Fighting Back [Section II]

excerpted from the book

Static

Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

Hyperion, 2006, hardcover

p209
Cindy Sheehan, addressing the Veterans for Peace Convention, Irving, Texas, August 5, 2005, the day before she went to Crawford

"Somebody's gotta stop those lying bastards."

p213
Cindy Sheehan
"I believe that it is my right and responsibility as an American to question our government when our government is wrong. I'm not one of the immature patriots who say, My country, right or wrong.' Because my country is wrong now. And the policies of my country are responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people, and I won't stand by and let that happen anymore. I believe that anybody who tries to tell me that I don't have the right to say what I'm saying, they're unpatriotic. They're un-American...."

p239
As recruiters go bottom feeding to meet quota, the Pentagon is busy creating a high-tech database to reach out and snare unsuspecting students. First there was the obscure provision of the No Child Left Behind Act that forces high schools to turn over the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors, effectively transforming President George Bush's signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft.

Then, in June 2005, privacy advocates were shocked to learn that for two years, the Pentagon had been amassing a database of information on some 30 million students. The information dossiers on millions of young Americans were to help identify college and high school students as young as sixteen to target them for military recruiting.

p240
The main obstacle to getting kids into the military-concerned parents-has at long last been circumvented. Private companies can now harvest data on children and provide private recruiters with the information they need to contact kids directly. If skeptical parents find out that the "Mr. Jones" calling for Johnny is offering their child a free ticket to Iraq, the military is spending millions to learn how best to persuade or bypass these negative "influencers." One JAMRS study is focused exclusively on how to change mothers' attitudes. In March 2004, 271 mothers from Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, and New York City were interviewed in order to enable recruiters to "better understand ways to motivate mothers currently on the fence to be accepting of military service, [and] exert some influence on mothers who are currently against military service. "

Now rebellious teens have a new ally in challenging their overprotective mothers-the Pentagon. And in case the prospective recruit has dropped out of school, has a criminal record, or is a single parent-each normally a bar to acceptance into the military JAMRS is also studying "moral character waiver policies" to help recruiters sign them up anyway.

Data mining-which the Pentagon claimed it had stopped in 2003 after an earlier program, the Total Information Awareness Project, was exposed-is fraught with risk. As Mark Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told Democracy Now!, "There is a real problem with the security of information databases in this country right now. The most recent breach was about 40 million records maintained by a credit card processing company, and this is also having a direct impact on the crime of identity theft, which according to the Federal Trade Commission cost American consumers and businesses over $50 billion in 2004."

In late 2005, over one hundred groups wrote to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld demanding that "because of the potential for abuse and the threat to the personal privacy rights of a generation of American youth, we request that the JAMRS project be immediately ended." But the program continues.

As the military secretly gathers personal information about students and passes it around, abuse has followed close behind. In Indiana, six female high school recruits were sexually assaulted by a recruiter in 2002 and 2003. According to the Indianapolis Star, Indiana National Guard Sgt. Eric P. Vetesy "picked out teens and young women with backgrounds that made them vulnerable to authority. As a military recruiter, he had access to personal information, making the quest easier. '131 The local prosecutor noted that of the victims, young women between the ages of 17 and 21, "most were in single-parent families with no father figure. Because Vetesy assembled background information on each recruit.. . he was able to target those he most likely could coerce."

The Star continued, "Nationwide, military recruiters reportedly have been linked to at least a half-dozen sexual assaults during the past few years, since the creation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. This broad education law requires, among other things, that high schools give military recruiters greater access to students." Groups are mobilizing against the Pentagon's massive student recruitment and data mining campaigns. Leave My Child Alone (wwwleavemychildalone.org) offers online opt-out forms that students and parents can download and submit to schools to keep their names off recruiter contact lists. The group estimates that as of 2006, students have opted out of the No Child Left Behind requirement. Students can also file another form to send to the Pentagon to have their names removed from the JAMRS database.

It's little wonder that the Pentagon must invent new ways to find bodies for the front lines. Support for America's foreign wars has dropped to new lows among young Americans: One study showed that just 25 percent of teens support the Iraq War .3' As more returning soldiers speak out against the war, today's soldiers may just follow the lead of their commander in chief: Go I AWOL.

p247
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan responded to the scathing criticism from Human Rights Watch


"The United States of America does more than any other country in the world to advance freedom and promote human rights. Our focus should be on those who are denying people human dignity and who are violating human rights."

 

Uzbekistan

p241
On January 19, 2006, [former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan] Craig Murray came to the Democracy Now! firehouse studio to give his first interview in the United States since he publicly released the confidential memos. He described what he encountered when he became ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002. "I found a country which lives in fear . . . . It's a totalitarian state. Effectively they haven't reformed much from the old Soviet system, and then they have added a new level of brutality and violence and an extra level of corruption to that. It's a state where everyone is scared of their neighbor, where there are 40,000 secret police in the city of Tashkent alone. And the astonishing thing was it was a state where people were being disappeared and tortured on an industrial basis and which was being financed and organized by the United States of America."

p249
Uzbekistan's sordid human rights record did not deter the United States, which had a large military air base in the country. Uzbekistan is located immediately north of Afghanistan, and the air base was used for US. military operations there. Halliburton was building facilities on the Uzbek base, and the airfield was being turned into a permanent military base. Murray explained, "The United States was pumping huge amounts of American taxpayers' money into the Uzbek regime. According to a US. Embassy press release of December 2002, in 2002 alone, the United States government gave Uzbekistan over $500 million, of which $120 million was in military support and $80 million was in support of the Uzbek security services who were working alongside their CIA colleagues."

p251
The Western intelligence agencies, [former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray] explained, are careful to maintain "a fabric of deniability over the whole thing. They don't actually go into the torture chamber. They receive the intelligence that comes out of the torture chamber, but they don't enter it. The CIA will then process the material, so that when it actually arrives on the desk of Cohn Powell, as it was then, or Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld, or on the desk of a British minister, it just says this intelligence was got from an Uzbek prisoner related to al Qaeda. It doesn't say who he was. It doesn't say his name. It doesn't say when he was interrogated. So you can't trace it back, in order to say it was that individual and he was tortured in this way... So [Condoleezza Rice] can say, 'I, to my knowledge, have never seen information obtained under torture.' And that's a fabric of deceit set up to enable her to say that."

For Ambassador Murray, the reasons given to justify the invasion of Iraq pushed him to the edge. "I saw George Bush on CNN making a speech the day the real fighting started, where he said we are going in basically to dismantle the torture chambers and the rape rooms. And yet, the United States was subsidizing the torture chambers and the rape rooms in Uzbekistan." Murray said "the sheer hypocrisy of that" led him to cable the British Foreign Office:

As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not much focused on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan the US pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship. We must not close our eyes to uncomfortable truth.

I watched George Bush talk today of Iraq and "dismantling the apparatus of terror... removing the torture chambers and the rape rooms." Yet when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in international fora. Double standards? Yes.'

p257
Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), The Emperor's New Clothes

"The emperor's new suit is incomparable!" ... Nobody wished to let others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid.

"But he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last .... ...One whispered to the other what the child had said. "But he has nothing on at all," cried at last the whole people.

p270
President George Bush, 2006

"I am the decider."

p282
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at a CNN Town Hall Meeting, Feb. 18, 1998, at Ohio State University, responding to an audience member's criticism of the U.S.'s invasion of Iraq,

"What we are doing is so that you all can sleep at night... I am very proud of what we are doing. We are the greatest nation in the world..."

p300
Robert Fisk

"If you saw what I saw when I go to wars when I'm on the front line - with or without soldiers or with civilians or the wounded in hospitals - you would never, ever dream of supporting a war again. Ever in your life.

p300
Robert Fisk

"If you go to war, you realize it is not primarily about victory or defeat. It is about death and the infliction of death and suffering on as large a scale as you can make it... journalists, television reporting, television cameras are lethal. They collude with governments to allow you to have more wars. Because if they showed you the truth, you wouldn't allow any more wars."

p301
Robert Fisk

"Journalists like to be close to power. They know that if they want to be close to power, they mustn't challenge power."

p301
Robert Fisk

You must challenge power all the time, all the time, all the time. Even if the politicians and the prime minister, even if your readers hate you. You must challenge power."'


Static

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