Behind the Epidemic of Military Suicides
New Documentary Exposes Psychiatry as “The Hidden Enemy” in Military Mental Health
In order to gain acceptance as a medically relevant entity, psychiatry deliberately infiltrated this nation’s defense forces and others around the world, practicing pseudo-science on unsuspecting service men and women under the guise of mental health “treatment.”
The Hidden Enemy, a comprehensive, years-in-the-making, documentary has been released by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). It is the first documentary to fully expose psychiatry’s use of military personnel worldwide as guinea pigs, subjecting soldiers to devastating psychiatric experiments. In so doing, it provides important insight into the question of why more soldiers are dying from psychiatric treatment than on the battlefield. As Lieutenant Colonel Bart Billings stated, “We have never drugged our troops to this extent and the current increase in suicides is not a coincidence.”
The groundbreaking documentary reveals the chilling psychiatric strategy to use the captive population of military communities as guinea pigs for future psychiatric treatments. It was laid out by psychiatrist and Brigadier General J.R. Rees in 1945: “The army and the other fighting services form rather unique experimental groups since they are complete communities and it is possible to arrange experiments in a way that would be very difficult in civilian life.”
The end goal of this psychiatric assault? The planned permeation of psychiatry into every aspect of civilian life—and, as the documentary points out, it came from the mouth of Gen. Rees himself: “We must aim to make it [psychiatry] permeate every educational activity in our national life…. Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.”
Military psychiatrists used emotionally and psychologically wounded soldiers to experiment with “treatments” like electroshock, insulin shock and mind-altering drugs—much of which would later be considered torture. During this time, the military’s top psychiatrist, Brigadier General William Menninger, would write the manual listing all mental problems he thought soldiers could have—a volume that would ultimately morph into the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
Despite psychiatry’s failed and dangerous results from early military drug testing with LSD, the pharmacological experimentation on unsuspecting troops with mind-altering drugs—never studied or approved for such uses—became a full-frontal attack.
The Hidden Enemy exposes psychiatry’s inability to produce any science to back up even one of the alleged “mental disorders” commonly assigned to troops. “Psychiatry,” explains Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad, “especially has no objective means of making any diagnosis. In general medicine at least we have x-rays and blood tests to go on…. And so that’s the big, big dilemma faced by psychiatry. They have zero ability to diagnose, so they have zero ability to treat.”
Neurologist Dr. Fred A. Baughman, Jr. fully concurs. “No physical abnormality,” says Baughman, “has ever been found so there is no physical abnormality to demonstrate by an MRI, a CT, an EEG; it’s another fraud, pure and simple. It’s another fraud.”
The overwhelming psychiatric diagnosis fraud of choice assigned to military personnel has become the alleged “mental disorder” Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Once considered “battle fatigue” and “shell shock,” psychiatrists have subjectively decided soldiers suffering from the horrors of war now are “mentally ill” and suffering from PTSD. With the millions of dollars being spent on getting to the bottom of this “epidemic,” command may find it prudent to take a hard look at some basic facts. Suicides, and other unexplained sudden deaths, have increased for the past several years, as has the diagnosing of PTSD and the prescribing of psychiatric drugs, many of which are not approved by the FDA for treatment of PTSD and many of which cause the very symptoms the troops have sought treatment for.
Today thirty-seven percent of war veterans are being treated for the alleged PTSD, with 80 percent of those being “treated” with at least one psychiatric drug. The extent of the increased diagnosing and drugging is reflected in the mental health budgets of the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration, which collectively have reached nearly $9 billion annually.
The Hidden Enemy dramatically reveals the tragic result of psychiatry’s assault on military personnel, providing first-hand accounts from dozens of soldiers who survived the epidemic of pharmacological devastation to tell the tale of overwhelming psycho-pharmacological assault. Not all were so lucky.
Since 2002, the U.S. military suicide rates have almost doubled. From 2010 to 2012, more U.S. soldiers died by suicide than from traffic accidents, heart disease, cancer and homicide. In 2012 alone, more U.S. active duty service men and women committed suicide than died in combat, and veterans are killing themselves at the rate of 22 per day. Unbeknownst to the returning warriors prescribed the psychiatrist’s drugs—in some cases more than two-dozen drugs—they may actually be facing a kind of psycho-pharmacological firing squad.
From 2005 to 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense increased its prescriptions of psychiatric drugs by nearly seven times. That’s over thirty times faster than civilians.
Officially, one in six American service members is on at least one psychiatric drug and over the last ten years, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.5 billion dollars just medicating soldiers and veterans.
Former U.S. Army Sgt. Joel Kort provides a glimpse of his introduction to the “help” military psychiatry offered: “I didn’t see the emergence of psychiatry in the Army until I suffered my own injury, and then it was like, it was a flood. It was a flood of doctors and it was a flood of meds…. I know that I’ve been on Ambien, Seroquel, Paxil—that was one of the big ones. A very dangerous drug…called Abilify. It kind of puts whatever meds you’re on, on steroids.”
Kort’s experience with a virtual “cocktail” of psychiatric drugs is becoming the norm in military mental health “treatment.” The problem, as exposed by The Hidden Enemy, is that the majority of psychiatric drug cocktails have never been studied in combination by national drug regulatory agencies.
The Hidden Enemy is a comprehensive exposé of psychiatry’s systematic infiltration and control over military forces worldwide, through which the ultimate plan—to slowly bleed into all aspects of civilian life—has now become the reality.
Psychiatry’s ugly truth has been laid bare. The Hidden Enemy is a battle cry for action.
In the interest of disclosure, I was interviewed for this documentary.
Also see CCHR’s White Paper: A Review of How Prescribed Psychiatric Medications Could Be Driving Members of the Armed Forces and Vets to Acts of Violence & Suicide
Click here for Options & Alternatives for Soldiers and Veterans.
Stan Goff
Author, Veteran, Anti-war Activist: b. 1951
Biography
Stan Goff grew up in a staunchly conservative, anti-communist family. In 1970, he joined the Army. Goff retired in 1996 as a Special Forces Master Sergeant. During his tenure, he was sent to Vietnam, Haiti, Panama, Colombia, and Somalia, participating in several different military attachments. Goff would later write that his time spent in Latin America shifted his politics to the left. His experiences, particularly in Haiti, are recounted in his 2000 book, Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti.
In between stints in the military, Goff studied literature and philosophy at Garland Community College, Henderson State College, and the University of Arkansas at Monticello. Soon after retirement, Goff began a career in activism, studying Marxism and briefly joining the Communist Party USA.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Goff became active as a speaker against an invasion of Iraq. His status as a veteran gave him credence and popularity with anti-war activists. In 2003, Goff wrote “Bring ‘Em On?” for the online journal Counterpunch. It was a response to the taunting phrase “Bring ‘em on!” uttered by President Bush regarding Iraqi guerrillas. In the article, Goff compared the Iraq war to his experience in Vietnam. He wrote of being told by a fellow veteran that “All Vietnamese were the enemy…this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was given to the American Public for the war was not true.” He ended by stating that President Bush’s “legitimacy has been eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all.”
The popularity of this article led to the formation, with other veterans and activists, of the organization Bring Them Home Now.
His 2004 book, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century, critiques US foreign policy. According to the publisher, Goff “depicts the new ‘American Empire’ as over-reliant on technology, ignorant of the lessons of history, and backward in the stereotyping of other countries.”
Goff began studying and writing about feminism, particularly how it relates to war. This re-examination is brought together in his article “Sex and War”, where he argues that war is not an instinct of man, but rather, “men are made into killers by governments, corporations, and systems of power.” His latest book is a compilation of essays calledEnergy War.
Stan Goff´s is an active voice on the Internet. He is a frequent contributor at The Huffington Post. He also maintains his own blog called Feral Scholar, and a website at. He is a principal member of the website Insurgent American, that defines insurgents as “pretty much anyone who disagrees with the dominant consensus and does even a little bit more than talk about it…we [insurgents] exist to promote a fundamental transformation of power relations within our society.”
http://www.garlicandgrass.org/issue8/PerfectCircle_StanGoff.cfm
ehind The Matrix in Special Forces
Speaking With Stan Goff
Stan Goff spent twenty-four years in the U.S. military, much of it in the Special Forces. He fought in Vietnam, was a sniper with the counter-terrorism unit Delta Force, and taught military science at West Point. His career took him to Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, and other hot spots around the globe. He saw up close how the U.S. government�s official statements didn�t match up with the actions of its military. His role in the U.S. invasion of Haiti disillusioned him for good. Officially named �Operation Restore Democracy,� the invasion, Goff says, was aimed only at eliminating any threat to U.S. domination. In his book Hideous Dream: A Soldier�s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press), he writes, �Haiti taught me what I was and showed me what I must become.�
Having spent his adult life in the military, Goff wasn�t sure where to turn once he no longer believed in its mission. �I was fortunate,� he says, �to have people close to me who were on the other side of the debate.� His sister had introduced him to women�s-rights and gay-rights activists, and an Internet search put him in touch with a North Carolina group called the Carolina Socialist Forum. Through that connection, he made many friends who helped him make the leap from soldier to activist. Goff retired from the military in 1996 and has been involved in progressive causes ever since.
Today Goff is active in the Bring Them Home Now campaign, led by Military Families Speak Out and Veterans for Peace. The campaign calls for the U.S. government to pull its troops out of Iraq. Its website, www.BringThemHomeNow.org, publishes anonymous statements from GIs, so that they can write freely about what�s going on in Iraq. �The more soldiers do it,� Goff says, �the more likely others will be to speak up.� Goff has a personal interest in seeing an end to the conflict: his son is in the military and was stationed in Iraq earlier this year.
Goff�s most recent book is Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century (Soft Skull Press). He�s currently working on a new book about gender and the military, titled Sex and War.
I first encountered Goff at an informal talk he gave in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For more than an hour, he spoke passionately about the current war in Iraq, about class struggle here in the U.S., and about what he considers to be the real motives behind U.S. foreign policy.
For this interview, we met at his house in Raleigh, North Carolina. A sturdily built man, Goff met me at the door with a firm handshake. On the walls of his small home office hang vibrant paintings from Haiti, a place he refers to as his �second home.� Since the 1994 invasion, he has been back to that country ten times as a member of the Haiti Support Network. We sat in his kitchen, surrounded by pictures of his children and his first grandchild.
Elliott: What does the title of your latest book, Full Spectrum Disorder, refer to?
Stan Goff: During the Clinton administration, when Hugh Shelton was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he began what Donald Rumsfeld calls the �revolution of military affairs,� which is the complete restructuring of the U.S. military. The shorthand for it is �full spectrum dominance.� This refers to dominance in three dimensions: technology, the full spectrum of conflict (from street riots to thermonuclear war), and geography. The belief that we can achieve such dominance is quite likely the most grandiose delusion in human history. It simply is not possible. It�s amazing and worrisome to me that people who hold the reins of power would actually believe in something like this.
I have been reading a book by Swedish anthropologist Alf Hornborg, who looks at social development through the lens of entropy: the notion that disorder always increases within a closed system. Hornborg says that, within the closed system of the world economy, energy is transferred from peripheral nations into the high-tech, metropolitan core. What�s left behind is immense social disorder. The environmental-justice movement focuses on one aspect of this: the way rich communities make a lot of toxic trash and dump it on poor communities. The rich gain order in the form of resources and export their disorder elsewhere.
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Reading Hornborg, it occurred to me that as we increase our dependence on higher and higher orders of technology, we not only increase social disorder elsewhere, we�re also increasing the probability that some unexpected event will come along and create an avalanche of disorder here. For instance, twenty-one power plants in the eastern United States shut down on August 14, 2003, leaving millions of people without electricity. And nobody really knows what caused the blackout. Or terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center, and the whole global geopolitical architecture is transformed.
Elliott: What are your feelings about George W. Bush�s �war on terror�?
Goff: Bush is a terrorist. When you engage in massive state-run terrorism, and you support other leaders who conduct state-run terrorism, as Bush has done in Israel, you can expect a terrorist response.
No one — not the Palestinians, nor the Iraqis, nor the Afghans, nor anyone else — has the military capacity to confront the U.S. or Israel directly. They are forced by the situation either to lie down and die, or to fight back using asymmetric warfare, which we refer to as terrorism. Of course bulldozing people�s houses and bombing civilians are terrorism, too.
There is an implicit nationalism in the phrase �war on terror� because it says the threat is outside of us. But the single biggest cause of terrorist attacks, aside from the policies and actions of the U.S. government, is the size and scope of our military. There is simply no chance of victory if you confront the U.S. military on a conventional battlefield. Terrorism is a tactic, not a free-standing phenomenon. This is not a war on terrorism, nor on al-Qaeda, which is not a real organization but a loose, decentralized network characterized by spontaneity. The Taliban were real: they were the government of Afghanistan. But there�s no group called al-Qaeda, with a list of members and a hierarchy. So the Bush administration has this amorphous entity out there that it can use to frighten people. What�s great about having an amorphous enemy is that you can�t tell when it�s defeated. You can declare a perennial war and use it as an excuse for anything you want to do. All the Bush administration has to say is �We think this might be connected to al-Qaeda,� and the public will accept its actions uncritically. That�s what the administration did with the Iraq War: suggest a connection to al-Qaeda and terrorism. But this war isn�t about terrorism; it�s about oil. If the principal export of Iraq were palm dates, we wouldn�t be there.
Elliott: So al-Qaeda isn�t connected to Iraq. What is it connected to?
Goff: Its clearest connection is to Wahhabi Islam, which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. This fundamentalist branch of Islam was nurtured by the United States during our longstanding military and political alliance with the Saudis. At our behest, they exported politicized Islam throughout the region as a weapon to destroy Arab nationalism and socialism. The effort finally culminated in the war between political Islamists and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has said we laid a trap for the Soviets in Afghanistan. We funded and trained these fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, and maintained a long-standing alliance with them, even after bin Laden broke with the Saudis. The U.S. was funneling money to the Taliban all the way up until 2001, when our strategy came back and bit us.
Since we helped destroy Arab nationalism in places like Afghanistan, the only ideology left that gives voice to the increasingly frustrated masses in the region is politicized Islam. Everything about U.S. foreign policy right now is increasing the power of people who hate us. This doesn�t strike me as a very smart thing to do, even if you support U.S. imperial objectives, which I don�t. I desperately want to see the U.S. suffer a devastating political defeat in the Middle East, because maybe that would cause our country to pull out of the region.
Elliott: How have the Bush administration�s military operations differed from those of past administrations?
Goff: I�d say his success rate is worse, but the history of U.S. military operations is not as glowing as we�re led to believe. The U.S. military says it beat the Germans in World War II. In fact, the Soviets beat the Germans in Stalingrad. It was a mathematical certainty after Stalingrad that the Germans would be defeated. The Americans rolled in at the last minute to make sure they had a say in the postwar reconstruction. The Korean War was a debacle. Our use of overwhelming force led to a stalemate. Vietnam was a notorious disaster. And the attempt to impose a U.S. military presence on Lebanon failed miserably.
Our most glorious military victories — the invasions of Grenada and Panama — have been attacks by the world�s most well-funded military on nations that have fourth-rate militaries or no militaries at all. The Iraq War is an attack on a nation that has been shattered — militarily, politically, and economically — by warfare, sanctions, and the destruction of its economic infrastructure during the first phase of the Gulf War. To claim that Donald Rumsfeld�s military has had a great success in Iraq is like saying it�s a great success for Mike Tyson to knock out a ten-year-old in the third round.
The last time the U.S. had a striking military success was probably Sherman�s March, during the Civil War, which was the first time that troops deliberately bypassed engagements with enemy troops and went after strategic targets instead.
Elliott: Didn�t this policy lead almost immediately — in the case of the burning of Atlanta — to attacks on civilian targets?
Goff: All armies in all places have always attacked �civilian� targets. There are no exceptions to this fact. Yet people persist in believing the notion that civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure are somehow the exception. This is a fantasy to convince citizens to support the state�s actions.
Sherman’s use of force against strategic targets was simply a recognition that military and civilian resources had become integrated because of the Industrial Revolution. It was a quantum shift in warfare. Supplies were being moved by rail, so he went after the railheads in Atlanta. The principles first put into use by Sherman — what some military theorists call �general war� — would flower into the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and finally Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We are seeing it on a smaller scale today with Rumsfeld�s meritless �shock and awe.�
Elliott: Your son recently returned from Iraq. How do you feel about his decision to join the military?
Goff: I didn�t want him to, but it didn�t surprise me. He was working at McDonald�s, and he had an infant son and no healthcare. He grew up on a military installation. What am I going to do, tell him the military is all bad? He knows better. In fact, the years that he lived on a military installation were the best times in his life. It�s like living in a park. It�s the only thing in this country that even approaches a socialist society. Of course, Rumsfeld�s trying to get rid of military schools, and military healthcare has already been turned over to an HMO.
Elliott: What changes would you like to see made within the military? Is it possible to reform it?
Goff: The military cannot be changed, for better or for worse, without a transformation of the state and the socioeconomic system within which it operates. The military is just one facet of a larger system. I would like to see a change in our military mission, however, which right now is to invade other nations to protect our power and the global business regime.
I would welcome the end of U.S. global power, because it has been an essentially destructive and exploitative force in much of the world. Leftists need to be honest and admit that our standard of living, constructed as it is on consumer culture and fossil-fuel energy, is based on draining the wealth of other nations. This was once accomplished through controlling markets, and now is done more through encouraging countries to go into debt to the World Bank or some other global financial institution. We can support our profligate lifestyle only through military intervention.
When our beliefs don’t match up with our experiences, we develop cognitive dissonance, a kind of mental conflict. To settle it, we either have to deny our experience or give up our beliefs. |
I at least have a grudging respect for those on the Right who openly admit that if we don’t crush the will of people all over the Third World, then we can’t live the way we do. The Left often wants to soft-pedal it and tell people that we can live even better without the use of military power, but that is a grotesque misrepresentation. I agree with African revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral, who said: “Tell no lies and claim no easy victories.” I think the American public needs to be confronted with the truth: that we are a dirty, dangerous, destructive society, and that we export that dirt, danger, and destruction to poor people around the world so that some of us can live in a suburban Stepford fantasy.
Elliott: Do you think it’s fairly common for a person in the military to become disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy?
Goff: Certainly there is a long history of it. If you are in the military for a career, of course, there is a tendency to identify with the foreign-policy goals and objectives of the national command authority. But you encounter a lot of contradictions in the field. In Special Forces, you get a much clearer look at the politics behind it all than you do in the infantry, where you sit behind some concertina wire with a weapon and never get out and mix with the population. In Special Forces you are required to learn target languages, establish a rapport with the locals, eat their food, and acclimate yourself to the social conventions. Whether you cling to your old notions or not is another question. The way to maintain your belief in the rightness of what you’re doing is to adopt a racist, imperialist worldview, which is far more common than disillusionment.
When our beliefs don’t match up with our experiences, we develop cognitive dissonance, a kind of mental conflict. To settle it, we either have to deny our experience or give up our beliefs. In a narcissistic culture like ours, it’s a tough thing to admit that your beliefs are wrong. To say that you were wrong, that your parents were wrong, that possibly your whole society is wrong — that’s a tough proposition in any culture. It’s almost like surrendering your identity. For men, it’s like a surrender of masculinity.
Elliott: You were in Haiti in 1994 as the operations chief for a U.S. Special Forces team, and you ended up facing a possible court-martial. What happened there?
Goff: [Laughs.] It’s a long story. Basically, I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. I was supposed to read between the lines of the official guidance and find my real orders, which couldn’t be given directly because it was a politically sensitive situation. The Clinton administration was reinstalling populist leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president of Haiti, but only because it feared that a revolution against Haiti’s right-wing dictator might result in a true popular government taking over. Aristide was a left-wing in a populist way, but easily co-opted.
While the American public was hearing that we were restoring the legitimate president of Haiti, the troops who were obliged to carry out this task were receiving vile anti-Aristide propaganda in our intelligence summaries. We were expected to infer from this contradiction that we were not to facilitate any genuine return of popular sovereignty, and that we were supposed to subvert the local committees of the democratic Lavalas movement, which had helped to elect Aristide by a landslide in 1990. We had to figure this out without anyone officially telling us what to do. They didn’t want to end up with a situation where we could say, “I received an order.”
I interpreted the guidance my own way and was very pro-Lavalas. But my team members were also seeing these intelligence summaries, and there was a strong racist and anti-Aristide element among them. Eventually my team rebelled against the direction I was taking and reported me to the task-force command for violating General Order One, which prohibited any of us from eating local food, drinking with the locals, mixing directly with the population — all these things Special Forces can’t function without doing. Of course, everyone there had violated General Order One.
During the investigation, no one asked me anything about General Order One. They asked me why I was so pro-Lavalas. Was I being seditious? In fact, one of the more bizarre accusations leveled at me by members of my own team was that I had become too “pro-Haitian.”
It’s probably a good thing that I was relieved, because if I had stayed there three more months, I would have had a nervous breakdown.
Elliott: Were there any other people there who felt the way you did?
Goff: Nobody on my team. We were isolated from other teams, with the exception of resupply runs and radio communications, which were very official and cryptic. My team commander followed my lead not because he agreed with me politically but because our actions had been incredibly efficacious. We had achieved a higher degree of stability than probably any other team, primarily because we had gone out and identified ourselves publicly with the popular force on the ground, which was the Lavalas movement. We were in a district that had a higher-than-average number of Haitian reactionaries, but still, the vast majority of the population was pro-Lavalas. By identifying ourselves with the Lavalas leadership and showing active support for them, we gained the cooperation of the majority of the people. So we were able to get on top of problems quickly before they got out of hand.
I could do this because the mission guidance was vague. One of the things it told us to do was conduct “stability operations.” By that criterion, we were wildly successful. But that was not our real job. Our real job was to make sure that no Haitian political movement had the power to challenge the U.S. presence in Haiti.
Elliott: Doesn’t giving vague and contradictory orders to soldiers in the field lower our military’s effectiveness? Don’t soldiers ever misinterpret the orders?
Goff: Of course vague communications have a deleterious impact on a mission, but they are a necessary institutional evil if the military is to avoid responsibility, not because it is the military, but because it is a bureaucracy. All bureaucracies are inherently insular and self-justifying. They function only because those who work in the system are invested in it for their livelihoods.
I believe that the methods that were employed in Abu Ghraib were probably sanctioned from the very top. It’s difficult for me to imagine otherwise. Of course, now that we’ve gotten caught, the people at the bottom are expected to sacrifice themselves to protect the king. |
As for the soldiers “misinterpreting” orders, that hardly ever happens. Part of institutional culture is learning to read between the lines of official rules and policies. A situation like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, for example, categorically could not have happened without the knowledge and tacit approval of nearly every level of command. The so-called investigations now will only measure the effectiveness of the firewalls of plausible denial at each level of command, and serve to bewilder the public.
Elliott: What creates a climate in which such abuse can occur?
Goff: The occupation itself. The obligation of our troops right now is to dominate people. That’s what they do. That’s going to be carried to its limit whenever the opportunity presents itself.
These troops are confronted with tremendous cognitive dissonance, and there are only two ways to resolve it: Either they are going to acknowledge the Iraqis as equal human beings, in which case they are confronted with questions like “Why am I telling them what to do?”; “Why am I pointing my weapon at them?”; and “Why am I evenin their country?” Or the soldiers are going to reduce the Iraqis, both psychologically and physically, to a subhuman level.
I believe that the methods that were employed in Abu Ghraib were probably sanctioned from the very top. It’s difficult for me to imagine otherwise. Of course, now that we’ve gotten caught, the people at the bottom are expected to sacrifice themselves to protect the king. That’s why Rumsfeld, when he went up to testify under oath before the Senate, brought six other people with him. Anytime he was asked a question that would have put him on the spot legally, he handed it over to one of his cohorts. It was a transparent strategy to escape responsibility, but only Senator John McCain tried to call him on it. God bless McCain for that, even though he’s a reactionary.
Violence is systemic because the occupation itself is an act of domination. The abuse scandal has turned into a recruiting tool for the Iraqi resistance, due to their cultural sensitivity to sexual humiliation — though it must be said that anyone would have been “sensitive” to that kind of treatment. These problems have been out there for two years now, however, starting in Afghanistan. There’s a documentary film by Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran called “Afghan Massacre.” It shows U.S. complicity, and direct involvement, in the massacre of thousands of unarmed prisoners in Afghanistan. Yet no one in the media even talks about it.
Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross have been documenting atrocities in Iraq. In April 2004 the U.S. military killed six hundred civilians in an attack on Fallujah. The civilian death toll was reported by the wire services and major newspapers, but nobody batted an eye about it. Those killings strike me as a far more horrendous problem than sexual humiliation of prisoners, but it was the pictures from Abu Ghraib that shocked everyone. CBS even gave the U.S. military two weeks’ warning before releasing the photos, so that the higher-ups could get their story together.
The soldiers who were guards at the prison said they didn’t hit the prisoners, but they did “force them to assume uncomfortable positions.” But what if the prisoner said, “No, I won’t assume the uncomfortable position”? What do you think they did?
Elliott: Used more force.
Goff: The notion of using limited force in a situation like that is ridiculous. It doesn’t pass muster. Nobody asks the next logical question. There are these invisible boundaries that the mainstream media won’t go beyond.
Elliott: What interrogation techniques were you taught?
Goff: I was not an interrogator. The last interrogations I observed were in Vietnam, where our South Vietnamese allies kicked and beat civilian detainees while we looked on with orders not to intervene.
Elliott: Are there any circumstances in which it would be legitimate to use such tactics? To obtain information that could save lives, perhaps?
Goff: Hypothetical questions like that are impossible to answer because they have no context. We never act under just “any circumstances.” All circumstances occur within a complex historical reality.
Within the context of Iraq, I don’t believe there’s any situation that justifies the use of force, because I don’t think we belong there. The context is an imperial invasion and the destruction of a sovereign nation. This is a war of plunder for the purpose of establishing permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East and eventually gaining control of the world’s remaining oil supplies. But the U.S. government can’t say that we’re over there because of the oil, so they refer to the “war on terror” and the “liberation of Iraq.” And the media, which are so incredibly polite and supportive of what our government is doing, repeat this constantly. One has to be deliberately disingenuous to accept it, but we habituate ourselves to that kind of disingenuousness until it becomes natural to say, “Well, yeah, I guess it is true.” For such an “advanced” society, the U.S. has the most indoctrinated citizens in the world.
Elliott: You’ve said that the lines between the police and the military are becoming blurred. Why is this?
Goff: It’s partly because, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. Rural people have been forced off their land and into urban environments like Calcutta and Mexico City, where there are not many economic prospects. Demographically the population has become much younger, and the economic activity has fallen more and more outside the legal system. In many cases crime is the only choice available. There are a rising number of gangs, and a type of neighborhood-based urban warlordism is beginning to take shape.
In response to this, the police and military are both changing their functions. Police officers are carrying assault rifles and wearing body armor and helmets. They are relying more on SWAT tactics for things like drug busts. Meanwhile the conventional armies are trying to perform both military and constabulary functions in urban environments. If things keep moving in this direction, the military and the police will become indistinguishable except in name and jurisdiction. The Third World and the Middle East are the testing grounds for this experiment.
Another practice that erases the old boundaries between law enforcement and military is the employment of private security companies as both constabularies and mercenary forces. The second-biggest armed contingent on the ground in Iraq right now is the mercenaries. The British have eleven thousand troops on the ground; we have twenty thousand “civilian contractors.” The technicality that makes “not mercenaries” is that they are corporate in structure and contracted through the Department of Defense, so we pay them, but they have no congressional oversight. Maybe that’s one reason Rumsfeld likes them. They are not accountable. They also don’t show up on official casualty tallies. Their missions are spelled out in corporate contracts, but how they get the job done is not well monitored. The law governing their actions is the UN charter, and it is beyond vague. I think the Department of Defense wants to use more contractors, but it will only exacerbate the biggest problem that the U.S. military has now: its fundamental inability to acknowledge the political context of this war.
The United States has the most indoctrinated citizens in the world. |
With the rise of globalization, all armed conflicts are going to become more ambiguous in character, neither criminal nor political, but somewhere in between. As the system devolves further, if we don’t have a vital and active Left prepared to seize the reins and effect a state-managed transformation of our society, there is a good chance we’ll fall back into a feudal state, or a form of urban warlordism that would have some modern-day feudal characteristics.
Elliott: In Full Spectrum Disorder you connect the war in Iraq to the war against the working class at home. Do you think domestic class struggle is behind the decision to go to war?
Goff: I don’t think class struggle is ever the determining factor in a decision to go to war, but I think it’s always one factor. Wars are helpful to the U.S. ruling class because they focus attention on external enemies and distract from the systematic war being waged against the workers. The problem in the U.S. is that working-class people don’t admit that they are working class. They call themselves middle-class. They don’t understand that they are being robbed. The last three decades have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in U.S. history from the so-called middle class to the rich.
Elliott: How does wealth get transferred?
Goff: You can look at state government here in North Carolina for an example. Except for education, transportation is the biggest expenditure in the state budget. We have nineteen people on the Board of Transportation, and all of them are appointed by the governor. They take the taxpayers’ money, in the form of the state transportation budget, and roll it into pork-barrel road projects all over the state. Does the money go to public transportation? No. It’s spent on roads because of the asphalt lobby. The Department of Transportation board members all gave money to the governor’s last political campaign. That’s just one example of how the rich take money away from the working class at the state and local level.
The real vulnerability is that working-class people think of themselves as middle-class. Historically, when the middle class is thrown into political crisis, it does not embrace revolutionary politics; it embraces reactionary politics. Twentieth-century crises in Spain, Italy, and Germany led to the rise of fascism in all three of those countries. Fascism is a middle-class phenomenon. A powerful preexisting racism, like we have in our culture, pushes people in that direction.
Elliott: Do you think the U.S. is in danger of becoming a fascist society?
Goff: It’s worrisome. If we do see something like that in this country, I don’t think it will look like Italian fascism, or Spanish fascism, or German fascism. It will be our own special form. The people who are closest to that kind of consciousness right now are right-wing Evangelicals, who make up a huge percentage of the Republican Party base. There is a powerful undercurrent of white supremacy in their worldview. It’s easy to make fun of them, but we need to be wary. Even though these right-wing Christian Zionists can appear ridiculous sometimes, they are politically well organized and very powerful. It’s a big mistake to underestimate them, especially if you are an oppressed minority, or queer, or if you’re female; they are incredibly misogynistic.
Elliott: You’re not a pacifist. How do you relate to pacifists within the antiwar movement?
Goff: I have some philosophical disagreements with them. But I have philosophical disagreements with my spouse, too, and we’re still married. Right now my pacifist friends and I are in absolute solidarity about trying to stop this nation’s latest military adventure.
I think pacifists are fundamentally decent human beings, and it’s hard not to like them for that, even if sometimes I disagree with them. If I disliked everybody I disagreed with, I wouldn’t like anybody at all — even myself. [Laughs.]
I would love to be a pacifist. I don’t want to hurt anyone, and I don’t want anyone to get hurt. My argument with pacifists is that it’s also important to recognize people’s right to defend themselves against extermination. Look at the Jewish people who fought back against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. Should they have just lined up and allowed themselves to be exterminated?
I believe that the Iraqi people have the right to resist with arms the U.S. military occupation, even though for a while my son was one of the people they were firing at. It’s not those young soldiers’ fault that they are over there. Nor is it the fault of the people fighting for self-determination in Iraq. It’s the fault of the people up in Washington, D.C.
Elliott: You want to bring together antiwar activists and people in the military to try to form some sort of united movement. How do you see this happening when these two groups come from such different backgrounds.
Goff: It’s true, people who are part of the antiwar movement tend to have high levels of education, whereas many people who enter the military do so for economic reasons. I went into the military so that I wouldn’t have to work in the airplane factory where my mom and dad worked. I had no desire to drive rivets into airplane fuselage. That sounded to me like death, whereas joining the military sounded like an adventure.
Elliott: So how do you bring those two groups together?
Goff: We’re working on it. More and more disillusioned GIs are becoming a part of the Bring Them Home Now campaign. And, of course, ex-soldiers are actively involved in Veterans for Peace.
I’m not comfortable with how the antiwar movement sometimes uses soldiers and veterans as a way of legitimizing its cause. And I’m also not comfortable with how readily some veterans will adopt that role of token vet. For a while I thought I was going to be a professional antiwar veteran. Everyone wanted me to speak. I understand that veterans have a degree of immunity against the patriot-baiting the Right engages in. But when antiwar activists put veterans in the spotlight as a way of saying, “Peace is patriotic,” it sends a mixed message.
I don’t care about patriotism. I agree with Samuel Johnson that it’s the “last refuge of scoundrels.” It’s twisted to think that somehow we’re all united against the rest of the world simply because we live inside the same geopolitical borders. “We’re all Americans”: what the hell does that mean? I may identify with you because we share a common culture, but am I supposed to value your life more than I do the life of someone outside our culture? That’s the implication of patriotism. I’m glad to accept people’s invitations to talk, but I quickly disabuse them of the notion that I’m there to talk about patriotism.
I also don’t want to be identified as just a soldier, as if the only thing that gives me value is that I once wore a green beret. I’ve got other identities. I’m a writer, too, and I don’t write just about military topics. I’m also a grandfather.
Elliott: I heard you speak recently, and one of the things you said was: “Hope is hidden in contradictions.” What do you mean by that?
Goff: I actually stole that idea from Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. He said, “Within the contradiction lies the hope.” It means that periods of instability create opportunities. Stability creates inertia. It’s when things get shaken up by contradictions that inertia can no longer be sustained. We can use instability as an opportunity to shape the future, and we are entering a period of extreme instability in this country: economic, political, and otherwise. Something’s got to be on the other side of that. If we want a world in which our grandchildren can grow up safely, then we’d better be engaged. Our actions will determine what we leave to the next generation. It’s not a choice; it’s a duty.
Rachel Elliot is photo and editorial assistant at The Sun, where this interview first appeared.
Stan Goff | Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family
Friday, 28 July 2006 20:32by: Anonymous
Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family
By Stan Goff
Truthdig.com
Friday 28 July 2006
Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich has taken Christ into his heart, or so he says. Like my old colleague, Lt. Gen. William G. (“Jerry”) Boykin, he has also carried the organically entrapped messiah onto the heathen-infested battlegrounds of Southwest Asia. Kauzlarich is the subject of my exposition today, but Boykin is his context.
You all remember Jerry Boykin-the general who, as part of the Bush 2003 civil relations effort in Iraq, called Muslims idol worshippers.
Back in the Reagan days, Boykin and I were simultaneously assigned to the allegedly super-secret Delta Force. He was a major then, and he would organize prayer breakfasts for the unit, driving many of us out of the building to purchase sausage-biscuits. His evangelical lunacy was already under siege then. Special Operations is a motley fraternity, in which operators are as likely to worship Odin or an oak tree as they are to attend Sunday services.
Boykin’s recent rise is symptomatic of War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s fascination with Special Operations-in spite of its generally dismal record. Kauzlarich was on the same career fast track when he was the 75th Ranger Regiment’s “cross commander” at Forward Operating Base Salerno, Khoust, Afghanistan, in 2004.
Bishop Boykin, shooting from the lip, asserted in 2003 that the U.S. military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq involved “an Army of God” squaring off against Satan.
Beelzebub himself! Can’t say Jerry lacks ambition. Of course, the Satanists in this case were the very Muslims that the administration was trying to recruit as political puppets in the oil patch.
For this subtle bit of international relations, Boykin was punished by promotion to the position of deputy undersecretary of defense for… intelligence. Yes, the pun is nearly unbearable.
And so Boykin ascended. As the Haitian proverb says: The higher the monkey climbs, the more you see his ass.
Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, on the other hand, is not exactly being placed center-stage at the Pentagon. More than any other single person below the rank of general, he is probably most responsible for the Pentagon’s embarrassment when NFL-player-turned-Army-Ranger Pat Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004, by his own comrades.
Kauzlarich has been energetically avoiding responsibility for the fratricidal incident ever since.
“When you die,” [Tillman’s commanding officer] Kauzlarich said, “I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt.”
It appears from reading the documents in the incident the he and others in the military may have violated multiple laws-including obstruction of justice, evidence tampering and conspiracy.
Kauzlarich may have conspired with others to award an inappropriate Silver Star, complete with a phony account of the events surrounding Tillman’s death. Members of Tillman’s chain of command attended Tillman’s memorial service without breathing a word to the family about what really happened, and it appears, again from the documents, that Kauzlarich deep-sixed the original investigation, which he then had redone under his personal supervision.
The Army’s criminal investigation division and the Pentagon’s Inspector General are currently investigating Tillman’s death and the events that ensued.
Kauzlarich now looks to Nov. 7, 2006, with a gnawing disquiet. Only a thin congressional majority that stand between a nemesis like Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee. Subpoena authority might transform a mere gavel into a mighty political weapon.
But in the meantime, a recent ESPN.com expos by Mike Fish aired an interview with Kauzlarich, who was the “cross commander” of the Rangers in Khoust, Afghanistan, in April 2004. Kauzlarich, in a stunning display of Christian empathy, blamed the family for continuing to ask questions about the circumstances of Pat’s death, and suggested that the reason they’d found no closure was that infidels such as themselves (the Tillmans did not belong to a church), when they die, are only “worm dirt.”
A choice of words worthy of Bishop Boykin, who is surely beaming with pride at this officer’s devout diction.
“His parents continue to ask for it to be looked at,” Kauzlarich told Fish petulantly. “And that is really their prerogative. And if they have the right backing, the right powerful people in our government to continue to let it happen, then that is the case.”
Playing the victim. A broadly effective tactic in the case of international military aggression, domestic battery (she made me do it) and politically motivated cover-ups.
In fact, powerful people in government have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the case by the dogged persistence of Pat’s family. So far the government’s efforts have been to assign aides to do enough to get the family off its back, and submit queries to the military that are answered with the same contradictions and equivocations that provoked the family’s suspicion in the first place.
“But there [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide,” Kauzlarich told ESPN, “and the parents have basically said, ‘OK, it was an unfortunate accident.’ And they let it go. So this is-I don’t know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs.”
Nothing to do with the fact that the Department of Defense lied to them until the impending redeployment of in-the-know Ranger batallion back to the U.S. made the revelation of fratricide inevitable … oh no.
The office of Defense Department public relations official Lawrence Di Rita should have purchased high-quality shredders for all commanders. The documents pertaining to the first three of six investigations contain generous and often gratuitous redactions. They were given to the Tillman family, and through them to CNN, to ESPN-oh yes, and to me. They show that it was the impending redeployment of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, Pat Tillman’s unit, in which the real story of his death was general knowledge, that compelled the Department of Defense to come clean, sort of.
“When you die,” the Reverend Kauzlarich explained to ESPN’s Fish, “I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt.”
A theological term perhaps.
Next page: “Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of ‘atheism.'”
I don’t doubt for a minute that Kauzlarich’s version of spirituality is a kind of quid pro quo-a simple exchange of belief for immortality would strike the hardest of bargainers as a pretty good deal. It even trumps the dissonance of the Warrior Jesus, the Prince of Peace mounted on a Humvee, perhaps manning the .50-cal, in Mazar-i-Sharif or Fallujah.
If you can sustain that contradiction, it is not particularly remarkable to believe you are a Lamb of God at the same time you deploy religious belief as a disingenuous dodge in defense of your career.
“So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more,” continued Kauzlarich, “that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks…. You know what? I don’t think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don’t know. Maybe they want to see somebody’s head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can’t bring their son back.”
So we get to it at last. Kauzlarich imagines himself as John the Baptist, and Mary Tillman as Salome. Poor, poor man. Wretched, wretched woman.
I imagine a fish decal on Kauzlarich’s car, one that has a double significance: Jesus, of course, cloning fish for the starving masses, but also a red herring.
Kauzlarich is in a state of dread-not the existential variety, since he has already cut the deal to survive death. His dread is more immediate and secular.
A Ranger captain was assigned to investigate the death of Pat Tillman-Richard Scott, then commander of Headquarters Company, 2/75 Rangers. Scott carried out his task with integrity, and the Article 15-6 investigation was completed in two weeks. That investigation determined two things: (1) The fellow Rangers who shot Tillman (and an Afghan that the military has never credited with a human being’s name) violated their own rules of engagement and were possibly criminally negligent and (2) that the order that led to splitting the platoon-one vigorously and rightly opposed by the platoon leader on the ground-was responsible for setting up the communications breakdown that resulted in the incident.
It is not legal in the military to dispose of investigations or to compel or allow witnesses to change statements, and then make the original statements disappear, but that is precisely what happened in the case of Pat Tillman. When Kauzlarich took over the investigation from Scott, Kauzlarich’s role in the incident disappeared and criminal charge recommendations were transformed into wrist-slapping nonjudicial punishments.
Even before the first investigation was complete-nay, even before Tillman’s unit returned from the field to conduct an “after-action review” to determine what happened-everyone in Tillman’s chain of command, including Kauzlarich, appears to have conspired to draft a recommendation for a Silver Star award as part of the intentional development of a fictional account to cover up the fratricide.
This was in April-May 2004. And for those who don’t remember, these months were a catastrophic cascade of setbacks, bad news and rank scandal, including the dual rebellion in Iraq and the first public release of the Abu Ghraib photos. The death by fratricide of a famous young man (who was resisting the Department of Defense efforts to turn him into a jingo icon) ran headlong into the DoD public affairs narrative of precision and professionalism (in an elite unit). That was very bad news.
But with every stick, there is a carrot.
If this story could be covered up, for just a while, it had spin capacity. Pat could be turned into a martyr-jingo icon. An account could be constructed that would map directly onto the television-stunned social imagination of the American public. A tale worthy of the arrested development of a nation that believes in the fantasies of masculine adolescence.
And that is precisely what they did, Kauzlarich included. They drafted a Silver Star and a docudrama lie about an intense encounter with a determined enemy in which the obedient patriot sets an example worthy of a recruiting poster. A Tom Clancy joint. The real Pat Tillman was not only of no use, he was a net negative. Real people get in the way.
They never counted on his brother Kevin discovering that there was an initial investigation that vanished. They never counted on a mother and father who were strong enough to demand the truth about what had happened, and determined enough to rescue the real person that was Pat Tillman from the spin machine into which the Pentagon tried to feed his body.
Pat himself, after seeing the Iraq war firsthand and declaring it to be “so fucking illegal,” quipped to his fellow soldiers that the military seemed to be so inept that it couldn’t even construct a credible lie. How prescient was that?
Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of “atheism.”
Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, showed me a page from Pat’s journal when he was 16 years old. It was Pat’s reflection on why he had decided, once and for all, that he didn’t need organized religion. The entry was motivated by Pat’s grief at the death of an old family cat. Pat wasn’t comfortable with the idea that one could love another creature that was being excluded from the bargain in the afterlife. He and his brothers grew up between a river and the mountains, where they roamed countless miles and delighted in the ceaseless interplay of geography, climate, flora and fauna. In his journal entry, Pat speculated about this singular universality, and made up his mind that one didn’t need some anti-material monarchy buzzing with angels to accommodate himself to mortality.
Pat never felt separate enough from the world to despise the worms. And so Kauzlarich’s expression of fear and loathing for the world would have amused Pat.
Pat’s ashes are adrift from where they were scattered along the Pacific Ocean, mixing back into the elements with which he was so at home; while Ralph Kauzlarich and the Pentagon fret about a five-foot-two-inch mother who refuses to make them an offering of her fear. Surely Pat Tillman is laughing.
——–
The author of this essay, Stan Goff, is a retired veteran of the US Army Special Forces. During an active-duty career that spanned 1970 to 1996, he served with the elite Delta Force and Rangers, and in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia and Haiti.
He is a veteran of the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama and also taught military science at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Goff is the author of the books Hideous Dream-A Soldier’s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti, Full Spectrum Disorder-The Military in the New American Centuryand Sex & War.
In this article Goff writes on the events surrounding the fratricidal death of Army Ranger and former NFL player Pat Tillman, and the possible military coverup that ensued.
Goff argues that Tillman’s commanding officer, in a recent ESPN magazine interview, made a series of shockingly callous statements about the Tillman family’s search for the truth because the officer was trying to divert attention from the role he may have played in the alleged coverup.
Goff has written extensively on these matters in the past. His published articles can be found at the online publication From the Wilderness.
His research included a detailed review of more than 2,500 pages of official briefings and documents from three investigations, in addition to extensive interviews with Tillman family members and some of the soldiers in Tillman’s unit.