GI Resistance

Continuing GI Resistance coverage…

Winter Soldier – Iraq and Afghanistan:
Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations from Iraq Veterans Against the War 

Elaiine Brower Reports from Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier Testimony from IVAW

Winter Soldiers Expose Chilling Lies of the Bush Regime by Malcolm Shore

Testimony from
Winter Soldier March 2008

*Scott Ewing,
who served for three years as a cavalry scout in the U.S.
army, described his unit’s “block-by-block” raid of the entire city of Talafar in September of
2005. Ewing said tactics were particularly brutal in the Sarai neighborhood of
the city, which the U.S.
military had identified as an insurgent stronghold.  “We were told to search aggressively to teach
the residents a lesson not to harbor terrorists,” Ewing
testified.  The result of those orders
was doors kicked in, homes ransacked-and nothing found in the way of
weapons.  The Army then moved northward,
and continued to terrorize innocent Iraqis.

Ewing described one incident in which the military
rounded up every male of military age and detained about 500 Iraqis in a
barbed-wire enclosure as their families watched across the street. A “masked
man,” as Ewing described him, then walked the
line of detained Iraqis and gave either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.  In the end, 50 men were zip tied and taken
away, with the crimes they were accused of written on their hands.  Ewing said
he had no idea what happened next to these 50 men .  “It’s hard for me to believe,” Ewing said, “that the Iraqis who witnessed this could
take seriously our version of justice and democracy.”

Ewing concluded his speech by noting, ironically,
that “The only war our country has really waged well is a propaganda war on its
own people.”

For the next several weeks, World Can’t Wait will be publishing
testimony from the Winter Soldier: Iraq
and Afghanistan hearings that recently took place in Washington, DC.
This testimony is an accurate and disturbing account of what has happened and
continues to happen daily in these countries.

*Chris Arendt’s strikingly youthful appearance was
made all the more chilling when he referred to himself as a former
“concentration camp guard” at Guantanamo.  With disgust, Arendt recalled the
dehumanizing absurdity of practicing to shackle detainees, in preparation for
the “big game” of shackling actual detainees. He said , to applause from the
audience, that he considered imprisoning human beings for five years away from
their friends and families, without ever explaining why, to be torture in and
of itself. “If that wasn’t enough,” Arendt said, “there were other methods to
make sure we got around to torturing people.”  

Arendt
testified that detainees were kept in rooms 10 to 20 degrees in temperature, blasted
with loud music, and shackled to the floor by their hands and feet.  Arendt also described how detainees viewed as
unruly would be pepper sprayed and forcibly removed from their cells. “These
are all on tape,” Arendt noted. “The government makes sure all of these are on
tape.”   As he began to describe a
prisoner who was subjected to such a procedure, he seemed to abruptly stop his
testimony, and it seemed unclear exactly why-if he had simply run out of time,
if he was too emotional to continue, or if another factor was at play.

This testimony may be particularly disturbing to those that are
against this war but think that recruitment centers have free speech rights and
that U.S.
troops should be supported.  World Can’t Wait
does NOT support the recruitment of young men and women into a military that
commits these crimes against humanity.