A few items of note on our, ahem. not so favorite subjects:
Those anti-war active-duty soldiers are getting harder and harder to ignore This egregiously mistitled Times story, "Un-Volunteering: Troops Improvise to Find Way Out," notes instead a resourcefulness mixed with desperation, including:
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One by one, a trickle of soldiers and marines - some just back from duty in Iraq, others facing a trip there soon - are seeking ways out.
Soldiers, their advocates and lawyers who specialize in military law say they have watched a few service members try ever more unlikely and desperate routes: taking drugs in the hope that they will be kept home after positive urine tests, for example; or seeking psychological or medical reasons to be declared nondeployable, including last-minute pregnancies. Specialist Marquise J. Roberts is accused of asking a relative in Philadelphia to shoot him in the leg so he would not have to return to war.
A bullet to the leg, Specialist Roberts, of Hinesville, Ga., told
the police, seemed his best chance. "I was scared," he said, according
to a police report on the December shooting. "I didn't want to go back
to Iraq and leave my family. I felt that my chain of command didn't
care about the safety of the troops. I just know that I wasn't going to
make it back."
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Others, including both folks we know, like Kevin Benderman and Camilo Mejia, and others just as eloquent about the horror they've witnessed, have joined with veterans of Gulf War I to spread the word that military regulations recognize when someone has realized what war is and wants no part of it.
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A group of former soldiers who succeeded in achieving conscientious-objector status has created a Web site, www.peace-out.com, showing people how to apply. The site reported 3,000 hits the first day.
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That "trickle" Davey writes about -- and it is, in a million-strong force -- is likely to reach flood levels. And I wonder whether it will start to include those returning from, or bound for, Afghanistan -- where so many are engaged in creating a bigger and more lethal Guantanamo, for anyone the U.S. decides to sweep away. The newest report from the invaluable Human Rights First contains this astonishing number:
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Since September 2001, the United States has established a network of detention facilities
around the world—under both military and intelligence control—used to detain
thousands of individuals captured in the “war on terrorism.” More than 65,000
individuals have been screened for military detention and 30,000 detained in the last three
and a half years. What is unknown about this detention system – particularly the location
of U.S. detention facilities, how many are held within them, on what legal basis they are
held, and who has access to the prisoners – still outweighs what is known about it. But
the information that is known paints a troubling picture.
But let the Guardian paint this picture.
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Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it's a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it's owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won't scare away his new friends.
Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.
Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.
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Let me get this clear. Help create the mother of all failed states, not once but twice. and plant your military so deeply in the result that the efforts of brave people to move on and get beyond warlords and fundamentalists are fruitless. (Still thinking about President McCain -- even though he's pushing for permanent bases there?) Then expand what you are already doing, at Bagram Air Force Base and elsewhere, and start construction on a state-of-the-art gulag, so that extraordinary rendition is no longer so extraordinary. I'm having to stomp on the tin hat being offered to me, no, urged on me. And philosophically that paranoia's accurate, though I do draw the line at accusing poor Jimmy Carter, in promoting Russia's war, of envisioning this particular set of human rights violations.
I promise the next post will be more uplifting (I'm already writing it) , even on a similar subject.
( Meanwhile, go rent Valley Girl and Moonstruck and tell me Nicolas Cage wasn't playing the exact same character. I suspect him of using the same leather jacket.)