randomWalks

The first U.S. soldier to go public with his refusal to fight Bush’s war in Iraq was convicted of desertion on May 21. Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia was sentenced to a bad conduct discharge and one year of hard labor.

One of the reasons Mejia cited for not wanting to go back was that he witnessed the same type of abuse documented at Abu Ghraib where he was stationed, at Al Asad.

(W)here he witnessed the abuse and sleep deprivation of detainees in May 2003. The detention center was controlled by three interrogators, who were in civilian clothes and operated with pseudonyms. One of them called himself "Rabbit," and one called himself "Whitey."

They were in charge and telling the troops which detainees "to soften up," which meant 24 to 48 hours of sleep deprivation. They would take unloaded pistols and pull the trigger with the gun on the detainee’s temples. They would pound the walls with sledge hammers, and they would constantly wake them and make them walk around.

The one-year sentence handed down to Mejia is the same as that handed out to the "bad apples" convicted for the Abu Ghraib abuse. So Mejia was given the same punishment for refusing to dish out the same kind of abuse that resulted in one-year sentences for other soldiers.

I think that speaks volumes about how much the U.S. government really cares about the torture and how systemic it really was. They're scapegoating individual soldiers, but it's clear that in some ways they were faced with no choice at all. Either lose your soul and do what you know to be wrong or face punishment for not following orders.

That seems to be the message of the Mejia case.

Anyway, Mejia is not the only soldier to have spoken out. His case is only the most pressing because he is being imprisoned now. There's information here not only about him, but about Stephen Funk, who has been freed, and about Ghanim Khalil, who refused to be deployed when the war began.

Camilo Meija info.
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Citizen Soldier is a resource for soldiers looking for ways out of the military.
Ghanim Khalil
Stephen Funk page
More on Funk

originally posted by zagg