04/13/10 – Josh Stieber – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Okay, so our first guest on the show today is Josh Stieber.
Maybe it's Stieber, I should have asked him before.
He is a former soldier of the Collateral Murder Company, so-called.
Hopefully all of y'all have seen the YouTube of the WikiLeaks video of the Apache helicopters killing the dozen or so men in Baghdad that came out last week.
And so Josh was a member of the same U.S. Army company that is featured in that video.
Welcome to the show, Josh.
How are you doing?
I'm good, thanks for having me.
Well, thanks for joining us, and I'm sorry about your last name.
Is it Stiber or Stieber here?
It's Stieber.
Stieber, okay.
I apologize for that.
I should have asked you before we went on the air here.
Okay, so tell me, Josh, what do you see in that video?
Well, actually, first tell me name, rank, serial number, basics, stuff like that, and then we'll talk about the video.
Well, you got my name now.
Yeah, I was in that company, not on that actual mission, but in the company, and it was an infantry unit.
And so it's the guys on the ground, not the helicopter.
So an infantry unit, and I got out about this time last year as a conscientious objective.
Okay, and you were stationed in Baghdad, I think it says in your bio, I guess during the surge or in 2007, 2008?
Right, yeah.
Can you tell us exactly when you got there, what month, what part of which year?
We were there from February 2007 to April of 2008.
Okay, so yeah, infantry unit in Baghdad during the spring and the summer of 2007, at least up through that August, I guess, was pretty much the worst of the killing during that war.
Is that pretty much your understanding?
That was a pretty intense time, and then also towards the end of our deployment, the spring of 2008, things got pretty hot, too.
All right, well, listen, I want to talk all about your activism and your conscientious objector status and all of that at the end, but now let's talk about this video.
You say these are your friends flying the helicopters.
You recognize their voices, huh?
Not the helicopters, the guys on the ground.
Oh, the guys giving the okay.
Right.
So, yeah, when I saw the video at first, it took a minute or two to process everything, but when I realized what it was, I guess I started thinking that what was shown in the video is not something that's really that uncommon, and I think this video can be used to have a much-needed conversation about the nature of this war and what war looks like, and, again, think that's just a snapshot of what things look like on a daily basis and that if people are shocked by this video, then the right answer is not just to take it all out on a few select individuals, but it shows everything that's wrong with the system, and the stamp of approval was put on over the weekend by Secretary Gates saying there's nothing wrong with this, and so it shows that this is what the system looked like, and if we don't like it, then we need to change the whole thing.
Hmm.
Well, so let's get into some of the particulars, because I guess on one hand you have some people saying, I guess because I did read a couple of articles where they refer to this as, well, you know, this is an extreme circumstance, and, yeah, it doesn't look like anybody in the video being killed even saw the helicopter pilots or were engaged in a firefight with anybody.
They're basically just walking down the street and all that, but this is, you know, this is an exception, right?
That's why WikiLeaks bothered to leak it.
It happened to have a couple of reporters killed in it, but this isn't, you know, always how it goes, and then I guess there's another argument that says that there's nothing wrong with what happened at all, and I guess they tend to cite the regularity of such things as proof that it's perfectly okay.
This is how it is, but I guess you're saying, you know, one, it's wrong, but two, yeah, that's how it is, but so, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Go ahead and explain, you know, the 10,000 words per snapshot.
Well, there's, you know, 45 minutes of footage.
What do you see?
Yeah, I think it can be discussed on two different levels, but morally I think it's completely wrong, and that's why I left as a conscientious objector, but yeah, militarily speaking, what happened in the video was justified, and again, I think we need to have a conversation about it, but to do that, we need to understand all the details too, and I think the video is taken a little bit out of context that, you know, people have made the point that, well, no one pointed a weapon directly at the helicopter, but what was going on that day was the guys on the ground were going house to house, searching different houses, and the helicopter was attached to them to try and keep watch over them and eliminate anything that was threatening them, and, you know, it goes all the way back to the things you hear in basic training on a regular basis of shooting first, asking questions later, and so when the pilots saw those threats, they did what they were trained to do and opened fire, saying that they were protecting the people around the corner, searching houses.
Okay, so despite the fact that the report, the military report, that there was a firefight going on, you're saying that there was, in fact, a team of American soldiers on the ground going house to house.
How far away were they from this courtyard in the video?
Do you know?
From talking with my friends who were there, a couple blocks away, maybe a block or two.
Well, you know, in fact, Julian Assange seemed to, if I'm saying that right, he seemed to concede quite a bit about the nature of the spin in the video to Stephen Colbert pretending to criticize him on TV last night.
I don't know if you saw that, but Colbert attacked him for calling it collateral murder and for not pointing out that at least one of the guys is carrying an AK and another guy perhaps is carrying an RPG, at least in the beginning of the video, it seems like it, that kind of thing, and Assange basically said, well, yeah, but now that part about there being a team of soldiers right there in the neighborhood that the Apaches were supposed to protect, I didn't know about that, but one thing I noticed in there was that it seemed like the pilots always overstated everything.
Now, I don't know if they were just making a mistake in saying, oh, that camera looks like a weapon to me, or whether they were kind of wink-nudge pretending that they thought it was a weapon because they wanted to shoot anyway or what have you, but they do seem to overstate things, particularly the one that jumps out at me is when the Good Samaritan pulls up to rescue the wounded guy.
He says, I guess the one that wasn't dead yet, one of the Reuters reporters, the Apache pilot says, well, they're getting out to retrieve wounded and weapons.
Can I fire?
And the ground officer says, yeah, sure, go ahead.
But there's no anybody picking up any weapons in that footage.
It's just they get out of the van to pick up the wounded guy.
They put him in the van and they start to leave.
So my question is, I guess if I can make a question out of that, how far within the rules of engagement are they?
You say they teach you in boot camp, shoot first, ask questions later.
Is that out of the Geneva Conventions or how exactly does that work?
I never really heard the Geneva Conventions get referenced.
It would be nice if they would go by that.
But yeah, I mean, I guess trying to put a little bit broader aspect on it and, again, by no means trying to morally justify what happened, the majority of my friends who were there, I would like to hope at one point or another, enlisted because they were told that doing so would help their country.
And then you throw them in this situation where we really didn't have a mission.
We were just driving around doing these missions all the time, searching through different houses and pretty much out there getting pot shots taken at us, roadside bombs going off all the time.
So it puts you in this extreme state of panic all the time.
You never know where something is going to come from.
And so, again, not to justify what goes on by any means, but anything can potentially be a threat.
I mean, these roadside bombs would go off in a pile of trash and our frontiers would be there one minute and would be dead the next.
And that's just the nature of it.
And, again, I think we can have an important discussion of why the nature of it, you know, means we shouldn't be there, why it doesn't even make sense.
But, yeah, so going back to the helicopter and everything, you know, your first reaction as somebody in a helicopter, as somebody in that situation, I don't think is going to be, oh, I see somebody with something that looks like a weapon trying to figure out all the possibilities of other things it can be.
You're in that state of panic and combined with that training, again, that says, you know, we need to shoot first and ask questions later and just a lot of very callousness and a lot of calculation to put people in that psychological state.
And that combination leads to not much critical thinking or not much evaluation.
It's just, yeah, fire and then ask questions later.
The New York Times ran this piece where they went and got a bunch of psychologists to explain why it is that the pilots are having such a good time doing this killing in this video, apparently.
And, well, they don't use the word degeneracy, but basically they say, this is what's necessary, this is what you have to do.
You can't go around killing people all day and consider them all human or whatever.
That's too much to bear.
So you turn it into a video game or you turn them into hajis or you do whatever you have to do in order to deny them their humanity so it's okay to kill them.
But then I guess, you know, what we get to see on this end of the video when it finally gets leaked is that it dehumanizes our guys, too.
It turns the kid from the high school football team into an animal over there because this is what he has to do in order to continue getting up and doing his missions every day.
Yeah, and I think there's a large sense of betrayal from a lot of people who enlisted for noble reasons.
You know, the people whose advice they valued told them that joining the military was a noble thing.
And then, yeah, you go through this process where it is very calculated that that's the kind of person they want you to become.
Yeah, well it is.
It all does come down to the dads and the coaches out there, doesn't it?
Yeah, it starts with, you know, the very fabrics of our society.
Alright, so, I mean, I guess the point that you keep getting back to about this footage is that this is what occupation looks like.
You know, the army was beaten years before you even joined up, it sounds like, right, Josh?
The Iraqi army fell, Baghdad was occupied, and there was no more Iraqi army to fight.
It's like Cat Williams said, tell me what the Iraqi army uniform looks like.
Don't worry, I'll wait.
Right, you haven't ever seen it, because we're not fighting their army, we're fighting them.
We're killing them.
And so, I guess, if people want to quibble about the details of that one particular video, and whether it shows murder, or whether it shows a mistake in judgment, or whatever, it's ultimately one detail in a larger war crime.
How could you occupy a people, especially an Arab land rife with AK-47s, right?
They've probably got more AKs than people over there.
They have their own little Iraqi Second Amendment, I guess.
And then every time there's a guy with a rifle on the street, it's okay to kill him, and anybody near him.
Yeah, I mean, a couple of interesting points with that is that, yeah, one was the comment about, oh, you shouldn't take your kids to battle, which, two points to make on that.
One is that, yeah, it seems like an extremely callous statement.
And I was talking to my friend about it the other day, and he was like, wait a second.
They didn't take their kids to battle.
We brought the battlefield to their own neighborhood.
But then, two, an interesting thing with that statement that the helicopter gunner makes is, on a surface level, it does sound like an extremely callous thing.
But if you think a little bit more about human nature, when we do something stupid or when we do something that we think is wrong, our natural reaction is to come up with a quick excuse for it.
What I hear in that statement and the man's voice is that he's realizing what he did.
Oh, crap, we just shot a child, and this is wrong.
And then he's scrambling for an excuse, and his excuse is, oh, they shouldn't have been there to try and excuse him from what he did.
Right, yeah, I think that's right.
The first thing out of his mouth is, oh, no, or something like that.
Right, yeah.
So, I mean, again, I think that's why the conversation that has to come from this video is so important, that there are soldiers morally struggling through what's going on.
And this is a perfect opportunity to admit as a country, look, we put you in this situation, and try to reach out to them and try and say, all right, we're working as hard as we can to try and solve problems differently to make up for this mistake of sending you there in the first place and for telling you to do exactly what you were trained to do.
But so much of the conversation has been kind of the complete opposite of that.
And, I mean, I guess one thing is that me, who has chosen to leave that system and to speak out about it, I've been criticized and called a baby killer and white trash and stuff like that.
And I would say that by no means is a representation of the peace movement.
I've met a lot of very amazing people in it.
But if people in the military who are struggling through, you know, can I speak out, can I act on my conscience and start living a different way and lay down my weapons, if they're seeing me and seeing other people who have chosen to speak out about it get criticized and just faced with all this heavy judgment, that's not going to make them any more likely to lay down their weapon and do something different.
Yeah, well, and good for you for that, too.
And let's go ahead and develop that theme a little bit more.
It is quite apparent.
I don't know.
You tell me your own story, Josh.
But it seems to me like pretty much, well, I mean, obviously there are exceptions.
But I would say almost, you know, at least in super majorities, the kids who join up the U.S. Army, they don't even ask themselves about the, you know, stop and think about what is the policy really at all.
It comes down to this is one of my career paths.
Basically, I don't have too many choices.
This is one where maybe I can get some money and go to college and get some discipline and they'll make a man out of me and an army of one and all these things.
And then basically you just kind of default trust the coach, the democracy, the elected leadership, the civilians in charge, the officers deploying you, that they're the ones doing the right thing.
They're the ones who know all these big grownup questions.
Your job basically is to just sign up and go do this thing.
And like you said, people whose judgment is trusted by young kids are the ones saying, yeah, go ahead and do it.
There's nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
It's perfectly fine.
And so, well, it's almost like listening to Republicans talk about, you know, what's true or not or whatever.
It's like an alternate reality that has no real relationship to the truth or something.
So these same kids don't even really have the question brought up.
What am I going to be like after I've killed a bunch of people?
You know, what situations might I be put in?
Maybe I'll come back without my arms and legs.
Maybe I'll come back, you know, just alive enough to stay alive another 40 years, but brain dead in a bed the whole time.
Or, you know, the real questions about what it means to go to war in occupying other people's countries in this day and age.
It's not like just fighting off the Japanese in some heroic naval battle or something.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, I think, again, it goes back to so many fundamental things.
And, again, with all the public outcry over these videos, you know, I think there should be shock.
And I want to make that important, too, in that there should be a reaction to this.
But I think if we look deep enough, like so many of these things are so deep-seated in our society.
And I think back to my high school history class and, you know, we would learn about things like the atomic bomb or bombings of civilian populations during wars in the past.
And I don't remember ever being told that that was morally wrong, only maybe tactically debatable.
But the end mindset is that, you know, if it helps your country come out on top and if at the end of the day, you know, your country still lives the way they want to live, then there might be some tragedies involved and some regrets.
But what happened was a good thing.
And, yeah, we don't really question that.
Yeah, I guess to jump ahead in my story a little bit is I spent six months walking and biking across the country trying to talk to people about these different ideas and to get them to start thinking critically.
So one of the ways that I would do that is when I would be sharing my experiences, I got to speak to a lot of audiences across the country.
And so I would start those talks out by asking the audience who cared about their family and friends.
And if they did, would they stand up with me?
And, you know, of course, the whole room stands up.
And then I said, this is a big question that led to a lot of my decisions.
And I was told different things would be in my best interest to do along the way.
And I'm going to tell you one of those things.
And I think you'll find it in your best interest to repeat after me.
And I'll leave the room in a military cadence that we sang about killing women and children.
And the interesting thing was that, you know, even the most, like, dedicated peace group or religious group usually went along.
The majority of people in the room would go along and repeat after me just because I was telling them to do something.
And I think that's such a fundamental part of human nature is that we do want to just listen to whatever we're told.
And it is so uncomfortable to speak out against something or to really question the things we're being asked to do.
Yeah.
Well, so what do you tell an 18-year-old kid who says, yeah, but I think I'm going to join the Army?
I mean, I've been getting a lot of good opportunities to visit a lot of high schoolers and talk to a lot of students.
And I really just try to tell them my story and kind of put a personal face on it.
And, you know, I think there are a lot of very important facts that people need to consider.
But I think, you know, from my conversations, talking with people with different points of view, facts alone aren't going to do the trick.
So I try and tell them my story and just the slow process of the things that I went through in training and seeing other people lose this humanity that, you know, again, is demonstrated in the video.
And so I give them examples of that and try and run through different scenarios and then also talk to them about, you know, how challenging it was to go through the conscientious objection process and different challenges that I've faced since then, but all the positive things that have come from that and the transforming power that I've seen from the love and compassion that I've tried to dedicate myself to since then.
And, yeah, I've gotten a lot of very positive feedback from the different students that I've been able to talk with.
Oh, that's great.
You know, when I was in ninth grade, I guess, toward the end of the year, one of the teachers, he wasn't one of my teachers, but he was one of the teachers there, came back from Operation Desert Storm.
And he gave his little talk about it, and I think he kind of deflated the whole cheering yellow ribbon thing a little bit just with how serious he was about it.
But he also said, you know, he was just stationed in Saudi Arabia, I think, and didn't really deploy out into the war.
But, you know, basically, I'm pretty sure the consensus was, wow, you know, camouflage equals us, equals America, equals heroism and yellow ribbon and wonderful.
And I think, you know, virtually the whole ninth grade class, at least there in the auditorium that day, you know, we pretty much bought it, you know, all the way through that point.
And I guess I would have really liked to have heard a veteran come home and talk about, you know, a little bit more reality of the situation.
But then again, that war was, you know, almost entirely an air war, and there were so few casualties on the American side, it was pretty easy to just make a cartoon out of it.
But, you know, now we see that that war never really ended, and that, you know, it wasn't ever going to end, I guess, without at least 4,000 Americans and perhaps a million dead Iraqis as a result.
But anyway, I just like the idea of you coming and talking to high school kids and kind of giving them a whole different dose of reality on the situation and what they're hearing from their football coach.
Right, yeah, and I think that's why it's so important to embrace these soldiers in the military or who have gotten out of the military who are tempted to just put everything behind them, and unfortunately that's what a lot try to do.
But I think if people can try and reach out and find ways to support them and give them this opportunity to talk about their experiences, then, yeah, as a society, we can learn a whole lot from them.
So tell me this.
If you're in the U.S. Army and you don't want to do this anymore, we all know you're not just allowed to quit like a regular job.
They'll put you in prison for trying to break this contract.
So how does one become a conscientious objector?
Well, I was in the Army for two years before I even knew the process existed, but you fill out this big application, answer a whole bunch of questions, and then you get interviewed by a chaplain and a psychologist and an officer, and they write up their reports, and then it all gets combined into a big packet and forwarded up the ranks.
And, yeah, I was really fortunate through that experience to have a lot of support from different organizations and from friends and family.
And, yeah, I think the more of that exists, one, just educating people that there are options out there like conscientious objection, or some people have felt like, you know, I'm not a conscientious objector but I object to this war and have chosen to go to jail.
Instead of that, there's ways to support those soldiers or, you know, even if somebody, for whatever reason, doesn't have the strength to stand up when they're in it, there's plenty of guys who, you know, just kind of grit their teeth and get through it.
And then when they're getting out, you know, that can be another way or another time when to reach out.
Now, are you a member of any groups or you just kind of do your own thing out there?
No, I'm doing a little bit of everything with everyone.
So I'm continuing to blog on my website, which is just loveexperiment.wordpress.com.
And then I'm doing an internship with Peace Action and organizing a leadership conference for high school students and then working with a peace education program in inner city D.C. with some elementary students and then working to help spread the word of a group in Afghanistan called Our Journey to Smile.
And I was trying to bring them over here, actually, this summer to do a speaking tour and have them share their insights from their own country, but they were denied travel documents from the U.S. Embassy.
All right.
Now, say the address of your blog one more time.
Contagiousloveexperiment.wordpress.com.
Right on.
Okay, well, listen, I think it's great that you're going around preaching the peace message to people.
It seems like we'd have won by now, you know, being as right as we are about it and everything.
But, you know, the more soldiers, figuratively and literally, we have on our side, the better.
So thanks a lot.
Sure.
Thanks for having me on.
And, yeah, again, hopefully we can take this video and have a much-needed conversation with people who might not have realized what was going on before.
Yeah.
Well, everybody can go to YouTube.com or CollateralMurder.com, Wikileaks.org, or just go to the blog at Antiwar.com slash blog and you can find the YouTube there.
Pass it around to all your friends on your Facebook and whatever you like and try to get that out to more and more people.
I highly recommend that folks try to do that.
And I thank you again, Josh.
Sure.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Josh Steven.
And, again, the website is loveexperiment.wordpress.com.
And we'll be back after this.