[Peace-discuss] Our demos are important

[C. G. Estabrook]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/150059_fisk27.html

Telling the truth won't set you free

Thursday, November 27, 2003

By ROBERT FISK

In Iraq, they are just numbers, bloodstains on a road. But in the little
town of Madison, Wis., last week, they were all too real on the front page
of the local paper, the Capital Times. Sgt. Warren Hansen, Spc. Eugene Uhl
and 2nd Lt. Jeremy Wolfe of the 101st Airborne Division were all on their
way home for the last time.

Hansen's father had died in the military. Uhl would have been 22 at
Thanksgiving but had written home to say he had a "bad feeling." His
father had fought in Vietnam, his grandfather in World War II and Korea.
Two of the three men were killed in the Black Hawk helicopter crash over
Tikrit.

But of course, President Bush, our hero in the "war on terror," won't be
attending their funerals. The man who declined to serve his nation in
Vietnam but has sent 146,000 young Americans into the biggest rat's nest
in the Middle East doesn't do funerals.

Nor do journalists, of course. The U.S. television networks have feebly
accepted the new Pentagon ruling that they can't show the coffins of
America's young men returning from Iraq. The dead may come home, but they
do so in virtual secrecy.

Things are changing. At a lecture I gave in Madison last week, there was a
roar of applause from the more than 1,000-strong audience when I suggested
that the Iraq war could yet doom George W. Bush's election chances next
year. A young man in the audience stood up to say that his brother was in
the military in Iraq, that he had written home to say that the war was a
mess, that Americans shouldn't be dying in Iraq.

After the lecture, he showed me his brother's picture -- a tall 82nd
Airborne officer in shades and holding an M-16 -- and passed on a message
that the soldier wanted to meet me in Baghdad next month.

But I'd better make sure I don't reveal his name because those in the
United States who want to keep the people in the dark are still at work.

Take the case of Drew Plummer from North Carolina who enlisted during his
last year in high school, just three months before 9/11.

Home on leave, he joined his father, Lou, at a "bring our troops home"
vigil. Lou Plummer is a former member of the U.S. 2nd Armored Division
whose father, unlike Bush, served his country in Vietnam. Asked for his
opinion on Iraq by an Associated Press reporter, Drew Plummer replied, "I
just don't agree with what we're doing right now. I don't think our guys
should be dying in Iraq. But I'm not a pacifist. I'll do my part."

But free speech has a price for the military in the United States these
days. The U.S. Navy charged Drew Plummer with violating Article 134 of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice: disloyal statements. At his official
hearing, he was asked if he "sympathizes" with the enemy or was
considering "acts of sabotage." He was convicted and demoted.

Yet still the U.S. media turn their backs on this. How revealing, for
example, to find that the number of seriously wounded U.S. soldiers
brought home from Iraq is approaching 2,200, many of whom have lost limbs
or suffered facial wounds. In all, there have been nearly 7,000 medical
evacuations of soldiers from Iraq, many with psychological problems.

All this was disclosed by the Pentagon to a group of French diplomats in
Washington. The French press carried the story. Not so the papers of
small-town America, where anyone trying to tell the truth about Iraq will
be attacked.

And while the Pentagon is now planning to have 100,000 GIs in Iraq until
2006, the journalistic heavyweights are stoking the fires of patriotism
with a new and even more chilling propaganda line. One of the most vicious
has just been published in The New York Times. Claiming that Saddam's
torturers are attacking U.S. troops -- some of his intelligence men are
working for the occupying army, but that's another matter -- columnist
David Brooks writes that "history shows that Americans are willing to make
sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them.
What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start
broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to
adopt?

"Inevitably there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted
people to defect from the cause ... somehow ... the Bush administration is
going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of
Midway in the war on terror ..."

What is one to make of this vile nonsense? Why is The New York Times
providing space for the advocacy of war crimes by U.S. soldiers? I doubt
the U.S. channels will broadcast any images of "brutal measures" --
they've already had the chance to do so and have declined. But atrocities?

Are we now to support atrocities against the "scum of the Earth" --
Brooks' word for the insurgents -- in our moral campaign against evil?

Amid such filth, we should perhaps remember the simple courage of Drew
Plummer. And remember, too, the following names: Army Prv. First Class
Rachel Bosveld, 19; Army Spc. Paul Sturino, 21; Army Reservist Dan
Gabrielson, 40; Army Maj. Mathew Shram, 36; Marine Sgt. Kirk Strasekie,
23. They, too, came from Wisconsin. And they, too, died in Iraq.

Robert Fisk writes for The Independent in Great Britain.

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