Going back to 2003 --
He also said this:

Illegal and immoral orders.

Ehren Watada refused to be sent to Iraq to to follow an illegal and immoral order. There are tens of thousands of desserters who have done the same, as well as, those who have fought, but now refuse to.

So, is it too much to ask the active troops, in the same way that Pace asked the Iraqi soldiers, to oppose the occupation on the illiegal and immoral basis to which it was and is being run

The idea for this thought came from the early Friday morning show from Ray Taliaferro.

But he went one further -- he asked what it means to "support the troops" in light of the obvious illegal and immoral nature of our occupation. And Ray followed with the idea that, yeah, Blame Bush, but he's only directing the war/occupation. Somebody else has to carry it out. The generals, the commanders, etc.. The troops.

Now, we hear that there is dissent amongst the troops. They want to come home. But when are they going to say this in mass scale, with a dislike for our occupation like Americans stateside feel?

Very good information, CZ...thanks for posting that, and it's very, very thought provoking.



I don't know...maybe when the Americans stateside actually say it in mass scale, too, like the protests against the war in Vietnam.

I imagine the troops are kept away from any really truthful information about the war and what is actually going on outside their platoon assignments. Not totally sure about this, but it makes sense in Bush's Amerika. I wonder if their letters, emails, and phone calls are "edited for content." Also, it's very easy for a dissenting soldier to suddenly either be killed or to disappear in a place like Iraq.

Well, yeah, the protests aren't happening massive enough.

Yet, you do have Ehren Watada who knows what we know and made that stand.

Then you have those that seem to go through the motions over there. They say they are just following orders and supporting their comrades.

Do they not have enough of a conscious to know what is illegal and immoral about this whole thing or not? Most, some, or very few?

They see their buddies ending up dead. Battered. With missing body parts. Don't they see the damnedest thing in all of that?

Probably, but their response to the awfulness of it all is with sheer, gut-wrenchingly deep emotions, and the first one is the need for REVENGE. So, they immediately look for something that resembles what they believe, in that instant, is the reason for its happening. They can't fathom, at that moment, that the real reason, the root cause, for their buddies' deaths, is the moron sitting in the White House, smirking at the latest Fox News report and being fawned over by idiots calling themselves his 'base.'
... and the Congressional members who voted for the moron to invade Iraq, the msm, Haliburton, Dick Cheney, the oil industry, and generals like Patraeus...let's not forget who else is responsible.

Some have fathomed it. Others have been disgruntled by the extended stays and the crud they see.

Yet they trudge on. Talk about being trapped in serial monotony.

THIS IS VERY SAD AND....RATHER SUSPICIOUS, IMNSHO....

[url=http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/12/82nd-soldiers/]Two Of Seven Soldiers Who Wrote New York Times Op-Ed Die In Iraq
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On Aug. 19, seven active duty soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division wrote an op-ed in The New York Times called “The War As We Saw It.” The piece expressed skepticism about “recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable”:

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. […]

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal. […]

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

On Monday, two of these soldiers — Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance Gray — died in a vehicle accident in Western Baghdad. The news of their deaths came as Gen. David Petraeus wrapped up his testimony to Congress about the Bush administration’s progress in Iraq.

Their account is powerful stuff. Take this McCain, Bush, et al:

The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Did Bush give the TORTURE orders?

General claims Bush gave 'marching orders' on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo

More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators "abused, tortured or killed" scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even expected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book.

In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners.

"[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes," write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. "Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating 'stress positions,' held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months."

Most of the documents on which Administration of Torture is based were obtained as a result of ongoing legal fights over a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2003 by the ACLU and other human rights and anti-war groups, the ACLU said in a news release.

The documents show that prisoner abuse like that found at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was hardly the isolated incident that the Bush administration or US military claimed it was. By the time the prisoner abuse story broke in mid-2004 the Army knew of at least 62 other allegations of abuse at different prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors report.

Let's see how long this actually lasts:

[url=http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila/Lawmakers_agree_to_limit_CIA_interr_12052007.html]Lawmakers agree to limit CIA interrogators to military-approved technique, bar waterboarding

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House and Senate negotiators working on an intelligence bill have agreed to limit CIA interrogators to techniques approved by the military, which would effectively bar them from using such harsh methods as waterboarding, congressional aides said Wednesday.

Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees decided to include the ban while working out differences in their respective bills authorizing 2008 spending for intelligence programs, according to the aides, who spoke anonymously because the negotiations were private. Details of the bill are to be made public Thursday.

That will set the stage for another veto fight with President Bush, who last summer issued an executive ordered allowing the CIA to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" that go beyond what's allowed in the 2006 Army Field Manual.