09/15/09 – Daniel Lakemacher – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright everybody, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest on the show today is Daniel Lakemacher.
His website is warisimmoral.com.
And, as per my limited understanding, he just won conscientious objector status and was discharged honorably from the U.S. Army.
Is that right, Daniel?
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Scott.
It was actually from the United States Navy.
Ah, from the Navy.
I'm sorry, I have not done my homework here.
No worries.
No worries.
So, but this was what?
Just the other day, right?
That they let you out?
Ironically enough, it was on September 11, 2009 that I was finally released.
Wow.
So, okay, now tell us, you know, name, rank, serial number, basics, when you joined, and what your status was, and what you were up to, and all that.
Okay.
A little bit of background on myself.
I joined back in 2005.
I was 22 years old at the time.
I had been working corporately and kind of bored of the cubicle life and decided that I wanted to do the patriotic duty and gain a little more adventure and do my part in getting revenge for 9-11.
And so I joined up into the Navy at the time.
Over the course of a couple of years, I ended up down in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And it was while I was down there in Gitmo that it just, it really made me do a double-take about everything that I stood for and what I was involved in.
And how old were you when you joined up there?
I was 22 years old, so I was a little older than the average person.
And so what was your job?
You were a medic there, yeah?
Hospital corpsman is what the Navy calls their medics.
And so what was it that you saw there that bothered you so much?
Essentially, it began to sink in that there was, from these people's perspective, there was no hope.
And that just clicked in my mind because there was no system of justice.
They were simply being held there indefinitely.
And it just, day in and day out of every day, seeing these people in these cages, and some of them, of course, were acting so angrily and would try and say and do mean things to the guards, to the medical staff, to whomever.
And at first I responded back with anger as well, like, what's your problem?
Here we are, I'm just a medic.
I'm trying to help you out.
And why are you behaving this way towards me?
Well, what if I were in their shoes?
What if I were in a situation where I was locked away, taken away from family, taken away from friends, put in this completely different cultural situation, and I had no means of trying to speak out about what it was that brought me there or kind of say my own piece, no way to defend myself.
There were no charges that had even been brought against me.
What kind of situation would that be to live in?
Well, were you witness to torture or abuse of any kind on there?
That certainly depends upon how you define the terms.
I would say it's absolutely abusive and torturous to keep somebody confined indefinitely in a cage.
But say when they were making Katani do dog tricks and slamming him against the wall and chaining him to the floor, you weren't witness to that kind of thing?
No, I was not.
I didn't see anybody get just tied up and beaten or anything of that nature.
In my mind, the most atrocious thing that I actually witnessed was, and this happened frequently, but were force feedings.
People who literally no longer had any will to live, and so they wanted to stop eating, and they simply wanted to die, and yet they would get strapped into chairs, their heads would get forced back, their jaws would get pried open, and they would be force fed.
And as a Navy medical corpsman, did you participate in that?
Thankfully, I didn't have to participate directly in that.
My specialty within the corpsman rate is that of a psychiatric technician.
So as odd as it sounds, there are psychiatric technicians down there who are supposed to talk to these guys about how they're feeling and trying to meet mental health needs, a pretty much impossible task when somebody is in that type of predicament.
But that was my role.
So you were a counselor to the prisoners there?
In some sense, yes.
It's kind of an abhorrent term to me, because it's so unjust to be saying that you're offering counseling to people at the same time when you're inflicting such harm against them, psychological and otherwise.
But that was the theoretical role that I was playing, yes.
So you would talk to them about who you are, where you're from, what's your problem, and that kind of thing?
Upon their request, yes.
Or they do have specific psychiatric facilities down there, too, for them.
So that was more or less my role.
Now you talk about people losing the will to live and having to be force fed.
What about people going insane?
I've read cases, I don't know about at Guantanamo, but certainly at the Bagram prison, at the Salt Pit dungeon outside of Kabul there in Afghanistan, of people slamming their heads into the walls over and over and over again, trying to kill themselves, that kind of thing.
Are you dealing with that level of reaction to this kind of imprisonment?
Absolutely.
The sad thing is that it's not surprising to see that kind of self-harming behavior, when somebody feels that they have lost all control, and they effectively have lost all control over almost every facet of their life, for them to begin to act out against themselves is not that surprising a thing to happen.
Now Candace Gorman, who's a lawyer who represents a couple of these guys, she has reported that one of her clients had hep C and that he was not being treated there.
He was basically just dying.
I think maybe one of the other ones had AIDS or something, and that these people were not receiving medical care for their treatable diseases.
Do you know about that?
Honestly, as far as I saw, everybody was receiving proper medical treatment.
I'm not aware of any detainees specifically having AIDS and not receiving any type of treatment for that, but as far as I saw, there was proper medical treatment being rendered.
Well, now Jeremy Scahill has written about these hit teams, and I'm sorry I forget the exact name of them, but I think we've all seen MSNBC, Real Prison Stories or whatever, where they have the five guys basically in riot gear who raid a cell for an uncooperative prisoner.
According to Jeremy Scahill's reporting, the cell squad, whatever they call it down there at Guantanamo, basically is just torturing these guys for the fun of it on a regular basis down there.
In fact, they were saying it got worse ever since Obama took power.
At least to say I haven't been down there since Obama came into his rule, but from my time down there, definitely.
That's why harking back to when you asked about torture, it depends on how you define that term, because they call them FCE teams, forced cell extraction teams, or somebody being disobedient, noncompliant, and yes, a team of five-plus would go in in full riot gear complete with a shield against a completely unarmed person cloaked only in essentially pajamas and restrain that person for something as simple as not handing back a Styrofoam meal tray that they had been given with their food.
And so did it amount to just beating people up for the fun of it, or were they using as much or more force as necessary to gain compliance, that kind of deal?
Well, I think any listener could decide for themselves if you've got five or six people in riot gear complete with a shield going up against a completely unarmed person, decide for yourself if that's excessive force.
I honestly didn't see anybody just getting held down and beaten or anything of that nature, but it certainly says something that you even have that type of scenario in existence.
You know, oh, I'm going to keep my meal tray and my Styrofoam piece, try and exercise some type of control in this environment, and what is the response to that?
Well, your little ten-by-eight space is going to be invaded by a team in riot gear and you're going to be held down until you're deemed to be compliant.
Well, you know, I saw in your interview with the Motorhome Diaries guys that you said that there's such an atmosphere of hate there and frustration that here we are stuck in Guantanamo, we can't kill anybody, we can't go be part of the war.
Here we've got the baddest guys are right in front of us and we're supposed to be their nannies kind of attitude.
And so those kinds of frustrations, that kind of atmosphere, it amounts to an atmosphere that allows for abuse to take place.
It certainly does.
I mean, I've said it before, I think already in this interview, the most hate-filled place I could possibly imagine for the reason you just described, because it's on both sides, that level of hatred and that feeling that there's no way in which to vent it.
Well, and for the record for people in the audience here, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but hundreds and hundreds of these guys, more than 300, maybe more than 400, have been released.
And the ones convicted, you know, like David Hicks, the Australian, was sentenced to four months of home arrest in Australia and not being allowed to describe what they did to him was part of the condition of his plea.
There's basically what?
I mean, in your estimation, do you have any idea of what percentage of these guys or maybe even raw numbers of how many of these guys are actual, you know, Ramzi bin al-Shibh-type terrorists and how many of them are just, you know, cheap herders who were sold by the Pakistani intelligence services to the Americans?
I have no idea from my own personal experience, and that's another part of what got me is just the military expects blind obedience, and that's the only thing that's accepted is blind obedience.
So, you know, you're told, you know, these are prisoners, these are the worst people on Earth, and you're just expected to believe that, hands down, no questions asked.
And if you do ask, it's like, well, look at this, look at this, this guy, you know, he tried to throw feces at you, of course he's evil, of course he's wrong, look at this.
And again, I came back to ask myself that question, well, what would I do in the same situation?
Would I be thanking the people who were keeping me in prison?
I mean, come on.
So I have no idea, and that's just it.
Nobody, I think, knows, at least no information is being made, knowing exactly who's there, exactly what reason they're being held, if any, how they were abducted, for what reason they were abducted.
All these things are pieces that are missing from this scenario.
Well, you know, hundreds of them, the hundreds were really most of them released before the Supreme Court said that they get a habeas corpus hearing, and then ever since they started the habeas corpus hearings, it's been far from perfect, but I think it's like 30 out of 34 or something now have been released, including the guy that was 12 years old when they arrested him.
By the way, were you witness to children being held on there?
I did not see any children, no.
But I guess there's all different kind of camps and prisons in there, you don't necessarily have access to the whole picture, huh?
There are definitely multiple different camps, and I went into, you know, who knows?
I don't even know if I went into all of them or not.
Everything is very segmented, segregated off one section from another.
Because of being medical, we would go into a variety of the different camps, and some of them are just like caged in fence areas, others of them are very much high security, what you would envision of a high security prison here in the U.S., you know, air locking doors and things of that nature.
So I don't even know, even having been down there, if there aren't other areas where different people are being held as well.
And by the way, I forgot to mention in your introduction there that you have some articles here, a couple of them I think, oh, four or five of them?
No?
I don't know.
For antiwar.com, that's original.antiwar.com slash lakemocker, spelled just like it sounds pretty much there.
And this one is called Behind the Wire and Insiders' Reflections on Gitmo.
So, okay, you say you notice that, man, this is just crazy, holding these people indefinitely and no hope of ever even, you know, getting to argue their own case, that kind of thing.
Is that what, you know, at what point did you really make the change and decide I've got to get out of here?
Because you know the deal.
The deal is, hey, you signed up, pal.
Exactly.
And it really, for me, it wasn't until months afterwards where I really came to the conclusion that ultimately war is immoral on the whole.
While I was down there, I certainly began to question, but just in that type of emotional environment, or I don't know, maybe it's a flaw of my own character, but I certainly couldn't truly come to grips with the reality of the situation when I was there.
I don't know what would have happened if I had.
You know, I certainly couldn't envision myself doing anything but refusing to go back into the camps as soon as I came to that conclusion.
But it really wasn't until months afterwards.
Well, and I think you told the Motorhome Diaries guys that what happened was you found libertarianism and started reading some books down there.
The USO hooked you up with some Ayn Rand or something?
Absolutely.
I find that pretty ironic.
It was actually the Morale Welfare Recreation MWR.
It had a little library down there, and people would send books.
I think even publishers and stuff like that would send extra materials and things down there for the troops.
So I picked up a copy of Ayn Rand, and it was within that that I first discovered the non-aggression principle, the idea that ultimately morality is defined by whether or not you're initiating force against another or fraud.
And with that as a grid for morality, the entire idea of just war falls apart.
Doesn't it, though?
Absolutely.
So here you are.
At least you're a medic, right?
You're not the CIA torturer down there.
Here you are.
You're stationed at Guantanamo Bay, and you pick up on the zero-aggression principle.
So you were able to somehow, I guess, here we are after the fact, you were able to convince a military court that, hey, I found libertarianism, so let me out of the Army?
It definitely wasn't as simple as that.
How I got out was by being classified as a conscientious objector, which is something that for a long time I had thought about, but I thought the only way that that applied was if you had some kind of religious affiliation.
Right.
I always thought, too, you had to prove that basically your whole life you've been raised Quaker or something.
You really, really have a longstanding thing.
If you're already in the Army, then that proves you're not really a pacifist.
You just want out now, so sorry.
Actually, that's not the case, because they say that if you were of these opinions or beliefs, or let's say you were raised Quaker and somehow you end up in the military, then you cannot be classified as a CO, a conscientious objector, because they would claim that you knew ahead of time and you already had these beliefs for whatever ridiculous reason you joined up anyway, so that's your own fault.
What they put on you as the burden of proof is to show them that there's been some dramatic shift in your beliefs and in your thinking and in your lifestyle to boot, that you have gone from somebody who did support war at the time that you joined up to being somebody, most of the time it is religious, who has since been converted or there's been some change that you no longer believe that war is moral.
And so how difficult was it for you?
Because I think at this point, this part of the interview really ought to sort of read like a how-to manual for people out there who want to quit their job in the U.S. Armed Forces.
That's exactly what my website is all about.
If you go to the links page on there, I have...warsamoral.com There you go, thank you very much.
I have links on there to each of the instructions or orders or whatever your specific branch of the military calls it for the conscientious objector instruction.
There's the DOD, Department of Defense instruction on there as well.
One of the big things I want to do through my site is get out the information about this.
There are some great resources, legal and otherwise.
I know you had spoken with the Courage to Resist, spoken with them last week.
There's the Center on Conscience and War.
And these folks at these nonprofits, they have lawyers that will work for you pro bono in terms of walking you through this process.
There are definitely resources out there.
What you want to do is read through that instruction first, see what it entails for your specific branch.
For all of them, it will involve a psychological evaluation.
It will involve writing some essays for myself.
They turned out to be rather lengthy to try and answer all these questions.
It will involve a hearing in which you get questioned.
You have to meet with a chaplain.
Go figure, I say I'm not religious, they still want me to meet with a chaplain who's supposed to determine my sincerity.
It's a lengthy process, but I hope that others can see that it can be an effective way for you to separate yourself from the immoral institution that is the United States military.
Well, tell me this, Daniel.
I've heard people say before that if during basic training you basically say, oh man, Sarge, I don't know what I was thinking, but this really isn't for me, that they'll pretty much just let you go because they'd rather not mess with you.
And I wonder if you kind of got that feeling that they would rather just get rid of you and replace you than have to continue dealing with somebody who doesn't want to be there, when after all it's the Great Depression and everybody's going to get a government job in the Army anyway.
So who needs you to go ahead and go?
Was it like that or did you really have to fight them?
It was not like that at all.
People, particularly in the military and even outside the military, are so vehement about the fact that you signed up, you better do your time, you better do your part, you have nobody to blame but yourself for being in there.
And verbally I never got that exactly what you just described, which in my mind just makes sense that behind closed doors that was what the ultimate decision was that was made, that hey, this is not worth it.
This guy's being on podcasts, this guy's writing all the time on the Internet, he's getting articles published, and he's still in.
We can't have this continue to go on.
But I certainly never got that impression from a face-to-face conversation.
Anytime I met with anybody, whether it was the JAG officer, whether it was the chaplain, whomever it was, it was always the throw it in your face, you signed up for this, you know what you are getting into, you need to do the honorable thing and see this out.
It doesn't matter if your beliefs have changed, you do your job or else.
So what's your message to people who are still in the military right now?
My message is definitely think through these issues for yourself.
The biggest problem I see with the military is that it's completely an obedience-based morality.
They try and define for you that right and wrong is based on whether or not you're being obedient to them or being disobedient to them.
I think we all know that that's not actually true, that another person doesn't define right and wrong in any given situation.
And so think through whatever situation it is that you're in, whether you're driving a truck somewhere, whether you're pulling a trigger, whether you're loading munitions someplace.
Think for yourself, is what you're being a part of and what you're being involved in, is that right or is that wrong?
What is the larger context of what you're doing?
Well, and I guess your point is when you started thinking that way, all of what they were telling you started falling apart in front of your eyes.
I guess that's really, I'm trying to think, you know, hopefully there's some, you know, punk rock 16-year-olds listening to chaos radio today too who are going to, you know, be inoculated against all the propaganda that they'll just have a great time like the commercial on TV if only they go join the army and kill people.
It's really not like that.
It is not at all.
One of the simple things I'd encourage you to do if you're thinking about joining up is one simple question you can ask of almost anybody in the military and get the same answer for is ask them, do recruiters lie?
Because you go to this recruiting office and you hear all this good stuff and it sounds so much like something that you would want to be a part of.
Find somebody who's not a recruiter and simply ask them the question, do recruiters lie?
Should I believe this person?
Should I take what they say at face value and accept it?
And I can't think of anybody apart from somebody in the higher-up echelons who would be answering and saying, oh, yeah, definitely, believe everything they tell you.
It's bound to be true.
Nobody inside the military says that.
I'm trying to remember what it was I was just reading where the guy said, you know, he and his commanding officer would laugh and joke and say cynical remarks back and forth about their commanders and the dumb politicians and the stupid war and the evil plans.
But, boy, if he said anything like that to the enlisted men under them, boy, oh, boy, was that trouble.
No, you can talk like that among the officers.
Don't ever tell the enlisted men the truth, for God's sake.
What are you doing?
That's exactly the case.
It's one of those things that behind closed doors, I worked at the Navy boot camp, and I saw day in and day out people who would be coming in 18, 19, 20-year-olds who would be coming in 17-year-olds, too, and who had just been lied to through and through.
People who would come in, and they were promised that, oh, yeah, my recruiter took my medication, and they said that once I get back in, I'm working in mental health here.
We're talking about people with bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, everything else.
And they said, oh, yeah, my recruiter said that after I joined up and got into boot camp, you would provide me with more meds.
And then they didn't get them, and so there's schizophrenic privates in the Army is what you're saying.
Of course not.
Exactly.
Those recruiters are just working on the fact that they get credit when somebody shows up at boot camp.
There you go.
And there's no accountability whatsoever, as you said, if they lie to you.
So if there's no accountability for them lying to you, then why wouldn't they lie to you?
Exactly.
Seems like a pretty obvious lesson.
All right, well, listen, I've got to go.
Gareth Porter coming up next.
But I really appreciate your time on the show today, and I hope that you keep churning out the articles and sending them in to AntiWar.com.
Well, thank you very much, Scott.
I just want to say a quick note.
Resources like yours are what definitely gave me the courage to do what I did in terms of filing my application and in publicly decrying what the military is doing.
Wow, that's great.
It's great to hear that.
I appreciate that very much.
All right, well, thank you.
All right, everybody.
AntiWarIsImmoral.com, Daniel Lakemacher.
And, again, you can find them at Original.
AntiWar.com slash Lakemacher.