09/29/09 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

All right, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 959 in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.comslashradio.
Happy to introduce my next guest, welcome him back to the show I guess is the better way to put it.
It's Dar Jamal, he's writing at truthout.com these days, pardon me, .org and by the way he is the author of Beyond the Green Zone and The Will to Resist.
Welcome back to the show, Dar, how are you sir?
Good Scott, always good to be with you.
Well I'm very happy to have you here and this is an infuriating article.
You know I was trying to study up on Iran's safeguards agreement this morning but I got so pissed off reading this thing it kind of threw me off for a minute there.
Army prisoners isolated, denied right to legal counsel.
Now you're not talking about people who are accused of say, torturing somebody, but in fact people who want out of the military, are being held, what in solitary or just without access to their lawyers, what?
Well what happened was, this is basically a follow up at least in part of a story I did on a guy named Sergeant Travis Bishop.
He was court-martialed not that long ago by the military, about three weeks ago for publicly refusing to go to Afghanistan because he had applied for conscientious objector status and rather than giving him time to flush out that application and give him a shot at obtaining CO status, they deployed him anyway, of course he refused and so they court-martialed him and so he was thrown in jail, given one year in a military brig, forfeiting two-thirds of his pay, had his rank reduced from sergeant to private and then he'll get a dishonorable discharge upon being released from the brig in about 11 months from now.
But what happened was they transferred him up to Fort Lewis to the brig there which is notoriously bad, has a horrible reputation of treating soldiers there very very poorly and regularly denying them their legal rights and constitutional rights.
And in this particular case, he along with another soldier who had also been transferred to Fort Lewis from Fort Hood, Texas, a guy named Leo Church, which we should talk about his story after this, both of them upon being there, their first, I believe it was nine days there, were not being allowed to see or talk with their attorney, which of course violates the Sixth Amendment, it violates attorney-client privileges, and they literally were being held completely incommunicado, no contact with the outside world whatsoever, which is of course in violation of their constitutional rights.
And it's particularly insulting when we're talking about this with members of the military, people who had joined, signed up to serve their country, someone like Travis Bishop is a case study and someone who is really trying to follow the letter of the law to a T, and yet he's thrown in the brig, and despite his rights, and then now for the first nine days completely denied access to his lawyer, since that time we do have to say that Fort Lewis did initially, did then bend enough to allow him visits with his lawyer, but only while Sergeant Travis Bishop was accompanied by two guards who never left the room while he was on the phone with his lawyer on the other side of the glass.
So that also, though, while he was allowed to talk with his lawyer, because of the lack of, total lack of privacy, continues to violate his Sixth Amendment.
Alright, well, tell me you never heard this one before.
Hey, he signed up, and that goes in two parts, actually.
The first part is, you're not allowed to quit when you join the military, don't kill people till they tell you that you're done.
And then two is, you don't get the Bill of Rights in civilian, criminal, everything, just like regular citizens, you have the military, Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is a separate rule of law entirely, Doc.
Right, and both of these are, you know, based on tons of faulty assumptions and completely bogus, because when you join the military, yes, you do give up certain rights, however, you maintain integral rights that all of us maintain.
For example, as a member of the military, you do retain the right to have a lawyer, you retain the right to, and the duty to disobey illegal orders, you retain the right to be able to contact your congressperson and or senator, you retain the right to petition your commander and question orders if you think they are illegal.
So there are plenty of rights, and then of course, in this case, exactly what we're speaking of, you do retain your constitutional rights and the rights granted to you from the Bill of Rights and things like the Sixth Amendment, so if you do get thrown in prison and you're in the military, for whatever reason whatsoever, you still maintain certain fundamental rights.
And this is, at least in theory, why we like to believe that our country is different from countries like Burma or China, that we're supposed to have certain constitutional rights, and yet here we see the military blatantly pissing all over the rights of soldiers in their own brigs, just completely ignoring the Constitution.
But again, this should not come as a surprise when we have a military today that's really willingly allowing itself to be used by a government in two very completely unconstitutional wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan that both, of course, therefore, violate by default by the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, they violate our own Constitution.
So that's a very long-winded way of saying that, well, guess what, we have a government and a military that are blatantly violating international law and the U.S. Constitution abroad, so therefore it should not come as a big surprise that they're doing the same as to how they treat soldiers within their own military.
Well, let me make sure I understand this story right.
You're talking about this guy, Travis Bishop.
Was a sergeant in the Army, or the Marines, or what?
The Army.
The Army.
And so this is the very same guy that we're all supposed to drop our luggage and stop and clap if we see him at the airport.
He's our idol.
To disagree with the policy is to sacrifice him to the gods of the other side of the war, you know, or something.
And yet, when it comes to him being a conscientious objector, and I think you say in the article, referring to his religious beliefs that forbid him from taking part of this any longer, he's treated like one of the worst criminals in America.
I saw he's not even allowed to talk to his lawyer without military guards standing there.
Is this like an aberration?
Is this how it's happened to people across the board now, or what's going on exactly?
You know, Scott, yeah, and we need to also throw into the mix that you just described.
This is a guy who had already served a tour in Iraq as well.
So yes, he came back, and this is the guy that would be walking through the airport and you'd see him getting slaps on the back and handshakes from other passengers thanking him for serving the country, and then he comes home and, of course, is shortly thereafter starting to be denied and continues to be denied his constitutional rights as a US citizen.
But this is not an aberration.
Let me bring up the other fellow I mentioned at the outset, this guy Leo Church, another soldier in the Army from Fort Hood, and let me give you a brief rundown of his story.
This is a guy who's serving in the Army and was not making enough money, and he learned that his wife and their two young kids were literally living in a car because they didn't have enough money to have an apartment, and so Leo Church approached his command and said, look, here's my situation.
My wife can't find a job.
We have two little kids.
We're completely broke.
They're literally living in a car on the street.
Can I go, can I have, can you either help me or give me a little time to go figure out this situation, because literally my family is on the street?
And they said no, he petitioned a lawyer in the military, he petitioned a civilian lawyer, all of it to no avail, and so Leo Church, acting like, and I'm being very sarcastic here, acting like a very disobedient soldier who hates his government, went AWOL to go take care of his family and to get them out of the street, into an apartment, he brought them to Fort Hood, went back to his command, turned himself in, said, look, I'm back from AWOL.
This is why I went.
I'm going to do it to take care of my family.
So they throw him in jail for having gone AWOL.
He's court-martialed.
He's given, I'm not sure exactly how long he received.
It was over six months.
He's sent to Fort Lewis now as well.
Now he is being held in the same conditions as Travis Bishop, under, you know, with his same constitutional rights being stripped away, lack of access and privacy to discuss things with his lawyer as well.
And this is a guy who is simply trying to take care of his family, and the military was doing nothing to help him out.
And let's be very clear.
There's going to be another article coming out soon on POM Dispatch that I'm doing that's really going to show that this is systemic.
This is happening all across bases in the United States where soldiers who've either gone AWOL or come back from Iraq with PTSD and they're not getting treated.
They're literally being warehoused in different units around the country, being denied their rights, being treated literally like cannon fodder, held in these positions, and then every once in a while somebody will come by one of these units and say, OK, well, look, we see you have some legal problems here.
We're going to turn the other way and forget about that if you decide to go to Afghanistan.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Well, support the troops in war, betray them when it's over, right?
Just or better, just forget about them and be confident that the government will take good care of them.
That's basically right.
Exactly what the government, the Obama administration at this point, certainly wants folks to think.
And the problem is, Scott, is they're getting away with it, because if this type of information was coming out under the Bush administration, it would be absolutely scandalous.
People would be freaking out.
But here we are, just because we have the charismatic Obama with a very smart, savvy speechwriter and so many people who've drunk the Obama Kool-Aid, you know, this isn't really raising that much hell.
And I'm actually quite shocked.
I mean, it's kind of funny, Scott, that I've almost become some sort of a military advocate of someone who's doing these stories trying to raise hell about soldiers' rights being violated, about soldiers not getting the health care that they deserve, not getting the benefits that they'd already earned.
And I'm really quite surprised that more people aren't really in an uproar about this, because these are people that joined the military for honorable reasons to serve their country.
They are holding up their part of the bargain.
But then when it comes to the government and the military, when it's time for them to hold up their side of the bargain, these people are literally being hung out to dry.
All right, well, forgive me for being so mean-spirited, but at least, you know, part of me thinks that really this is a good thing, that the American people need to understand and teach their sons that when the Army's done with you, they'll throw you in the garbage.
They don't care about you at all.
An army of one and all that is a big lie.
And if instead in our society we think that being a soldier is the quickest path to real manhood and respect and a future job in a profession somewhere and free college money at everybody else's expense and free medical care for you and your family forever, then what we have, I mean, hell, look at us right now.
We've got the entire Old South is on welfare as part of the military state in this society.
I mean, shouldn't it be, I mean, in a way, isn't it at least a silver lining that the truth is that you'll actually, you're more likely to come back broken and abandoned than come back riding high on glory like some, you know, TV commercial, some fable?
Well, that's exactly true, Scott.
I mean, anyone that believes that someone's going to join the military, get sent overseas, serve a deployment or two or three or five in Iraq or Afghanistan or both, and then come back home and, you know, they're going to finish their contract and the military's going to let them go at the end of their contract and then give them all the benefits they've earned, whether it be college money or VA care or what have you, and then send them on their merry way, you know, you need to just, you need to eat off drugs because that's not happening.
It's very, very, very rare if it ever happens at all anymore, and the reality is if someone joins the military today, frankly, they have to be out of their mind or so desperate to believe the lies of a recruiter that they've allowed themselves to be suckered into a machine that is literally doing nothing but supplying cannon fodder to perpetuate both of these occupations that are utterly failed and completely endless, and the military is chewing people up and spitting them out faster than it can keep up, and that's why we're looking at a situation now when we're on the brink of an announcement coming probably within a month of a government that's going to be sending tens of thousands, if not up to 45,000 more Americans over to Afghanistan alone, and we look at, okay, so where are they going to get these troops?
Well, that's why they're sending back people with PTSD, they're sending back people with traumatic brain injury.
I talked to a guy in Alaska a month ago in the Army who told me they tried to send me to Iraq and they had already diagnosed me with a brain tumor.
I talked to another guy shortly after that who, literally, the military diagnosed him with PTSD, and they gave him more meds, and then we're trying to send him, in the process of trying to send him to Iraq, and we're telling him he could get treatment for his PTSD in Iraq.
So this is what the length the military is going to in order to keep enough boots on the ground for the Obama administration to continue perpetuating both of these occupations.
Wow.
Absolutely incredible.
They're just literally taking people out of the hospitals, basically, to send them back, huh?
That's literally what's happening, and that is not an exaggeration whatsoever.
That or, even one better than that, refusing to put people in hospitals, refusing to give people their mental health treatment and their PTSD treatment, and letting them sit and stew in barracks indefinitely in sort of a legal limbo, and then coming back and saying, you know, you can get out of this if you just go ahead and deploy to Afghanistan.
And that's how they're getting enough boots on the ground, and so then they're not even sending over regular troops.
They're sending over troops that have already been deployed and are seriously damaged individuals, and then sending them into this situation in Afghanistan that is spiraling, already spiraled completely out of control, and then people are going to wander 20 years down the road just like what we're doing now with Vietnam.
How did we let that happen?
How did we let these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in the military get completely used and abused while we just sat back and watched it happen?
Well, I got your solution right here, Dar.
Mutiny.
I mean, we've talked before, you covered these guys in Iraq who would say, oh yeah, we're going out on patrol, and then they'd go sit in a field and hang out all day and then go home at the end of patrol time, because why go and get blown up for nothing?
And you know, basically what we need is that, only with a little more gumption, it's time for these guys to get in their trucks, if they're in Iraq, start driving toward Kuwait, start driving toward Jordan, refuse to fight.
In Afghanistan, hole up in your bases, refuse to go out there.
I mean, we're talking about a bunch of guys with machine guns, it's not like their officers can force them to go out there and fight like this is, you know, the French in World War I, you know, go out there and fight or be executed on the spot or something, just refuse to fight.
End these wars right now, it's up to the soldiers to do it.
That's exactly right, and the soldiers do have that power, and you know, the silver lining to this dark, dark cloud is that more and more people are standing up and refusing to fight.
And we just got the news a few days ago, Lieutenant Aaron Wipat in the U.S. Army, who stood up back in 2006 and publicly refused orders to deploy to Iraq, is the highest ranking member of the military to do so with a combat deployment.
And we just heard a few days ago that the Army's releasing him this Friday, as in three days from now, and so at the end of the day, this guy publicly refused, and he will not serve one day in jail as a sentence, nor one day in Iraq, so you can fight and you can win.
Yeah, and you know, his story is really important, too, because he didn't just say, hey, look, I don't want to go to this war, or it's against my religion or something, he said, this war is illegal, and as an officer, that means that I would be responsible for any killing that happened by guys under my command, and I will not lead men into battle to commit war crimes.
No!
Exactly, and I don't know what more honorable thing someone in the military could do, and this is a fine example of someone literally following the oath they swear as a soldier to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but only by following lawful orders.
Aaron Wipat did that to a T, people like Victor Augusto are doing that to a T, people like Sergeant Travis Bishop are literally, these people are acting at the height of patriotism and setting amazing examples for other soldiers in the military to start following, again, you have rights, it's your duty to disobey illegal orders, you can stand up, you can fight the military, and you can win.
Alright, how can they find help?
GIrightshotline.org, Military Law Task Force, groups like CourageToResist.org down in Oakland, these are just the tip of the iceberg of actually a fairly large support network that does exist right now, the T-Troops just need to get information that this does exist, that these folks are there to help you, they will help you figure out exactly what your rights are, and then how to go about obtaining them.
Alright everybody, that's the heroic Darja Mail, unembedded, real journalist, he's writing at Truthout.org, the article is called Army Prisoners Isolated, Denied Right to Legal Counsel, the books are beyond the green zone, and the will to resist.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Dar, appreciate it.
Thanks again, Scott.