 6:15 PM – 7:30 PM
--including members from other local non-partisan groups such as the Tulsa chapter of “Season for Non-Violence,” the Tulsa University chapter of Amnesty International, ImpeachOK1.org, TulsaTruth.org, the Center for Racial Justice in Tulsa, the Tulsa Interfaith Allliance, Pax Christi, and the Quakers.
--including a meeting of the counter-recruitment campaign activists
Come join us! Especially parents, guardians, and students in the Tulsa Public Schools system who are interested in countering the presence of military recruiters on school grounds.
An arch
lead story:
Two guests from C-R outfit in Dallas/Ft. Worth share their success strategies with the OCC
— counter-recruitment workshop in Oklahoma City, hosted by Oklahoma Center for Conscience
— "Peaceful Vocations," the Texas-based counter-recruitment organization, is online: http://www.peacefulvocations.org/
Schools in NC let Quakers pitch counter-recruitment
— a Quaker peace activist is granted her request for access to high school students so she can warn them about joining the military
— For years, Sally Ferrell had been asking permission to talk to students about alternatives to joining the military
related story:
Veterans start over as colleges ignore experience
— College-bound veterans find it's back to basics as schools ignore years of military experience
— Military experience considered useless by some university admissions boards
fact:
At least one in five colleges and universities in the U.S. do not give academic credit for military experience.
related story:
Vets shred uniforms to heal through art
— The Combat Paper Project, a Vermont-based collective of combat vets who became artists after leaving the military, has spent the past year holding coast-to-coast workshops aimed at teaching former service members to help themselves by recycling fatigues into artwork.
file under: active-duty resistance
New video promoting "Under the Hood Cafe" (close to Ft. Hood, TX): "The Resistors," by Casey J Porter
— includes interview footage with Spc. Victor Agayo, conscientious objector refusing to deploy to Afghanistan
— "Under the Hood" is also mentioned in this story about Sgt. Travis Bishop, inspired by Agayo's example: http://www.truthout.org/081209A
— video link: http://www.vimeo.com/5901045
quote: "Soldiers and civilians work together to create balance and support each other where the Army fails."
Report Card on Obama's Sec'y of Education, Arne Duncan
— the Military-Corporate Bias in Chicago-area schools under the now National Secretary of Education
— Student outcomes in the Chicago School District prove that it is a poor model to follow
facts & figures:
As CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan he personally oversaw the attempted closing of 20 Chicago public schools in low-income neighborhoods of color in 2004.
Chicago's fourth and eighth graders ranked, with only one exception, in the bottom half of all districts nationwide in math, reading, and science in 2003, 2005 and 2007. In addition, from 2004 to 2008, the Chicago Public Schools district failed to make "adequate yearly progress."
Chicago is the most militarized school district in the nation. Chicago Public Schools has five military high schools, more than any city in the nation, and 21 "middle school cadet corps" programs. All but one of the military high schools are in African American communities, and all the middle school cadet programs are in overwhelmingly black or Latina/o schools
quote:
A call to abolish ROTC, to help end American Imperialism
"Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools."
~Chalmers Johnson
from the archives
Lyrics to "Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die" by Country Joe McDonald
— standing ovation at Woodstock, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBdeCxJmcAo
excerpt: '"Come on mothers be the first ones on your block, to have your boy come home in a box"
page two:
The Hell of War Comes Home: Newspaper Series Documents Murder, Suicide, Kidnappings by Iraq Vets
A startling two-part series published in the Gazette newspaper of Colorado Springs titled “Casualties of War” examines the difficulty of returning to civilian life after being trained to be a killer.
— Democracy Now! does an interview with the reporter who broke the story and gets the Army’s response to the list of atrocities committed by Iraq veterans on U.S. soil, as laid out by Dave Philips, in his newspaper articles.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/30/the_hell_of_war_comes_home
file under: arbitrary imprisonment
Conscientious Objector Sentenced to 12 months
— Another Fort Hood TX soldier was sentenced more harshly for his stance as a conscientious objector
— Sgt. Bishop believes all war is wrong, after religious conversion experience; seeking legal status as a CO
sidebar
U.S. Apache Helicopter Kills Cucumber Farmers in Afghan Village
— file under: increasingly aerial occupation
related story:
US Copter Opens Fire on Afghan Medical Clinic
file under: war crime committed by U.S. forces
quote:
Air cadet programs appeal to the psychotic
“Every boy in this society grows up wanting to fly a fighter jet –wouldn't it be fun?-- but you gotta be a murderer to fly one -- is the only catch.
~Scott Horton, the host of antiwar.com radio
http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/08/01/eric-stoner/
backpage:
analysis:
The Secret Shame of our Empire of Bases
by Chalmers Johnson
The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Sept 2009
lead story
"Peaceful Vocations" uses court case precedents set in other states to institute effective counter-recruitment presence in North Texas
Two guests from C-R outfit in Dallas/Ft. Worth share their success strategies with the OCC, in Oklahoma City
Event hosted by the Oklahoma Center for Conscience, held Aug 10, 2009
by T. Nuspl, for the Tulsa Peace Fellowship
Ft Worth - Peaceful Vocations, the counter-recruitment outfit, is making visits to each public school in its area at least twice per year, plus attending college recruiting days on school grounds. Peaceful Vocations has used the law, and the decisions by various courts in the U.S., to uphold and put into practice its right to have the same degree of access to high school students as do military recruiters. It is a long held complaint among counter-recruitment task forces across the nation, associated with peace groups such as the Oklahoma Center for Conscience, that the so-called "No Child Left Behind" legislation enacted under the Bush-Cheney administration gave military recruiters a privileged degree of access that was both unjust and unfair to the students targeted for recruitment.
According to one member of Peaceful Vocations, their campaign to get counter-recruitment booklets in to ALL of the schools in their district, as well as pamphlets responding to the hype used by recruiters to inveigle students into joining up, was a long-term struggle.
"This is the hardest work you will ever do," said Yvette Richardson, a U.S. Army veteran involved in the coordination of Peaceful Vocations.
In addition to visits to school grounds, Peaceful Vocations also engages in weekly events with community service groups, such as providing back-to-school packets that include the essential "Opt Out" form, so that students who object to having their personal details and private contact information divulged to military recruiters can use an official means of redress, to prevent their school administrators from handing over the private information to the recruiters. Peaceful Vocations has its spokespersons speak at rallies, such as at the recent Cesar Chavez parade, and they march purposefully right behind the ROTC contingent in such parades. Their large 5' x 10' banner "BOOKS NOT BOMBS" is often visible at community events, in parks, and in various other public spaces. In particular, the outfit is often invited to community events hosted by Hispanics, Native Americans, or African Americans, groups that are often targeted as part of the poverty draft. Boys & Girls clubs have also invited Peaceful Vocations to speak in about 15 districts.
Essential to the successes of Peaceful Vocations, according to Yvette Richardson and Diane Wood, a retired Registered Nurse also involved in coordinating the group, is a ruling made in the U.S. Ninth District Court. In San Diego, a counter-recruitment outfit called the Committee to Opposing the Military Draft was granted a huge civil rights victory, in a recent court case in their district. The watershed decision stated that groups presenting alternatives to the misinformation provided by military recruiters had a right to provide their views on school grounds, in opposition to the recruiters attempting to prey on high school students.
Although the decision was binding for that district only, the Ninth District's decision has become a precedent for courts in five or six other districts. School attorneys are now aware of this watershed decision. As a result, in an understanding reached with public school districts in North Texas, Peaceful Vocations is able to have access to school grounds and talk to students every time that a military recruiter makes a presentation in a school, to distribute its literature wherever pro-recruitment propaganda is deposited with school counsellors, as well as to place posters side by side with any pro-recruitment poster that is found on school grounds.
The school boards have determined that the principals of individual schools are obliged to allow the counter-recruiters into their schools, as per the terms of the law. In theory, should a recruiter attempt to pull a student out of a class session in order to give them the "hard sell," a group like Peaceful Vocations should be given a chance to provide the antidote to the misinformation that the recruiter may have provided, in the interest of having students make fully-informed decisions about their futures.
In a success particular to North Texas, Peaceful Vocations discovered that schools were allowing posters for recruiting purposes that had both machine guns and/or pistols on display, contrary to district rules about posters in hallways and counseling offices on school grounds. Now there are no guns in any military displays on school grounds, in the schools where Peaceful Vocations is vigilant. This is a far cry better than other school districts, such as in Oklahoma, where so-called instructors are tolerated who even bring mock guns into the classroom.
In addition to community activists and veterans, Peaceful Vocations also has the cooperation of the students themselves. With the help of intrepid students, Peaceful Vocations is able to report back to the school board about violations committed on school grounds by military recruiters and/or JROTC "instructors." With the help of students, Peaceful Vocations hopes to emphasize the need to de-militarize area public schools. Students have the right to organize groups on school grounds for the express purpose of de-militarizing their respective schools. Peaceful Vocations means to be a resource for such students.
Among plans for the immediate future, Peaceful Vocations will be hosting "Back-to-School" "Opt-Out Parties" for students enrolled in Ft. Worth area schools.
byline: T. Nuspl is President (2009) of the Tulsa Peace Fellowship. He is also a member of the TPF counter-recruitment task force designed to provide alternative information to counter the propaganda provided by DoD and Pentagon advertisements and/or by recruiters targeting youth, in particular high school students susceptible to joining up without a full understanding of the risks and the downfalls involved in being part of the U.S. military machine. He has also presented counter-recruitment information to college-level students.
© Tony Nuspl 2009
School lets Quaker counter recruiting pitches
By Mike Baker - The Associated Press
Posted Aug 12, 2009
RALEIGH, N.C. — A rural North Carolina school district with a proud military tradition has surrendered to a Quaker peace activist’s request for access to high school students so she can warn them about joining the military, attorneys said Wednesday.
For years, Sally Ferrell had been asking permission to talk to students about alternatives to joining the military. The Wilkes County School Board had denied her access, even though military recruiters are typically allowed in schools.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that Ferrell’s plight was a matter of free speech, said attorneys reached a settlement this week with school officials granting the group, North Carolina Peace Action, the same opportunities as military recruiters.
Ferrell said in a statement she looks forward to providing job-related information. She has previously touted AmeriCorps and other alternatives to the military.
The government-funded AmeriCorps offers a range of volunteer opportunities including housing construction, youth outreach, disaster response and caring for the elderly. Most participants receive an annual stipend of slightly less than $12,000 for working 10 months to a year.
In part, the agreement puts new restrictions on all types of recruiters. Instead of allowing recruiters to set up a table in the cafeteria to meet the students directly, Superintendent Stephen Laws said they will instead meet only with students who specifically sign up to hear about opportunities.
“We’re extremely pleased with the agreement, and we’re excited about moving on,” Laws said.
Recruiters have been relying more heavily on high schools to help fill the ranks of the all-volunteer military. Thousands of people like Ferrell have responded with counter-recruiting groups, saying the military often gives misleading information.
Activists have complained the military often targets high schools in poor and rural areas, where graduating students have limited options. Wilkes County, on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 50 miles west of Winston-Salem, has been hurt by the exodus of manufacturing jobs. Its June unemployment rate was 13.2 percent.
Ferrell first approached the school district in 2005, but Laws denied access. Two years later, the group reached an agreement with the school board allowing Ferrell in the high schools, but Laws revoked that privilege shortly after.
“We allow recruiters into the schools to recruit for post-high school opportunities. But she wasn’t offering that,” he said last year.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/08/ap_military_schools_recruiter...
related story:
Veterans start over as colleges ignore experience
College-bound veterans find it's back to basics as schools ignore years of military experience
Alan Scher Zagier, AP News
Aug 20, 2009
Twelve years of military service left Donald Spradling highly trained in satellite imagery, nuclear engineering and foreign intelligence analysis. None of that made a difference to the University of Missouri.
Nearly half a million veterans are expected on college campuses this year as part of the new GI Bill. The surge is leading to a call for schools to re-examine their policies of declining to grant college credit for military training and service.
An estimated one in five colleges and universities do not give academic credit for military education, according to a recent survey of 723 schools by the American Council on Education that is believed to be the first systematic measure. Even more of the schools, 36 percent, said they don't award credit for military occupational training.
For Spradling and others, that can mean spending more on tuition, stretching financial aid or GI Bill scholarships and delaying their entry into the work force.
At Boston College, a private school, the standard has always been to accept credit only for institutions of higher education, said school spokesman Jack Dunn.
"That holds true for members of the armed forces as well," he said.
Many college-bound veterans said military recruiters often offer an unrealistic portrayal of what awaits in academia, suggesting their military coursework and training will count for college credit.
Army veteran Michael McIntosh noted that Missouri's policy meant he could not use his experience jumping from planes as part of an airborne unit to fulfill a physical education requirement — even as other students could enroll in scuba diving or similar pursuits.
"I would have liked for them to at least acknowledge it," he said. "It might have been a military education, but it was still a lot of work and a lot of training."
http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/08/20/veterans-start-over-as-colleges-...
Vets shred uniforms to heal through art
By Russ Bynum - The Associated Press
Posted : Saturday Aug 8, 2009
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Tired of taking pills prescribed to suppress his pain, Zach Choate decided to wrestle head-on with the trauma that followed him home from Iraq. He began by using a razor to shred his Army uniform to bits.
“I’m hoping I come out of this a little more whole, a little bit more at peace,” said Choate, who was a gunner in the 10th Mountain Division. “I’m not an anti-war, anti-military person. This is just me fixing me.”
He chopped his camouflage jacket into inchlong strips. He diced the American flag patch on its right shoulder, along with a prescription for sleeping pills he found in a pocket. Even the Purple Heart ribbon Choate earned after being wounded by a roadside bomb got torn into tiny threads.
The 25-year-old soldier from Cartersville joined a handful of Iraq veterans at a Savannah art studio last week to destroy uniforms that had become painful reminders of their combat experience, using them to create something new.
The young vets mixed the jigsaw pieces with water and beat them into pulp to make sheets of paper — blank canvasses on which they could write, paint or screen images to tell their personal war stories.
The Combat Paper Project, a Vermont-based collective of combat vets who became artists after leaving the military, has spent the past year holding coast-to-coast workshops aimed at teaching former service members to help themselves by recycling fatigues into artwork.
Drew Cameron, who became opposed to the Iraq war after serving in an Army artillery unit during the 2003 invasion, started the group after moving to Burlington, Vt., where he learned paper making from a local artist while also becoming active with Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Cameron, 27, saw it as a way reach out to other Iraq veterans haunted by memories of friends slain in battle and men they had killed, wounded physically and psychologically by bomb and mortar explosions, and struggling to direct their own lives after years of being told what to do by the military.
“I just want to cut this thing into a million pieces,” said Jason Hurd, tearing the seams of the desert camouflage jacket he wore in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 with the Tennessee National Guard.
After spending 10 years in the military, the 29-year-old from Savannah said destroying his uniform was a way of proving that his life is now his own. He says he hasn’t shaved or cut his hair since leaving the Guard two years ago.
“When you hold these strips in your hand, you think about all the times you ironed it and spit polished your boots — all that was something the Army made you do,” Hurd said. “This is my uniform now. I’m not Army property anymore, and neither is it.”
The vets dunked their uniform scraps into water swirling through a belt-driven machine that beat the mixture into pulp before being drained into 18-gallon tubs. The pulp was sifted through a screen into sheets of paper, then carefully smoothed and stuck onto the windows outside to dry in the summer heat.
The finished paper is thick, almost like cardboard, with an olive-gray color accented by fine threads of red, blue and purple from any awards and decorations the former soldiers add.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/08/ap_combatart_080609/
The Duncan Doctrine
The Military-Corporate Bias of the New Secretary of Education
By Andy Kroll, Jan 2009
President-elect Barack Obama named Arne Duncan, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools system (CPS), as his nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education. He was also regularly hailed as a "reformer," fearless when it came to challenging the educational status quo and more than willing to shake up hidebound, moribund public school systems.
Yet a closer investigation of Duncan's record in Chicago casts doubt on that label.
Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan's belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago's school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he's started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.
The Militarization of Secondary Education
Today, the flagship projects in CPS's militarization are its five military academies, affiliated with either the Army, Navy, or Marines. All students -- or cadets, as they're known -- attending one of these schools are required to enroll as well in the academy's Junior ROTC program. That means cadets must wear full military uniforms to school everyday, and undergo daily uniform inspections. As part of the academy's curriculum, they must also take a daily ROTC course focusing on military history, map reading and navigation, drug prevention, and the branches of the Department of Defense.
In addition, military personnel from the U.S. armed services “teach” alongside regular teachers in each academy, and also fill administrative roles such as academy "commandants." Three of these military academies were created in part with Department of Defense appropriations -- funds secured by Illinois lawmakers -- and when the proposed Air Force Academy High School opens this fall, CPS will be the only public school system in the country with Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps high school academies.
Encouraging students to be critical thinkers, to question accepted beliefs and norms, remains key to a teacher's role at any grade level. The military's culture of uniformity and discipline, important as it may be for an army, hardly aligns with these pedagogical values.
Of no less concern are the types of students Chicago's military academies are trying to attract. All of CPS's military academies (except the Rickover Naval Academy) are located in low-income neighborhoods with primarily black and/or Hispanic residents. As a result, student enrollment in the academies consists almost entirely of minorities. Whites, who already represent a mere 9% of the students in the Chicago system, make up only 4% of the students enrolled in the military academies.
There is obviously a correlation between these low-income, minority communities, the military academies being established in them, and the long-term recruitment needs of the U.S. military. The schools essentially function as recruiting tools. Before the House Armed Services Committee in 2000, the armed services chiefs of staff testified that 30%-50% of all Junior ROTC cadets later enlist in the military. Organizations opposing the military's growing presence in public schools insist that it's no mistake the number of military academies in Chicago is on the rise at a time when the U.S. military has had difficulty meeting its recruitment targets while fighting two unpopular wars.
It seems clear enough that, when it comes to the militarization of the Chicago school system, whatever Duncan's goals, the results are likely to be only partly "educational."
When measured on a national scale, Duncan's record looks a lot less impressive. In comparison to other major urban school districts (including Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C.) in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or "The Nation's Report Card," Chicago fourth and eighth graders ranked, with only one exception, in the bottom half of all districts in math, reading, and science in 2003, 2005 and 2007. In addition, from 2004 to 2008, the Chicago Public Schools district failed to make "adequate yearly progress" as mandated by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act.
Public education is not meant to be a win-lose, us-versus-them system, nor is it meant to be a recruitment system for the military -- and yet this, it seems, is at the heart of Duncan's legacy in Chicago, and so a reasonable indication of the kind of "reform" he's likely to bring to the country as education secretary.
byline: Andy Kroll is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a student at the University of Michigan.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175022/andy_kroll_will_public_educa...
for more on the Military-Corporate Bias in Chicago-area schools under Duncan, please see:
The Chicago Model & Obama and Duncan's Education Policy: Like Bush's, Only Worse
By Danny Weil
http://www.counterpunch.com/weil08242009.html
TPF editorial: The counter-recruitment task force of the Tulsa Peace Fellowship certainly bemoans the fact that, under an Obama administration, save effective organized opposition, the so-called "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) legislation is not being repealed, as an error in policy direction committed under the Bush regime. The Orwellian newspeak of this legislation's name and the privileges it grants to military recruiters preying upon students during school hours betray the true intention of the federal education department: to keep the poverty draft in place, by denying a proper education to Blacks and Hispanics living in poorer neighborhoods.
from the archives
Lyrics to "Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die"
by Country Joe McDonald
--standing ovation at Woodstock, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBdeCxJmcAo
"Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die"
by Country Joe McDonald
Come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
he's got himself in a terrible jam
way down yonder in Viet Nam so
put down your books and pick up a gun we're
gonna have a whole lotta fun
And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for
don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Viet Nam
And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates
ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee we're all gonna die
Come on wall street don't be slow
why man this war is a go-go
there's plenty good money to be made by
supplying the army with the tools of its trade
let's hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
they drop it on the Viet Cong
Come on generals, let's move fast
your big chance has come at last
now you can go out and get those reds
cos the only good commie is the one that's dead and
you know that peace can only be won when we've
blown 'em all to kingdom come
Come on mothers throughout the land
pack your boys off to Viet Nam
come on fathers don't hesitate
send your sons off before it's too late
and you can be the first ones on your block
to have your boy come home in a box
The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Sept 2009
page two
The Hell of War Comes Home: Newspaper Series Documents Murder, Suicide, Kidnappings by Iraq Vets
A startling two-part series published in the Gazette newspaper of Colorado Springs titled “Casualties of War” examines a part of war seldom discussed by the media or government officials: the difficulty of returning to civilian life after being trained to be a killer. The story focuses on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment. Soldiers from the brigade have have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. The Army unit’s murder rate is 114 times the rate for Colorado Springs.
--Democracy Now! does an interview with the reporter who broke the story and gets the Army’s response to the list of atrocities laid out by Dave Philips, in his articles.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/30/the_hell_of_war_comes_home
TPF editorial comment: Why didn't the Army court martial Kenneth Eastridge for the 80 murders he committed of Iraqi civilians?
related story:
Another Soldier Refuses Afghanistan Deployment
Wednesday 12 August 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | r e p o r t
Sgt. Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad with the 3rd Signal Brigade, faces a court-martial this Friday for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. Bishop is the second soldier from Fort Hood in as may weeks to be tried by the military for his stand against an occupation he believes is "illegal." He insists that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposes on both moral and legal grounds and he has filed for conscientious objector (CO) status.
http://www.truthout.org/081209A
U.S. Apache Helicopter Kills Cucumber Farmers in Afghan Village
file under: increasingly aerial occupation
Source: CBC News
Posted: 08/06/09 9:01AM
Five farmers were killed by an air strike from Western forces, Afghan police said Thursday.
The farmers were loading cucumbers into a taxi in the rural Zhari district near Kandahar city when a military helicopter fired on them, said district police Chief Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi.
Sarhadi alleged the strike was conducted by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Officials will review footage from the Apache helicopter to determine what happened.
The repeated deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of foreign troops have caused deep resentment among Afghan people. President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called on foreign troops to halt air strikes and raids in Afghan villages.
http://news.aol.ca/article/afghan-farmers-killed-by-air-strike-poli...
related story:
US Copter Opens Fire on Afghan Medical Clinic
Injured Taliban 'Sought Treatment,' Leading to Attack
by Jason Ditz, August 27, 2009
US and Afghan forces, backed by a US Apache helicopter attacked a medical clinic in the Paktika Province of Afghanistan yesterday after receiving reports that a wounded Taliban commander had “sought treatment” at the facility.
Attacking a medical clinic, however, particularly when health care is in such short supply in rural Afghanistan, is likely to fuel resentment among locals. Likewise, the attack on a relatively minor Taliban commander when he was already injured and seeking medical treatment is probably going to raise further suspicions as the Afghan government continues to talk about reconciliation.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/08/27/us-copter-opens-fire-on-afghan-m...
The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Sept 2009
backpage
We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
excerpt from a longer article by Chalmers Johnson
31 July 2009
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:
"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults — 2,923 — and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior.
byline: Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).
Tulsa Peace Fellowship's counter-recruitment update/digest for Sept 2009
masthead
who we are:
The website for the Tulsa Peace Fellowship is:
www.tulsapeacefellowship.org
TPF meets monthly @ Peace House in Tulsa
inside the Unitarian Universalist church at 1314 N. Greenwood Ave, in Tulsa, close to corner of Pine & Greenwood, just north of the OSU-Tulsa campus
If you have not already done so, please join the new social networking tool for TPF on Ning, in lieu of TPFtalks on yahoogroups, which has fallen into disuse Thank you! You can check out our new tool here: http://tulsapeacefellowship.ning.com/ (new for 2009) Also still going strong: our announcement list on yahoo! tulsapeace@yahoogroups.com (since 2002) Go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/ and search for "tulsapeace"
Through its counter-recruitment task force, TPF is a member of the National Network in Opposition to the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) representing some 188 counter-recruitment groups in cities and towns across the country.
On the web: http://www.nnomy.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=v...
Tulsa Peace Fellowship is non-partisan, and is open to 3rd parties, progressives, Dems, libertarians, etc. TPF is the activist wing of the peace movement in Eastern Oklahoma "Waging Peace One Person at a Time".
Peace House-Tulsa is an incubator for peace and justice. The Peace House building can host a wide range of activities: classes, discussion groups, meditation, music-making, social gatherings, retreats, etc. While some activities may be limited by the size and amenities of this building, our imaginations need not be limited!
If you enjoyed this news digest and/or found this update useful, please consider making a donation of time, money, or effort to the Tulsa Peace Fellowship. Details on tax status available.
info for TPF counter-recruitment-- contact by phone 918 906 0828
The next regular meeting of the Fellowship will be held
on Thursday, Sept 10th 2009, 6:15 PM – 7:30 PM
--including members from other local non-partisan groups such as the Tulsa chapter of “Season for Non-Violence,” the Tulsa University chapter of Amnesty International, ImpeachOK1.org, TulsaTruth.org, the Center for Racial Justice in Tulsa, the Tulsa Interfaith Allliance, Pax Christi, and the Quakers.
--including a meeting of the counter-recruitment campaign activists
Come join us! Especially parents, guardians, and students in the Tulsa Public Schools system who are interested in countering the presence of military recruiters on school grounds.
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