The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Aug 2010

[Tony Nuspl]

counter-recruitment update-digest for aug2010_gangs-with-military-t...

Truth in Recruiting- "Don't Believe the Hype!"
(scroll down for details and weblinks to any story)

Lead Story from the past month's news:
Chicago Cop Warns: U.S. Gang Members Coming Home from Iraq with Military Training
--American cop who served in Afghanistan and Iraq blows the whistle on Pentagon's slack recruiting
standards
--police departments are now obliged to track whether gang members were in the U.S. military, a thorough condemnation of
DoD recruitment practices

quote:
"The military needs to wake up."
~T.J. Leyden, a former white supremacist, now working against the movement, who warns that skinheads and street gangs are entrenched in
both the regular military and the National Guard.

page 1

antiwar radio, streaming audio on demand:
Becoming a Marine isn't so great, says "Punk Johnny Cash"
--veteran  of the U.S. Marine Corps and blogger discusses the similarity of the mindset of an enlisted man
and a battered wife

John Kerry on the WikiLeaks Afghanistan leak
--Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) in response to the New York Times story on the leak of
classified documents concerning Afghanistan and Pakistan
--US intelligence records reveal civilian killings, 'friendly fire' deaths
and shadowy special forces, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

War-What Is It Good For?
Absolutely nothing, according to latest work by San Anselmo filmmaker
--recently released Every War Has Two Losers, a film about Stafford's objections to combat

file under: losing hearts and minds
Civilian Casualties Create New Enemies, Study Confirms

quote:
“An incident which results in 10 civilian casualties will generate about 1 additional IED attack in the following 2 months,” the researchers write.

facts & figures:
The most recent United Nations quarterly study of political and security affairs in Afghanistan found that civilian casualties caused by the U.S. and its allies dropped from 33
percent to 30 percent of total civilian casualties, a dip the U.N.
attributed to measures resulting from “a reiteration of the July
2009 tactical directive by the Commander of the International
Security Assistance Force limiting the use of force.” But the
researchers suggest that Afghans aren’t going say, “Those
Americans are OK! They only cause one out of three dead innocent
Afghans!” — especially if, as the U.N. also found, civilian
casualties in the escalated war are on the rise overall.

from the archives:
Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler: War is a Racket
--in 1935 he wrote this short exposé, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare

quote:
“Neoconservatives are not really conservatives at all... They are supported by very large companies and government officials who benefit from perpetual war, and the
billions of spending it requires.”
~Rep. John Duncan (R-Tennessee, 2nd District, Knoxville, Maryville and Athens) in a
speech on the U.S. House floor, March 2010, channeling Major General
Smedley's conclusion that war is a racket. source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMnj8yd8dqA

page 2

file under: political asylum for conscientious objectors
US Army War Resister Wins in Canada Appeal
--Canada's appellate court has ruled a U.S. Army deserter's beliefs must be taken into account in deciding whether to
deport him back to the United States.

featured op/ed: classic dialogue written by U.S. veteran of Korean War
"Conscience on the Battlefield" by Leonard Read (1898–1983)
--a soldier contemplates the Day of Judgment for him personally, based on
the record of his actions

excerpt:
"While in many respects you were an excellent person, the record shows that you killed men –  and were also responsible for the death of many women and children during
this military campaign.  Did you kill these people as an act of
self defense? No, you did not. Were they threatening your life or
your family? No, they were not. Were they on your shores, about to
enslave you? No, they were not."

Pfc Bradley Manning arrested for leaking "Collateral Murder" video
--the U.S. military arrested an Army intelligence analyst who allegedly leaked the video of a Baghdad
massacre, which shows a war crime committed from an Apache
helicopter
--the Wikileaks video not only provided the Pentagon with a black eye, but will likely be used in evidence to hold the war
criminals accountable

file under: homosexual & in the army
Legal group: Gays shouldn’t answer Pentagon survey

---

The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Aug 2010
lead story

Chicago Cop Warns: U.S. Gang Members Coming Home from Iraq with Military
Training
--American cop who served in Afghanistan and Iraq blows the whistle on Pentagon's slack recruiting standards

July 18, 2010

By Frank Main, Chicago Sun-Times Staff Reporter

Being in a street gang is forbidden for members of the U.S. armed forces. But you might not guess that if you were to
visit U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to
soldiers who have recently served there.

Jeffrey Stoleson, a Wisconsin corrections official, returned from Iraq in January with
photos of gang graffiti on armored vehicles, latrines and buildings.
Stoleson, a sergeant with a National Guard unit, was there for nine
months to help the Army set up a prison facility outside Baghdad.

"I saw graffiti [from gangs] out of Chicago," Stoleson said, adding
that there was a lot of graffiti for Texas and California gangs, as
well as Mexican drug cartels.

A Chicago Police officer -- who retired from the regular Army and was recently on a tour of
Afghanistan in the Army Reserve -- said Bagram Air Base was covered
with Chicago gang graffiti.

"It seems bigger now," said the officer, who previously served a tour in Iraq, where he also
saw gang graffiti.

Now back in Chicago, the officer said he has arrested high-level gang members who have served in the military
and kept the "Infantryman's bible" in their homes. "It's
scary," he said.

In 2006, Stoleson saw similar graffiti in Iraq during another tour of duty there. That year, the Chicago
Sun-Times reported on gangs in the military -- and published
several of Stoleson's photos of gang graffiti.

Congress eventually banned members of the military from belonging to street
gangs. And last November, the Defense Department added the ban to its
rules.

Spokesmen for the Army and Defense Department said they could not provide figures on how many soldiers have been thrown out
of the military or otherwise disciplined as a result of gang
membership.

Stoleson, who stressed he was not speaking for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections or the Army, said it appears the
problem is worse than ever. He warned that soldiers who return to
gang life back home are especially dangerous because they know
military tactics that they can use against the police and the public
-- as a Marine did in 2005 when he killed a police officer and
wounded three others in a California ambush.

"Gang members are coming home now with one or two tours," he said.
"Some were on the field of battle."

Civilian contractors in Iraq are part of the gang problem overseas, Stoleson
said. He said he was involved in destroying a large quantity of drugs
confiscated from U.S. contractors in Iraq.

Stoleson, who is a member of the International Latino Gang
Investigators Association, said some police departments in
California are now tracking whether gang members were in the
military.

A second Chicago Police officer, who searches homes for drugs and guns, said gang members targeted by his team are
sometimes current or former members of the armed forces. That becomes
part of the team's pre-raid briefings because the suspect is an
increased safety risk with military training, the officer said.

"We recently arrested a guy in the reserves for crack [cocaine],"
the officer said. "He was a gang-banger."

T.J. Leyden, a former white supremacist, was one of those guys. He said he
recruited fellow members of the [his gang] into the Marines when he
was in the corps in the late 1980s and early 1990s and sent stolen
Kevlar body armor and helmets to fellow skinheads back home.

"I wore white supremacist T-shirts, and I hung a swastika flag out of my
barracks," said Leyden, who was kicked out of the Marines for
drinking and fighting. "I hated America. The only reason I was a
Marine was because they were the baddest of the bad."

Leyden, who lives in Utah now, said he quit the white-supremacy movement in
1996 because he was worried "my sons were becoming me."

He began working against the movement and founded Straight
Talk Consulting, giving lectures to students and advising
the FBI, the National Guard and other organizations about gangs in
the military.

Leyden said his informants have told him that skinheads and street gangs are still entrenched in both the regular
military and the National Guard.

"The military needs to wake up," he
said.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2506292,CST-NWS-graffiti18.article

---

The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Aug 2010
page 1

antiwar radio:
Becoming a Marine isn't so great, says veteran & blogger
Scott Horton Interviews "Punk Johnny Cash"
July 17, 2010

“Punk Johnny Cash,” veteran  of the U.S. Marine Corps and blogger at the GonzoTimes.com, discusses movie portrayals
of the marines, how basic training changes one forever, the modern
epidemics of shell shocked vets and on-base violence, the similarity
of the mindset of an enlisted man and a battered wife, examples of
how they humiliate and break down new recruits in order to rebuild
them and whether or not the U.S. needs to take over the planet Earth
in the first place.

MP3 here.
(20:22)

http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/07/17/punk-johnny-cash/


John Kerry on the WikiLeaks Afghanistan leak
by Joan McCarter
Mon Jul 26, 2010

    Statement By Chairman Kerry On Leaked Documents On Afghanistan And Pakistan

    WASHINGTON, D.C. - Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John
Kerry (D-MA) released the following statement this evening in
response to the New York Times story on the leak of classified
documents concerning Afghanistan and Pakistan:

"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical
stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and
make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent."

This statement is in stark contrast to the White House reaction, and coming from a Senator with the stature that Kerry has on issues of war, indicates that this could be the beginning of an
important discussion about, as he puts it, "the reality of
America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan." The country
needs and deserves a serious policy discussion on this
war.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/7/26/887789/-John-Kerry-on-t...

More coverage:

The WikiLeaks Afghanistan leak
by Joan McCarter
Mon Jul 26, 2010

A massive new leak by Wikileaks of more than 90,000 pages of classified materials covering
the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009 dominates the front page of
the New York Times today, one of the outlets to receive the
papers along with The Guardian and Der Spiegel.

The Times' initial report gives the basic overview:

    A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on
Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in
Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official
portrayal....

    The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004
through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the
United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in
Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since
2001....

    The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some
elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public
eye:

    • The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not
been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped
the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

    • Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group
of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill
list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which
have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable
successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and
stoking Afghan resentment.

    • The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and
strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less
impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing
American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the
Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

    • The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations
inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and
conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of
Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

    Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the
war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military
made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a
helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles
or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special
Operations commandos.

The White House has condemned the leak and in a statement from national security adviser, Gen. James Jones,
vows: "These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing
commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan;
to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the
Afghan and Pakistani people."

With an American public becoming increasingly impatient with the ongoing war, which has been
ill-defined from it's outset when the Bush administration abandoned
the pursuit of bin Laden, and now the release of these documents will
bring that conversation front and center. The conversation about this
should not be over the leak itself, but what it reveals about this
decade-long war.

The Times has devoted a large section of its site to the
documents.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/7/26/887768/-The-WikiLeaks-A...

Much more
coverage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs


War-What Is It Good For?
Absolutely nothing, according to latest work by San Anselmo filmmaker

By Ronnie Cohen
July 9, 2010, Marin, CA
Published by Pacific Sun.

Born in 1914, the first year of World War I, poet William Stafford grew up hearing war horror
stories along with the biblical commandment, "Thou shalt not
kill." When the U.S. government drafted him into World War II,
he felt he could not go and instead became a conscientious objector,
one of 12,000 who lived in civilian public-service camps throughout
the country.

"I belong to a small, fanatical sect," Stafford wrote in his journal. "We believe that current ways of
carrying out world affairs are malignant."

San Anselmo filmmaker Haydn Reiss recently released Every War Has Two Losers,
a film about Stafford's objections to combat. Reiss would like
viewers to see the film as an invitation to reconsider their ideas
about conflict. The 32-minute documentary feels more like a poem or a
peace meditation than a movie. It assembles a cast of
writers—including Alice Walker, Robert Bly, Maxine Hong Kingston
and just-named U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin—who read Stafford's
poems and journal entries and talk about how his words moved them.
Marin County actor Peter Coyote provides the voice of Stafford, who
died in 1993.    

Last week, Walker joined Reiss and media critic Norman Solomon on stage at the
Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center after a screening of the
film. The three talked about their disgust with what they see as a
warmongering, materialistic culture and brainstormed ways to change
it.

"Small ways of choosing to live may be the best we can do," Solomon said.

Walker said the film prompted her to consider actions she could take to stop war. "It again
reminds me that it's up to us. And leadership will always disappoint
us—even though we worked hard to elect it," she said. (During
the 2008 presidential election, the author of the 1983 Pulitzer
Prize-winner The Color Purple campaigned for President Barack
Obama.)

Solomon talked about being disgusted by what he called "warnography." "We're besieged by it," he said,
"and it has become the wallpaper of our society."

Walker did most of the talking. She tried to rouse the San Rafael audience
to organize against the Hollywood motion-picture industry. "Do
we have to sit and endure bombings, car crashes?" Walker asked.
"We don't have to endure it. We can actually see how to change
things. From now on, these people will not insult us. We do not have
to endure this. Where is the human indignation in us?"

Over the past five years, Solomon said, Marin County taxpayers sent $1.5
billion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Audience members gasped
when they heard the figure.

Reiss, who is 56 and came of age during the Vietnam War, said he feels frightened because Americans
seem numb to the wars our country is waging. "War is not
divorced from concerns about the environment, health, the economy,"
he said.

"The position I take is the reason war is never a good idea is because every war is a war against the earth, and you
cannot just bomb your mother," Walker said.

Solomon said we tend to objectify the people we call our enemies and turn the
people at the other end of our missiles into non-people. In the film,
Stafford says, "When it's an enemy, it's not a person anymore.
It's a target."

"When I lived in the South, white people didn't think we had feelings," said Walker, an
African-American. "From the way we are behaving as a nation, we
don't feel. We have numbed ourselves out. People are just numbed out
and seduced by the mall in a big way."

Walker said an affluent white woman recently asked her if she didn't believe that
economic disparities between whites and people of color were
narrowing. The question incensed Walker.

"The inequity has not disappeared at all," she said. "When you see the
soldiers going off to Iraq, the inequity is visible in the faces of
the soldiers. They're mostly poor boys and girls. They don't have
good teeth, good healthcare."

Walker recoiled at the film's most moving image—a close-up of a crying Iraqi child, her
arms raised in surrender, staring into the barrel of a gun as
soldiers lead her out of her home. "Generations of her family
will be frightened by that moment," Walker predicted.

[T]he filmmaker, who visited German concentration camps and whose father
was Jewish, said the question is whether the war path leads to
greater safety. World War II, he said, gave birth to nuclear weapons.
"So did we win?" he asked.

"I think William Stafford's ideas are as vital today as when he wrote them 20, 30
years ago, and his essential opinion is that war is not inevitable,"
Reiss said. "He's asking us to think for ourselves, question
what we've been told and always see war as a tragedy."

For more information on Every War Has Two Losers and a schedule of
screenings, go to www.everywar.com.

Contact Ronnie Cohen at [e-mail].

http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/news/2010-07-09-11-12-42-news.php


Civilian Casualties Create New Enemies, Study Confirms

By Spencer Ackerman
July 6, 2010

Yes, we needed economists to tell us this. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of
Economic Research finds “strong evidence for a revenge effect”
when examining the relationship between civilian casualties caused by
the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan and radicalization
after such incidents occur. The paper even estimates of how many
insurgent attacks to expect after each civilian death. Those
findings, however intuitive, might resolve an internal military
debate about the counter-productivity of civilian casualties — and
possibly fuel calls for withdrawal.

“When ISAF units kill civilians,” the research team finds, referring to the U.S.-led
coalition in Afghanistan, “this increases the number of willing
combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.” According
to their model, every innocent civilian killed by ISAF predicts an
“additional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next 6-week
period.” In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two
civilian casualties killed in ISAF-initiated military action leads to
six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks.

That’s not all. The researchers found that ISAF-caused civilian casualties
corollate with long-term radicalization in Afghanistan. Plotting
reprisal incidents of violence in areas where civilians died at
coalition hands, the data showed that “that the Coalition effect is
enduring, peaking 16 weeks after the event. This confirms the
intuition that civilian casualties by ISAF forces predict greater
violence through a long-run effect.” That’s consistent with
intuitions that civilian casualties “are affecting future violence
through increased recruitment into insurgent groups.”

The team doesn’t examine the effect of CIA drone strikes in neighboring
Pakistan, the subject of fierce debate concerning both the level of
civilian deaths the strikes generate and their radicalizing
effect.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/civilian-casualties-create-...




Further reading:
Gen. Smedley D. Butler: War is a Racket

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps,
and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S.
history.  He became widely-known for his outspoken lectures
against war profiteering, U.S. military adventurism, and what he
viewed as nascent fascism in the United States.
In addition to his speeches to pacifist groups, from 1935 to 1937 he
served as a spokesman for the American League Against War and
Fascism.  In 1935 he wrote the exposé War Is a
Racket, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind
warfare. His views on the subject are summarized in the following
passage from a 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In
short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make
Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in
1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National
City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half
a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I
helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown
Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic
for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras
right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I
helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The
best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I
operated on three continents.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

---

The Tulsa Peace Fellowship's Counter-Recruitment Update/Digest, for Aug 2010
page 2

8 July 2010
War Resister Fleeing US Army's Illegal Occupation Wins in Canada
Appeal

Canada's appellate court has ruled a U.S. Army conscientious objector's beliefs must be taken into account in
deciding whether to deport him back to the United States. A
three-judge panel of the Federal Court of Appeals issued a unanimous
decision Tuesday saying a Canadian immigration officer's decision to
turn down Jeremy Hinzman application for permanent residency was
"significantly flawed and therefore unreasonable" because
the officer had not considered Hinzman's beliefs and motivations,
Canwest News Service reported.
Hinzman, who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 but became an opponent of the war in Iraq, fled to
Toronto in 2004. He seeks to stay in Canada on humanitarian and
compassionate grounds. His case will now go back for another hearing
before a different immigration officer.

Michelle Robidoux, a spokeswoman with the War Resisters Support
Campaign, said the appellate ruling is important for other
war resisters in Canada, as well. "It's time for the Harper
government to stop deporting them and to let them stay in Canada,"
she
said.

http://www.military.com/news/article/us-army-deserter-wins-in-canad...

featured op/ed: classic dialogue written by U.S. veteran of Korean
War
"Conscience on the Battlefield" by Leonard Read (1898–1983)
--a soldier contemplates the Day of Judgment for him personally, based on the record of his
actions

excerpt, from published dialogue, 1951:

In the first place, please understand that I don’t care to discuss what you call your foreign policy. It is too late for that. The judgment which now concerns you must be rendered on you as an
individual – not on parties or mobs or armies or policies or
processes or governments. While governments limited to keeping the
peace and invoking a common justice are necessary for mortal beings,
before Him it is only the quality of individuals that counts. What
collective can have any validity for you from now on? In the Temple
of Judgment which you are about to enter, Principles only are likely
to be observed. It is almost certain that you will find there no
distinction between nationalities or between races. A woman is a
woman. A child is a child, with as much a right to an opportunity for
Self-realization as you. To take a human life – at whatever age, or
of any color – is to take a human life. You imply that you feel no
personal responsibility for having killed these people. Why, then,
did you personally accept the “honors”? According to your
notions, no one person is responsible for the deaths of these people.
Yet, they were destroyed. Seemingly, you expect collective
arrangements such as “the army” or “the government” to bear
your guilt. Yet you expect in Everlasting Life the bestowal of
personal honors for virtues. Are you not struck with the absurdity of
it all? Will you not stand before Judgment unadorned – just as a
spirit, a recorded memory and conscience? Is this not all that will
be dealt with there? Can there be any other trappings to consider
beyond this spirit you are – once a person who lived and had the
opportunity to choose between good and evil?

But, my Conscience, I had no choice. I had to do what others called my duty. Otherwise, my friends and fellow-citizens would have dubbed me a traitor. I would have been put in jail,
disgraced before man, borne the name of a coward.

You are doubtless right about what would have happened to you, and at the very hands of those whose guilt is as great as yours. In my view there can be no distinction between those who do the shooting
and those who aid the act. Moreover, the guilt would appear to be
even greater on the part of those who resorted to the coercive power
of government to get you to sacrifice your home, your fortune, your
chance of Self-realization, your life – none of which sacrifices
they themselves appear willing to make. They will face Judgment, too,
in but another moment. And they will be judged as you will be judged.
On the surface it would seem that more courage would have been
required of you to attend strictly to Principle than to do what you
did – than to take a part in tearing asunder what God has created.
Deeper reflection, however, will reveal that you and others took on
the characteristic of a herd, and by so doing surrendered your
standing as individuals. By this drifting from personal action to
mass action – a move that only alert intelligence could have
avoided – a dilemma was created for you and for all members of the
collective: the choice of shooting others or having others shoot you
for forsaking them; to do as the others demanded, or risk the
collective’s penalty for nonconformance.

Having any part in coercive, collectivist action is one way of insuring sin. If Conscience has any function, it must be as a guide to the avoidance of evil acts and their inevitable consequences.

I thought you were fighting for freedom. Isn’t it possible that the way to advance freedom is to behave like free men rather than like regimented men? You, I fear, have been spreading the very
disease you claim to be trying to destroy.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/fee-timely-classic/conscience-on-th...

Pfc Bradley Manning arrested for leaking "Collateral Murder" video

By Courage to Resist. June 23, 2010.

“From what I’ve heard so far of (Wikileaks co-founder Julian) Assange and (Army Pfc Bradley) Manning,… they are two new heroes of mine.”
~Daniel Ellsberg, famous whistle-blower of the Pentagon Papers

In April, Wikileaks.org released a notorious video depicting a U.S. helicopter attack resulting in the killing of 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters employees. The video, titled
“Collateral Murder” was widely posted and reported on. Last week,
the U.S. military arrested 22-year-old Pfc Bradley Manning, an Army
intelligence analyst who allegedly took credit for leaking the video.
Lawyers for Wikileaks have not yet been allowed access to Bradley,
who is currently being held in pretrial confinement in Kuwait.
Courage to Resist's primary concern is that Bradley has access to
civilian legal representation to fight what are expected to be very
serious charges at court martial. We expect to collaborate with many
concerned organizations and individuals in order to best support
Bradley legally and politically.

Wired reports that Bradley claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks
contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the
public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in
Washington DC.”

News reports about this case include:

• "The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo...
  By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com. June 18, 2010

• Democracy Now!
  With Amy Goodman. June 17, 2010

• "Wikileaks Commissions Lawyers to Defend Alleged Army Source"
  By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, Wired.com. June 11, 2010
  

More from Wired.com that, if true, underscores Bradley courage to expose the truth:

Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by
Wikileaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” shows a 2007 Army
helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that
the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters
employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene
afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into
his van. The man’s two children were in the van and suffered
serious injuries in the hail of gunfire...

“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from,
right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also
the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I
looked into it...”

“He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?” Tyler Watkins, a close civilian friend in Boston, said. “That was one of his major
concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a
difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir….
He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t
happen again.”

http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/846/1/

Legal group: Gays shouldn’t answer Pentagon survey

The Associated Press
July 8th, 2010

An advocacy group for gays in the military is warning them not to answer a Pentagon survey
seeking opinions on repeal of the policy that bans homosexuals from
serving openly.

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network said Thursday that troops could be accidentally exposed by answering the
survey and that the Defense Department has not agreed to grant
immunity should that happen.

The survey was e-mailed to 400,000 service members as part of a wider review by a special
working group that is studying how repeal of the policy might be
implemented and how it could affect the
military.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0708/legal-group-gays-answer-pentagon-s...





The information provided in this digest/update herein is for non-profit
use only, according to "fair use" doctrine.  Copyright
and all commercial exploitation rights remain with the various
authors/publishers cited above. The Tulsa Peace Fellowship
does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the articles
appearing herein.

[Tony Nuspl]

More complete version of the above, provided in attached PDF file, for Adobe Reader.