This past Wednesday, Admiral Mullen (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff) announced that the Pentagon will seek additional war funds for
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2010. While he did not give a firm
dollar amount, the New York Times reported that defense budget analysts
are kicking around the number of $50 billion.
As the Obama administration debates whether to send tens of thousands
of extra troops to Afghanistan, an already overstretched military is
increasingly struggling to meet its deployment numbers. Surprisingly,
one place it seems to be targeting is military personnel who go absent
without leave (AWOL) and then are caught or turn themselves in.
The Dialogues Against Militarism (DAM) delegation has arrived in
Be'er Sheva, Israel, a small city that sits in the middle of the Negev
Desert. Our travels from San Francisco, California lasted two days, including a
twenty hour flight and a long ride through the Sinai Desert. As with
crossing any border, the terrain was heavily militarized.
British
Army Lance Corporal Joe Glenton faces court martial for refusing to
return to Afghanistan. He defied a direct order by his commanding
officer to not participate in the in the Saturday, October 24, 2009, Stop the War march in London.
Matthew
Hoh, a former Marine captain with combat experience in Iraq, resigned
last month from his position with the Foreign Service, where he was the
the senior U.S. civilian in the Taliban-dominated Southern Afghanistan
province of Zabul, because he became convinced that our war in that
country will not only inevitably fail, but is fueling the very
insurgency we are trying to defeat.
KAUAI, Hawaii -
Six months into Barack Obama's presidency, the U.S. public's display of antiwar sentiment has faded to barely a whisper.
On Wednesday, the 29th of July, I filed a lawsuit against the federal government declaring that, because of my religious beliefs, I should not be required to register for the draft unless it could be officially recognized that I claim to object to all war.
Echo Platoon is part of the 82nd Replacement Detachment of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Soldiers in the platoon are relegated to living quarters in a set of dimly lit concrete rooms. Pipes peep out of missing ceiling tiles and a musty smell permeates beds placed on cracked linoleum floors.
For soldiers who have gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave) and then voluntarily turned themselves in or were forcibly returned, the detention conditions here in Echo Platoon only serve to reinforce the inescapability of their situation.
[Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.]
On May 1st at Fort Hood in central Texas, Specialist Victor Agosto
wrote on a counseling statement, which is actually a punitive U.S. Army
memo:
BERLIN - Tomorrow President Obama will be in Germany. First he will stop
in Dresden and at the concentration camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar.
Then he will visit wounded U.S. soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical
Center, the largest American hospital outside the U.S., located on a
site of built in 1938 as the campus of the Adolf Hitler School for
Youth.
