I have seen the United States change from a vital and open society and democracy to a closed, repressive, authoritarian one in my life time. Never a perfect place, a nation which has made many errors and done bad things, it was at least a place where people could speak out and be heard on most issues, where there was lively dissent and challenge to vested interests and to authority. Not now.
Tom Paine’s famous quotation about the times that try men’s souls and the Winter Solder, the example among our forefathers who did not desert Washington and the Revolutionary Army during that dreadful winter when all looked lost, but who stayed on and earned freedom for the rest of us, inspired Viet Nam veterans to speak out about what was really going on in Viet Nam. Widely covered by the media at the time, those brave patriots helped their country by speaking the truth about the very real enemies to US freedom: aggression, government deceit, corporate greed, war profiteering, and injustice.
Veterans told what they had done and what they had seen. Americans were horrified.
This was in a time when the nightly news carried images of violence perpetrated in our name and when protesters where not herded into the Bush regime’s egregiously not free “free speech” zones out of sight, and when the media were not the propaganda organs for the administration that the current corporate media have become for this regime.
Later this month, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will hold a second Winter Soldier event where women and men who have served in those invasions and occupations will tell the truth.
When I was at Camp Casey, I had the privilege of hearing some of those stories from veterans. They tell movingly of being ordered to shoot white phosphorous, a weapon banned by international law, into populations of civilians.
Once a military action is over, the troops muster to assess their victory, count combatants killed, and collect weapons. I heard stories of them finding no combatants at all, just the viciously burned and mutilated remains of unarmed civilians, many of them women and children. A marine I know wept openly when telling about the baby shoes with feet in them, unattached from the rest of the child’s body. A huge pile of women’s and children’s shoes at Camp Casey reminded us all of the many Iraqis who were brutally killed in such actions.
I know these Winter Soldier Patriots will tell about torturing people. I know they will tell about murder and mayhem on a scale I can hardly fathom.
I doubt most Americans will hear about it. The only major media story about this event, titled Patriot Missiles, appeared in the Times in the UK.
Here are links to information about this event for anyone who wants to read about it.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_cheryl_b_080305_winter_soldier_3a_can_.htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3444835.ece?Submitted=true
I am grateful to the WIP and other alternative sources of information. If there is hope for the United States to stop its tragic decline, certainly part of that hope lies with institutions like it.
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