He wished to remain anonymous as he spoke with WCRS Columbus reporter Evan Davis during the first of two interview segments. (Audio @ wcrsfm.org
He said the US military is lying to and ignoring the medical problems of troops exposed to depleted uranium.
“The DOD will never acknowledge it. So, you can never get treated for it. One of my friends, when we were in Afghanistan, he got sick from it and started dying. Rather than treat him for depleted uranium exposure, they just gave him chemo which only sped up his passing.”
He said mercenaries working for various companies such as Black Water, which changed its name to Xe and then to Academi, would destabilize areas of Iraq so the military could then go back in to resume fighting, with the apparent ultimate goal of prolonging the conflict in order to make more money for corporations involved.
“Looking back, most of these conflicts could have easily been won over a year, but they were stretched out over ten, just to keep the profits going…They (US officials) are not trying to run an honorable war. They’re trying to maximize corporate profits…The people that run this country, that have created these wars for profit, they’ve stolen my friends from me.”
He said the US government has designated returning veterans as among the greatest domestic terrorism threats.
“It was a memo signed by Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security, passed down to law enforcement agencies…When I saw that I said, ‘why, would they be so paranoid about us?’ It’s because so many of us are figuring out what they did. While I will never say my friends died in vain, at the same time you have to also admit that the people who started these conflicts didn’t have the best intentions.”
The combat veteran in this interview says the military aims for recruiting men and women at their most impressionable age, about 18-22.
But as even one of my friends who does counter-recruitment says, our youth shouldn’t necessarily be talked out of joining the military. They should, however, be able to make informed decisions and not be lied to, before and after their service.
The protest movement against the recent US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been better than the one against the US war in Vietnam, at least in the sense that the former focuses more the rights of returning veterans in terms of jobs and medical care than on demonizing them as ‘baby killers.’ (Similarly, the mistake of some on the Left in the past calling cops ‘pigs’ and rural working class whites ‘rednecks’ was hypocritical, and counter-productive in terms of correcting racism and classism.)
The guy in the WCRS interview said he and other veterans shouldn’t be looked down upon because many of them volunteered for altruistic reasons. They genuinely believe(d) they were/are serving their country, many of them making the ultimate sacrifice.
He said it’s wrong for critics of the wars to blame veterans for the apparent fact that our political system–if not individual leaders themselves— cynically exploited the noble intentions many of the soldiers had/have. ( I am inclined to think the problem is much more systemic than it is due to any one or several bad individuals–be it Kissinger, or more recently, Bush or Obama)
As for the US war machine, if we take war profiteering out of the equation, it might not be far-fetched to think the US after the 9-11 attacks might have been better off to kill our ‘asymmetrical warfare’ enemies with a series of spec ops similar to the one that killed Bin Laden.
Why’d it take our government ten years to kill him? Perhaps keeping him alive helped with the propaganda that made General Electric and other corporations lots of money. (Of course, those unthinkingly immersed in propaganda label those who question it as ‘conspiracy theorists.’)
After thousands of US and coalition troop deaths and thousands more disabled and ill, and tens or perhaps a hundred thousand or more civilian deaths, it’s at best debatable as to whether our country is safer and otherwise better off because of the wars.
Less debatable is that the wars have been ways for some of the rich to get even richer, while adding to our national debt, as our schools, and infrastructure, not to mention our nation’s space program, slide further away from being objects of national pride or enviable examples for the rest of the world.
But why would our political system allow a process that undermines long term US national interests–whether in terms of our infrastructure, our economy, or the skills and knowledge of our workforce ? One possible explanation is that our system rewards extreme greed, at the expense of all else.
We may be living thru a process that has been repeated thru out history. We have a system in which wealth is increasingly concentrated. As the treasury lacks more revenue and as our government goes further into debt, our leaders seem more inclined to imposing austerity on the rest of us than they are inclined to making the wealthy pay taxes. Making scape-goats of the poor and undocumented immigrants is also being thrown into the largely unintentional process of sliding from democracy into oligarchy.
But our future is not written in stone, so to speak. A mass movement for participatory democracy might minimize the damage of, if not prevent, plutocracy. I invite thoughtful, constructive feedback.
War profiteering is one of many aspects of our systemic problems. This focus on systems in need of correction, if not replacement, calls to mind the Occupy theme of the 99 percent-vs-the 1 percent.
That approach caught people’s attention, but it’s not good in the long run, strategically or in terms moral consistency. Individual human beings comprise the 1 percent that possesses a grossly disproportionate degree of economic power.
In various ways, their positions of power need to be challenged, but they have to be part of the process of bringing about systemic changes for the better, unless reformers give up and opt for violent revolution, which may make things worse in terms of political freedom, fairness, and justice.
Though the human beings who are part of the 1 percent are far more capable of defending themselves against verbal and physical attack than, say, undocumented immigrants who are used as scape-goats, demonizing and hating the former is still wrong, as well as strategically unsound.
Seeing the scams involved with the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq leads to a better type of patriotism. It’s one in which we recognize our remaining political freedoms here in the USA as tools which place on us the responsibility to see to it that our government and we ourselves live up to, if not surpass, our nation’s founding ideals.
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