Winter Soldier

Iraq Veterans Against the War are holding hearings this weekend in Washington, DC. to present testimonies about individual experiences of soldiers fighting the so-called war against terror. If you aren't familiar with the Winter Soldier concept, check out the terrific documentary film Sir! No Sir! which includes scenes from the first winter soldier hearings, held in 1971, by vets of the Vietnam war.

It's disturbing, yes, but also fascinating to hear from people inside the military what exactly they have been doing on the streets, in the prisons, and on combat missions. KPFA from Berkeley, California, has been broadcasting the hearings live, and archiving individual testimonies. There's more info, on-site blogs, etc. at the Iraq vets site. The sessions also included some testimony from journalists and Iraqis who have lived through the invasion nightmare and survived to tell about it.

I would like to share with you how one becomes a concentration camp guard without ever having really made any decisions. Christopher Ardent, speaking about his time as a Guantanamo guard

I'm thinking to myself, how tough does a question have to be in order to kill? Domingo Rosas, on the death of an Iraqi who died during interrogation

When you follow the crumb trail with respect to Iraqi corruption, it leads to American corruption, and investigating American corruption leads to the negligence, mismanagement, incompetence and dereliction of duty, of quite a few generals and colonels. Captain Luis Montalvan

So much of what's going on in Iraq is really being driven by a profit motive, and the actual human costs of the occupation is totally overlooked and totally insignificant for these corporations and the government, who is totally supporting this policy of corporate corruption and profiting off the backs and blood of Americans and the Iraqi people. Kelly Dougherty

i've been reading Patrick Cockburn's excellent book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, in which he confirms from a journalistic perspective the arrogance and incompetence of the US military at the highest levels. What Cockburn makes absolutely clear is that just about every major decision about how to conduct this occupation has been done so inside concentric circles of surreal fantasy worlds: from the White House, to the State Department, to the Green Zone, to the embedded journalists and various groups of Iraqi exiles honing in for the pillage. He shares the story of meeting with some US diplomat inside the Green Zone, who tells him that according to the latest reports, the petrol shortages have been worked out. Cockburn decides it's not worth mentioning that he was late for the interview because of the traffic jams caused by the long lines of cars trying to get gas. When he gets into the countless stories of death and destruction, the divergence between doublespeak and reality is more stark, despicable and horrifying.

The Winter Soldier testimonies bring this out repeatedly. The soldiers say over and over that they were unable to reconcile what they were being told to do with what they understood the overall mission to be. Then another level of cognitive dissonance emerges when they come home and are threatened with deportation (if not US citizens) and/or try to get medical assistance from the Veterans Health Administration. An endless helix of nightmares intertwining. If ever one needed proof that nothing good can come from war, this is it.