- In Iraq, they are just numbers, bloodstains on a road.
But in the little town of Madison in Wisconsin last week, they were all
too real on the front page of the local paper, the Capital Times. Sergeant
Warren Hansen, Specialist Eugene Uhl and Second Lieutenant Jeremy Wolfe
of the 101st Airborne Division were all on their way home for the last
time.
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- 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 the
Second World War and Korea. Two of the three men were killed in the Black
Hawk helicopter crash over Tikrit just over a week ago.
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- 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.
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- Nor do journalists, of course. The American 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.
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- 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 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.
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- 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.
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- But I'd better make sure I don't reveal his name because
those in America who want to keep the people in the dark are still at work.
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- Take the case of Drew Plummer from North Carolina who
enlisted during his last year in high school, just three months before
11 September 2001. Home on leave, he joined his father, Lou, at a "bring
our troops home" vigil. Lou Plummer is a former member of the US 2nd
Armoured Division whose father, unlike Mr Bush, served his country in Vietnam.
Asked for his opinion on Iraq by an Associated Press reporter, Drew Plummer
replied that "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."
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- But free speech has a price for the military in America
these days. The US 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 "sympathises" with the enemy or was
considering "acts of sabotage". He was convicted and demoted.
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- Yet still the US press turn their backs on this. How
revealing, for example, to find that the number of seriously wounded soldiers
brought home to America 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Claiming that Saddam's torturers are attacking American
troops - some of his intelligence men are now working for the occupying
army, but that's another matter - 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 programmes 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 ..."
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- What on earth is one to make of this vile nonsense? Why
is The New York Times providing space for the advocacy of war crimes by
US soldiers? I doubt the US 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" - Mr Brooks' word for the insurgents - in our moral
campaign against Evil?
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- Amid such filth, we should perhaps remember the simple
courage of Drew Plummer. And remember, too, the following names: Army Private
First Class Rachel Bosveld, aged 19, Army Specialist Paul Sturino, aged
21, Army Reservist Dan Gabrielson, aged 40, Army Major Mathew Shram, aged
36, Marine Sergeant Kirk Strasekie, aged 23. They, too, came from Wisconsin.
And they, too, died in Iraq.
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- Copyright: The Independent
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