|
Author
|
Topic: "I Was a Propaganda Intern in Iraq"
|
DayDreamer
unregistered
|
posted August 23, 2006 12:19 AM
 
"I Was a Propaganda Intern in Iraq" - Fmr. Lincoln Group Intern Describes Paying Iraqi Press to Plant Pro-American Articles Secretly Written by U.S. Military
Monday, August 21st, 2006
quote:
He held a loaded submachine gun while being driven through Baghdad by two Kurdish security men.
He had three million dollars in cash locked inside his bedroom in the Green Zone. Armed with a gun, he interrogated Iraqi employees about whether they were doing their job. He spent a summer in Baghdad paying to plant pro-American articles in the Iraqi press that were secretly written by the US military. He was just 22 years old and he was an intern at the Lincoln Group, the Washington-based government contractor. The company gained notoriety last November after the Los Angeles Times first revealed it was being paid by the Pentagon to plant stories in the Iraqi press as part of a secret military propaganda campaign. A subsequent Pentagon investigation in March cleared the Lincoln Group of any wrongdoing. Today, we speak with that former intern of the Lincoln Group. Willem Marx is a freelance writer and a graduate student in journalism at New York University. His article detailing his experience is published in the latest issue of Harpers Magazine. It's titled "Misinformation Intern: My summer as a military propagandist in Iraq." He joins us on the line from Uzbekistan.
Willem Marx, former intern with the Lincoln Group in Iraq.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more... AMY GOODMAN: Today, we speak with that former intern of the Lincoln Group -- his name, Willem Marx. He joins us on the line from Uzbekistan. He's a freelance writer and a graduate student in journalism at New York University. His piece -- his latest piece appears in Harper's magazine, detailing his experience. It’s called “Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq.” Willem Marx, thank you for joining us. WILLEM MARX: Hi, Amy. Good to be with you. AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, why don't you start out just explaining, how did you get this job? WILLEM MARX: Well, it started when I was approaching my final exams at Oxford just over a year ago, and a cousin of mine who lived in New York told me about a company that was offering internships in Baghdad. I had a place to study at NYU the following September, and I thought that a summer working in Iraq would be a very good experience for me as a burgeoning young reporter. And I sent off my resume. I saw a sort of position offered as a media intern. It didn't give a huge amount of detail. And it seemed like an opportunity that very few people my age would get. And having sent off my resume, I was contacted by the company, went through a few telephone interviews, and soon found myself flying over to D.C. to pick up a military identification card and then, a few days later, landing in Baghdad. AMY GOODMAN: When you came to this country, you met the founders of the Lincoln Group? WILLEM MARX: Yes, I did. Two men -- one called Christian Bailey, who is a Brit like me, and another former Marine called Paige Craig, who -- they have their headquarters in Washington, D.C. AMY GOODMAN: And can you tell us any more about them and about that part of -- WILLEM MARX: Absolutely. Absolutely. I arrived in D.C., having not been there for a few years, since I visited a cousin at a university there. I didn't know the city very well. They put me up in a hotel near their office, and the morning after I had arrived, I walked up there. It was on K Street, the heart of the lobbying industry. And I was introduced to both of them. Paige Craig was very military, not particularly friendly, and just, you know, muttered a few words to me, whereas Christian Bailey had also gone to Oxford, and so we chatted about that for a while. Neither of them were very forthcoming really about what I would be doing out in Iraq. Pretty sort of sketchy on details. But both, you know, were telling me there were great opportunities for young people like me. They were a company that was growing rapidly. And they welcomed me on board and wished me good luck. AMY GOODMAN: Willem Marx, we're going to break, and then we're going to come back to hear about your time in Iraq, your time in the Green Zone and out. Willem Marx, former intern with the Lincoln Group. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Willem Marx. We're speaking to him now in Uzbekistan, a freelance writer and graduate student, spent the summer, last summer, in Iraq as an intern with the Lincoln Group and has written a piece about it in the latest edition of Harper's magazine called "Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq." Willem Marx, had either man who founded the Lincoln Group been to Iraq? WILLEM MARX: Yes. Paige Craig, the former Marine, had certainly spent a lot of time there, I think after the initial invasion in March 2003, and from what I understood, he went out there to try and facilitate business opportunities for foreign investors and in a very roundabout way ended up with a contract for, I think, what they call “strategic communications” with the U.S. military. The other, the Brit, Christian Bailey, had never, when I first met him, been out to Iraq, and he explained to me that every time he meant to go out there, something would come up in D.C., and he was needed to stay behind. Just after I left, at the end of August, I think he made a trip out there for a few days, but as far as I’m aware, that's the only time he's been there. AMY GOODMAN: So you got on a plane and went to Baghdad. Describe your experience there. WILLEM MARX: Well, I arrived in Baghdad airport and was taken to a villa in the Green Zone via Camp Victory. After about a week of twiddling my thumbs and not really doing a lot, I became rather impatient and emailed people back in D.C., saying, you know, "What am I doing here? I thought I was going to be doing some work." And within a day or two, I was taken to lunch by another employee, and he explained to me in detail what exactly it was the Lincoln Group was doing. And I was going to take over his position, because he was going on holiday, so -- on vacation, I should say. And what he was doing was receiving English-written articles by soldiers in a certain unit inside Camp Victory, the major U.S. base just south of Baghdad. He was choosing which of those articles would be published in Iraqi newspapers. He was sending them to Iraqi employees, getting them translated into Arabic, getting them okayed by the command back at Camp Victory and then having other Iraqi employees run them down to Iraqi newspapers, where they would pay editors, sub-editors, commissioning editors to run them as news stories in the Iraqi newspapers. And that was the role, you know, after about a week or ten days of me being there, that I took over. And for the first two or three weeks of that, things seemed to go according to plan. I obviously wasn't hugely happy about the work I was doing, but I saw it as a very, very interesting insight into how both the U.S. military operate in Iraq and also how contractors operate there. And things started to get slightly more exciting, in that the company was offered a much larger contract to do all sorts of other types of media placement, both on television and radio, and the internet and through posters around Baghdad. And I was involved in setting up some of the budgeting and the execution of this larger contract, which was worth $10 million a month for the company. AMY GOODMAN: $10 million. According to MSNBC, "In December 2005, Pentagon documents indicate the Lincoln Group […] received a $100 million contract to help produce these favorable articles, translate [them] into Arabic, get them placed in Iraqi newspapers and not reveal the Pentagon's role.” WILLEM MARX: I think MSNBC has got it slightly confused. The Lincoln Group was one of three companies also offered -- also contracted for up to $100 million for a contract with the Psychological Operations Joint Task Force, I think it’s called, down in Florida. And that $100 million was dependent on pictures they made, ideas they came up with and could then sell to the military. That contract, with Lincoln Group at least, has been canceled, I think as recently as this month. I think I saw a piece in the Washington Post reporting that. So that $100 million, very little of it was ever given to the company, I think, and it was certainly touted by them as one of their major crowning achievements. But these are $20 million over two months, the $10 million a month for media placement in Iraq, was a separate contract with the military in Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: So, Willem, talk about how you chose these articles. Talk about the generals you communicated with, what the content of the articles were. WILLEM MARX: Sure. Well, I'd get about five a day from this unit inside Camp Victory. And they'd vary from profiles of an Iraqi policewoman, maybe, to stories about factories opening, hospitals opening, terrorists being eliminated. And I tried as much as possible to stay away from those that dealt with terrorism and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I thought they were particularly inflammatory, often badly informed about local feelings towards insurgents in Iraq. And I tried as much as possible to push pieces which talked about reconstruction. I'd pass those ones onto Iraqi employees, that talked about hospitals being rebuilt, and they were very clinical stories. There was not often a lot of art to the writing, but I felt that those were definitely stories that, you know, the mainstream media, both in Iraq and elsewhere, would not be writing about, purely because they would have no access to them. And it was the kind of positive spin on the situation that I felt more comfortable with using. AMY GOODMAN: And then -- WILLEM MARX: And I'd -- sorry, yes? AMY GOODMAN: Talk about then what you would do once you chose these articles? Who would you transmit them to? WILLEM MARX: I would send them to an Iraqi in Lincoln Group's downtown Iraqi office, which was staffed entirely by local Iraqis, and he would choose one of the translators they had there, get it turned into Arabic, send back to me. I unfortunately don't read Arabic at all well. And I would then send it to the command. I think they had an Iraqi translator there themselves, who would check that it more or less followed the original English. They would rubber stamp it, and I would then send it back to the Iraqi office saying, “This is good to go. Put it in newspaper A, B, or C.” And from there, the process really was beyond my control, and they would do their best to place it in the newspaper I'd ask them to put it in, and often they didn't, and I began to grow suspicious about why exactly they weren't putting it in certain newspapers. And that led to what was, to me, the most shocking episode of my time in Iraq, when I was called upon to question some of the Iraqi employees at the downtown office as to why articles were being placed in newspapers we hadn't asked them to be put in and also why they were charging these newspapers far more than they had when I'd first arrived, the suspicion being that Iraqi employees were taking a cut of the money they then expensed the company. AMY GOODMAN: Why don't you explain that whole journey, how you left the Green Zone and went to conduct this interrogation? WILLEM MARX: It was extraordinary. I was asked by my boss at the company to look into -- you know, I'd noticed these discrepancies myself in the kind of flow charts we kept, which monitored how many articles were published and where, and I saw there were some very strange goings on in these records, and I was sent to go and investigate, myself. So I took a friend from the Green Zone, an Iraqi guy who lived nearby and worked more or less as a handyman for another American contractor. He agreed to come down as a mutual sort of friend of mine and translator, who the other Iraqi employees wouldn't know and would not be able to follow or suspect, in case there was any foul play to be experienced. And he and I drove down to this downtown office through all the checkpoints, sort of mid-afternoon, I would say, arrived at this office, which, of course, is bolted and relatively heavily guarded inside this apartment building. And I went straight to the head of the Iraqi office and said, “I want to speak to such-and-such and such-and-such and ask them about these discrepancies.” And I, at this stage, had no idea who was really involved, who was guilty and, because my Arabic was very rudimentary, I very rarely understood much of what was sort of said in front of me, so it was difficult to know who I should be trusting. And I sat down with one employee after another and really questioned them about their involvement in the publishing of these stories and whether they had been taking kickbacks in connivance with local editors. And the really startling episode I write about is sitting down with one of these men, who I'd never really trusted, and he very angrily was protesting the accusations I was laying against him. And I carried a gun very often with me when I traveled outside of the Green Zone, a small sort of Glock revolver, and carried it in my belt, and as I sat down to talk to this man, after a few moments, I realized that the revolver was very uncomfortably placed inside my belt. And as I started asking these very accusatory questions, I pulled the gun out of my belt and put it on the table between the two of us and suddenly realized that was a horrifically threatening motion. And I was really quite disgusted with myself, and the man left. He ran away out of the office when I was questioning someone else. The two men who had been sent to help me put pressure, along with my own translator friend, to help me put pressure on these employees were former Mukhabarat officers, part of Saddam's intelligence service, and they told me the best approach would be to sort of threaten this guy with a CIA investigation, telling me that those three letters were the most threatening three letters to any Iraqi. And once I had learned that the man I’d probably gone on, as it were, had left the building, I decided, you know, it was getting dark, and I needed to get the hell out of there, and this was not at all the sort of thing I should be spending my time doing if I wanted to be a journalist. And that really precipitated my departure from Baghdad. I decided, you know, that week, I was out of there. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the amounts of money that we're talking about on both ends? Here you were interrogating these Iraqis about whether they had possibly pocketed some of the money that was supposed to go to the newspapers. And yet, on the other hand, you had the Lincoln Group receiving millions of dollars. WILLEM MARX: Absolutely. AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain? WILLEM MARX: Well, that was one of the really shocking things to me, is that, you know, I was sent down to talk to these guys, and at most we paid, I think, roughly $2,000 to place an article in the best Iraqi newspapers. And, you know, they were taking half of that. They were pocketing a grand an article, which in Iraq, as I'm sure you'd appreciate, is a huge amount of money and would have helped them and their families quite significantly. At the same time, items in the contract that the Lincoln Group had with the U.S. military -- one such item, a line item, as they would call it, would be placing a TV commercial on Iraqi television, and that would require them to film, edit and then air these 30-second-long or minute-long on-air sort of commercials. And each commercial, they were paid $1 million, just over $1 million. And when I went to try and, you know, get some idea of prices for these things, I was told that you could effectively get one of these on air for about $12,000, and as I’m sure you appreciate, that's a pretty significant profit margin. And yet, there was I, interrogating people with guns for a mere $1,000. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the U.S. generals involved and also the Iraqi newspapers you had these articles placed in? WILLEM MARX: Yes. The process by which I passed on these articles often involved a bit of back-and-forth between myself and captains and majors in the U.S. military unit that I dealt with, and my relationship with them was very important to the company. I had to at times be diplomatic, at times be critical. And occasionally I would have to give up my editorial control over which articles were pushed through to the Iraqi media, because they had, themselves, received orders from above, from men like General Casey, who was the top commander in Iraq at the time and, I believe, still is. And General Casey said, “No, sorry. It's very important we publish this article. You guys make sure the Lincoln Group publishes it.” And lo and behold, we'd publish it, even though it would be something that I felt was, you know, not really suitable and would grate with many Iraqis reading it, who would think this is obviously American propaganda. And, you know, the newspapers we dealt with, I think on occasions like that, were very, very suspicious, I would imagine, of who was planting these articles, where they were coming from, why freelance Iraqi writers would turn up to their offices and offer them $1,000, $2,000 to publish an article. And there must have been a huge suspicion from some of these editors that the Americans were involved. And one particular article about the Badr Brigade, which is a Shiite militia, I'm sure you know, which General Casey was very keen to push, basically applauded the Badr Brigade for not retaliating against attacks on the Shia in Baghdad. And he was very keen to get it pushed out, and two newspapers in a row refused to publish it, because it was too inflammatory in a political sense. So that was a very interesting experience, having this senior, senior general getting involved in the nitty-gritty and wanting one particular story to go out, only to discover that no Iraqi newspapers in their right mind were willing to publish it for however much money we offered. AMY GOODMAN: Well, Willem Marx, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Have a safe trip back to the United States. I look forward to meeting you when you come back to New York to get your journalism education. Willem Marx has written a piece in the latest edition of Harper's magazine called "Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq." www.democracynow.org[/quote] IP: Logged |
DayDreamer
unregistered
|
posted August 23, 2006 12:28 AM
Broadcast Exclusive...AWOL Army Sgt. On the Run for a Year Speaks Out for the First TimeFriday, August 11th, 2006 quote:
In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with Sgt. Ricky Clousing, an Army interrogator who served in Iraq from December 2004 until April 2005. He became a war resister after witnessing how the war was being fought. Within months after returning home, he went AWOL and remained in hiding for a year. We speak with Sgt. Clousing just hours before he plans to go to Fort Lewis to turn himself in to military officials. [includes rush transcript]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pentagon is now estimating that as many as 40,000 troops have deserted the U.S. Armed Forces over the past six years. Many have refused to fight in Iraq.
Today, we are joined by an Army sergeant, who chose to serve in Iraq as an army interrogator with the 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg. But he became a war resister after witnessing how the war was being fought. His name is Sgt. Ricky Clousing. He is a 24-year-old from Sumner, Washington. He served in Iraq from December 2004 until April 2005. Within months after returning home, he went AWOL. In June 2005, Sgt. Clousing sneaked out of Fort Bragg in the middle of the night. He left behind a quote from Martin Luther King. It read, "Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" But conscience asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right." Today Sgt. Ricky Clousing plans to go to Fort Lewis to turn himself in to military officials. But first he joins us live from Seattle.
Sgt. Ricky Clousing, Iraq combat vet and U.S. Army Interrogator.
Related Link:
The Seattle Draft and Military Couseling Center's website dedicated to Sgt. Ricky Clousing
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more... AMY GOODMAN: Today, Sgt. Ricky Clousing plans to go to Fort Lewis in Washington to turn himself in to military officials. But first, in this first national live broadcast after going AWOL, he joins us in a studio in Seattle. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Sgt. Ricky Clousing. SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Thank you. AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Why did you go AWOL? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I chose to leave after experiencing the brutalities of war in this war in Iraq, and it was a process that I considered long and hard upon my return to Fort Bragg. Those two-and-a-half months of my integration back into the military and back into society really questioned and really forced me to reevaluate my beliefs and my own personal feelings and convictions, politically and spiritually, about my involvement in the war in Iraq and also the organization of the military in general. JUAN GONZALEZ: Could you talk to us about some of your specific experiences while you were there? My understanding is you actually witnessed some killings of innocent civilians that really affected you deeply? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Yes, I was assigned to a tactical infantry unit, which meant basically that I was out on patrols with infantry units. The particular incident you’re referring to, I was in Mosul on a convoy en route, and we stopped to assist another convoy that had been struck by an IED. And during that time, I was ordered to pull rear security on the convoy, where I proceeded to go behind the rear Humvee and guard the road, basically to ensure that nobody turned down and posed a threat to U.S. forces assisting soldiers in their personal crisis, what was going on with the IED. As I was doing that, I had seen a vehicle turn down our road going approximately 15 miles an hour. I saw directly in the window. It was a young boy, or a young man, I should say, and as soon as he saw U.S. troops, he was terrified, took his hands off the wheel. It was evident that he was scared that U.S. troops were there, weapons drawn. He didn't know what was going on. He was making an effort to brake the vehicle and to turn around immediately, when a soldier in the turret of the Humvee behind me proceeded to open up fire and fired four to five rounds inside of the vehicle. I went over to the vehicle with a medic and broke the window out and dragged the civilian into the road, which is common to provide first aid upon injured civilians, and even insurgents, but I look downed at him as the medic was performing first aid. And the situation, obviously, was really -- I was in shock. I didn't know what was going on. It was really fast. But as I looked down in the eyes of the boy, I could tell that he was just scared. He was frightened. And I don't speak Arabic, and obviously there was no words exchanged, but I could look into his eyes and see that he was confused and hurt and didn't know what was going on. You know, I could sense that from the soul he was crying out, you know, “Why is this happening to me? What’s going on? What did I do? I was turning my car around.” I spoke with the leaders afterwards and told them that basically they needed to instruct their soldiers to assess and analyze a situation properly, as the proper procedures were neglected. The escalation of force by waving of the arms and firing a warning shot and then proceeding to try to disengage the vehicle by shooting the tires, and then actually if the vehicle doesn't stop and it poses a threat still, you're authorized to engage into the vehicle and engage the civilian. All of those procedures were ignored, and it was directly -- basically the civilian was fired on immediately. And I thought that this Iraqi died innocently, and I was really disturbed by it, really shook my foundation of why I thought we were there. And I had skepticism before, but that particular incident, along with some other ones, really just made me second guess what we were doing there and what really is happening. AMY GOODMAN: Did you raise it with your superiors? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I did raise it to the superiors that were in charge of the convoy. I did. AMY GOODMAN: And what did they say? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I brought it up to them. And it was hard for me to do that, because I was never deployed before, because I wasn't an infantry soldier. I was a military intelligence soldier attached to these infantry guys. But when I did, I spoke what I felt I needed to say and bring up issues that needed to be questioned and concern. And when I did, I was really shot down by the superiors, basically that I didn't know how convoy operations worked, and I had never been deployed before and I didn’t understand that this happens and that that’s just something that’s a reality of war, and that I apparently didn't know what I was talking about. JUAN GONZALEZ: And how prevalent, in your experience, were these kinds of incidents of innocent civilians being needlessly killed? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I, myself, only witnessed this particular incident where an innocent civilian was killed, although because I was an interrogator, my security clearance granted me access to the S-2 room, which is the intelligence briefing room. It’s where they have all the intelligence updates. There is a board called the daily intelligence summary, and that holds information on how many times in our area of operation that soldiers have received small arms fire, how many IEDs have gone off and also the number of local nationals or noncombatant Iraqi civilians that are killed. And as I said, I only saw this personally one time, but the number of innocent Iraqis killed on the bleeder board, or on the intelligence board, definitely climbed the whole time I was in Iraq. The number never -- it gradually increased day by day that we were there in the sector. AMY GOODMAN: It’s called the “bleeder board”? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: It’s an intelligence summary board, basically of all the updates in the area of operation that we conduct in, all of the significant events. AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Ricky Clousing, can you go back to the beginning and tell us when and why you joined the military, the Army? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I joined in 2002. I was actually taking some time off school, and I was doing some mission work in Thailand in an orphanage. And I ended up coming back from that trip and not knowing whether to pursue school or not. So I moved to Europe to live with my father for a little while, and I was there for about four months, backpacking around. I was traveling, and I encountered soldiers coming back from Afghanistan, which was fairly after 9/11, fairly short after that. And I really just started considering the possibility of serving in the military in this new era of these all new ideas that had been thrown out there. So I started contemplating. I went and spoke with a recruiter, and the job title that seemed appealing to me was an interrogator, partly because of the nature of the job and also because of the possibility to learn a foreign language and just the new experiences that I would have. JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you decided to go AWOL, could you take us through some of your thoughts then, and why you decided you had to do this? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Well, as I said, the particular incident that I saw definitely disturbed me. There’s a number of other incidents that happened that really added to my confusion and my conflict of conscience, you could say. And it really -- although some might call these incidents isolated, and even in the media, you watch on the news the events that happened in Haditha, you read about the 14-year-old girl that was raped and killed by soldiers or even the abuses of Abu Ghraib. Every month or every couple months, there is always a headline issue, it seems to be, that there’s some sort of abuse of power that’s going on in Iraq. But what’s not really covered by the media and what really isn’t spoken about are the daily injustices that happened. And my experiences over there were daily injustices, which included that innocent civilian that was killed, but as I said, there was also a number of other incidents where I -- to sum it up, I really saw the physical, psychological and emotional harassment of civilians. The abuse of power that goes on in Iraq each day really was just not -- I believe should not be tolerated. And these events aren’t covered by the media. So those events that I witnessed and I was exposed to really forced me to second guess my ability to perform daily functions as a soldier, to train my soldiers that I was in charge of and to be trained. I was basically kind of -- I felt stuck in my situation, where I really felt like -- as I got home, I really dug into information leading up to the war in Iraq and also through foreign policy in general, and I just really was -- I felt stuck, that I’m in an organization right now that I’m discovering, based on my experiences and the knowledge that I’m reading, that I really do not believe that I can honorably serve and be a part of at this time, so -- AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Clousing, we have to break for 60 seconds. We’re going to come back. We want to talk to you about that process that night when you left Fort Bragg and also what you’ve done over this past year. It has been difficult. You’ve gone AWOL. Today, you’ll be holding a news conference in Washington State and turning yourself in. We would like to talk about that, as well. We are talking to Sgt. Ricky Clousing, speaking out nationally for the first time. Today, he will turn himself in in Fort Lewis. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: Our guest in Seattle today is speaking out nationally for the first time. His name is Sergeant Ricky Clousing, served as an army interrogator in Iraq from December 2004 to April 2005. This is more than a year later. Ricky Clousing, what did you do the night you left Fort Bragg, and did others there know that you were leaving, placing that quote of Dr. Martin Luther King, leaving it behind you and walking out of the base? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Well, I didn't actually plan a day that I was going to depart from my unit. Like I mentioned a little bit before, it was a process of when I integrated back home of my feelings really intensifying over time, and it intensified to the point in June, where I really felt like the only decision that I had in obeying my conscience and living honorably was to separate myself from the military in that way. So nobody else in my unit knew that I was going to be leaving. It wasn't -- I didn't talk to anybody about it. I basically -- I knew this was a time I had to move and I had to separate myself. So, as you mentioned, I left a note on my door explaining my feelings, which my unit was well aware of. My superiors already understood my conflict, and I left a quote by Martin Luther King, which you read earlier, which I feel kind of explained in a summary of how I felt in the whole matter. JUAN GONZALEZ: What about your fellow soldiers? Did any of them share your frustration and your disillusionment with what was going on there, or were you pretty much a loner on this issue? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: When I was in Iraq, I was primarily attached to infantry units, so I was around a different mentality of soldiers. When I returned home and spoke to some of the people that I had trained with and stuff in my intelligence unit, there's definitely, even among the infantry soldiers, there was absolutely a feeling of confusion, a feeling of questioning whether or not we're actually in Iraq for the reasons we were told, because men and women are dying each day, you know. Even these infantry guys are losing their friends each day in roadside bombs, losing their friends in gunfire attacks, and absolutely, the -- I mean, people are wondering, “Why am I here? I mean, I was sent here for a reason.” And people still, soldiers in particular, they definitely feel this question of “What is really going on?” It’s not so much spoken about on a big platform, because it’s kind of like this inner question that I had before I went to Iraq, as well. It’s just that the experiences that I had really kind of forced me to deal with these questions on the forefront, kind of like compelled me to answer them. AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Clousing, last November we interviewed a former U.S. Army interrogator specialist. His name is Tony Lagouranis. He, too, served in Iraq. He was at Abu Ghraib beginning in April 2004. He was in other places, as well, began to speak out about what he witnessed there. During the interview, he talked about the methods of interrogation he used. TONY LAGOURANIS: We were using dogs in the Mosul detention facility, which was at the Mosul airport. We would put the prisoner in a shipping container. We would keep him up all night with music and strobe lights, stress positions. And then, we would bring in dogs, and the prisoner was blindfolded, so he didn't really understand what was going on, but we had the dog controlled. He was being held by a military police dog handler on a leash, and the dog was muzzled so he couldn't hurt the prisoner. That was the only time I ever saw dogs used in Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: Did the prisoner know that there was a muzzle on the dog? TONY LAGOURANIS: No, because he was blindfolded, so the dog would be barking and jumping on the prisoner, and the prisoner wouldn't really understand what was going on. AMY GOODMAN: What did you think of this practice that you were engaging in? TONY LAGOURANIS: Well, I knew that we were really walking the line, and I was going through the interrogation rules of engagement that was given to me by the unit that we were working with up there, trying to figure out what was legal, what wasn't legal. And according to this interrogation rules of engagement, that was legal. So when they ordered me to do it, I had to do it. And, you know, as far as whether, you know, I thought it was a good interrogation practice, I didn't think so at all, actually. It didn't -- we never produced any intelligence. AMY GOODMAN: Former Army interrogator, Tony Lagouranis, talking about his experiences. You, too, were in Mosul, Sgt. Ricky Clousing, as well as Baghdad. Did you have experiences like this, you, too, an Army interrogator? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I actually was never exposed to the mistreatment of prisoners. It could have been because of the differences between the specific unit I was working with. There’s two separate possibilities basically for an interrogator. You’re basically assigned to a strategic unit, which are -- a lot of those units are -- they’re basically not attached to infantry units. They're not an infantry support unit. Those are the interrogators that were at Abu Ghraib. Those are the interrogators that are at Guantanamo Bay and a lot of the larger interrogation facilities. Those are strategic unit interrogators. It just happened to be, primarily because of my airborne qualification, that I was stationed with the 82nd Airborne, which happens to be a tactical infantry unit. So, because of that, my interrogation experiences were tactical questioning out in the city after raids, after searches and whatnot, but also in the interrogation facilities. But during my time in the interrogation facility, I never witnessed, like I said, mistreatment of prisoners. My unit back at Fort Bragg was very adamant and was very particular about the treatment and the proper handling of prisoners. But, however, I did hear stories from other interrogators in Iraq that things went on. I heard stories from Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities of methods used, and using dogs is one of them, using some of the interrogation practices now that are deemed inhumane, I guess. I've heard of stories like that. The common idea in a lot of the mentality in the military is “out of sight, out of mind,” and that definitely prevails in that instance with interrogations being held in Iraq. JUAN GONZALEZ: Sergeant, next Thursday U.S. Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is going to face a pretrial hearing for refusing to deploy to Iraq. Two months ago, he became the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment. This is an excerpt of a video recording he issued at the time, explaining why he's refusing to fight. EHREN WATADA: The war in Iraq violates our democratic system of checks and balances. It usurps international treaties and conventions that, by virtue of the Constitution, become American law. The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of Iraqis is not only a terrible moral injustice, but it is a contradiction to the Army's own law of land warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes. Normally, those in the military have allowed others to speak for them and act on their behalf. I believe that time has come to an end. AMY GOODMAN: First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, he's in Washington State. Suzanne Swift, who also went AWOL and was confined to the Fort Lewis base, from Eugene in Washington. Also, James Yee, the chaplain who was arrested from Guantanamo, comes from Olympia, Washington. And now, you today, here in Seattle, you're going to Fort Lewis. Can you talk about the atmosphere in Washington State? Why do you think there are so many of you? Or are we just hearing people going public in Washington State? After all, we hear there are tens of thousands of people who have left the military, according to the Pentagon's figures. SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I think that there is definitely a wide amount of people that feel the same feelings I have, the same questions that Lieutenant Watada had, as many -- just like a lot of other war resisters that are standing up. Going public is something that is basically an individual choice that has to be made that -- I know other soldiers who have left AWOL and other soldiers who even would like to leave AWOL. I don't think it’s necessarily that the Northwest is particular to those people. It does so happen to be that Suzanne Swift is from the Northwest, I myself am from the Northwest. Lieutenant Watada is from Hawaii. He's stationed here in the Northwest. But I would definitely say that there is a progressive idea of involvement and of collective consciousness here about questioning politics and questioning what’s going on in Iraq, which really needs to involve our whole society. I think that that's the kind of the lack of civil responsibility, I maybe could say, that people in this nation have kind of stepped back from and not understood that not only are soldiers really responsible for, you know, certain situations they find themselves in in Iraq, I think as a whole our society really needs to step back and realize what's going on in Iraq and that we are directly and indirectly responsible for the injustices happening over there, whether you're military or not. If you're a civilian and you don't speak out against what’s going on and don't make an attempt to understand it and then do something about it, I think we all share that same responsibility. So, like I say, going public is one way I chose that I felt like I wanted to share my experiences in Iraq and shed light on a window of reality that I think has kind of been absent from the media, which is, like I said, the daily abuse of power that goes without accountability. JUAN GONZALEZ: Let me ask you, you have been in hiding now for over a year. Could you talk about that experience? Were you aware of any attempts by the Army to track you down or to detain you? What’s been the reaction of your family and your friends to your situation? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I’ve been very grateful that my family has been very supportive of me. They've loved on me this whole time I've been gone. They've been really supportive of me. My friends, as well. I’ve had friends in different parts of the country that are standing by me. Even friends that don't necessarily agree with my politics of my decision, they still know that I’m a person of conviction and they still support my decision. The last year has been obviously an interesting year, where I was really trying to piece together a lot of ideas, where as a 24 year-old man trying to recalculate my world view and my perception of not only the military, but of our government and my association in it and my involvement and my responsibilities -- these are all questions that I've pondered and thought about the last year -- I spent a lot of the year in reflection and a lot of it really trying to just be centered and, yeah, like I said, come to grips with a lot of these questions and answers. AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Clousing, today you're going to hold a news conference. And then, well, tell us how the day will proceed. You're turning yourself in after a year. SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Yes, there's a news conference planned today at 9:00 Pacific time, where it’s actually in coordination with the Vets for Peace conference with the Iraq Veterans Against the War. I'm going to be kind of speaking out not only for myself, but also just in support of the war resisters. But that's going to happen at 9:00 Pacific time for approximately an hour, and then at the conclusion, as you mentioned, I’m going to drive down to Fort Lewis and surrender myself to military custody. AMY GOODMAN: And what will happen to you then? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: It’s basically dependent upon the military's reaction of what will happen. I can't -- I don't know what to expect, or I can't make speculations at this time. I have no idea. JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask you, during the year that you have been in hiding, obviously you've had a chance to see news coverage on the 6:00 news or in the newspapers here in this country of the war in Iraq and the reported death tolls now of a hundred people a day being killed. What do you think, given your experience, what are the American people missing in what they're getting from the reporting from our own media here about the war? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: As I mentioned before, I really think there’s just an indifference, and also really these incidences that keep being thrown into the media -- they are these huge, tragic events -- seem to be discovered. I mean, they're not brought up by media, and they're not brought into the light of the population because of a moral issue: is this right? They're not questioning the basis of the war in general. They're just saying, this event was discovered so we have the responsibility to report that to our people. AMY GOODMAN: Haditha, Mahmoudiya, did these surprise you? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: They actually didn't. I mean, my experience, especially working with infantry soldiers and seeing their reaction in circumstances that they're put in, it didn't surprise me, because I think that these events that you're talking about and the experiences that I saw are basically a larger picture of the daily devastation in Iraq and a symptom of the dehumanization of the Iraqi people and the dehumanization that happens as a soldier, naturally, of being able to take another person's life for whatever reason. It's just these are just symptoms of the larger problem that really America has neglected to face in the last three years and that need to be talked about. They need to be brought up in the media, these daily -- like you mentioned, the hundred people that are dying a day in Iraq, these issues need to be brought up. The mistreatment of prisoners, the mistreatment of civilians, whether or not they are detained or not, these are all -- AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Clousing, we just have ten seconds, but you are now turning yourself in. Are you willing to go to jail for going AWOL, absent without leave? SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I knew when I made my decision that there would be consequences, and I felt like I needed to be true to my conscience, so whatever the result is, I feel at peace, and I feel calm and collected that this is destiny and that I am standing up for what I really believe in. AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Ricky Clousing, I want to thank you for joining us. We will certainly follow this case in a Monday report to our listeners and viewers about what has taken place, speaking to us from Seattle, turning himself in at the base at Fort Lewis. www.democracynow.org
IP: Logged |
jwhop
Knowflake Posts: 2787
From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
Registered: Apr 2009
|
posted August 23, 2006 01:03 AM
Nice try, no cigar  Amy Goodman is a radical revolutionary communist bent on overthrowing the United States who uses any lie, any tactic and any device she can find to do so. So we have this guy she is supposedly interviewing who was involved in spreading stories in the Iraqi press...stories which were favorable to the US...but true stories...as has been reported long ago in the press. BTW, a Glock is not a revolver. A Glock is a pistol "And the really startling episode I write about is sitting down with one of these men, who I'd never really trusted, and he very angrily was protesting the accusations I was laying against him. And I carried a gun very often with me when I traveled outside of the Green Zone, a small sort of Glock revolver" 
Amy Goodman Radical co-anchor of Democracy Now! radio and television show Co-creator of Democracy Now! at Pacifica Radio in New York City, a far-left network with which this show remains associated. In secret deals, acquired effective ownership of Democracy Now! and millions of dollars for herself Co-author of book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them "Amy Goodman is an extraordinary journalist, in the grand American tradition of Lincoln Steffens, Heywood Broun, I.F. Stone...Her contribution to our culture is unique, bringing information and ideas to her listeners which they cannot see in the major media." -- Howard Zinn, Marxist historian
Amy Goodman is co-host of Democracy Now!, a weekday newscast that its web site says can be heard on approximately 132 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada and on shortwave station Radio for Peace International. The show also produces a television version of each newscast, which its web site says can be seen and heard on approximately 141 cable TV systems, mostly on public access channels, and on subscriber satellite TV systems Direct TV and DISH network.
Amy Goodman, a red diaper baby, was born in 1957 in Bayshore, New York. "Goodman grew up a movement child, the daughter of radical parents," wrote reporter Michael Powell in the March 10, 2003 Washington Post. "Her father, a physician, was featured in a poster for nuclear disarmament, the image of a mushroom cloud in his stethoscope. (Going further back, she is descended from prominent Hasidic rabbis, although she counts herself a secular Jew.) " After graduating from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1984 with a degree in anthropology, Goodman found work at WBAI, the New York City station owned by the radical Pacifica Radio network. (In 1984, that same year, her red diaper brother David Goodman traveled to South Africa as a radical activist. Out of his experiences there he co-authored the book Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa. He is a "Contributing Writer" at the leftwing magazine Mother Jones, producing such articles as its October 11, 2004 "Breaking Ranks" that glorified U.S. soldiers who disobeyed orders to fight in Iraq and thus encouraged other soldiers to mutiny. His freelance articles have also appeared in theWashington Post and in the leftwing magazine The Nation. He is co-author with sister Amy of their 2004 book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them.) In 1985 Amy Goodman became news director of WBAI, a position she would hold for a decade. In 1990-91 she and New Left Review editor Allan Nairn traveled to East Timor and witnessed Indonesian troops gun down 270 people there. Their documentary "Massacre: The Story of East Timor" won the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton and several other leftwing broadcasting awards. Her approach to journalism, she said in a prize acceptance speech, is "Go where the silence is and say something." In 1996 along with veteran Pacifica broadcaster Larry Bensky, Juan Gonzalez, New Times columnist Salim Muwakkie and Julie Drizin, she founded the news program Democracy Now! Its aim was to provide "perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media," i.e., the views of radical and foreign journalists, left and labor activists and ideological foes of capitalism. The popular hard-left show soon began airing not only in New York City but also on the other Pacifica-owned stations in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington, D.C. In 1998 Goodman and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria. Their anti-corporate documentary "Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship," won yet more of the politically-correct awards that leftwing journalists give to one another, including the George Polk Award. The following year Goodman trekked to Peru to interview radical activist Lori Berenson, whose collaboration with Peruvian terrorists landed her in jail. In November 1999 Goodman covered the "Battle in Seattle" as radical demonstrators smashed store windows and caused mayhem as part of a protest against the World Trade Organization and multinational business. Goodman, as usual, reflected the leftwing views of the radicals. Unlike the politically-partisan hosts of Air America Radio such as Al Franken and Janeane Garafalo, whose main aim is to defeat Republicans and empower Democrats, Goodman is a hardcore radical who detests both of the established major U.S. political parties. She perceives the politicians of both parties, as well as the dominant liberal media, as corrupted and controlled by a corporate ruling class, and from this perspective attacks them all (albeit from a place on the political spectrum much closer to leftwing Democrats than to Republicans). After being interviewed for 30 minutes on election day 2000 by Goodman and WBAI's Gonzalo Aburto, President Bill Clinton called Goodman "hostile,""combative" and at times "disrespectful." She had, among other things, pressed President Clinton to pardon a jailed radical. To the acolytes of the pseudo-religious neo-Marxist cult of the far left, Democracy Now! and Goodman are hypnotically attractive and are revealing the mysteries of the hidden capitalist conspiracies that rule us. Her audience is hard-core and devoted. To decipher and deconstruct the cult of Democracy Now!, note that key figures around Goodman such as radio producer Mike Burke and television producers Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press and John Hamilton all have backgrounds in Indymedia, a leftwing Internet movement steeped in the views of radical political cult figure Noam Chomsky. Nogueira also has written for the Chomskyite Z Magazine. Chomsky, a linguist at the Masschusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), teaches that the United States is the successor to Nazi Germany, that the Holocaust might never have happened, that Communists are better than capitalists, and that Western democracy is fraudulent because corporations "manufacture consent" through media manipulation. (See Collier and Horowitz (eds) .................
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1692 IP: Logged |
DayDreamer
unregistered
|
posted August 23, 2006 01:21 AM
no you made a nice tryAs if discoverthenetwork doesn't have a radical neo-con/right wing bent. I wouldnt trust them if my life depended on it. IP: Logged |
DayDreamer
unregistered
|
posted August 23, 2006 01:32 AM
A big contributer to discoverthenetwork...David Horowitz And a few sites dedicated to dishing out the truth about him and his agenda...
http://horowitzwatch.blogspot.com/ The Hypocrisy Of David Horowitz
The Zionist Communist Matrix By Henry Makow, PhD <Henry@savethemales.ca>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/makowhypocrisyofdavidhorowitz10apr05.shtml
April 10, 2005  Some more information on Horowitz:
http://chuckcurrie.blogs.com/chuck_currie/2006/02/the_marriage_of.html http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=12234 http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo02152005/ http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/27140 http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/27295 http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h012302.html http://www.temple-news.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&uStory_id=1b90461d-a244-4a03-920c-53fef1ea3cec [URL=http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/001743-5.html]http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/001743-5.html IP: Logged | |
Lindaland
UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! 
