[News] Bradley Manning and GI Resistance to US War Crimes

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Bradley Manning and GI Resistance to US War Crimes --An interview 
with Dahr Jamail
by Angola 3 News
Wednesday Dec 22nd, 2010 7:19 PM
When someone becomes a soldier, they swear an oath to support and 
defend the US constitution by following "lawful" orders. Thus, they 
are legally obliged by their own oath to not follow unlawful orders. 
What Bradley Manning did by leaking this critical information has 
been to uphold his oath as a soldier in the most patriotic way. Now, 
compare that with how he has been raked over the coals by most of the 
mainstream media.

Bradley Manning and GI Resistance to US War Crimes
--An interview with Dahr Jamail

By Angola 3 News

Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent nine months reporting 
directly from Iraq, following the US invasion in 2003. His stories 
have been published by Inter Press Service, Truthout, Al-Jazeera, The 
Nation, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, the Guardian, Foreign Policy 
in Focus, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Independent, and many others. On 
radio as well as television, Dahr reports for Democracy Now!, has 
appeared on Al-Jazeera, the BBC and NPR, and numerous other stations 
around the globe.

Jamail is the author of two recent books: Beyond the Green Zone: 
Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist (2008) and The Will To 
Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse To Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009). 
He also contributed Chapter 6, "Killing the Intellectual Class," for 
the book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, 
Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered (2010). Learn more at 
<http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com>http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com


Angola 3 News: On April 4, 2010, WikiLeaks.org released a classified 
2007 video of a US Apache helicopter in Iraq, firing on civilians and 
killing 11, including Reuters' photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and 
his driver, 40 year old Saeed Chmagh. No charges have been filed 
against the US soldiers involved.

In sharp contrast, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst named 
Bradley Manning has been accused of leaking the classified video. 
Arrested in May and facing up to 52 years in prison for a range of 
charges, Manning is now being held under what lawyer/journalist Glenn 
Greenwald has termed "inhumane conditions."

Manning's support website declares that "exposing war crimes is not a 
crime." Indeed, the Nuremberg Laws, established after the horrors of 
WWII, declare that soldiers have a legal obligation to resist 
criminal wars. Let's please take a closer look at this issue of US 
war crimes. What do you think are the strongest arguments that have 
been made for why US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal?

Dahr Jamail: To be clear, while I've covered Iraq extensively, I've 
not covered Afghanistan. Thus, I'll keep all my answers in the 
context of my expertise, that being Iraq.

That said, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq could not have 
more clearly violated international law. Even former Secretary 
General of the UN, Kofi Annan, said in September 2004 that the Iraq 
war was illegal and breached the UN Charter.

An illegal war is thus the mother of all war crimes, for from that 
stem all the rest. What I've seen in Iraq has been a parade of war 
crimes committed by the US military: rampant torture, collective 
punishment (Fallujah is an example), deliberate firing on medical 
workers, deliberate killing of civilians for "sport," and countless others.

Then, there is the fact that both occupations are so clearly about 
control of dwindling resources and their transport routes, that the 
excuses given for them by the US government (both Bush and Obama) are 
both laughable and insulting to anyone capable of a modicum of 
critical thought.

A3N: How do you rate the corporate media's coverage of the Bradley 
Manning story?

DJ:It's been a farce. A classic case of "shoot the messenger." When 
someone becomes a soldier, they swear an oath to support and defend 
the US constitution by following "lawful" orders. Thus, they are 
legally obliged by their own oath to not follow unlawful orders. What 
Manning did by leaking this critical information has been to uphold 
his oath as a soldier in the most patriotic way. Now, compare that 
with how he has been raked over the coals by most of the so-called 
mainstream media.

A3N: How do they address the argument that "exposing war crimes is 
not a crime?"

DJ: Usually they don't, because the corporate media, and the 
government for that matter, avoid the words "war crime" as though 
they are a plague. Thus, they avoid the issue at all cost.

A3N: In your opinion, how do the corporate media present the US 
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the US public?

DJ: With Iraq, the occupation is presented as though it was a 
mistake, as though the great benevolent US Empire was mistakenly 
mislead into the war. But since "we" are there, it is good that at 
least Saddam Hussein has been removed, and now of course the US has 
only done the best it can in a tough situation.

With Afghanistan, the occupation is presented to the public as the 
ongoing frontline battle against "terrorism," while in reality, they 
should call Afghanistan "pipeline-istan" because it's all about 
securing the access corridors for natural gas and oil pipelines from 
the Black Sea, through Afghanistan (the 4 main US bases there are 
located along the exact pipeline route) to the coast of Pakistan.

A3N: How does the corporate media narrative contrast with what you 
have seen first-hand in Iraq?

DJ: The difference is night and day. The whitewashing and outright 
lying by the corporate media is offensive to me. It is repulsive, in 
fact, when compared to what the reality on the ground is in Iraq. The 
brutality of the US military there against the civilian population 
would shock people. More than 1 million Iraqis have been slaughtered 
because of the US occupation. As you read this you can know that one 
in every ten Iraqis remains displaced from their homes. Can you 
imagine that? The US policy in Iraq has been so destructive, that one 
out of every ten Iraqis is currently displaced from their home, now 
at more than 7 years into the occupation?

A3N: Returning now to the issue of soldier resistance, what are the 
various reasons that anti-war soldiers give as motivation for their 
opposition to the occupations?

DJ: Mostly from what the soldiers see once they arrive in the 
occupation: the buckets of money being made by the contractors, the 
lack of goals for the occupation beyond generating huge amounts of 
profit for war contractors, and that the reasons given for the 
invasion/occupation were entirely false. So most seem to become 
anti-war when they see that they've been lied to, used, betrayed, and 
that they are putting their lives on the line so that war contractors 
can get richer.

A3N: What are some of the ways that anti-war soldiers in Iraq and 
Afghanistan have resisted?

DJ: Myriad ways. The most common, and least dramatic, is going AWOL. 
More than 60,000 soldiers have now taken that route since 11 
September 2001. So, often, folks will go do a deployment, come back 
for a break, then simply not show up when it's time for their unit to 
redeploy.

Some of the more interesting means of resistance I've found entailed 
doing what soldiers refer to as "search and avoid" missions. One 
soldier told me how they would go out to the end of their patrol 
route in their Humvees, find a big field, and park. They'd call in to 
base every hour to check in and say, "We're fine, we're still 
searching this field for weapons caches." And they would sit there 
doing nothing until the time was up for their patrol, and they'd 
return to base. I met more and more soldiers who shared similar 
stories, from all over Iraq, during different times of the 
occupation. That's when I realized how low morale was and how 
widespread different kinds of resistance had become.

Other soldiers found out how to manipulate their locator beacon on 
the GPS unit in the Humvees, so they'd sit and have tea with Iraqis, 
while someone moved their beacon around so their base thought they 
were patrolling.

A3N: How has US military leadership responded to this resistance?

DJ: They don't know about much of it when it's happening. Although 
there have been times when a unit has been caught doing something 
like the aforementioned, and they've broken up the unit, but that has 
been quite rare overall.

With AWOL troops, the military doesn't have the manpower to send 
their MPs after them, so they let them go, wait for them to get a 
traffic ticket, for example, then the cops hand them over to the MPs 
who throw the AWOL soldier in the brig to await a court-martial. 
Then, often, the soldier is told he/she can go back to 
Iraq/Afghanistan, or they will be court-martialed.

A3N: In your book The Will To Resist, you document many different 
cases of soldiers that faced criminal charges for their opposition to 
US wars. We discussed Bradley Manning's case earlier in this 
interview, but can you please tell us about any other recent, ongoing 
cases that have begun since the publication of your book in 2009? How 
can our readers best support these soldiers?

DJ: Most of those I followed that took place after my book was 
published have been completed, time served by the soldiers, and then 
their release into freedom from the military. Two cases of this type 
really stand out: Victor Agosto and Travis Bishop. Both of these men 
stood up and refused to be deployed, were court-martialed, served 
their time, and are now free.

There will be more to come as these occupations persist. A group to 
follow who regularly supports these resisters is Courage To Resist. 
They are based in Oakland and are run by Jeff Paterson, himself a 
resister to the first Gulf War. They do a great job of tracking 
resisters and what folks can do to support them. Support includes 
donations, but also making phone calls, writing letters, and other 
forms of activism.

A3N: In the months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 
anti-war movement in the US was relatively strong, but since the 
invasion began, the anti-war movement seems to have lost considerable 
momentum and strength. On a practical level, what do you think the US 
anti-war movement needs in order to be re-energized and finally end 
these wars?

DJ: At the risk of sounding like a cynic when I feel I'm making an 
honest assessment, I don't feel there will be a mass organization of 
an anti-war movement. We already live in a police state. What is left 
of the anti-war movement is completely infiltrated, and is being torn 
apart by sectarianism and profiteering (the peace-industrial-complex).

In addition, I feel that the main reason for the failure of the 
anti-war movement is that most folks involved in it still believe 
they can work within the system to generate change, when the system 
is completely corrupted already. By "system," I mean the federal 
government. That apparatus is broken beyond repair, it is completely 
corrupted, and needs to be dissolved. Thus, any movement that seeks 
to work within the parameters set by the system (such as weekend 
permitted demonstrations, thinking you can effectively pressure your 
representative, etc) is doomed before it begins, because it is still 
playing by the rules set out by those in power. Rules guarantee never 
to jeopardize the loss of power by those who hold it.

Only truly radical actions, meant to subvert the system and shut it 
down to a point where business as usual is impossible until demands 
are met, are all that is left.

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free 
the Angola 3. Our website is 
<http://www.angola3news.com>http://www.angola3news.com where we 
provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our 
own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story 
of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, 
solitary confinement as torture, and more.
<http://www.angola3news.com>http://www.angola3news.com




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