I am shocked and horrified by the decapitation of Nicholas Berg in Iraq, but not for the chest-puffing reasons the folks at Fox News are. U.S. military proxies held Berg without charges for an extended period of time and there are too many questions about when he was released and who he might have been released to. I’m not one for conspiracy theories but there are real questions as to how Berg ended up in front of those anonymous, hooded butchers. Whatever the answers, the U.S. military is involved in his detention, as is the FBI (who made him miss a plane that was supposed to take him out of Iraq last month), as is the U.S. government back home who didn’t cooperate with his family to get him out of there.
My major piece on this is over on the main Nonviolence.org site: “US military proxies held Berg before decaptiation; who were his executioners?”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000340.php
I’m sure to get even more hate mail than usual for this but I’ll also be watching the mainstream media coverage. I only know of many of these details because Berg was local and Channel 10 News gave background to Berg’s detention. Here’s my prediction from past experience: this story will be too hot for the mainstream media to question for a few days and then it will only be to report that there are some nutcases asking questions. Only after a few days of this kind of second-hand question will the national media drop the fascade and start asking the questions themselves. It should be a fun week ahead.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ U.S. military
Conscientious Objection, After You’re In
April 30, 2004
Here’s a website of “Jeremy Hinzman, a U.S. Army soldier who became a a conscientious objector”:http://www.jeremyhinzman.net/faq.html in the course of his service. His applications denied, he moved to Canada and is seeking political asylum there.
I find I can understand the issues all too well. In only a slightly-parallel universe, I’d be in iraq myself instead of publishing Nonviolence.org. My father, a veteran who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, really wanted me to join the U.S. Navy and attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis. For quite some time, I seriously considered it. I am attracted to the idea of service and duty and putting in hard work for something I believe in.
Hinzman’s story is getting a lot of mainstream coverage, I suspect because the “escape to Canada” angle has so many Vietnam-era echoes that resonate with that generation. I wish Hinzman would flesh out his website story though. His Frequently Asked Questions leaves out some important details that could really make the story – why did he join the Army in the first place, what were some of the experiences that led him to rethink his duty, etc. I’d recommend Jeff Paterson’s “Gulf War Refusenik”:http://jeff.paterson.net/ site, which includes lots of stories including his own:
bq. “What am I going to do with my life?” has always been huge question of youth, and today in the wake of the horror and tragedy of New York September 11th this question has increased importance for millions of young people. No one who has seen the images will ever forget… If I hadn’t spent those four years in the Marine Corps, I might be inclined to fall into line now. Most of the time my unit trained to fight a war against peasants who dared to struggle against “American interests” in their homelands-specifically Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala… Faced with this reality, I began the process of becoming un-American-meaning that the interests of the people of the world began to weigh heavier than my self-interest. I realized that the world did not need or want another U.S. troop…
There are bound to be more stories all the time of service-people who find a different reality when they land on foreign shores. How many will rethink their relationship to the U.S. military. How many will follow Paterson’s example of becoming “un-American”?
Duck Rogers Gamma Ray Bombs
August 14, 2003
Like something out of an old Looney Toons reel, the U.S. military is “trying to build a death ray bomb”:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1018361,00.html. Part of the next generation of boutique nuclear weapons the Pentagon craves, this one kills by sending nuclear gamma rays. The _Guardian_ article talks about how development of the new weapon might lead to a new arms race. This is of course quite possible: new weapons throw off the balance of power and often create the perceived need for new defences in a continuing cycle.
One wonders why the U.S. needs to be building ever more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. It already has enough nuclear weapons to ensure total destruction of a country and the two recent wars have shown that its military is quite efficient at invasion. A gamma ray weapon wouldn’t help in a situation like North Korea, where there are more-conventional weapons they could strike back with that would seriously hurt U.S. or its allies (even without their renewed nuclear weapon program their short-range missiles would devastate South Korea and Japan).