Posts
EGYPT,
SYRIA, MILITARY, ETC.
We have a couple of Latuff's cartoons this time. The first one, above, came to me the day
after our last edition when we published the latest information over Sisi's
election in Egypt. It remains the only
virtue of Sisi that he at least not claim that God told him to do what he has
been doing. Other than that, he attacks
journalists, his own citizens, etc.
Naturally, the U.S. likes him.
Saudi Arabia does not and he will not return the money they sent Egypt
while the Moslem Brotherhood was running the show over there. Hardly anyone showed up to vote, and Latuff
makes the point.
The one above here is Latuff's impression of the vote in
Syria. Obviously, he feels that the
election was not entirely democratic.
Still, most of his enemies are either U.S. supported or religious
fanatics. Christians are especially
terrified of these enemies as well as most sane Moslems. Still, Latuff at least speaks his mind and
actually has a mind to speak of.
Around here, things are getting even more absurd than usual,
especially concerning the military, and not because the military is a force for
evil, either. Both the VA idiocy and
the recent crap about a POW exchange has made most people in the mainstream
media, not to mention the lunatic right, transparently subhuman, an argument
for post-term abortion. (I realize that
most of them will not even get that last clause. No matter.)
There are gloating idiocies coming from the right about the
fact that the POW's home town has cancelled his welcome back. The reason, of course, in that the town only
has a population of 8,000, is in Idaho, the county is larger that a few eastern
states and has a population of 22,000, and the place is simply not equipped to
handle the influx of media and morons that such a celebration would cause. They simply do not have enough electricity,
for example, let alone police.
First, some important information about the POW
himself. Our administration was told
during negotiations that if word leaked about the impending exchange, the POW
would be executed before being released.
I would not trust our Congress to keep that secret for the 30 days they
are complaining about, so Diane Feinstein is an even bigger liar than we first
thought.
Second, the guy himself was hardly a deserter or a
"coward," but more about cowardice later. There is no point educating these right wingers about military
justice as they should at least know that much, but they will not know. To paraphrase, there are none so ignorant as
those who *will* not know.
One of this group, now on the House Intelligence Committee
thinks we need a President like Benjamin Franklin again. Right.
Third, the cowardice of these people is overwhelming. The argument against letting these
"prisoners" go to Qutar is that they might attack us. I'm not afraid of them. Why are they? And weren't they kidnapped by us in the first place?
Forget the numbers now:
the VA is next. It does not
matter how many people the right wing manage to get fired over this. The real criminals in the lack of treatment
for veterans are those people who manufactured so many veterans in the first
place by sending people to Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places without
providing adequate funding for their health care when they got back. Does anyone remember the families holding
bake sales to send equipment to the sons in Iraq?
Well, another of these people wants to pass a bill providing
that any woman who gets an abortion after being raped should get the same
sentence as her rapist. I am not making
this up.
At any rate, here are a couple of interviews of the military
subject:
THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2014
Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s Idaho Hometown Cancels "Welcome Home" Celebration as Backlash Grows
The backlash over the prisoner swap involving
U.S. soldier Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and five members of the Taliban continues to
grow. In Bergdahl’s hometown of Hailey, Idaho, community members have a
canceled a celebration of his release over public safety concerns. In recent
days, angry phone calls and emails poured into Hailey city hall and local
organizations over the town’s support for the soldier. Bergdahl was captured by
the Taliban in 2009 shortly after he left his military outpost in Afghanistan.
Some of Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers have described him as a deserter. They have
also said at least six soldiers died while searching for him, a claim the
Pentagon rejects. We discuss the Bergdahl controversy and its local impact in
Idaho with Larry Schoen, a county commissioner in Blaine County.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in
its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The backlash continues to grow over the prisoner swap
involving U.S. soldier Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl and five members of the Taliban.
In Bergdahl’s hometown of Hailey, Idaho, community members have canceled a
celebration of his release over public safety concerns. In recent days, angry
phone calls and e-mails poured into Hailey City Hall and local organizations
over the town support for the soldier. Bergdahl was captured by the Taliban in
2009 shortly after he left his military outpost in Afghanistan. He was held by
the Taliban or five years. Some of Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers have described
him as a deserter. They’ve also claimed at least six soldiers died while
searching for him. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel rejected that
claim.
CHUCK HAGEL: On Sergeant Bergdahl, I do not know of specific
circumstances or details of U.S. soldiers dying as a result of efforts to find
and rescue Sergeant Bergdahl. I am not aware of those specific details or any
facts regarding that issue.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Capitol Hill, four top intelligence and military
officials held an unusual closed-door briefing for the entire Senate on
Wednesday to discuss why the White House decided to move ahead with the
prisoner swap without notifying Congress. Senators were shown a recent video of
Bowe Bergdahl depicting him in declining health. Meanwhile, Republican Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned that Republican lawmakers would call
for Obama’s impeachment if you release more prisoners from Guantánamo Bay
without congressional approval.
AMY GOODMAN: In another development, The
Wall Street Journal reports
that during the prisoner exchange negotiations, the Taliban warned that U.S.
drone strikes had come close on several occasions to killing Sergeant Bergdahl
while he was in captivity. To talk more about the story, we first go to Idaho
where we’re joined by Larry Schoen, he’s the County Commissioner for Blaine
County, Idaho. Hailey is one of the five cities in Blaine County. Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk first about, first,
Larry, the decision to cancel the celebrations upon the return of Bowe
Bergdahl, though we don’t know when that will be?
LARRY SCHOEN: Well, first thing, good morning, and thank you for having
me. And I speak very mindful of all of those who have given so much in service
of the best intentions of the mission in Afghanistan. I was not in on the
decision-making to cancel the event. But I think there were concerns about —
that the event would become too large for local officials to manage. I think
some people have felt the temperature rising here as disagreements about what
may have happened have come to the floor on the national stage. Really, I think
nobody here wants to channel some of the nastiness that is out there. People
are rushing to judgment, and I think that is inappropriate. And I think in
light of circumstances today, the decision was made to cancel the event several
weeks ahead of it to tamp that down.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And Larry Schoen, can you tell us something about your
corner of the country where Bowe Bergdahl grew up?
LARRY SCHOEN: Well, this is a beautiful part of the country. Idaho is a
state with more wilderness than any state in the lower 48. People come here to
recreate and be part of the great outdoors. Our community is small. It is about
22,000, but made up of people who have come to live here and visit here from
all over the world. It is home to the Sun Valley resort, which was America’s
first ski resort founded back in the 1930’s. And so it is a very close-knit
community, well-educated community. People support one another in tough times.
And I think that was the nature of this event, is to show support for the
Bergdahl family and Sergeant Bergdahl who has been held by the Taliban for five
years.
AMY GOODMAN: Larry Schoen, yours is in an usual community in that you
have the great wealth of the celebrities like Bruce Willis and Demi Moore,
their home there — though they are divorced, but what they have there. And then
you have got working-class people. You’ve got for example, you the Bergdahls
who moved from California, Calvinist, homeschooled their kids both Bowe and his
older sister Skye. He worked at the Zany’s coffee shop. Can you tell us a little
bit about that as a community center? And actually was was well-known for his
ballet performances, Bowe Bergdahl was.
LARRY SCHOEN: Right, well, people focus on the celebrity aspects of this
community because people have been coming here from Southern California since
the 1930’s. In fact, that was part of the marketing of this resort when it
first opened. But this is a working-class community. The Zaney’s is a coffee
shop owned by an old friend of mine who opened it because that’s what — she
loves being with people. She loves serving people. It is a place where Bowe
worked and therefore has become kind of the Mecca in town. Our county is bigger
than the state of Delaware with only 22,000 people. People tend to congregate
in the towns, but the Bergdahls, like I, live out in the rural parts of the
county. That has been a gathering place. I think that is appropriate. I think
people have tried to show their support over the course of these five years.
Needed a place to do that, and Zaney’s was a good place. The job that he held
there was one of the many things this young man has done in his short life.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And how has the uproar in Washington and across the media,
now nationwide, over whether Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter and should have been
rescued — how has that affected the town and its support for the family?
LARRY SCHOEN: I think it has, I think it’s shaking the town because I
think, first and foremost and certainly I as an elected official here, think
about the family and the family and their son, our native son, and what they
need to get through this ordeal. The whole five years of captivity and now this
ordeal in the national press, the global press. So, we are thinking first about
them. And this is — from our perspective, this is not, first and foremost,
about national and military policy and U.S. foreign policy, but certainly, the
issues surrounding his release — this is a very complex story. There are ties
to U.S. foreign policy coming out of this really hometown story about this
young man. So, I think people are shaken by that. I think people are trying to
not rush to judgment here locally. I think everybody knows what is right and
what is wrong, and many of the different actions that have occurred. So, we
have many different components to the story. There is the question of what was
his state of mind when he left his base and went missing, was it appropriate
for the U.S. government to release these five Taliban under the circumstances?
There are many different parts of that story. We are feeling the effects of the
global story, but trying to focus, I think, on the health and welfare of the
Bergdahl family.
AMY GOODMAN: And Larry Schoen, you know Bowe’s parents Bob and Jani
Bergdahl. Can you tell us a little about them?
LARRY SCHOEN: They are wonderful people. It is a loving family. They are
loving people. I am sure they instilled in their son the best values that
America has to offer. And I support them 100% through all of this.
AMY GOODMAN: Bob Bergdahl worked at, what, UPS for some — well, close to three
decades.
LARRY SCHOEN: Yeah, I don’t really know how long he work for UPS, but he is
well-known in town. He’s been criticized for having spoken local Afghanistan
language, the Pashtun. And now he’s been criticized for a number of different
things because people are just searching for things to criticize in this event.
But really, Bob is a very thoughtful man. I think he — and he expressed
publicly any times that his goals and intentions were to stand in solidarity
with his son, and to try as best he could and as best they could to appreciate
and understand his circumstances and the circumstances of his comrades in
Afghanistan. I think the Bergdahls have acted with only the best intentions
toward their son and this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Larry Schoen, I want to thank you for being with us,
County Commissioner for Blaine County, Idaho. Hailey is one of the five cities
in Blaine County. The Bergdahls live just outside Hailey b and Bowe grew up
just outside Hailey and worked at this well known watering hole, Zaney’s coffee
shop, which is why he was very well known in the community. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’re going to
speak to a soldier who served years in the military. He was in Afghanistan at
the same time as Bowe Bergdahl. And when he came back to the United States, he
applied for conscientious objector status. Stay with us.
The
original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org.
Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately
licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2014
Veteran: Politicians Using Freed POW Bowe Bergdahl as "Chess Piece to Win Political Matches"
The Obama administration is seeking to contain
a congressional backlash over a prisoner exchange that saw the release of
American soldier Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban leaders. On Wednesday, top
intelligence and military officials held a closed-door briefing for the entire
Senate showing them a recent video of Bergdahl in declining health. The
administration says the video helped spur action to win his release over fears
his life was in danger. Opponents of the deal say the White House failed to
give Congress proper notice, and may have endangered American lives by
encouraging the capture of U.S. soldiers. The criticism has exploded as news
spread through right-wing media that Bergdahl may have left his base after
turning against the war. We are joined by Brock McIntosh, a member of Iraq
Veterans Against the War who served in Afghanistan from November 2008 to August
2009. McIntosh applied for conscientious objector status and was discharged
last month.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in
its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As this controversy brews, it’s on so many different
levels. You’ve got the controversial prisoner swap and the whole issue of is
this leading to the closing of Guantánamo, and then you’ve got Bowe Bergdahl
leaving the base, not really fully understood at this point because we have not
talked to Bowe Bergdahl. And once he left the base, he was not spoken to again
except through Taliban videos of him. The question is being raised, did he
desert? The question is being raised and he’s being condemned in the mainstream
media for his antiwar views.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’re going to talk more about the Bowe Bergdahl
story. We go now to Brock McIntosh in Washington, D.C. He fought with Army
National Guard in Afghanistan from November 2008 to August 2009. And was based
near where Bergdahl was captured. McIntosh had later applied for conscientious
objector status and joined Iraq veterans against the war. Brock McIntosh,
welcome back toDemocracy Now!
BROCK MCINTOSH: Thanks for having me.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Your initial reaction to the uproar in Congress and around
the country over the prisoner swap with Bowe Bergdahl?
BROCK MCINTOSH: You just played a song called "Masters of War"
and there’s a lyric where it talks about you to hide behind walls, you that
hide behind desks, I just wanted to know I can see through your masks. And I
think that that is a perfect description of what we’re seeing in Congress right
now. These people who hide behind walls and hide behind desks, and are using a POW as a chess piece to win political
matches. And that last week, used a wounded veteran with nearly 40 years of
military service, General Shinseki, as a political chess piece. And so, I think
it is outrageous we know nothing about the actual circumstances of why exactly
Sergeant Bergdahl left. We don’t know what his intentions were. It is all
speculation at this point. All we know for sure is that he was a POW and he should have been welcomed home.
AMY GOODMAN: And Brock, tell us where you were in Afghanistan in
relation to Bowe Bergdahl. You served at the same time, though didn’t know each
other.
BROCK MCINTOSH: Sure Amy. I served in Paktika Province initially for six
months. That’s where Bowe Bergdahl went missing for six months. Spent the last
three months in Khost Province. Those last three months were when Bowe Bergdahl
went missing. He went missing in June 30, and I left Afghanistan in August 2009.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of this whole — the allegations that in the
search for Bergdahl, all of these soldiers, several American soldiers were lost
or killed. The — only The New
York Times, among the commercial media, has really raised the issue that
many of these soldiers are being brought out by Republican political operative
and made available to the various media. Your — what you understand about these
other soldiers who were killed around the same time while Bergdahl was in
captivity?
BROCK MCINTOSH: Right, so I think the story that is being told in the
media makes it seem as though there was a unit that received — that was briefed
about some rescue mission and they went out on this rescue mission to locate
and extract Sergeant Bergdahl and six people died in the process. That is
really not the case. Bergdahl went missing on June 30. Those six soldiers that
died died two months later in four separate missions. And it is not clear to
what extent those missions had anything to do with searching for Bergdahl. They
certainly were not rescue missions. I mean one of them — one of those deaths
involved an American soldier being killed supporting an Afghan national
security force mission. That is not a rescue mission. We don’t know why exactly
the six soldiers died. There’s all sorts of things that could explain it. Let’s
not forget that summer season is fighting season in Afghanistan. It could have
been that they died in late August and early September because it was late in
the summer, and it was right before the winter, and attacks always ramp up at
that time of year. It could also be explained by the fact that in 2009, the
Obama administration initiated this protracted insurgency campaign and a surge
in Afghanistan. So, there are all sorts of things that could explain why the
soldiers died. And I think it is unfair to assert that Bergdahl went missing
and therefore these soldiers died. And another thing also, in Bergdahl’s unit,
they had gone a few months without any fatalities. The first fatality was five
days before Bergdahl went missing. So, it could have just been that he happened
to have gone missing at a time when there were increased attacks and people
were being killed. What’s unfortunate is that he is being used, again, as a
political chess piece in a political game and conservatives are using the
allegations of soldiers in his unit to imply that this man wasn’t a hero and
therefore, President Obama is not a hero for bringing this soldier home.
AMY GOODMAN: Looking at Buzzfeed describing who Juan was just talking
about, this former Bush administration official, hired then resigned, Mitt
Romney foreign policy spokesperson, played a key role in publicizing critics of
Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. The involvement of Richard Grenell who once served as a
key aide to Bush, to — rather to the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. ,John Bolton,
later worked on Romney’s campaign. I wanted to go back, though, to 2009, to the
soldiers who Bowe Bergdahl worked with in that tiny outpost that they built in
Afghanistan. We had Sean Smith on a few days ago, a Guardian videographer and photographer who
produced a film back in 2009 as well as one when he went to Idaho and met
Bowe’s father, Bob Bergdahl, which we also played and I encourage people to go
to democracynow.org to see all of that. Sean Smith spent a month embedded with
Bowe Bergdahl’s unit in Afghanistan. In this clip, we hear from some of the
soldiers stationed with Bowe.
SOLDIER ONE: These people just want to be left alone.
SOLDIER TWO: Yeah, they got dicked with from the Russians for 17 years
and then now we’re here.
SOLDIER ONE: Same thing in Iraq when I was there. These people just
want to be left alone. Have their crops, weddings, stuff like that, that’s it
man.
SOLDIER TWO: I’m glad they leave them alone.
SEAN SMITH: A few weeks later, Bowe Bergdahl, pictured in this photo,
disappeared. The circumstances are unclear.
AMY GOODMAN: That is from the 2009 video for The Guardian produced by Sean Smith. Michael
Hastings would further right about that, the late reporter for Rolling Stone. Brock
McIntosh, can you talk about your feelings when you were in Afghanistan, what
was happening there? We have seen the e-mails that Michael Hastings wrote about
in Rolling Stone of Bowe to his parents, talking about
his disillusionment with the war. What were your thoughts and the thoughts of
other soldiers? Sean Smith, a reporter for The
Guardian, said it was not unusual, more so among Americans and British
soldiers in Afghanistan, to be highly critical of what was happening.
BROCK MCINTOSH: It is really hard — it was really hard to hear that clip,
Amy, because it reminded me so much of the conversations that I had while I was
in Afghanistan. There was so much talk about — within my unit about these
Afghan people and how they just want to be left alone. And we were all aware of
the role the U.S. played during the Cold War. Using the Afghan people as a
proxy to get back at the Soviet Union, using the lives of Afghans as political
chess pieces and gamesmanship? And so to then be in Afghanistan to help people,
to help the Afghan people felt very disingenuous. We never had any clear sense
exactly why we were there, what it was that we were supposed to be doing, why
these people are shooting at us, who was shooting at us. Who are we shooting
at? Why are we shooting at them? And it really eats away at you and it becomes
a situation where all you want to do is you just want to come home and want
your buddies on your left and your right to come home. And it’s — what are you
supposed to do in a situation where you find yourself — you find yourself in a
conflict that you don’t agree with, where people are dying on both sides? What
are you supposed to do? What recourse do you have? I did not know that the
conscientious objector process existed. That’s one recourse you can take. But I
didn’t know that that existed. There’s an overwhelming lack of awareness that
there’s a formal process where you, when you have a conscientious shift, you
can actually leave the military.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And even your commanders at times are not aware of these
options. Could you talk about that confronting your own commander — or your
sense that you wanted to go into conscientious objector status?
BROCK MCINTOSH: Right. When I initially applied, it through my commander
off guard. I actually applied on the very first day in my new unit, and so my
commander was thrown off guard both because it was my first day meeting him and
also because he didn’t think that that process was possible. You can’t just
leave because you morally disagree with war. But it turns out you can. And to
his credit, he read about the regulations and he actually drafted a document
that we signed together saying I did not have to study, use or bear arms.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what did that mean? Where were you, Brock?
BROCK MCINTOSH: Well, I had applied actually after about a year or so
after I had come home. And I transferred from an Illinois National Guard unit
to a D.C. state unit, and that is when I applied.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was that process you went through? You started
serving in, what, November 2008, you were in Afghanistan ’til August 2009.
BROCK MCINTOSH: I started serving in November, August 2008. Like so many
soldiers, I wanted nothing more but to just make this war work and to help the
Afghan people. And again, it became increasingly frustrated when you did not
know why you were there and you didn’t why these people were shooting at you or
who you were supposed to be — or why you were shooting and who you were
shooting. I wanted to make the war work. And so, in that process of trying to
make the war work, I started reading about the history and culture of
Afghanistan, just like Bowe’s father did. And like Bowe, it became really
discomforting to learn about the relationship that the U.S. has had with that
country for the past 30 years and all the problems it has created for the past
30 years. And there were certain first-hand experience I had — experiences I
had that were unnerving, like seeing a 16-year-old bomb maker get blown up. He
came to our base to be treated. And we took turns babysitting his body in one
hour shifts. And when I was alone with him in this room, thinking how crazy it
is that me as a 20 world and the 16-year-old are being sent to kill each other
by these adult for these ideologies that we don’t quite understand. It’s just a
sad situation.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: According to Rolling
Stone magazine Bergdahl sent
a final e-mail to his parents on June 27, three days before he was captured. He
wrote, "The future is too good to waste on lies... And life is way to
short to care for the damnation of others as well as to spend it helping fools
with their ideas that are wrong. I’ve seen their ideas and I’m ashamed to even
be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. Is
is all revolting. I am sorry for everything here... These people need help, yet
what they get is the conceited country in the world telling them that they are
nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. The
horror that is America is disgusting." In that email, he also referred to
seeing an Afghan child run over by U.S. military vehicle. Your reaction to some
of those words?
BROCK MCINTOSH: I want to react to one thing — to one aspect of that
statement, and that was about lies. We were lied — we as veterans were lied to
about the Iraq war. We were lied to by the Bush administration and with the
endorsement of Congress, we went into Iraq. Nearly 5000 American soldiers were
killed, well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, based on that line.
There has been a lot of talk over the last few months about a lie that was told
that the Phoenix VA Hospital about these secret waiting lists. I find it really
ironic that Congress is so obsessed about figuring out who lied at the Phoenix
VA Hospital and the circumstances of that lie that are connected to the deaths
of 40 veterans, when a lie that they told killed nearly 5000 American soldiers
and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. And what they’re doing is they’re trying to
defer blame from themselves. Congress is the reason that we have waiting lists.
’Congress is the reason that we deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and deployed
over 2 million veterans and have this influx of veterans that are fighting to
get V.A. health care.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it is interesting you raise this, Brock, because
last week at this time, everyone nonstop across all of the media was talking
about whether General Shinseki would resign and about the horror of the V.A.,
the waits that people have when they come home from war, one to two years. And
within two days, then that is all wiped off of the face of the media and this
is the controversy that takes its place. But you see these as connected.
BROCK MCINTOSH: Well, I’m not sure if they’re connected. It could be that
this happened at a time when the Obama administration anticipated General
Shinseki stepping down. I don’t know, but I see a connection in Congress’
willingness to exploit other people’s service for political gamesmanship. Last
week, they scapegoated General Shinseki, a wounded veteran who served for
nearly 40 years, they scapegoated him to defer blame from themselves and the
role that they played in creating these wait lists and failing to prepare for
the cost of veterans coming home. When we went to Iraq and we went to
Afghanistan, they did not set aside the necessary funds that would be required
to care for our veterans to come home and to make the systematic changes that
would need to be made. So the Congress played a huge role in creating those
wait lists and the problems that the V.A. is facing and they scapegoated a
veteran last week. And this week, they’re now taking advantage of a POW and using him for political games and
it is pretty sick and pretty disgusting and it’s pretty shameful.
AMY GOODMAN: Brock, finally, did you ever get conscientious objector
status?
BROCK MCINTOSH: I did not get conscientious objector status. You know, the
process for reserve soldiers, it’s supposed to take about six months, three
months for active soldiers. But, the process is always — there are always
obstacles and barriers in the process. You always have to butt has with
officers. They lose your paperwork. You really need to have legal assistance in
order to get c.o. status because the process is so difficult. If more veterans were
aware, more soldiers were where aware that c.o. process exists and if there
were reforms made to the c.o. process, we may not have had a situation where a
soldier had a conscientious change of heart and left his post because he didn’t
realize that there were formal recourses of actions that he could have taken.
Not saying that that’s the reason why Sergeant Bergdahl left, we don’t know.
But, the point is, I think we could avoid potential situations like this if we
reform the c.o. process and if more soldiers are made aware that that process
exists.
AMY GOODMAN: Brock McIntosh we want to thank you so much for being with
us. A soldier served in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009, applied for conscientious
objector status and was discharged in May of 2014. He’s a member of Iraq
Veterans Against the war.
The
original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org.
Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately
licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
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