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Standing With Military War ResistersBy Ward ReillySix hundred veterans attending the Veterans for Peace national convention in Seattle, including dozens of VVAW members, had the great honor and pleasure to stand with Lt. Ehren Watada and Sgt. Ricky Clousing during a four-day weekend of resistance, planning, and organizational workshops. Watada spoke on Saturday, August 12, as did, among others, Dahr Jamail (outstanding independent journalist), Ray McGovern (CIA analyst for twenty-seven years, cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), and John Perkins (economist and author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).
Lt. Watada is the first West Point officer to refuse to be deployed to Iraq, and what makes his case even more intriguing is that he has challenged the legality of the Iraq invasion, also a first. Watada is not acting as a conscientious objector, which is a much more common (but not common enough) reason to refuse deployment to Iraq. Much to Watada's surprise, he received a standing ovation before he even spoke, and that thrill was doubled when at least forty members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) followed him onstage in an emotional and spontaneous show of solidarity. We also had the honor of standing with Iraq combat veteran Sgt. Ricky Clousing, who had been AWOL for a year and a half prior to his press conference at the convention. On August 11, Clousing held a press conference to announce that he was turning himself in to military authorities at Fort Lewis, Washington. Clousing is a twenty-four-year-old Army sergeant and interrogator from Seattle who left Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2005 after returning from Iraq. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division. At the press conference, Clousing stated, "In Iraq, I operated as an interrogator and was attached to tactical infantry units during daily patrol operations. As an interrogator, I spoke to Iraqis each day. This gave me an idea of what local civilians thought of coalition forces. Throughout my training, very appropriate guidelines for the treatment of prisoners were set. However, I witnessed our baseless incarceration of civilians. I saw civilians physically harassed. I saw an innocent Iraqi killed before me by US troops. I saw the abuse of power that goes without accountability. Being attached to a tactical infantry unit and being exposed to the brutalities of war, I began to doubt and reconsider my beliefs."
On August 13, about 150 US military veterans boarded buses for Peace Arch Park on the US-Canadian border to celebrate resistance to current and past aggressive US invasions with US troops currently taking refuge in Canada. Retired US Army colonel Ann Wright embraced twenty-two-year-old Iraq veteran-turned-refugee Kyle Snyder at the border. Of his resistance to the war, Col. Wright said, "It is part of military tradition that you can refuse illegal orders," she said. "They have the courage to stand up and say ... 'I'm not going to have this war on my conscience.'" Back in Seattle, Sarah Rich, mother of formerly AWOL, now imprisoned US Army soldier Suzanne Swift, blasted the Army for jailing her daughter at Fort Lewis for refusing orders to return to Iraq. Speaking to a jam-packed news conference at the convention, Rich said her daughter was repeatedly subjected to sexual harassment by US soldiers during her first deployment to Iraq. "She was arrested, stripped, treated like a common criminal, while the criminals who assaulted her go free," Rich said. "Suzanne was my hero when she went to Iraq, my hero when she came home, and my hero when she went AWOL. Right now, soldiers are being raped. It's an epidemic. There are twenty-two task forces on military sexual assault, yet the perpetrators go free," she charged. "Free my daughter, and stop military sexual assault now!" Jane Fonda showed up to support our work, and she attended a Vets 4 Vets session on Friday the eleventh. It was nice to meet Ms. Fonda in person and to see her still supporting antiwar work. Some of the VVAW members in attendance were: Bill Perry, Dave Cline, Mike Hastie, Brian Willson, Ray Parrish, Billy Kelly, Doug Zachary, Jim Driscoll, Lane Anderson, Thomas Brinson, Elliott Adams, and myself. Many others were also there. All in all, it was an incredible weekend of resistance, peace, and solidarity against the unjust and illegal wars in the Middle East. Ward Reilly is the Southeast national contact for VVAW.
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