thedrifter
06-02-08, 08:20 AM
Winter Soldier
Northwest veterans share the horrors of Iraq.
BY CYDNEY GILLIS, Staff Reporter
Chanan Suarez Diaz had just come off a night raid in Ramadi and was trying to eat a meal in the mess hall. But at a table next to his, Marines from another platoon were regaling each other in a way that the former Navy corpsman says made him sick.
“They were laughing and saying, ‘Hey, did you see that old guy I shot in the stomach running away? Ha, ha, ha,’” the 26-year-old Iraq War veteran recalls. “They were making fun of and joking about an innocent old man they shot during that night raid.”
Suarez Diaz, who later received a Purple Heart for saving two Marines’ lives in a 2005 humvee blast, was not surprised. The other platoon, he says, had lost two Marines to roadside bombs and, in the wake of the carnage, was known for killing noncombatants — a situation that Suarez Diaz and other members of Iraq Veterans Against the War say is common in a guerilla war that turns every Iraqi into an enemy.
“The military and just the nature of how they train people breeds war crimes,” he says. “It’s not an isolated incident. It’s something that’s systemic. The only way to end it is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately.”
Suarez Diaz and other Iraq Veterans Against the War plan to talk about what they saw and call for an end to both wars on May 31 at Northwest Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan. The public forum, which is expected to draw about 100 participants to Seattle’s Town Hall, is a regional follow-up to the national IVAW conference and testimony that took place near Washington, D.C., in March.
The event, which will be followed by a downtown antiwar demonstration, takes its name from a tide-turning Detroit gathering organized in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Scheduled speakers include authors Dahr Jamail (Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq) and Antonia Juhasz (The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time) and — a last-minute addition — antiwar activist Ann Wright.
Wright is a retired Army colonel and one of three foreign services officers who resigned from the State Department in early 2003 over the invasion of Iraq and other Bush administration policies, including the suppression of civil liberties. In 2005, she helped Cindy Sheehan organize the Camp Casey protest outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and served in 2006 as a defense witness in the trial of war resister Lt. Ehren Watada.
“This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an Administration of the United States,” Wright wrote in her March 2003 resignation letter to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. “I believe the administration’s policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place.”
After serving in Iraq, Seattle’s 14 IVAW members agree: The U.S. occupation is breeding terrorists, they say, not curtailing them. Most also echo author Antonia Juhasz, stressing the invasion wasn’t about gaining oil or political control per se, but creating a new profit center for U.S. corporations such as Bechtel, Chevron, Halliburton and Lockheed Martin — something Winter Soldier organizers are trying to get across to a public that they say is ill served by the mainstream media.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are “not benefitting the people of these countries and we’re not spreading democracy to these nations,” Suarez Diaz says. “It’s all based on profit.”
Jan Critchfield, a former National Guard specialist who served as a military journalist in Baghdad in 2004 and 2005, agrees.
“I think the people in office right now are robbing the American people blind,” says Critchfield, 24. “Their constituencies [are] huge multinational corporations like Halliburton and KBR that are reaping windfall profits, and we’re putting soldiers on the ground and putting future generations in debt to the tune of, what, $2 trillion now?”
“You hear the rhetoric that we’re fighting terrorists,” he says. But, in Iraq, “I didn’t see any terrorists. All I saw were people trained to defend their homes.”
Ellie
Northwest veterans share the horrors of Iraq.
BY CYDNEY GILLIS, Staff Reporter
Chanan Suarez Diaz had just come off a night raid in Ramadi and was trying to eat a meal in the mess hall. But at a table next to his, Marines from another platoon were regaling each other in a way that the former Navy corpsman says made him sick.
“They were laughing and saying, ‘Hey, did you see that old guy I shot in the stomach running away? Ha, ha, ha,’” the 26-year-old Iraq War veteran recalls. “They were making fun of and joking about an innocent old man they shot during that night raid.”
Suarez Diaz, who later received a Purple Heart for saving two Marines’ lives in a 2005 humvee blast, was not surprised. The other platoon, he says, had lost two Marines to roadside bombs and, in the wake of the carnage, was known for killing noncombatants — a situation that Suarez Diaz and other members of Iraq Veterans Against the War say is common in a guerilla war that turns every Iraqi into an enemy.
“The military and just the nature of how they train people breeds war crimes,” he says. “It’s not an isolated incident. It’s something that’s systemic. The only way to end it is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately.”
Suarez Diaz and other Iraq Veterans Against the War plan to talk about what they saw and call for an end to both wars on May 31 at Northwest Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan. The public forum, which is expected to draw about 100 participants to Seattle’s Town Hall, is a regional follow-up to the national IVAW conference and testimony that took place near Washington, D.C., in March.
The event, which will be followed by a downtown antiwar demonstration, takes its name from a tide-turning Detroit gathering organized in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Scheduled speakers include authors Dahr Jamail (Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq) and Antonia Juhasz (The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time) and — a last-minute addition — antiwar activist Ann Wright.
Wright is a retired Army colonel and one of three foreign services officers who resigned from the State Department in early 2003 over the invasion of Iraq and other Bush administration policies, including the suppression of civil liberties. In 2005, she helped Cindy Sheehan organize the Camp Casey protest outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and served in 2006 as a defense witness in the trial of war resister Lt. Ehren Watada.
“This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an Administration of the United States,” Wright wrote in her March 2003 resignation letter to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. “I believe the administration’s policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place.”
After serving in Iraq, Seattle’s 14 IVAW members agree: The U.S. occupation is breeding terrorists, they say, not curtailing them. Most also echo author Antonia Juhasz, stressing the invasion wasn’t about gaining oil or political control per se, but creating a new profit center for U.S. corporations such as Bechtel, Chevron, Halliburton and Lockheed Martin — something Winter Soldier organizers are trying to get across to a public that they say is ill served by the mainstream media.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are “not benefitting the people of these countries and we’re not spreading democracy to these nations,” Suarez Diaz says. “It’s all based on profit.”
Jan Critchfield, a former National Guard specialist who served as a military journalist in Baghdad in 2004 and 2005, agrees.
“I think the people in office right now are robbing the American people blind,” says Critchfield, 24. “Their constituencies [are] huge multinational corporations like Halliburton and KBR that are reaping windfall profits, and we’re putting soldiers on the ground and putting future generations in debt to the tune of, what, $2 trillion now?”
“You hear the rhetoric that we’re fighting terrorists,” he says. But, in Iraq, “I didn’t see any terrorists. All I saw were people trained to defend their homes.”
Ellie