01/14/10 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome Darja Mail back to the show.
Unembedded reporter, author of Beyond the Green Zone and also The Will to Resist, Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He writes for Truthout.com.
Welcome to the show, Darja.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Thanks.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And so, wow, yeah, there you go.
You heard it.
You wrote an article about it for Truthout here.
It's called Army Imprisons Soldier for Singing Against Stop-Loss Policy.
That song that the Chaos audience just heard got a man thrown in jail, Dar?
Exactly.
He's been sitting in jail so far for over a month because he wrote that song.
A little background on this first.
This is a guy who did 14 months in Iraq on a tour.
He was in a very volatile area in South Baghdad and then came back home, was against the occupation.
This is a story that's become so common.
He comes back home.
He's against the occupation, but he's only got a couple of months left in his contract.
And so he decides, well, I'll just suck it up.
I'm almost there.
They can't deploy me in two months.
Bang, they stop-loss him.
So far since September 11, 2001, more than 200,000 troops have been stop-lossed in the army.
Currently, according to recent Pentagon figures, approximately 6% of all the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are stop-loss.
So that is the policy.
I think we've talked about it before, Scott, where basically the government can step in and say, well, we know that you're about the end of your four-year contract, but it's national emergency, these words, so we're going to send you back over.
Sorry.
Suck it up.
And that's what happened to Mark.
He has a daughter.
He was divorced because of his deployment.
He has a daughter.
He was banking on getting out and having more family time.
They stop-loss him.
He becomes extremely angry.
He writes the song that we just heard and sends it to the Pentagon.
His commander even said, yeah, I like the song.
But then he ends up getting thrown in the brig, and now he's facing a court-martial that's, at least right now, tentatively set to take place in about four months.
In other words, a political decision was made from higher than his commander.
Exactly.
Clearly.
And this is a big situation because he's directly taking on the stop-loss issue.
Of course, the Army doesn't want to get more media attention on this.
They don't want word out because this is one of the things in the Army that's a major contributor to low morale.
No big shocker there.
So they're trying to keep a lid on it.
But also his case has very potential, potentially large ramifications.
It could well be a precedent-setting case, because this is a First Amendment issue.
And just because he's a soldier doesn't mean that he gives up all of his First Amendment rights.
He still has the right to do this.
He composed this song off-duty.
This is not something he was going around on duty in his uniform doing.
It's his right to do it, and they've imprisoned him, and it's a violation of his right.
Well, you say in your report here for Truthout, it's truthout.org, army-imprisoned-soldier-for-singing-against-stop-loss-policy, that they say that the song is a threat.
He says, I'm going to put you all up against the wall and kill you, and then you won't be able to stop-loss me, will you?
Or something like that.
Jeez, I guess that would have been a rap if it rhymed without just being the same word twice there at the end.
But anyway, the point is, that's the deal, right?
That's what they're charging him with, is that he's threatening them, and they're frightened.
Exactly.
And let's be straight up.
These are incendiary lyrics.
That is very inflammatory, extremely angry stuff.
But the argument of his lawyer is that, look, granted, I understand that the Army is touchy on this, particularly given that we're still in the wake of November 5, the Fort Hood massacre, where a guy went in and did just that, used weapons and opened up on other soldiers and killed a dozen people and wounded a few dozen others.
I mean, this is very serious stuff that we're talking about, and the Army's touchy on that.
And his lawyer is basically saying, look, we understand the nature and the sensitive nature of this, but what the Army has to understand is that this is political hyperbole.
This is just music.
If we went around and imprisoned every artist who had inflammatory, incendiary lyrics, how many of the rappers and hip-hops and anyone else, or even Bruce Coburn for that matter, and we can go down a long list, and we'd basically be imprisoning all the artists for writing any lyric that might challenge authority, even incendiary ones like this.
And it gets into, where is that line?
And this is probably, we could do a whole show on this discussion in itself, but where is that line where art is not allowed to cross a certain line when it challenges authority?
I mean, that's really, in some ways, the whole purpose of art is to question reality and authority and such.
And anyway, this is a big digression.
I don't want to get too far off on that, but his lawyer is basically saying, look, Mark Hall engaged in its political hyperbole, the incendiary lyrics.
Mark Hall has come out and made his own statements and been very clear.
These are just lyrics.
I have no intention of doing this.
This is just a song where I'm expressing my anger because this policy has affected me and my little girl in a very deep way, and I'm angry.
And so I wrote a song to express my anger, and that's all that's going on here.
Well, and here's the thing about it, too.
We're talking about a job that you can't quit, and not only a job that you can't quit, but a job where they don't even have to respect their end of the contract.
When your contract is up, they can still keep you from quitting.
And if they really are worried about things like what happened at Fort Hood happening again, how about when somebody is begging to not be deployed and saying, I can't take it anymore, how about you just let them quit rather than pushing them to wear their backs against the wall and they go crazy?
Well, exactly.
And this brings up another topic.
As I know, you're aware, Scott, we just had this report come out recently about suicides for Veterans who've been discharged, where between 2006 and 2007, we saw a 26% increase in the number of suicides with discharged Veterans.
And this is typically a very hard segment of the population to get these figures on for obvious reasons, but not surprisingly, it really fairly closely correlates with the number of suicides, the increases in the Army, because we've had record years of suicides in the Army, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.
And these trends are increasing.
2008 was also a record suicide year in the Marine Corps.
And I think that really is indicative of what you just said, that when you keep redeploying people, and then in this situation with stop loss against their will, and then we start having suicide problems, and rape problems, and domestic violence problems, and alcohol abuse problems, and drug abuse problems, and soldiers with extremely low morale, well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why is this happening.
And these people literally feel like they're in prison.
I can't tell you how many folks I interviewed during my book that referred to the Army as like a big green prison, you know, that basically you sign up, and as they put it, the Army owns your ass, that, you know, you sign a contract, and that contract's not even worth the piece of paper that it's signed on because of stop loss, they can basically keep you indefinitely.
And that's what Mark Hall and so many of these other, at this point, hundreds of thousands of soldiers who are stop loss are concerned about.
We're in this indefinite so-called war on terror.
There's clearly no end in sight for either the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan.
If they can stop-loss me now and redeploy me, what's going to stop them from doing this indefinitely?
And so guess what that's doing to troop morale?
Yeah, it's like being in Guantanamo and knowing that you're never even going to get a trial, you know?
An indefinite detention, an indefinite sentence.
Exactly.
I mean, I don't know what could possibly be worse for morale, and that's what all these Guantanamo detainees, or people who were in Abu Ghraib, or, you know, all these people that fall into these kind of black prison sites.
I mean, you know, and that's why suicide is so rampant.
They have no idea where they're going to get out, and there's nothing they can do about it.
Well, and here's where, you know, real reality comes up against the big phony reality that TV paints for us all, and the politicians like to pretend is real.
Where, you know, war is, you know, maybe a five-second bit of frames out of some John Wayne movie, or some myth, or something like that, and in reality what you're talking about is mass killing, and people seeing their best friends killed, and close quarters combat, and people hating you as much as a human can hate you right to your face as, you know, you're in battle with them.
IEDs, you know, attacks from ghosts you can't even shoot back against.
I always think of this this thing by Kevin Tillman, Pat Tillman's brother, that he wrote for Truth Dig, where he said he's mocking the care packages, and people having kindergartners write little letters saying, we support you, and all this, and he's saying, oh yeah, that's a big help to me when my skin is melted to the seat of my aluminum Humvee, and I'm being thrown 50 feet in the air here.
I mean, and so what we're talking about here basically is that all the myth is just that, and in the real reality, this is, you know, wars break human souls, man.
You're talking about, tell me more about these suicide numbers, and give me give me good footnotes to give the audience some good footnotes of what this really means to take.
I mean, after all, Dar, these are people, most of them who join the military are young men.
They basically take it as a matter of course that the American democracy will only use them to do the right thing, to defend freedom, defend the country, fight for truth and justice, and movie scenes that they've memorized, and whatever, and that's how it's going to be, and then so they're being betrayed, and they're being put through, as you say, this war that has no end in sight.
A generational conflict like Dick Cheney promised is on.
The long war, and so tell me again about the real consequences for the people who, you know, in and out of the military when they get out, and people still in, in terms of suicides, and the post-traumatic stress, and all of this.
You got free reign in 10 minutes.
Okay, well, I don't have exact figures right in front of me, but what I can say is that, you know, we, for starters, and you really put that well, you know, we're talking about the reality of war, and what war does to human beings, and so first of all, I'll talk about a fellow that I quoted pretty heavily in a recent article, a guy named Dr. Kernan Mannion, who's a board-certified psychiatrist who was working out at Camp Lejeune treating Marines who were veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and what he told me is, he said, look, I was treating guys that were coming back from repeated deployments, and these were strong, well-trained, disciplined, fully committed troops when they started, and I was treating completely broken down human beings.
He said, literally, we don't even have the terminology in the American Psychiatric Association literature to address what's happening, because this is a new phenomena, this repeated deployment of people two, three, four, five, six times sometimes to these occupations, and they come back broken.
He said, literally, they're in a state of what he called psychological implosion, where literally they have suffered so much trauma, so much stress, usually abuse by their command if they try to actually go get help.
They're called sissies in a lot of other far more derogatory language.
You can imagine the words I'm going to use very easily.
They're degraded, they're made fun of, they're oftentimes punished when they try to actually go get help for their PTSD.
They're beaten down, and then they start to crack, and as Dr. Mannion said, this internalized resentment and all of this internalized emotion goes one of two places.
They either direct it inward and buy what their commanders are telling them and believe they are total pieces of shit, and they end up killing themselves, hence the intense suicide numbers and the increasing suicides, massive escalation in suicide in the last four years, or they project it outwards, hence other soldier-on-soldier violence, whether it comes in the form of killings.
I mean, we've had several other killings of soldier-on-soldier violence just in the U.S., just in the few weeks in the wake of Fort Hood.
I mean, Fort Hood was an extreme example, but this is indicative of soldier-on-soldier violence that happens regularly, almost as much as suicides in a lot of instances, when you include not just overt violence of a murder, but when you include rape or fight or this kind of thing.
I would argue that we probably even have more soldier-on-soldier violence than we have suicides.
So, this is what starts to happen when these people go overseas, they're traumatized, they're put in situations where they see horrible things happening, they're seeing the babies getting their heads blown off, they're seeing the innocent civilians getting shot and murdered, getting illegally detained, torturing, or they're doing it themselves, and then they come back and then they're stop-lossed because they're at the near the end of a contract and they're going to be forced to do this again.
So, you can imagine being in that situation as a human being, and so you start trying to find ways to get out of it, and then you try to use legal ways to get out.
Maybe you get a civilian lawyer and you refuse to deploy, and then the military is going to court-martial you and try to take all of your benefits and all of this.
So, major, major problems.
But again, just to bring up another segue from this is, I want to reiterate that despite a lot of talk recently about, from the Obama administration, of beefing up the Veterans Administration, of giving them more money and more help to take care of our troops, blah, blah, blah, it's a drop in the bucket.
It's not nearly enough to contend with this massive, overwhelming crisis of troops.
We've had now well over two million people in the military who've been cycled through both these occupations, and when someone comes back and they are actually given a discharge from the military, the average wait for them to get their first appointment at the VA is six months.
If they file a disability claim with the VA and the VA denies that claim, and then the Veteran appeals that denial of their claim, they have to wait an average of four and a half years to get a response from the VA about that claim.
So, that's why when we include Veterans of all wars, 18 Veterans a day in this country commit suicide every single day.
When we look at people who are already theoretically under the auspices of VA care, Veterans, 1,000 Veterans technically under the auspices of VA care every month attempt suicide, and these are staggeringly high numbers, and a lot of people hear this and say, well, it can't be true.
Well, these are all numbers directly from the VA itself.
The suicide numbers, the record suicides, 2006, and then every year so far since 2006, we've seen a 10 to 20, roughly a 10 to 20 percent increase every year in the number of suicides.
So, 2006, 10 to 20 percent more suicides.
In 2007, already from that larger number, another 10 to 20 percent increase in suicides, 2008, and the same for 2009.
Again, shockingly high numbers.
Where are these coming from?
These are the Army statistics.
This is from the Army itself.
So, there's no room for latitude to question these statistics.
They're coming straight from the source.
Well, so yeah, real reality and phony TV reality are quite different, and here's the other thing about this too, is that in TV reality, the soldiers, they're not dehumanized the way that the enemies are.
They're dehumanized almost in the opposite sense, in they're idolized, and in such a way that they become unreal in a way.
They become, well, characters on TV, like characters on TV, because that's what they are to most Americans, and so the consequence of all this horror that you're talking about is still happening to some TV characters, and it's not any more real than the average sitcom, I think, to most people.
That's a really, really important observation, I think, and it's something that I, not I think, I know, because that's something that a lot of the vets I interview lately speak to, and that's that on one hand, they come into the military, they're completely broken down and dehumanized during basic training.
They're not even allowed to use their name.
They're not allowed to look their sergeant in the eyes.
I mean, all of this stuff, their heads are shaved to kind of put them back in this kind of infantile mindset that the army's basically going to become your daddy or your mommy, and they're completely broken down and then rebuilt to be trained murderers, where they march around in cadence and chant, kill, kill, kill, and this kind of stuff, and then they're sent overseas, and they engage in these atrocities, and then they have to deal with this situation and this trauma, and what has this done to them, and what have they done, and they have to deal with all that, and then they come back home to a corporate media that deifies these people like they are heroes.
They're protecting our country.
They're keeping us safe from terrorism, and they know more than anyone else that that's a big, fat lie, and it really exacerbates this kind of schizophrenic experience then that they feel, where on one hand, they know the truth.
They know that these are wars for corporate empire.
These are wars for global domination by the U.S. These are all about corporate profit, nothing to do with national security and liberating Iraqis or Afghanis or any of this nonsense.
This is just a big, fat, ugly lie, and they are smack on the front lines of it, and then they come back home, and they have a media that wants to cheerlead and say, oh, look at these heroes, support our troops.
They walk through the airports across the country, and people come up and slap them on the back and shake their hands and thank them for defending the freedom.
So what does that do in their mind?
What kind of schizophrenic experience does that bring up where they have to try to reconcile reality with this total propagandistic idea of, oh, these people are these great protect defenders of our freedom, and that only then adds a whole other layer internally and psychologically that these folks are going to have to try to sort out.
Yeah, that's horrible, and you know, the thing is, too, I remember, well, my whole lifetime growing up, I've seen Vietnam veterans on the side of the road, and I wonder how a whole society that all has spent the last decades looking at Vietnam veterans on the side of the road, not that all Vietnam veterans, you know, were so broken that they couldn't get by in life, but many of them were.
We've seen our whole lives.
How can we believe it's going to be, what, different this time because the Republicans are doing it instead of the Democrats or something?
It's insane.
Right, and we talked about this before, I think in November, Scott, we talked about the fact, you know, talking about Vietnam, you know, we have an admitted number of, I think it's almost 60,000 U.S. soldiers officially that were killed in the Vietnam War, and we see that nearly three times that number of Vietnam vets have committed suicide since the end of that war, and again, that type of thing, we're starting to see those kinds of numbers replicated right now with Iraq and Afghanistan, where, yes, okay, we have a big increase of soldiers being killed in Afghanistan on the front lines, far, far less so in Iraq, at least for the moment.
This is probably going to be changing in the next few months, but we're seeing these numbers somewhat smaller by comparison of the massive numbers of people that were being killed in Iraq, soldiers being killed in Iraq a few years ago, but now they're being outpaced by the number of suicides, and again, this is a replication of what happened in Vietnam, and again, you know, these are some of the similarities and the parallels we can draw, you know, these illegal occupations, these wars for corporate profit, all based on lies and propaganda, and the soldiers that are supposed to be the grunts pushing forward this policy by use of military occupation and brute force, they know, they see firsthand what's going on, and then they come back broken, completely chewed up inside, realizing that they've put their life on their line for a big fat lie, and they've seen their buddies die for nothing, and then what are they going to have, what do they do with all the emotions that come up from knowing all this information?
Yeah, listen, I really appreciate you supporting the troops the way you do, and I'm sorry that we haven't even gotten to talk about this article that you wrote again at truthout.org, Army Files Charges Against Single Mother, where not only do they stop loss in this lady, they're trying to take her kid from her, and I guess we'll have to save that for another time, because we're all out of it today, but I thank you very much for all your work and your time on the show.
Thanks again, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Darjah Male from truthout.org, and his books are Beyond the Green Zone, from his time as an unembedded reporter covering the war in Iraq, and The Will to Resist, Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
NBC News in-depth tonight, back to the front.
The number of U.S. soldiers who've had their Iraq military service involuntarily extended under the so-called stop-loss policy is at its highest since the start of the war.
That's despite a Pentagon pledge last year to cut back on its use.
NBC's Jim Miklaszewski takes a look at the effect of this controversial policy.
As Sergeant David White was preparing to wrap up his military career last year, he was stunned when the Army refused to let him go.
I was just in disbelief.
I did not think that something like that could happen to me.
Instead, White was sent to Iraq for his second combat tour, leaving wife Crystal and newborn Eva behind.
What the Army did is slap White with a stop-loss, which allows the Army to extend the soldier's enlistment, like it or not.
Oh, yeah, I did a good thing.
I'm back from Iraq.
I served my country.
The only thing on my mind right now is to get down and serve big time with family.
What a housemaid, rocking the fruits of my labor.
That 14 months of Iraq behavior.
Better lurk, stay alive, shoot that fucking paper, no doubt.
I was making that Iraq paper.
Now I'm ready to get on out, become a civilian again, and get on out.
No car payments, house all decked out, so I'm set to motherfucking scream and shout.
But success got cost.
The Army got forced.
Telling me a nigga like me is stop-loss, that means I can't get out.
My salad got tossed.
They fucked me over like a mob boss.
58,000 soldiers have been stop-lossed in the past six years.
Their service involuntarily extended from a few months to more than a year.
Stuart McKenzie's stop-loss not only cost him his time, it nearly cost him his life.
It looks like the Army wants a war.
They want to fuck with a force never felt before.
You can't stop the unstoppable.
That's Warnickus' law.
So I'm fighting for the greatest cause.
When there's a will, there's a way.
So don't tell me, hey, that's life, motherfucker, because you can't get sprayed.
Warnickus, behave.
Nah, this is real days, when shit hit the airwaves, and somebody gotta say, fuck you, colonels, captains, E7 and above.
You think you're so much bigger than I am?
I've been too good of American.
This stop-loss, stop-movement got me chased and bashed in.
If I do drugs, I'll get kicked out.
But if my time was up, I can't get out.
So the good die young.
I heard it out your mouth.
So fuck the Army and everything you're all about.
Army surgeons reattach McKenzie's hand, which now gives him limited use.
To this day, McKenzie blames the stop-loss.
The Army says it uses stop-loss to keep soldiers who reach the end of enlistment from leaving the battlefield in the middle of the combat field.
Like Obama said, somebody be held responsible, but some of y'all gonna be held in hospitals, whenever possible, to pursue my own journeys in life, through my own made obstacles.
Since I can't pinpoint the culprit be, they want me, cause misery loves company.
I'm gonna round them up all, eventually, easily, warp right up peacefully, and surprise them all.
Yes, yes, y'all, up against the wall, turn around.
I got a motherfucking magazine with 30 rounds, on that three-round burst, ready to fire down.
Still against the wall, I grab my M4, spray and watch all the bodies hit the floor.
I bet you never stop-loss nobody no more, in your next lifetime, of course, no remorse.
Yeah, you don't stop.
Yo, the Army is the only military branch that still got this stop-loss in effect.
So, only thing I gotta say, is prepare for the consequences.
When people wanna get out, let them get out.
They don't like it any better than I do, but it has proven necessary, in order to maintain the force.
But many lawmakers and critics claim the Army has used stop-loss as a backdoor trap, to make up for the shortage of soldiers, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is going to destroy the morale of our troops.
We've got to stop it.