A Warrior Resists Deployment

If we are getting out of Iraq, why were more American soldiers killed in April than in any month since the presidential election? We actually seem to be accelerating the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan! We are constantly told that the number of actual troops in Iraq will be down to about 50,000 within the next few months but this says nothing of the “stability contractors” employed in our empire’s latest quagmire (that’s “mercenaries” for those of you who don’t like idiotic euphemisms). Currently, the U.S. has about 150,000 mercs on the payroll in Iraq.

So, given that we are escalating our resource wars, what should the peace movement be doing right now? Well, for starters, I think we should be celebrating a huge victory very few of us are even aware of.

Sergeant Mathis Chiroux, a young reservist who spent five years serving in Afghanistan, Japan and Germany refused to deploy to Iraq about a year ago. He has been waiting since for some resolution with the Army. He was told by people in the know that he could receive anywhere from a year of incarceration right on up to the death penalty if they really wanted to make an example of him.

On April 21st, he appeared before a board of Army officers in St. Louis, Missouri to explain his refusal to deploy. He told the truth. He said he felt that he was being called on to commit war crimes and that he could not participate. He also said that he could not participate in an illegal and unconstitutional war.

The hearing resulted in Chiroux being honorably discharged from the United States Army and the board allowed him to keep his G.I. Bill benefits. Did you hear about this big news?! I can only imagine that many will now also refuse to deploy (or re-deploy).

I find it amazing that this could happen with nary a peep from the mainstream media. This is a great example of the kind of information we are regularly being denied by the mainstream media. A whole lot of someones had to decide not to write about this and not to cover it on TV. That’s pretty scary to contemplate.

Chiroux is quite well-known within the peace movement for his work with IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War) and VFP (Veterans For Peace). Especially interesting was his testimony at the Winter Soldier hearings held in March of 2008 which were also ignored by the media.

These modern hearings were meant to emulate the “Winter Soldier Investigations” that took place in Detroit in January of 1971 at which a sizable group of Vietnam combat veterans, flying the VVAW banner (Vietnam Veterans Against War), spoke on camera for two days about the atrocities they had both witnessed and committed in Vietnam.

If you have never seen the film “Winter Soldier”, it has been out on DVD now for several years winter-soldier and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s simply phenomenal.

I also strongly urge you to read the powerful words that Mathis wrote about his trials and tribulations. His is not a typical war story. It is a very well-written description of the terribly dehumanizing effects of military training and culture and how it impacts human beings on all sides of the conflicts we are involved in.

Lets hope that the peace movement regroups and stops playing politics (Bush war bad, Obama war good). We are still very much involved in two wars and ramping up both. There are plenty of other soldiers out there standing up to the military-industrial-congressional complex who really need our help. G.I. resistance to the war in Vietnam was absolutely crucial to ending it. Please contact IVAW and make a donation today!

The New York Times Rears Its Ugly Pro-War Head (Yet Again)

I can only hope that we will all eventually learn that corporate media mechanisms (even those revered by the perceived left) are inherently evil and incapable of simply reporting the truth as they are tasked to do. What they ignore is waht REALLY matters. If they aren't covering it, it's REALLY important. Always!

Here, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) shares with us the answer handed to them by the "mighty" New York Times as to why they completely ignored the"Winter Soldier" hearings, a series of testimonies given by combat vets who have returned from Iraq and are willing to share their stories with the media and the public.

I asked the Post-Star on their forums (and every single message is throughly read before it is posted) why they weren't covering WinterSoldier about a week before it happened. They never responded. They also receive AP stories on the wire and there were several about Winter Soldier they could have lazily buried on page 7 but .... they CHOSE to completely ignore these young veterans. I guess I have to give them a small amount of credit for correctly posting our showing of the original documentary of "Winter Soldier" (1972) at my cafe. I was at the vigil at City Park to honor those murdered in the 5 year occupation of Iraq and Mark Mulholland was there from

WNYT-13. He is their News Director. I told him about Winter Soldier. WNYT totally ignored it and did nothing to cover it.

If this does not prove once and for all that ALL corporate media sucks, I really can't imagine what would constitute evidence! Corporate media is rife with agenda. Its pro-war and anti-
soldier and ALL OF IT IS, not just "right wing media". If its owned by a big corporation, we can't
trust it at all to tell the truth. It's lying and manipulating the public by diverting focus away from things that truly matter.


http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3340

New York Times Explains Winter Soldier Blackout - Public editor responds to concerns raised by FAIR 4/8/08

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has offered a response to media activists who wrote to the paper about its non-coverage of last month's Winter Soldier hearings. Hoyt's explanation is that reporters at the Times had "not been aware of the group or its meeting," but likely wouldn't have covered it if they had been aware of the event.

The idea that the Times was unaware of Winter Soldier is remarkable; the paper's D.C. reporters were repeatedly sent press releases about the events, the same ones that other media outlets received that did manage to cover the event, ranging from Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! to the New York Times' corporate sibling the Boston Globe.

Hoyt's letter in full:

***
Dear Reader,

Thank you for writing about the Winter Soldier event in Maryland last month and its lack of coverage by the Times.

My assistant checked with various editors at the Times to see if there was any discussion about covering the Winter Soldier meeting. The editor in the Washington bureau who oversees national security coverage said he had not been aware of the group or its meeting. The Times normally has three Pentagon reporters. The meeting fell within their area of coverage, and one of them probably would have been assigned had editors chosen to staff the event. But one is on book leave, one was traveling with the secretary of defense, and one was in Iraq covering the war. The Times also did not cover an announcement the following day by Vets for Freedom, a group supporting the war and claiming more than 13 times the membership of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the group which organized Winter Soldier.

One group was emphasizing what it charged were war crimes, war profiteering and war mismanagement. The other group was protesting what it charged was the failure of the media to report more fully on signs of progress in Iraq, such as rebuilt schools and infrastructure.

News organizations like the Times, with its own substantial investment in independent reporting from Iraq tend to prefer their own on-scene accounts of the war, rather than relying on charges and counter-charges at home by organizations with strongly held political viewpoints about the war.

Sincerely,
Clark Hoyt
****

The Times’ D.C. bureau editor’s claim to have not heard of the hearings is remarkable, given that the AP newswire carried a story on the hearings, and IVAW has confirmed to FAIR that the D.C. bureau had been sent three separate rounds of different IVAW press releases. In addition, at least 150 Times staffers were sent press releases about Winter Soldier by the Institute for Public Accuracy, a group that encourages inclusion of overlooked facts and progressive perspectives in media coverage. Given that media organizations operating on a small fraction of the Times' budget were aware of and able to find the resources to cover these hearings, the Times’ D.C. bureau’s plea to ignorance about the hearings is all the more disappointing.

Meanwhile, Hoyt’s justification of the Times failure to cover Winter Soldier on the grounds that they also did not cover “an announcement the following day by Vets for Freedom, a group supporting the war and claiming more than 13 times the membership of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the group which organized Winter Soldier,” draws a far-fetched parallel between a group presenting eyewitness testimony about atrocities in Iraq and a group releasing a press release about media bias. (As a group that often puts out press releases about media bias that don't get covered by the Times, the comparison strikes us as rather absurd.) Further, the size of IVAW and Vets for Freedom are not directly comparable, as IVAW is a group of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, whereas anyone can sign up on the Vets for Freedom website, which stipulates that “non-veterans can also be members of Vets for Freedom.”

Hoyt's claim that “news organizations like the Times, with its own substantial investment in independent reporting from Iraq, tend to prefer their own on-scene accounts of the war” is akin to asserting that reporters on the police beat prefer to write about crimes they have seen themselves rather than talking to eyewitnesses. Given that Times reporters, like all Western journalists in Iraq, have great difficulty travelling freely outside the Green Zone, it is hard to imagine that they could provide a full and accurate picture of the war without interviewing people who have participated in it. And of course the paper does often interview U.S. military personnel about what they've seen, though when they are whistleblowers trying to call attention to what they describe as "the human consequences of failed policy," the Times suddenly has much less interest in what they have to say.

The New York Times’ decision to assign one of its two available correspondents to tour with the Secretary of Defense instead of hearing the first-hand accounts of the Winter Soldiers demonstrates a very strange notion of “independent reporting.”

T.U. reprints AP story. Post Star ignores soldiers, as usual

While only a handful of us ventured to Syracuse for the rally, we met up with about 3,000 of our brothers and sisters in the peace movement to support about 25 active duty soldiers, members of the Fort Drum chapter of Iraq Veterans Against War (IVAW). We (and they) were also joined by about 100 members of Veterans For Peace. Green veterans were there in full force as well, represented by Bob Gumbs, a Gulf War vet and Green congressional candidate. The Times Union (at least) reprinted the lazy, inadequate AP fluff piece on the rally which I have copied below. The Glens Falls Post Star totally ignored our veterans as they are pro-WAR and anti-SOLDIER.

Peace,

Matt Funiciello

Peace rally organizers say thousands turned up at event

Associated Press
Last updated: 9:32 p.m., Saturday, September 29, 2007

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- About 2,500 antiwar protesters marched through Syracuse on Saturday, calling for an end to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The rally began at 1 p.m. at the Everson Museum of Art. It ended more than three hours later after a march of 1.6 miles to Walnut Park and another rally. Blocks of SU students joined the chanting, singing, banner-carrying marchers as they came near the campus.

The rally was organized by the Syracuse Peace Council, Service Employees International Union 1199 and Syracuse University Student Peace Action Network. Three buses full of members of the SEIU 119 came from New York City and Boston.

John Burdick of the Syracuse Peace Council, an organizer, said groups came from New York and New England, with an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 in attendance. "That number would make it one of the largest mobilizations since the Vietnam War," he said.

Angela Morano, 57, of Saugerties, said "this is nice, but it's not enough. It's not enough of us on the street."

Morano, who protested during the Vietnam War, said "we are much too peaceful protesters now."

David Lester, 26, of Syracuse, was part of the protest. The Nottingham High School graduate served in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division.

"We want to let the people still serving and the people at Fort Drum who don't understand this war to know they are represented," Lester said. "They are not alone."

Ben Winters, 23, of Albany, heard about the protest on the Internet and came.

"I have come to support the cause," Winters said. "I used to go here (to SU). This is much bigger than rallies two or three years ago."

Burdick said the rally marks a big change in logistics.

"It used to be that we'd travel to the bigger cities, New York and Washington, D.C., for these rallies," Burdick said. "It's time for us not to wait for the big cities. Now, they're sending buses up to us."

Betty Wood, 65, of Blodgett Mills, brought five quilt banners with her to the parade. Each had the 170 faces of U.S. soldiers from New York state who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since fighting began. Wood has gotten up to April. She's behind by half a banner.

She chokes up when she's asked why she did it.

"The photos of the flag-draped coffins coming back from over there became classified," said Wood, fighting back tears. "These soldiers became numbers. They deserved to have faces."

An evening panel discussion at the university's Hendricks Chapel was to include Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998; Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, who spent her childhood in Iraq; and Jimmy Massey, a former Marine and founding member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.