May 20, 2006

Congressional Briefing for Conscientious Objection

TRUTH BE TOLD

Congressional Briefing

 for

Conscientious Objection 

May 16, 2006  -  Washington D.C.

Hosted by

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

 

SPEECH BY MONICA BENDERMAN 

   

Thank you for giving me this time today.  I would like to preface my comments to Congressional representatives by reading a statement from my husband, Kevin Benderman, a US Army Sgt. who is currently serving a 15-month sentence at the Regional Corrections Facility, Ft. Lewis, WA.

From Kevin:

I have prepared this statement to address the injustice I have been dealt by the US Army after I made the decision to apply for Conscientious Objector status.  I made this decision after my return from Iraq where I witnessed and experienced for myself the insanity of war. What I learned from my experience is that war is a waste of humanity.  We kill many people in the name of keeping the peace – an oxymoron if there ever was one.  After many months of contemplation I reached the conclusion that I no longer wanted to contribute to the ultimate violence toward other human beings that war is.

 I attempted to discuss my feelings with a chaplain assigned to my military unit, but I got the sense that talking with him would be a less than worthwhile way to cope with these feelings.  Ultimately, my initial impression of him proved correct when I received an email from him stating how ashamed of me he felt, and that I had displayed little moral fortitude in my decision. 

The command structure of my unit was hostile towards me in their zealous need to have me prosecuted for having developed a desire to live a more peaceful, humane existence.  I was ridiculed publicly, called a coward, subjected to a farce of a general court martial, and falsely imprisoned.

The company commander refused to follow military regulations in regard to my Conscientious Objector application and the battalion commander blatantly disregarded a request from a congressional representative to examine my application in an unbiased manner. 

The General Court Martial Convening Authority blatantly abused his position of authority when he told the Ft. Stewart JAG office and the prosecuting attorneys how long my sentence would be prior to an investigation into charges they were considering against me.  This action is a flagrant violation of my right to a fair and unbiased hearing accorded me by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The Rear Detachment commander also tried to dredge up any other groundless charges to press against me that he could.  Two charges of Larceny were brought in to try to further tarnish my reputation, which eventually proved groundless, but not before they were used as a threat to encourage me to plead guilty to an act I did not commit. 

It is my desire to prevent other soldiers from having to deal with corrupt and unethical individuals like these commanders.  I would like to see legislation passed that would prevent any type of abuses from those serving in positions of authority within the military system.  The people who voluntarily decide to wear this nation’s uniform already sacrifice far more than the average citizen.  Their basic civil rights should not be sacrificed as well to the unethical whims of corrupt individuals who may hold a higher rank, but exhibit far less humanity.  Any assistance in rectifying this situation would be greatly appreciated, and I would like to thank those who made it possible for me to present my remarks here today.  I would also like to thank those of you who have taken time to hear what I have had to say.

Sincerely – Sgt. Kevin Benderman

I (Monica Benderman) will address my comments to the Members of Congress:

Each one of you is in office having been elected on the basis of promises you made.  In taking that office, each one of you took an oath to honor the Constitution of this country, and you did so by swearing to your God.

An American soldier, a volunteer, takes the same oath.  His commitment to that oath is based on the promises of our elected leaders.  But a true leader is not someone who blindly follows laws written by men.  A true leader is someone who leads with adherence to his own obligation to humanity.

If you, during your tenure and contract to serve as Congressional leaders, were asked to participate in an action that violated your own conscience and your own principles of humanity, would you take a stand against that action?  

If you were to step down, no longer willing to participate in an immoral, illegal action, would you have charges brought against you?

Would you be sent to jail for your beliefs?  Would you go willingly? 

Would you allow this to happen to any member who serves with you who also acted on their conscience?

As a volunteer, an American soldier has every right to question the purpose of his sacrifice, and to expect that sacrifice to be honored with integrity and honesty, and to be allowed to follow his conscience when orders given violate his own principles of humanity.

Freedom of Choice is one of the most significant principles on which our country was founded.  Conscientious Objection is the true exercise of a soldier’s right to choose.

Do you understand what it takes to publicly declare yourself a Conscientious Objector today?

Are you aware of the process an American soldier must go through to be granted Conscientious Objector status in today’s volunteer army?

My husband, Sgt. Kevin Benderman, is a ten year veteran of the US Army, and has served with distinction.  He served a combat tour in Iraq and was awarded two commendation medals for his service there.  While in Iraq, my husband’s firsthand experiences changed him.

My husband went to war.  He saw mass graves filled with dead bodies of old people, women and children.  He watched dogs feeding on their bodies.  How would that affect you?

He saw a young girl badly burned because of the actions of war and rather than stop to help her, war dictated that he must drive on by.  How would that tear at your heart?

As he helped set up camp, his commander gave his unit an order to shoot small children if they continued to return to the top of a retaining wall to watch what the soldiers were doing.   At what point would you draw the line?

What he saw and experienced appalled him, and he was angry.  My husband left Iraq cold and furious at what he had been asked to do for an unjust, undefined cause, and a dedicated soldier turned against war for moral and ethical reasons as his conscience would not allow him to violate his own principles of humanity.

When he returned home, my husband and I wrote publicly about our feelings for this and all war. 

We spoke of the horrors, the senseless inhumanity, and the disrespect shown to the sacrifice our soldiers had  made.                                                               

My husband took the course available to him and filed a Conscientious Objector application as his legal show of refusal to participate further in an immoral, inhumane action.

His command, in an effort to punish him for his humanity, and because they could not do so for the public comments that he and I had made, chose to disregard his application, and in the confusion their incompetence created found a way to put him in prison for his actions. 

Kevin was found guilty of missing movement, or not getting on a plane, and sentenced to 15 months in jail, loss of all pay, reduction in rank and dishonorable discharge. According to the lead prosecutor, the military spokesperson, and my husband’s commander – “a stiff sentence was called for to send a message to other soldiers that they could not use Conscientious Objection to get out of going to war.” 

My husband violated no regulations. His command violated many.  The command’s flagrant disregard for military regulations and laws of humanity sent my husband to jail as a prisoner of conscience.

Times have changed – and so has Conscientious Objection.  What has not changed is the constitution, the oath our volunteer soldiers take to defend it, and every American citizen’s right to Freedom of Choice. 

This Conscientious Objection goes beyond religious teaching.  It is not dramatic. There is no epiphany.  There is reality.  Death is final, whether it is your own, or you cause the death of another.  No amount of field training can make up for the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of a real battlefield, and no amount of threats, intimidation and abuse from a command can change a soldier’s mind when the cold hard truth of an immoral, unethical justification for war is coupled with real life sensations.

Who among us has the authority to sit in judgment of another man’s conscious decision to no longer participate in killing when he has been on the frontlines of death and destruction?

Simply by being born we each have an obligation to respect the authority of life; as individual human beings with an allegiance to what is RIGHT, not an allegiance to a flag, a country, or another human being elected to a temporary position of leadership they may not have earned.

When a soldier realizes that his conscience no longer supports the oath he gave to serve in the military, it is because he has learned that what he was asked to do as a soldier violates his obligation to himself and his humanity.

My husband was scheduled for a parole hearing in February 2006.  The parole board denied my husband’s request for parole.  The reason cited – my husband had not been “sufficiently rehabilitated.”  My husband is a Conscientious Objector.  What is the rehabilitation needed for someone who says he no longer will participate in war?

The right to choose life over the taking of life is every man’s right.  Regardless if that man has volunteered to defend his country in time of war, he did not volunteer to participate in wanton, irreverent killing at the whim of a government whose leadership is quick to “pull the trigger” without giving thought to the authority of the sanctity of life. 

A true American leader will stand up to laws and orders given that violate the sanctity of life and call the principles of our Constitution into question.  A true American leader will let his conscience be his guide when asked to participate in actions that violate his own high standards of morality.  When this leader is a soldier who has made a choice to stand against the inhumanity he has seen firsthand in a combat zone, it is up to those in Congress to see that laws are in place which give his right to conscience the respect it deserves. 

I am here on behalf of my husband, Sgt. Kevin Benderman; American soldier, Prisoner of Conscience, someone I am very proud of.

My husband and others like him are in prison because our country’s leaders have refused to acknowledge their responsibility to act as human beings first.  My husband, a volunteer soldier, after a combat tour in Iraq, chose to put his humanity first.  It is beyond my comprehension why, in this great country, my husband is in jail for simply exercising his human rights. 

It is time for each of you to remember your obligation to humanity and act in a manner that is truly worthy of my husband’s sacrifice.  I am strongly encouraging each of you to reflect on your responsibility and your conscience, and in doing so, I am advocating that my husband, Sgt. Kevin Benderman, be given the respect he deserves as a Conscientious Objector and an American leader who has taken a stand to defend the principles this country was founded on.

 

Support Kevin Benderman

Your in-kind support of the

 BENDERMAN DEFENSE TRUST

is very much appreciated!

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

Posted by Choice America Network at 18:29:37 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

May 18, 2006

Reality Check

 
Support Our Troops, Anybody?

By Dahr Jamail
 
05/17/06 "t R U t h o U t -
 
So Long as I Am Your Commander in Chief

As the violence in Iraq continues to escalate, at least 2,450 US soldiers have been killed, with roughly ten times that number seriously wounded since the beginning of the Invasion in March 2003. If current trends continue, May will be one of the deadliest months of the occupation yet for troops, with an average of over three being killed per day. 54 coalition soldiers have been killed in the first 16 days of May alone.

This probably explains why 72% of US troops in Iraq think the US should exit the country within the next year, and over 25% think the US should exit immediately. The same poll found that only one in five troops in Iraq want to heed War Criminal Bush's call for them to "stay as long as they are needed."

The occupation, now well into its fourth year and going strong, has already produced 550,000 Iraq war veterans. Troop morale is lower than ever before and dropping as fast as Bush's approval ratings. Further adding to the deteriorating situation is the mindless adherence to the highly absurd pledges of the "commander in chief."

"To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief. Most Americans want two things in Iraq: They want to see our troops win and they want to see our troops come home as soon as possible," he says, ad nauseum, "And those are my goals as well. I will settle for nothing less than complete victory." Just as he settled for nothing less than complete exemption from military service in Vietnam, a fact his soldiers are all too aware of.

Meanwhile, troops returning from Iraq are finding little comfort in the hollow rhetoric of their chief chicken-hawk. The medical attention necessary to support the troops is becoming scarcer with each passing tax-cut.

When soldiers come home from Iraq, the support they need in order to physically and mentally recover from the hell of Iraq is way out of reach for most. With their pay and benefits cut, health care, already scarce in many cases, is soon to become even more difficult to access.

A case in point is Marine Lance Cpl. James Crosby. He left Iraq strapped to a gurney after his legs were paralyzed and his innards lacerated by shrapnel. When he exited the combat zone to head back home for treatment, he realized the military cut his pay by 50%. "Before you leave the combat zone, they swipe your ID card through a computer, and you go back to your base pay," he said.

Of Course He Supports the Troops

Veterans are a different matter, as a growing number of them are beginning to realize, waking up to the fact that there is an ever-widening gap between what their "commander in chief" says and what he does. While Mr. Bush is busy telling reporters that he supports the troops in Iraq, even military web sites are posting stories like one from February 28 of this year titled "Vets May Be Denied Health Care," which stated:

At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half - if the White House is serious about its proposed budget. After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.

In the same story, Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, the top Democrat on the panel overseeing the VA's budget, said: "Either the administration is proposing gutting VA health care over the next five years or it is not serious about its own budget."

Disturbingly and more recently, on March 21st, a House Budget Committee Report shows us that this does indeed appear to be the Bush plan for "supporting the troops":

The President's 2007 budget provides $36.1 billion for appropriated veterans programs, which is $2.9 billion above the amount enacted for 2006 and $1.8 billion above the amount needed to maintain purchasing power at the 2006 level.

Beyond 2007, however, veterans funding is cut in almost every year. Over five years, the budget cuts funding $10.0 billion below the level the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates is needed to maintain purchasing power at the 2006 level.

Thus, their "commander in chief" will cut the veterans discretionary budget by $10 billion over the next five years.

Supporting Troops, Pentagon Style

To save the troops from lack of health care, our government has devised an ingenious solution, which is to let them continue in combat. Last week the US military was found to be violating its own rules concerning mentally ill troops by sending them back into combat. A recent news piece by the Hartford Courant stated:

US military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.

Citing records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviews of families and military personnel, the newspaper reported "numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq." The piece tells us that 22 US soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq last year, which is the highest suicide rate since the war began.

The article goes on to say that some of the service members who killed themselves during 2004 and 2005 had been kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, and had been prescribed antidepressants after little or no mental health counseling.

Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, minces no words: "I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on [antidepressants], when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal. You're creating chemically activated time bombs."

The article also quotes Dr. Arthur Blank Jr., a psychiatrist who assisted in having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War: "I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country."

Turning Troops Into Time Bombs

Among medical professionals, there is an unstated urgency that soldiers receive adequate treatment promptly upon returning home. "If we don't get intervention within the first five years, the veteran is set up for a lifetime of problems," says John Wilson, a psychology professor at Cleveland State University. In an Associated Press (AP) story from April 30, Professor Wilson also adds, "Iraq is a nonstop, 24-seven, hostile environment, so what happens is that these guys are incredibly wired all the time. One of the things we learned from Vietnam is that once that hyper arousal response develops, it doesn't go off."

The tragic death of Andres Raya, a 19-year-old US Marine, demonstrates this condition. The young man decided to commit suicide by inducing a gun battle with police officers in his hometown of Ceres, California, with the apparent motive of avoiding an impending return to duty in Iraq.

Raya, who fought in the April 2004 US assault on the city of Fallujah, had returned to the US on January 8, 2005, for a holiday. His mother later described his condition to the Modesto Bee thus: "He came back different."

He told his family on several occasions he did not want to go back to Iraq. According to local police, Raya went to a liquor store in Ceres wearing a poncho and "talking about how much he hated the world." He asked the store owner to call the police. Police officer Sam Ryno responded. He arrived to find Raya pulling the assault weapon from under his poncho. He shot Ryno, causing serious injuries. When another police officer arrived in the liquor store parking lot, Raya shot him twice in the back of the head, killing him, and then disappeared. Three police departments, the California Highway Patrol, and SWAT officers had to search the area for the distraught veteran. When they found him, after a brief but fierce gun battle, Raya was dead, with over 60 bullets in his body.

An article in the Modesto Bee described the final battle as Raya "shooting military style at the officers," while using "some of the same darting and dodging techniques we have seen in reports from Iraq." The police chief of Ceres told the Bee, "It was premeditated, planned, an ambush.... It was suicide by cop."

PTSD: "Post" for a Reason

Veterans who make it home alive from Iraq are immediately faced with the task of reconstructing their lives as they battle the effects of PTSD, which include anger, rage, isolation, sleeplessness, anxiety and anti-social behavior. In another AP story from April 28 of this year, the body of Spc. Robert Hornbeck, 23, was found in a hotel in Savannah, Georgia, after he had been missing for 12 days.

"A body found with items belonging to a Fort Benning soldier … was discovered … at a downtown hotel after guests complained of a foul odor in the lobby," read the story. Hornbeck had spent a year in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division and was to be married to his college sweetheart this July. Instead, due to lack of treatment for PTSD, "A maintenance worker at the De Soto Hilton hotel found the body of a man inside a large piece of air-conditioning equipment. Firefighters wearing hazard suits removed the body several hours later." His father believed that Hornbeck was highly intoxicated at the time of his death.

Then there are the soldiers who come home,suffering massive trauma from their experience in Iraq. Joshua Omvig, a soldier from Iowa, returned home and killed himself in front of his mother, due primarily to lack of assistance in dealing with his PTSD. The distraught parents of the 22-year-old veteran decided to deal with their loss by creating a web site in his memory, where his mother described the emails they receive from other soldiers: "It's been hundreds a day - so many heartbreaking stories. It's like the same story over and over again, just different names, different towns. A lot of them will make you cry, there's so much pain."

A 2004 study of several Army and Marine units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine found that only between 23 and 40 percent of those with PTSD had sought treatment. And post-traumatic stress is called "post" for a reason - its most serious symptoms usually emerge long after the trauma is over.

Confessions From the Accountability Office and Others

Last week the Government Accountability Office announced that "less than one quarter of the US military's Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who show signs of post-traumatic stress are referred for additional mental health treatment or evaluation, according to a government study."

Nonetheless, the VA has admitted that a staggering 35% of veterans who served in Iraq have already sought treatment in the VA system for emotional problems from the war. This statistic was also confirmed by a US Army study.

A piece written by Judith Coburn for TomDispatch entitled "Shortchanging the Wounded," posted this April, reveals many of the following startling statistics.

Nearly one in three veterans have been hospitalized at the VA, or visited a VA outpatient clinic, due to an initial diagnosis of a mental-health disorder, according to the VA itself. These numbers are consistent with a recent Army study on soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such a rate might add up over time (depending on how long these occupations last) to what could be over half a million veterans who need treatment.

The VA admits its disability system was overburdened even before the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of 300,000 disability claims. Now, the VA reports that the backlog has nearly doubled, at 540,122. By April 2006, 25% of the rating claims took six months to process. So veterans wounded severely enough to be unable to work are left high and dry for up to half a year. Worse yet, an appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have been filed so far by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its budget requests, the Bush administration has constantly resisted Congressional demands to increase the number of VA staffers processing such claims. Here is what the VA's national advisory board on PTSD says in a report released in February, 2006:

[The] VA cannot meet the ongoing needs of veterans of past deployments while also reaching out to new combat veterans of [Iraq and Afghanistan] and their families within current resources and current models of treatment.

How many Iraqi veterans will eventually join the ranks of the 400,000 troops-turned homeless vets already on the streets of American cities?

Support Our Troops: Anybody?

When answering a question following a speech he gave on March 20th, the day after the three year anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, Bush said, "... the best way you can help is to support our troops. You find a family who's got a child in the United States military, tell them you appreciate them. Ask them if you can help them."

Now is the time to stand up and be counted. It is going to take a little more than pasting stickers of yellow ribbons that read "Support Our Troops" on the bumpers of your SUVs and cars. Are the patriotic citizens of the United States of America willing to support our troops? Because their "commander in chief" sure as hell is not going to.

 CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

Posted by Choice America Network at 11:55:19 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

May 13, 2006

What will it take?

 

The Lessons of War That Few Have Learned
 
by John Grant
 
 
 

John Grant is president of the Veterans for Peace chapter in Philadelphia

As I exited the Staten Island Ferry recently for an antiwar demonstration of 300,000 people down Broadway, a young man next to me noticed my Veterans for Peace T-shirt.

"What war?" he asked.

"Vietnam."

"Thanks for your service," he said.

"The war never should have happened," I told him. "It's not something to thank me for."

"Thanks, anyway," he said as we parted.

As a veteran, you get "Thanks for your service" a lot. It always irritates me. I never quite know how to respond because I'm not proud of my service in Vietnam, and don't feel I should be thanked for it.

I was 18 when I joined. I spent the most influential year of my life in Vietnam. Then I came home and educated myself. If people want to thank me, let them do it for what I learned from the experience, not for going there.

The main thing I learned? U.S. military interventions since World War II have generally been dishonest and in support of quite vicious governments. There's Iran in 1953 and Guatemala the next year. And, of course, Vietnam.

My service was hardly the stuff of national warrior myth. I was a kid, a radio direction finder in the mountains west of Pleiku locating enemy units so they could be destroyed. My job was to spin a silver antenna around and say here's a map coordinate, bomb it silly, and maybe, if I'm right, you'll hurt the enemy. Then again, if I'm wrong, you may level an innocent village.

You know... the fog of war.

I'm not a pacifist, though I have friends who are. I will defend myself with violence to the best of my ability. I feel that way, as well, about the military. But like a pistol, the problem is in whose hands the pistol is held and what he or she does with it. The military we have now is more and more the instrument of imperial assumptions beyond even the electoral process.

I know there are people who will distort what I'm saying, and I understand how they might feel. By implication, I'm commenting on the service of others, suggesting that they might transcend all the patriotic and macho mind-wash and consider what their service in places like Vietnam actually accomplished.

Instead of the superficial "Thank you for your service" approach, what if we honestly examined experiences like Vietnam and used them to learn something? Susan Sontag was crucified for saying this after 9/11: "By all means, let's mourn together, but let's not be stupid together." She was right.

If the men and women of the White House had valued the painful lessons of Vietnam over blind service, we would not be bogged down in another quagmire and we would not be having 300,000 people marching down Broadway led by a growing organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War.

These young men and women also choose to transcend the superficiality of "Thank you for your service." While these veterans honor the courage, and mourn the suffering and loss, of their friends in Iraq, they are acting on what they've learned from their experience, which is that the U.S. occupation is wrong and needs to be ended.

Anyone who feels this is unpatriotic should consider the words of a famous World War II combat bomber pilot: "The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard." That bomber pilot was George McGovern.

So next time you consider muttering to a vet, "Thanks for your service," take a moment to consider what that service meant to the people on the wrong end of it and whether it was worth all the pain and misery.

In my case, I'd rather be thanked for my service opposing the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the winter of 2002, because of what I learned in Vietnam, I joined many others who were aware that the blind runaway train full of frightened and duped Americans racing toward Iraq was headed for disaster. Of course, the train went right over us.

If you need to thank me, thank me for that.

Contact John Grant at grantphoto4@earthlink.net.

© 2006 The Philadelphia Inquirer

 CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 
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