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WAR RESISTERS SUPPORT CAMPAIGN

For Immediate Release
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
*Federal Court of Appeal rules in favour of Iraq War resister Jeremy Hinzman and family Immigration Minister must act as directed by Parliament and let resisters stay in Canada*

TORONTO-This afternoon the Federal Court of Appeal issued its unanimous judgment that an immigration officer's decision rejecting Jeremy Hinzman's application for permanent residence in Canada was "significantly flawed" and "unreasonable."

The Federal Court of Appeal decided that the Federal Court erred in a June 2, 2009 ruling by dismissing the application by U.S. Iraq war resister Jeremy Hinzman for judicial review of a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA) Officer's humanitarian and compassionate (H&C) grounds decision. The PRRA Officer had rejected the application by Hinzman and his family, from within Canada, for permanent residence.

Jeremy Hinzman was the first U.S. Iraq War resister to seek refuge in Canada. He, along with his wife Nga Nguyen and their son Liam arrived in Canada on January 3, 2004. Their daughter Meghan was born in Toronto on July 21, 2008.

"This decision is important for all Iraq War resisters in Canada," said Michelle Robidoux, spokesperson for the War Resisters Support Campaign."The Federal Court of Appeal has clearly said that immigration officers can no longer ignore the sincerely held beliefs of these soldiers.

Canadians understand and support the decision these soldiers made in rejecting the Iraq War. It's time for the Harper government to stop deporting them and to let them stay in Canada."

The Hinzman-Nguyen family's Federal Court of Appeal hearing took place on May 25, 2010, the same day that a private member's bill in support of Iraq War resisters - Bill C-440 - was debated in Parliament at Second Reading. The vote on Second Reading is expected to take place shortly after the House of Commons resumes sitting in September.

"The House of Commons has twice voted to let Iraq War resisters stay in Canada," said Bill Siksay, MP (Burnaby-Douglas). "Canadians support Parliament's demand that the Conservative minority government stop deporting these veterans. When will Immigration Minister Jason Kenney act as directed by Parliament and use his ministerial authority to give Iraq War resisters permanent resident status?"

Bill C-440, brought forward by Liberal Gerard Kennedy, MP (Parkdale-High Park) on September 17, 2009 and seconded by New Democrat Bill Siksay, will compel the government to respect direction that has already been given twice by Parliament through motions that were adopted on June 3, 2008 and March 30, 2009. The Conservative government has ignored the motions,calling them "non-binding," and refused to grant Permanent Resident status to Iraq War resisters. Since the first motion was adopted, Iraq War resisters Robin Long and Cliff Cornell have been forced back to the U.S. where they were court martialed, convicted of desertion and jailed. Iraq
War veteran and resister Rodney Watson remains in sanctuary in the First United Church in Vancouver where he sought refuge after being ordered deported by the Harper government.

A public opinion poll conducted by Angus Reid Strategies in June 2008 found that 64 per cent of Canadians supported Parliament's vote directing the minority Harper government to immediately stop deporting Iraq War resisters and create a program to facilitate the resisters' requests for permanent resident status.

*For more information:*

Michelle Robidoux, War Resisters Support Campaign,
416-465-9180;

Alyssa Manning, legal counsel for the Hinzman-Nguyen family,
amanning@vanlehrer.com, 416-938-2816;

Office of Bill Siksay, MP, 613-996-5597;

Brett Thalmann, Office of Gerard Kennedy, MP, kenneg0@parl.gc.ca,
613-762-8542;

Ken Marciniec, War Resisters Support Campaign,
communications@resisters.ca, 416-803-6066.

*Excerpts from the Federal Court of Appeal ruling - July 6, 2010*

"The beliefs and motivations of Mr. Hinzman were of important significance to the ultimate decision, given the context of an H&C application. The appellants had also provided some evidence that the right to conscientious objection 'is an emerging part of international human rights law' (Zoljagharkhani v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration), [1993]
3 F.C. 540 (FCA), at paragraph 15). The Officer had given some weight in her PRRA decision to the views of Amnesty International. Still, there is no assessment of these factors in her H&C decision. . "The H&C Officer had the duty to look at all of the appellants' personal circumstances, including Mr. Hinzman's beliefs and motivations, before determining if there were sufficient reasons to make a positive H&C decision (ibidem, Chapter 5, section 11.3). She did not. Had the Applications Judge addressed the appellants' ground of complaint, as stated at paragraph 57 of his Reasons, I am convinced that he would have concluded as I do and found that the H&C decision was significantly flawed and therefore unreasonable."

--

In celebration of the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, on September 14, the MAPJ monthly film series will show Katja von Garnier's Iron Jawed Angels.

This 2004 film is a sexy, exuberant tour de force that tells the amazing story of fierce young suffragettes fighting for a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. Headlining the stellar cast are Hilary Swank as brainy, charismatic Alice Paul, and Frances O'Connor as smart, cheeky Alice Burns - real-life women who mobilized a defiant vanguard that gave Congress a run for its money.

In 1912, Paul and Burns take the reins of the National American Women's Suffrage Association's (NAWSA) committee in Washington, D.C., where they organize a landmark parade on President Wilson's inauguration day. The march is violently disrupted by men on the sidelines. Many more ordeals follow, including opposition from the more conservative NAWSA old guard (led by a deliciously persnickety Anjelica Huston), and grisly sentences as political prisoners.

Firing up an effusive contemporary pop score, a sweeping, restless camera, and a vibrant palette to match the suffragettes' radiant dynamism, von Garnier goes into high gear to tell a classic American tale of struggle for justice. The film brims with issues still relevant today, as the plucky warriors grapple with racism within the movement, friction between work and relationships, and the implications of protesting a wartime president. A formidable testament to the sacrifices and the blood shed for women's enfranchisement, Iron Jawed Angels may just embarrass people into actually going to the polls.

Iron Jawed Angels will be shown on Tuesday, 14 September, at 6:30 pm in the Manhattan Public Library Auditorium.

The Monthly Film Series presents:
The End of Poverty?

Tuesday, August 10th -- 6:30 pm
Manhattan Public Library Auditorium

More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. In total, 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day.

More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day...300 million are children.

Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5. -UN Millennium Project Fast Facts

SYNOPSIS:
Global poverty did not just happen. It began with military conquest, slavery and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals and forced labor. Today, the problem persists because of unfair debt, trade and tax policies -- in other words, wealthy countries taking advantage of poor, developing countries.

Renowned actor and activist, Martin Sheen, narrates The End of Poverty?, a feature-length documentary directed by award-winning director, Philippe Diaz, which explains how today‟s financial crisis is a direct consequence of these unchallenged policies that have lasted centuries. Consider that 20% of the planet's population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate. At this rate, to maintain our lifestyle means more and more people will sink below the poverty line.

Filmed in the slums of Africa and the barrios of Latin America, The End of Poverty? features expert insights from: Nobel prize winners in Economics, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; acclaimed authors Susan George, Eric Toussaint, John Perkins, Chalmers Johnson; university professors William Easterly and Michael Watts; government ministers such as Bolivia‟s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and the leaders of social movements in Brazil, Venezuela, Kenya and Tanzania. It is produced by Cinema Libre Studio in collaboration with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.

Can we really end poverty within our current economic system? Think again.

The film has been selected to over 25 international film festivals and will be released in US theatres starting November 13, 2009. Directed by Philippe Diaz, produced by Cinema Libre Studio with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 104mins, 2008, USA, documentary in English, Spanish, and French with English Subtitles.

For more information visit: http://www.theendofpoverty.com

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:

― A sort of 'An Inconvenient Truth‘ for global economics…a powerful description of how Western policies since colonialism have subjugated Third World countries.
- Charles Masters, The Hollywood Reporter

― It's an eye-opening work, a persuasive and compelling argument you don't usually hear about on what is terribly wrong with our global financial system and the poverty it produces around the world.
- Dimitirs Angelidis, Epsilon Magazine (Greece)

― Powerful and moving; it will make you shake your head with disbelief and if you are like me, it may even enrage you.
– Tim Rhys, Publisher, MovieMaker magazine

― This film tackles the issue of global poverty with clear-eyed honesty and optimism.
- Yes Magazine Spring 2009 Film pick

>
> Same Docs, Different Stories
>
> The three outlets gifted by WikiLeaks take three
> different approaches
>
> By Joel Meares
> > Columbia Journalism Review
> > July 26, 2010
>
> http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/same_docs_different_stories.php?page=al...
>
> On Sunday, three news outlets published the results of
> their investigations into 91,731 classified U.S.
> military documents that they had received from
> secret-sharing Web site WikiLeaks. The New York Times,
> The Guardian , and Der Spiegel each led today with
> their findings on their front pages and online with
> multi-dimensional, interactive reports on "one of the
> biggest leaks in US military history." The documents,
> spanning 2004 to 2009 and pertaining to the war in
> Afghanistan, were concurrently published on the
> WikiLeaks site.
>
> Mostly, the papers highlight the same discoveries: high
> incidents of weapons failure among U.S. drones; the
> actions of task force 373, the secret commando unit
> tasked with capturing or killing top insurgent leaders;
> the Taliban's possession and use of heat-seeking
> missiles; the hitherto suspected and assumed, but
> difficult to demonstrate, involvement of Pakistan's
> Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in, and instigation
> of, Taliban operations against the coalition; and
> revelations of a higher numbers of civilian casualties
> than previously acknowledged.
>
> But in shaping their syntheses of these various
> findings, each paper manages to characterize the
> discoveries in different ways, mostly to emphasize
> their relevance to local concerns about the war. The
> two European papers, both historically against the war,
> find in the reports cause for great pessimism. The
> Guardian is particularly brutal in its editorial on the
> documents:
>
> "These war logs - written in the heat of engagement -
> show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and
> immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up
> and sanitised "public" war, as glimpsed through
> official communiques as well as the necessarily limited
> snapshots of embedded reporting.
>
> ... However you cut it, this is not an Afghanistan that
> either the US or Britain is about to hand over
> gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national
> government in Kabul. Quite the contrary. After nine
> years of warfare, the chaos threatens to overwhelm. A
> war fought ostensibly for the hearts and minds of
> Afghans cannot be won like this."
>
> Der Spiegel finds the coalition vulnerable and its
> efforts in the region on course for failure. After a
> summary of the paper's treatment of the documents,
> reporters Matthias Gebauer, John Goetz, Hans Hoyng,
> Susanne Koelbl, Marcel Rosenbach, and Gregor Peter
> Schmitz write under the subhead, "A Gloomy Picture":
>
> But such shows of optimism seem cynical in light of the
> descriptions of the situation in Afghanistan provided
> in the classified documents. Nearly nine years after
> the start of the war, they paint a gloomy picture. They
> portray Afghan security forces as the hapless victims
> of Taliban attacks. They also offer a conflicting
> impression of the deployment of drones, noting that
> America's miracle weapons are also entirely vulnerable.
>
> And they show that the war in northern Afghanistan,
> where German troops are stationed, is becoming
> increasingly perilous. The number of warnings about
> possible Taliban attacks in the region -- fuelled by
> support from Pakistan -- has increased dramatically in
> the past year.
>
> Intriguingly, The Times chooses a similar lede in its
> main report, "View is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal
> of War in Afghanistan":
>
> A six-year archive of classified military documents
> made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished,
> ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is
> in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
>
> The secret documents, released on the Internet by an
> organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an
> American-led force often starved for resources and
> attention as it struggled against an insurgency that
> grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each
> year.
>
> However, its reading of the reports differs from its
> European counterparts, focusing less on military
> failures and more on inconsistencies between official
> accounts of the war from the White House and the
> revelations of the WikiLeaks reports. The front page
> story from which that excerpt was lifted documents many
> of these discrepancies, including incident reports,
> claiming the Taliban used heat-seeking missiles, that
> contradict official statements from the White House.
>
> The Times's reporting is perhaps the most distinguished
> of the three in that it is the least critical of the
> U.S.'s prosecution of the war, emphasizing instead
> revelations over which Americans are likely to feel
> betrayed. The big WikiLeaks piece the paper runs
> alongside its summary homes in on revelations that
> Pakistani's intelligence agency ISI has been working
> closely and secretly with the Taliban. Mark Mazzetti,
> Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt, and Andrew W. Lehren's
> article, "Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan,
> Reports Assert," opens:
>
> Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long
> harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy
> service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden
> hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a
> year from Washington for its help combating the
> militants, according to a trove of secret military
> field reports made public Sunday.
>
> The documents, made available by an organization called
> WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of
> the United States, allows representatives of its spy
> service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret
> strategy sessions to organize networks of militant
> groups that fight against American soldiers in
> Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan
> leaders.
>
> The reporters focus heavily on the involvement of
> former ISI leader Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul in insurgency
> efforts, including suicide bombings, and highlight the
> U.S. government's frustration with its supposed
> regional ally.
>
> American officials have rarely uncovered definitive
> evidence of direct ISI involvement in a major attack.
> But in July 2008, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, Stephen
> R. Kappes, confronted Pakistani officials with evidence
> that the ISI helped plan the deadly suicide bombing of
> India's Embassy in Kabul.
>
> From the current trove, one report shows that Polish
> intelligence warned of a complex attack against the
> Indian Embassy a week before that bombing, though the
> attackers and their methods differed. The ISI was not
> named in the report warning of the attack.
>
> German news magazine Der Spiegel also gives heavy
> weight to the ISI and the former general, using the
> revelation less to reveal a betrayal than as part of
> cumulative evidence of the inadequate nature of the
> war's execution. Under the subheading "System Failures,
> Computer Glitches and Human Error," in a section that
> includes details on the failures and problems of
> drones, its reporters write:
>
> The documents clearly show that the Pakistani
> intelligence agency is the most important accomplice
> the Taliban has outside of Afghanistan. The war against
> the Afghan security forces, the Americans and their
> ISAF allies is still being conducted from Pakistan.
>
> The country is an important safe haven for enemy forces
> -- and serves as a base for issuing their deployment.
> New recruits to the Taliban stream across the
> Pakistan-Afghan border, including feared foreign
> fighters -- among them Arabs, Chechnyans, Uzbekis,
> Uighurs and even European Islamists.
>
>
> According to the war logs, the ISI envoys are present
> when insurgent commanders hold war councils -- and even
> give specific orders to carry out murders. These
> include orders to try to assassinate Afghan President
> Hamid Karzai. For example, a threat report dated August
> 21, 2008 warned: "Colonel Mohammad Yusuf from the ISI
> had directed Taliban official Maulawi Izzatullah to see
> that Karzai was assassinated."
>
> Highlighting the inadequacies of the coalition's war in
> Afghanistan, the magazine takes a decidedly local
> angle, writing that "Germany's armed forces, the
> Bundeswehr... stumbled into the conflict with great
> naivety." Der Spiegel's reporters lift from "threat
> reports" in the WikiLeaks documents that show the
> Bundeswehr were in greater danger in northern
> Afghanistan than the German government had indicated,
> or the soldiers had anticipated, in the region they had
> once joked was like a spa town.
>
> In a "threat report" dated May 31, 2007, German troops
> based in Kunduz reported on the general situation
> following another suicide attack. "Contrary to all
> expectations of the Regional Command North, the attacks
> of the insurgents in Kunduz are going on as foreseen by
> the Provincial Reconstruction Team Kunduz and mentioned
> before several times," the German document states,
> adding that more attacks, particularly against ISAF
> troops, "are strongly expected."
>
> The soldiers appear to have been correct to have felt
> they were under a state of siege. The documents that
> have been obtained are comprised primarily of so-called
> "threat reports," thousands of danger scenarios and
> concrete warnings about planned attacks. These reports
> provide a clearer picture of the deterioration of the
> security situation in northern Afghanistan than the
> information provided by the German government or the
> federal parliament, the Bundestag, which must provide a
> legal mandate for the Bundeswehr's deployments abroad.
> Police checkpoints are constantly attacked or come
> under fire, patrols are targeted in deadly ambushes and
> roadside bombs explode.
>
> The left-wing magazine concludes its story with an
> ominous diagnosis for the future of the mountainous
> northern combat zone in which the German army is
> fighting.
>
> One thing, however, is certain. These thousands of
> documents indicate that, after almost nine years of
> war, a victory in Hindu Kush looks farther away than
> ever.
>
> Across the Channel, The Guardian offers the kind of
> excellent interactive, video-packed online package
> we've come to expect from the newspaper industry's Web
> leader. Covering the basic revelations of the
> documents, its reporting is steered by an outrage at
> the number of unreported civilian casualties unveiled
> by the WikiLeaks logs (you can see the number and
> location of these casualties--along with casualties
> among Afghan and coalition troops--in an interactive map
> from The Guardian here.)
>
> In the Web site's anchor story on the leaked documents,
> "Afghanistan war logs: massive leak of secret files
> exposes truth of occupation," writers Nick Davies and
> David Leigh paint a picture of a botched war in which
> coalition troops, either through confusion or
> self-protection, have killed and maimed civilians. The
> incendiary lede touches on the key revelations of the
> reports:
>
> A huge cache of secret US military files today provides
> a devastating portrait of the failing war in
> Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed
> hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban
> attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear
> neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the
> insurgency.
>
> Then, the bulk of this central report is given to
> detailing previously unknown incidents in which Afghan
> civilians were killed. Again, the local focus means
> highlighted sections of the report focus on British and
> European troops.
>
> At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed
> and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an
> underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted
> from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the
> ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by
> military intelligence analysts.
>
> Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the
> logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full
> of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol
> similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15
> of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a
> village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant
> woman, in an apparent revenge attack.
>
> Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also
> figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of
> four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely
> a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the
> death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting,
> they wrote: "Investigation controlled by the British.
> We are not able to get [sic] complete story."
>
> The hot language--"bloody errors at civilians'
> expense"--and assumptions that there is an
> underestimate, are typical of The Guardian's approach
> to the WikiLeaks documents, a trove of records it
> describes as "an unvarnished and often compelling
> account of the reality of modern war."

State Dept. planning to field a small army in Iraq

Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: July 21, 2010 06:09:15 PM

WASHINGTON — Can diplomats field their own army? The State Department is laying plans to do precisely that in Iraq, in an unprecedented experiment that U.S. officials and some nervous lawmakers say could be risky.

In little more than a year, State Department contractors in Iraq could be driving armored vehicles, flying aircraft, operating surveillance systems, even retrieving casualties if there are violent incidents and disposing of unexploded ordnance.

Under the terms of a 2008 status of forces agreement, all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, but they'll leave behind a sizable American civilian presence, including the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world, and five consulate-like "Enduring Presence Posts" in the Iraqi hinterlands.

Iraq remains a battle zone, and the American diplomats and other civilian government employees will need security. The U.S. military will be gone. Iraq's army and police, despite billions of dollars and years of American training, aren't yet capable of doing the job.

The State Department, better known for negotiating treaties and delivering diplomatic notes, will have to fend for itself in what remains an active danger zone.

Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, flew to Washington this week for a conference with the State Department on how to transition Iraq from soldiers to diplomats.

He and Ambassador Christopher Hill "have built a joint plan to do this transition," Odierno said. "So we are now going to go through this (plan) and brief them on it and tell what they have to do to support this transition."
Odierno said that one of the chief responsibilities of the remaining U.S. troops in Iraq is to help facilitate that transfer.

The arrangement is "one more step in the blurring of the lines between military activities and State Department or diplomatic activities," said Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington research center. "This is no longer (just) the foreign service officer standing in the canape line, and the military out in the field."

"The State Department is trying to become increasingly expeditionary," he said.

With public attention riveted on the war in Afghanistan, the coming transition of the U.S. mission in Iraq has gotten relatively little notice by the news media. American troops are pulling out of the country at an accelerating rate to meet President Barack Obama's interim ceiling of 50,000 noncombat troops remaining in Iraq by the end of next month.
The stakes, however, could be enormous. The Obama administration has promised Iraqis that the United States won't abandon their country when American troops leave. If it can't keep that promise, U.S. influence in the unstable region could dissipate, despite a seven-year war that's cost more than $700 billion and the lives of at least 4,400 U.S. troops.

Already, however, the State Department's requests to the Pentagon for Black Hawk helicopters; 50 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles; fuel trucks; high-tech surveillance systems; and other military gear has encountered flak on Capitol Hill.

Contractors are to operate most of the equipment, and past controversies that involved Pentagon and State Department contractors, including the company formerly known as Blackwater, have left some lawmakers leery.

"The fact that we're transitioning from one poorly managed contracting effort to another part of the federal government that has not excelled at this function either is not particularly comforting," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
"It's one thing" for contractors to be "peeling potatoes" and driving trucks, McCaskill told McClatchy. "It's another thing for them to be deploying MRAPs and Black Hawk helicopters."
"I know there's a lot of bad choices here," the senator said, adding that she'd choose using the U.S. military to protect diplomats in Iraq. "That's a resource issue."

A report July 12 by the bipartisan legislative Commission on Wartime Contracting said that the number of State Department security contractors would more than double, from 2,700 to between 6,000 and 7,000, under current plans.

"Particularly troubling," the report said, "is the fact that the State Department has not persuaded congressional appropriators of the need for significant new resources to perform its mission in Iraq."

"We have to make the case to them. We hope that people recognize the importance of follow-through here," a senior administration official said, alluding to the long-term U.S. commitment to Iraq. Walking away from that "would be a terrible mistake," the official said. He spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk for the record.

State Department and White House officials, while acknowledging the peculiarity of having a large civilian U.S. government presence in a war zone without American troops on the ground, said that the transition — already under way, in some cases _would go smoothly.

Planning began in spring 2009, and the transition is being shepherded by teams in Washington and Baghdad that confer in weekly video teleconferences.
"This is a major endeavor, and it is without precedent, I believe," said Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, the department's top management official, who's seen 37 years of management challenges.

"We've defined what we have to do. And now we have to define where we're going to do it and how we're going to do it," he said in an interview.

The State Department also will have to provide for its own basics, such as food, water and laundry, perhaps through existing Pentagon logistics contract known by the acronym LOGCAP.

Kennedy and other officials noted that the department has experience operating aircraft in war zones, through a long-standing, Florida-based aviation wing that's conducted counter-narcotics missions in Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In the interview, Kennedy defended the decision to use contractors to operate military assets. The State Department doesn't have enough Diplomatic Security agents to do the job, and it makes little sense to undertake a mammoth hiring effort for a temporary need, he said.

"This is the kind of surge activity that it seems very, very logical to use contractors for," he said.

Critics say it would be more logical for the military to leave several thousand troops behind to protect government officials and property.

However, that would require renegotiating the U.S.-Iraqi status of forces agreement, a sensitive step. There's "no thought of that right now," the senior administration official said.

US Military Surge in Costa Rica May Fan Regional Tensions
With the "War on Drugs" as Pretext, 46 Warships and 7,000 Troops > Reported to Be Heading to Central American Country and Coast
By Jamie Way

Special to The Narco News Bulletin

In a controversial decision that is likely to fan the flames of regional tensions in Latin America, Costa Rica recently granted the US permission to move 7,000 troops and 46 warships (along with their accompanying planes and helicopters) into Costa Rican waters. Officially, the act is considered to be part of the "Drug War," > which appears to be increasingly more war-like in nature due to such actions and mounting violence in Mexico and Colombia. Costa Rica's neighbors, however, see the massive military presence as a potential base for regional strikes.

Due to the long history of US intervention in Latin America (perhaps most notably in neighboring Nicaragua), the region is clearly justified in its concern over the disproportionate and virtual invasion of troops into an area that could potentially provide such a logistical and geographic striking point. Internally, many Costa Ricans are questioning the military presence and its impact on the nation's sovereignty. One party, the United Social Christian Party, has even brought forth a claim questioning the constitutionality of such an act. The Citizen Action Party, the United Social Christian Party and its former presidential candidate, Luis Fishman, have been amongst the most vocal opponents of the US military presence. Fishman has compared the permission granted to handing the US a carte blanche, and has denounced the act as having negative repercussions for the nation's sovereignty.

The US has responded by disregarding opposition. According to a Tico Times article, US Ambassador Anne Andrew responded by saying, "We are not sure why there is this uproar," and furthermore stated that the request was the same as the one that had been submitted each year for the last decade under a bilateral agreement. Past agreements, opposition argues, however, appear to have only granted US vessels permission to enter the area in pursuit of suspects and do not seem to have mentioned troop or warship presence. Furthermore, the opposition argues that the massive military presence of 7,000 troops and 46 warships is a disproportionate and inappropriate measure for fighting narcotics trafficking and money laundering.

Regardless of how this act varies from past US actions, it is clear that within the present context, the military surge is more disconcerting. This action comes amidst increasing disappointment with the Obama administration and its failure to create mutual respect between the US and Latin America as many had hoped. In fact, to the contrary, through the shuffling and increase of military presence in the region, not only has the relationship with the US remained strained, but additionally regional tensions have flared. Due to the newly won access to seven bases in Colombia (said to replace the loss of a base in Ecuador), regional relations have been further strained. Tensions remain high between Colombia and many of the countries in the region led my left leaning leaders, who see the US military presence in the region as a direct threat to their democratic rule. In fact, the Colombian-US agreement even drew heavy criticism from President Lula of Brazil, who is widely known to be one of the regions most reasonable actors.

From its Southern border to South America, the US has increased its military presence. Most recently, the Obama administration sent 4,000 troops to the US-Mexico border, further militarizing this already violent area. This regional increase in military presence is also accompanied by an increase in military and police aid. According to a report by the Center for International Policy, the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, and the Washington Office on Latin America, during most of the 2000s, military and police aid accounted for less than 40 percent of all aid that the US sent to Latin America. However this year, before aid to Haiti is added to the equation, military and police aid will total approximately 47 percent of all US aid to the region. Perhaps most telling, after 58 years of inactivity, in 2008 the US government reactivated the 4th Fleet, the navy fleet in charge of the waters in the Southern Command.

Amidst a growing climate of US militarism and the militarization of its relations with Latin America, the region is justified in its apprehension over impending threats to its sovereignty. While the media speculates about war against Iran, US solidarity activists are concerned about the near to total media blackout of news about the escalation of US militarism in our own hemisphere. Whether all of this is a mere shifting of the pawns or an increase, this massive military presence in the region (paired with the US's regional track record) necessitates careful vigilance if we are to address US military expansionism.

No Dominion: The Lonely, Dangerous Fight Against Christian Supremacists Inside the Armed Forces
Sunday 11 July 2010

by: Matthew Harwood, t r u t h o u t | Report

In his fight against British imperialism, Mahatma Gandhi described the life cycle of successful civil disobedience: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Mikey Weinstein, the 55-year-old founder of the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), likes to quote it, knowing full well he's crossed the line into a bloody-knuckle brawl. Over the past year, Weinstein and his organization have recorded a tremendous string of victories in the fight against Christian supremacists inside the armed forces.

In January, the MRFF broke the story on the Pentagon's Jesus Rifles, where rifle scopes used in Afghanistan and Iraq were embossed with New Testament verses. In April, he got the military to rescind its invitation to the Reverend Franklin Graham to speak at May's National Prayer Day because of Islamophobic remarks. Most shockingly, MRFF received its second nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in late October. These high-profile victories have earned him the enmity of the hardcore Christian Right and the mentally unstable. And the crazies are getting crazier. Weinstein and his family are bombarded with hate mail, from the grammatically incorrect and easy to dismiss - "I hope all your kids turn out gay as hell, take it in the ass, and get aids and die!!!!" - to the kind of threats that immediately make you leap out of your chair and double-check that the doors and windows are locked. (MRFF has referred multiple death threats on Mikey, his family, and MRFF employees to the FBI.)

Unlike Gandhi, Mikey's no pacifist. Aggression rises up in his voice like a white shark's fin breaks the waves. In a recent conversation, Mikey bragged how a punk wouldn't shut up in a movie. When a confrontation ensued and the man took a wild swing, Mikey put him down. None of this is surprising. Weinstein boxed during his Air Force days, his face marked by a strong jawline sitting below a bald head on top of a stocky body - a cross between Rocky Marciano and Butter Bean. Simply put: Mikey Weinstein can be a brute and a zealot. He knows this and admits it freely. But he believes it's the only position a reasonable person can take when confronted with a faction dedicated to mutating the U.S. military into "a weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ."

But for all of his rhetorical excesses and bravado, Weinstein's fight is simple and correct. The United States military cannot favor one religious sect over another, staying true to the Constitution's establishment clause that service members pledge to defend. More pragmatically, the military cannot favor one religious sect over another because it's destructive of good order and discipline, creating divisions between service members when they must rely on the guy next to them to survive in a firefight. Yet inside the U.S. military a small, determined, and fanatical clique wants to abuse its power and prosetlyze to service members below them in the chain of command. Through this captive market, they can inject their peculiar ideology into the most powerful institution on earth. As Weinstein likes to say, this isn't just a civil rights issue, it's a national security threat of the gravest magnitude. The description sounds hyberbolic, but according to Weinstein there's a pervasive Christian supremacist milieu inside the U.S. military that's a danger not only to constitutional order, but to the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What's ironic about Mikey's fight is that he never thought about becoming "a civil rights activist." He discovered his calling by rising up like a grizzly bear for his son.

The Academy

The Weinstein family is an Air Force family. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1953, Mikey's father switched to the Air Force to pursue new opportunities in a new service. Mikey followed in his footsteps, as did his two sons, Casey and Curtis. Casey, the oldest, even met his wife Amanda at the Air Force Academy while they were cadets there. Mikey's daughter Amber dates an Academy graduate - 2nd Lt. Mack Delgado, a Christian with a cross tattooed on his chest, a detail Mikey points out every time his name's brought up. It's a family whose life orbits around the Academy, although that gravitational pull has slipped.

As recounted in his 2006 book, With God on Our Side, Weinstein's confrontation with Christian supremacism began during his youngest son Curtis's freshman year at the Academy in Colorado Springs. Sitting at the base of Pike's Peak, Colorado Springs has been called the Christian Mecca. More than any city in America, evangelical Christianity saturates its streets. For instance, James Dobson's Focus on the Family sits just across the interstate from the Air Force Academy's airfield. Before he was outed for allegedly doing meth and banging a male prostitute, the Rev. Ted Haggard ran the 14,000-strong New Life Church in Colorado Springs. That extreme conservative religiosity has long permeated the Academy. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't like or respect diversity of any kind, as two generations of Weinstein's would discover.
Entering the Cadet Area at the Academy as a "doolie" in 2003, Curtis was asked from both naive and intolerant Christian cadets why the Jews killed their savior. During an intramural game, an upperclassmen asked him, "How it felt to kill Jesus." The religious discrimination got so unrelenting that Curtis complained to his father in June 2004. "The next person that calls me a fucking Jew or accuses me of killing Jesus, I'm going beat the fucking shit out of them," Mikey recounted to CNN in 2005. His older son, who graduated in 2004, confirmed the evangelical sea all Academy cadets swam in during their tenure there. "Dad, this is just the way it is," Casey said. "Senior cadets would sit down and say, 'How do you feel about the fact that your family is going to burn in hell?'"

Bad memories flooded back from Mikey's own time at the Academy, which he never told anyone about except for his wife, Bonnie. During his freshman year at the Academy, Mikey first faced anti-Semitic notes taped to his door that quickly escalated into two violent ambushes. The first time Mikey says he was attacked from behind inside an Academy academic building and thrown down the stairs, waking up in a pool of his own blood. The second time came while he was in the john. His attacker kicked in the stall and tore him up. "I was a victim, and having to admit that, even now, fucking pisses me off and makes me feel ashamed," he told the co-author of With God on Our Side, David Seay. Mikey was reduced to an Auschwitz Jew rather than the Warsaw Ghetto Jew he idolizes.

"I remember as an 18-year-old the overwhelming sense of helplessness of being abused, of utter degradation and humiliation," Mikey says. And the anti-Semitism then directed at Curtis gave him another chance to redeem himself and be that Warsaw Ghetto Jew. And he did. A former Judge Advocate General (JAG), a Reagan White House lawyer during the Iran-Contra scandal, and a former general counsel to billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, Mikey couldn't be dismissed as a Che Guevara T-shirt- wearing armchair revolutionary. And as a lawyer, he made it hard to ignore him.

In October 2005, he sued the Air Force Academy, seeking a ban on religious proselytizing or evangelizing by superior officers after finding evidence of systematic evangelical coercion festering inside the Academy's walls. While the lawsuit was later dismissed in October 2006, the precedent was set. The initial lawsuit that Mikey leveled at the Air Force Academy morphed into MRFF as the winter of 2005 slid into 2006. Mikey left his lucrative job as an executive of business development at Perot Systems to continue agitating religious reform inside the military.

"Who will guard the guards," he asks. "We will, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation will." In the process, he has systematically exposed himself and his family to terroristic threats, virulent anti-Semitism, and financial ruin.

Neo-Crusaders

Quickly, Mikey realized that the infection wasn't isolated; the virulence was military-wide. He likens it to nuclear contamination. "If you had a geiger counter, there wouldn't be a place you couldn't find it," he says.

For decades, he discovered, evangelical para-church organizations had cropped up with the sole purpose of evangelizing service members. One group, Campus Crusade for Christ's Military Ministry, described the service members that come under its sway as "government-paid missionaries for Christ." At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, Military Ministry snapped pictures of soldiers posing with their rifles and their Bibles, an image eerily similar to jihadist propaganda videos. The same soldiers participated in Bible studies where one outline asked "Can a Christian Soldier Kill?" "NO to murder, YES to killing," the outline declared, because the soldier was god's "angel of wrath," punishing evil.

Other examples MRFF uncovered were no less disturbing. Inside the Military Police building at Fort Riley, a printout slapped on an office door carried conservative columnist Ann Coulter's sunken face and this quote: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." A more subtle evangelical hubris also appeared inside the Pentagon. In 2007, MRFF's discovery of nine Pentagon officials appearing in a promotional video for Campus Crusade's Christian Embassy caused the Department of Defense's inspector general to rebuke seven military officers. For one officer, United States Air Force Maj. Gen Peter J. Sutton, that appearance proved embarrassing when he was assigned to Turkey as chief of defense cooperation. According to Sutton's own testimony to the inspector general, his Turkish driver approached him with an article from the Turkish newspaper Sabah, which carried a picture of his appearance in the video and described him as a member of "a radical fundamentalist sect."

But the Christian supremacist rot inside the military wasn't confined to home or overseas posts. It had spread to the worst possible battlefields: Afghanistan and Iraq. Tipped off by service members, MRFF has discovered chaplains handing out Bibles in Arabic, Dari, and Pashtun in theatre. In another instance, a lieutenant colonel and 15 to 20 armed troops cordoned off a city block in Iraq and told a missionary he knew from home that he would protect him and his missionaries while they evangelized Iraqis. These are all serious violations of military regulations. United States Central Command's General Order 1A, issued in December 2000, couldn't have been clearer for service members fighting overseas: "Proseltyzing of any religion, faith or practice" was prohibited.

According to MRFF's senior researcher, Chris Rodda, the organization has adopted a crude categorization scheme for incoming complaints such as these: "holy crap," "holy shit," "holy fuck," and "holy fucking shit." One "holy fucking shit" tip MRFF received described an incident in Samarra in 2004, when a National Guard unit painted an Arabic phrase on their armored pickup truck. It read: Jesus Killed Mohammad. Examples like these continue to accumulate with untold damage to U.S. military operations, Mikey says, despite the emphasis on winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan and Iraq, the focus of Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency manual. In these environments, fanatical Christian soldiers become self-tripped IEDs. When news broke out in May 2008 that a soldier shot up a Koran at a Baghdad shooting range, a violent riot broke out among 1,000 Afghanis in which three people died.

Mikey talks about Christian supremacists like they're vampires, demons determined to drain secularism and pluralism out of the military. That realization turned what was once a personal fight against anti-Semitism into a more lofty principle. "Wherever I see unconstitutional religious predators in the U.S. military, of any stripe, I don't care if I live or die. Someone's gonna get a beating and we're going to do it," he says. "The two ways to administer the beating is to go into the media or into court," he explains, a strategy distilled from his fight at the Academy.

Lance Benzel, a journalist for Colorado Spring's The Gazette, recently summarized Mikey's civil rights agitation aptly: "Condemn in the strongest language possible. Publicly embarrass. Sue if necessary. Each new step raises the pressure on his publicity-averse targets." What the U.S. military has realized over the years is that the mosquito they swatted at didn't only have bite, it had malaria.
Some Christians, out of ignorance or sincere apocalyptic belief, believe Mikey is the anti-Christ. (He's actually a reluctant agnostic.) Google "Mikey Weinstein" and you'll see descriptions like "Jesus-basher," "AntiChrist," and "anti-Christian Jewish supremacist." One "Concerned American" on the website "Powered by Christ" argued Weinstein's "doing all he can to create an anti-Jewish backlash and help bring about the predicted endtime Holocaust of Jews that'll be worse than Hitler's."

There's one problem with this assumption. Ninety-six percent of MRFF's 18,300 military clients are Christians - many Roman Catholics and mainline Protestant - that have been treated by their more spirit-filled comrades and commanders as not Christian enough. "This is not a Christian-Jewish issue," Mikey argues, "it's a constitutional right and wrong issue, and Christian fundamentalism does not recognize the supremacy of the Constitution over its sectarian theocratic dictates."
Elizabeth Sholes, the public policy director of the California Council of Churches/IMPACT, which represents 1.5 million progressive Protestant members, denied Weinstein and MRFF are anti-Christian. She says he simply fights for religious freedom.

Sholes is a good person to describe Mikey's enemies, as she sits on the left side of the great schism in American Protestantism. While Sholes supports an evangelical's right to witness to whomever they please, she, like Mikey, believes they cannot do so when they are representatives of the government. "Our Constitution was established to give everyone the right to conscience, the right to free expression of religion" she says, "but not to commandeer the institutions of government to make that happen." Yet Sholes says aggressive evangelicals within the military get it upside down, believing the government violates their religious freedom when government regulations forbid its public servants to proseltyze the saving grace of their savior.

Sholes, a believer in the Protestant social gospel tradition, argues Mikey's enemies represent the very worst of Christianity - the apocalyptic rapturites confident of their own salvation and most everyone else's belly flop into the lake of fire. These types of Christians go by many names, she says: fundamentalists, dominionists, the Christian Right, Christian nationalists. I asked Sholes if Christian supremacists is an accurate description. She says yes. But Shole's assessment goes even further, comparing Christian supremacists to Nazis. Asked if they represent Christian fascism, she doesn't hesitate: "Yes."

"We hate a small subset of Christianity that goes by this term, dominionist fundamentalist Christianity," Mikey says.
Hate on the Homefront

Case in point: On May 25, the 5th floor of the Dallas County Courthouse was cleared so Mikey's lawyer, Randy Mathis, could take the deposition of Rev. Jim Ammerman while six deputy sheriffs stood guard, rotating in and out of the jury room. In his 30 years of practicing law, Mathis never saw this type of security for a deposition unless the person being deposed was already a prisoner of the state. Spokeswoman Kim Leach for the Dallas County Sheriff's Department confirmed extra security was provided, but could not provide details except to say the judge had requested it because of a "security issue." One possible reason for the extra security is that Ammerman is batshit crazy, a man who holds so many wild and dangerous beliefs he can be seen as the grandfather of the craziest fringes of the Tea Party movement. To be clear, Ammerman, who will turn 85 in late July, is not the threat. It's those who listen to his conspiratorial screeds, according to Mikey and Bonnie.

A former Navy pilot, Green Beret, and Army chaplain who rose to the rank of full colonel, Ammerman is an early purveyor of the One World Government ideology that believes foreign troops are knowingly stationed in U.S. national parks, and that former President Bill Clinton and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are members of the Illuminati - a secret society determined to install a one-world government. As he stated in his deposition, he also believes there are 125 FEMA-built concentration camps inside the United States with more in construction right now.

What's striking about all this is that Ammerman's organization is currently one of the U.S. military's largest ecclesiastical endorsing agencies for chaplains. As President and Director of the Chaplaincy of the Full Gospel Churches, he currently endorses 270 Pentecostal chaplains across all branches of the military. Ammerman's tinfoil-hat beliefs, however, have brought scrutiny before - from the Pentagon, itself. In September 1997, Lt. Gen. Normand G. Lezy of the USAF ordered an investigation of Ammerman and his endorsing organization for using military chaplains "as agents to collect and convey military intelligence information for Mr. Ammerman's political purposes." The two other reasons Lezy gave for opening an investigation were no less inflammatory: Rev. Ammerman's encouragement of groups with "supremacist viewpoints" and his repeated suggestions that a military coup of the United States was imminent.

Mikey and his wife Bonnie are currently suing Rev. Ammerman because of the actions of Gordon Kingenschmitt, a former Navy chaplain and self-styled "traveling evangelist" he endorses. Klingenschmitt became a hero of the Christian Right in 2006 when he was court-martialed by the Navy for insubordination after he attended a Religious Right protest outside the White House in uniform. When the evangelical Episcopal Church pulled his chaplain endorsement after his reprimand, Ammerman's Chaplaincy of the Full Gospel Churches picked him up.

An avowed enemy of MRFF, which applauded the Navy's decision, Klingenschmitt began channeling the Old Testament's King David in his fight against godless secularism. Last year, Klingenschmitt issued multiple imprecatory prayers, basically a curse, calling for Weinstein and his family's destruction. During his first curse, Klingenschmitt quoted the Bible's most violent imprecatory prayer:

Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who issued press releases this week attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround us and tell lies about us. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus' name. Amen."
In a revealing exchange during the deposition, Klingenschmitt told Mathis that he and Mikey were both anti-Christians for suing him. Then, without prompting, Klingenschmitt added, "And it's a little bit anti-Semitic because King David was Jewish, and King David prayed that Psalm to God as a member of the Jewish faith."

His absurd Biblical exegesis aside, Randy Mathis says Klingenschmitt's prayers are coded directives to other Christian supremacists to harm Mikey, Bonnie, and their children, done on behalf of Ammerman. "They're trolling for assassins," he says. If a conspiracy exists and that was indeed its intent, there's evidence it worked. Kingenschmitt's curses have ratcheted up the hate directed at Mikey and MRFF to extreme levels. "Since these fatwahs were issued, the threats and hate mail have increased exponentially," the lawsuit filed last September states. "Plaintiffs justifiably live in fear of imminent violence against their person and their family."

Things have deteriorated more rapidly since the New Year. In January, MRFF discovered that the Pentagon had a $660 million multi-year contract with Michigan-based Trijicon, which supplies rifle scopes to the U.S. military that had New Testament citations inscribed on them. One scope read "2COR4:6," a reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 which states: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

The Pentagon, along with countries like Canada, Great Britain, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia, have all since either raised concerns about the scopes or demanded Trijicon wipe the scopes of their New Testament citations purchased by their respective militaries. Then the news broke that MRFF successfully had Rev. Franklin Graham's speaking invitation at the Pentagon's National Day of Prayer event revoked. The son of legendary presidential sycophant Rev. Billy Graham, the younger cleric didn't have his father's discretion in public and had assailed Islam repeatedly, once calling it "A very evil and wicked religion" after 9-11.

"We moved to another level," Bonnie says of getting Graham booted from the event.

Then on April 15 at 11:18 p.m., an e-mail popped into Mikey's box. It's subject read: "Bad Leo Frank," and displayed a picture of a young bookish man, hair parted to the side, with glasses framing a skinny face. A minute later, another e-mail appeared in Mikey's MRFF account. It read: "Good Leo Frank" and showed the lynched corpse of the same man dangling like strange fruit from a tree. Considered a textbook case of Southern prejudice and cruelty, Leo Frank was a Jewish pencil factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia who was murdered by vigilantes for the murder of a 13-year-old girl many believe he didn't commit.

A little more than 12 hours later, the final e-mail dropped into Mikey's inbox. The subject read "Re: Good Leo Frank." The e-mailer knew a version of Leo Frank's murder too. "He was guilty as sin, just like you," it read. "Tried, convicted, sentenced, appealed, denied. When jew money bought him a Clinton style pardon, white justice stepped in. Are you ready?"

Since Mikey's very public fight began half a decade ago, the family has had to take increasingly extreme security precautions, as people left dead animals on their lawn, shot projectiles into their home, and drew crucifixes and swastikas on the side of their house. The family has two attack-trained German Shepherds, referred to as "the girls," that patrol their property with a third one on the way. The house is equipped with floodlights, surveillance cameras, and when things get really bad, Curtis tells me, a team of security professionals camp out and watches over the property. But that e-mail, among other threats, made him embrace the Bill of Rights even more: he and Bonnie got concealed firearms permits.

Bonnie, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, now carries a gun in her purse. She and Mikey now regularly go shooting to keep their skills sharp. "I have to have my gun as my friend," Bonnie said. "It reminds me on a daily basis, if not hourly basis, that there are really crazy people out there and at any moment they can shoot." To remain comfortable with the weapon, Bonnie aims the unloaded gun at the TV and pulls the trigger.

The hatred takes a toll on her. "When I talk about this my chest tightens up; I get full of stress," she says. She is very, very afraid, she tells me.

Extended Family

Zachari Klawonn is an unfortunate young soldier. Not only is he a Moroccan-born U.S. Army Specialist and a Muslim-American, the twenty-year-old is stationed at Fort Hood, where Maj. Malik Nadal Hassan went jihadi postal on his comrades, butchering 12 soldiers and a civilian in November.

"I am just an American soldier who happens to be Muslim," he says. Not everyone at Fort Hood sees it that way, and his faith has not endeared him to some soldiers. In February, someone on base wanted him to know it - badly, at 2:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. That night, someone repeatedly kicked the door to his barracks room, making him leap from bed. When he opened the door, he found an empty hallway and a note, folded twice and wedged into the doorframe. It read: "FUCK YOU RAGHEAD BURN IN HELL." It was an incident reminiscent to what happened to Mikey during his Academy days. The nighttime visit, shoveled on top of a pervasive base culture that associated Islam with terrorism and repeatedly used the ethnic slur haji, made Klawonn decide to stand up for himself. It also didn't hurt that Klawonn's own comrades would hurl the most offensive slur imaginable after the Fort Hood Massacre; they called him "Zachari Hasan."

"Enough was enough," Klawonn says, and he filed a complaint with his unit's equal opportunity officer to force the Army "to take a good hard look at that moral compass and start using it."

But that arrow didn't move. Instead, Klawonn was forced off-base because Fort Hood could not assure his security. Too compound his problems, Fort Hood also did not pay out his housing stipend, and Klawonn had to survive on loans and pawning belongings. "I was running out of hope quite frankly," he said. "I lost hope in the system." With nowhere to turn, Klawonn did research online and found Mikey and MRFF. Within 24 hours, MRFF reached out to Klawonn's chain of command. "I felt the urgency in the matter just completely take a 180," he said. He was told immediately that his living expenses would be reimbursed. In another act of kindness, MRFF extended him a loan to carry him until Fort Hood reimbursed him. Within the next pay cycle, Klawonn was collecting his Army paycheck again. "It's clear and it's evident, MRFF definitely has some big push," Klawonn.

"He's the Jackie Robinson of the U.S. military," Weinstein says.

Klawonn's story isn't an aberration. MRFF receives multitudes of thank you's from veterans and service members serving across the globe. One thank you came from a U.S. Navy veteran, a self described "religious Jew," who described extreme religious coercion during hospital stays at the Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Center in 2007. "During two hospitalizations, despite my written and verbal instructions to the contrary, the hospital staff was not content to just refuse to contact my rabbi," wrote Akiva David Miller, now the director veterans affairs for MRFF, "they sent a proselytizing Protestant chaplain in to see me - while I was bedridden and wired to a heart monitor - to tell me that Jesus was the Messiah of the Jews too, and that my only hope was salvation through Jesus Christ." Miller and his rabbi protested and the medical center retaliated by discontinuing Miller's care. When they cut of his pain medication, Miller asked his doctor why. He response: "You're a religious Jew.

Why don't you try prayer or meditation?" Miller contacted MRFF. Mikey flew out to Des Moines and held a press conference that launched a full investigation that confirmed Miller's discrimination. And with the help of his old boss Ross Perot, Mikey got Miller care at the Dallas V.A. Medical Center.

While Mikey considers his approximately 18,300 clients new members of his family, his fight has naturally eviscerated other family relationships. Bonnie Weinstein tells of many friends and family who have left their sides when Mikey began trying to reconstruct the wall between church and state in the military, but she didn't provide details.

She didn't have to. On June 25, Colorado Spring's Gazette printed letters to the editor on Benzel's piece on Mikey. The comments took an even more absurd turn than usual, considering the type of e-mails and comments Weinstein and MRFF generate. Paul Baranek, the father of Mikey's daughter-in-law Amanda, wrote a letter to the editor calling Mikey an anti-Christian bigot and chastised the paper for giving him more press. "This man's motives are anything but noble, and the more publicity you give him, the more you encourage his crusade against Christianity," Baranek wrote. Mikey responded in typical Mikey fashion: "I want to fucking strangle him," he told me. But a more constructive and devastating response came from Baranek's own daughter, Mikey's daughter-in-law Amanda, published in the Gazette:

I was raised with the idea instilled in me that only a person with unstable and unsound beliefs tries to silence those with beliefs different from his or her own. Ironically, it is Paul R. Baranek who instilled this belief in me, the same man now wishing to silence Mikey Weinstein. Technically speaking, Paul Baranek is my father, but it is more accurate to describe Mikey Weinstein as my father. It is not by blood but by heart and choice that makes Mikey my father. He is the one who believes in me. He is the one who protects me. He is the one who defends me. He is the one who stands and speaks for me when no one will listen. He is the one who knows me. And he, Mikey Weinstein, is the one that I call father, that I call Dad.

But she wasn't finished, echoing a sentiment seen in countless e-mails to MRFF: "But Mikey is much more than just MY father. Every military member seeking help from MRFF, whether they are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, or Christian (and most of them, like me, are Christian) is treated the same way he treats his own children," she wrote. "Mikey is the only person willing to protect our military members and stand up for them when no one else will listen, ensuring they have the same constitutional right of religious freedom guaranteed by our country's forefathers, the same rights that he himself fought to protect during his service in the Air Force."

The letter, with all its awkward airing of family hatreds, proved one thing: Mikey Weinstein can be an incredible asshole sometimes, but to those that know him, he's an indefatigable protector of the weak when they have nowhere else to turn.

"The care with which he handles each and every person who has decided to appeal to him for help...is what matters to us," says Sholes. "His personal style is just not the issue."
"My family is my life," he declares repeatedly to me over multiple conversations.

No Dominion

The fight has changed Mikey. He has a darker view of American history now, acknowledging the genocidal underbelly of the American Christian conception of "manifest destiny." He also feels like he's beset by enemies from every conceivable angle - fearful an imbalanced Christian fanatic could step out of the darkness and end it all, as well as resentful he can't rely on even liberal Democrats for support. In May, the Pacific Pasilades Club awarded Mikey its Anne Froehlich Political Courage Award but then quickly yanked it back, the club's president justifying it by saying they weren't aware Mikey defended the Reagan administration during Iran-Contra. (The Air Force assigned him the task.) In disgust, former Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by the Bush administration during the run-up to the Iraqi War, gave back the same award they won years before. The club flip-flopped again and returned the award with apologies. Mikey will receive it in Los Angeles this fall.

Sholes compares the last five years of Mikey's life to the famous Vietnam battle of Khe Sanh: "He's been under fire relentlessly and he's just exhausted emotionally." Bonnie says their struggle, and she believes it's their struggle, has taken a lot from them, especially their wealth. "Our security is completely gone," she said. At times there's an air of fatigue in her voice, that the stress of all this has ground her and her husband down. Yet she says service members would have no one to turn to if MRFF closed shop.

And the e-mails seeking counsel and help just keep coming. In May, 43 members of the U.S. Army - 29 of which were Catholic and mainline Protestant - reached out to Mikey complaining about the emblem at of Evans Army Community Hospital at Fort Carson. The emblem shows a cross with a stake at the end accompanied by the Latin phrase "Pro Deo et humanitate," meaning "For God and humanity." The official Army Heraldry Manual says the symbol dates back to the Crusades when Christian pilgrims would stake a cross in the ground to mark their camp, and he wants it retired. Mikey says it shouldn't be ignored that the Fort Carson cross looks eerily like the cross emblazoned on the Web site of the Hutaree militia, the apocalyptic militia the FBI raided in March. He compares the casual Christian supremacy at Fort Carson to the casual racism of the "Sambo's" restaurant chain that died out after the Civil Rights movement took hold in America. And just a few weeks ago, Mikey received complaints about a new commander at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia. During the change of command ceremony, the new head of the 94th Airlift Wing, USAF Col. Timothy E. Tarchick, declared, "My personal priorities are first, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, second, my family, and third, everything else." Imagine Tarchick said this, argues Mikey: "My personal priorities are first, Allah and Savior Mohammed, second, my family, and third, everything else."

According to Mikey, these recent incidents mean the fight will continue on. Sometimes he says he feels like he's "screaming into the abyss each morning." In essence, he's a civil rights Sisyphus. He shoulders the boulder up the hill, only to watch it come crashing down again.
"I worry about him," Amber says, knowing full well her father won't stop "unless someone shot him dead."

Looking back on the 20th century, one of the morbid realizations of any civil rights activist is that their wick doesn't last long. There's no reason to think the 21st century will be any different. That doesn't deter Weinstein. Neither does poverty. He says he'll sell everything to continue his fight. He is a man on fire, but he's hoping his wick will burn out naturally.

Mikey Weinstein is a member of Truthout's board of advisers.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Matthew Harwood is a journalist in Washington, DC, and a frequent contributor to the Guardian's Comment is Free. His writing has appeared in The Washington Monthly, Progress Magazine (U.K.) as well as online at Columbia Journalism Review, CommonDreams, and Alternet. He is currently working on a book about evangelical Christian rhetoric and aggressive US foreign policy.

CRIPDES is a non-governmental organization in El Salvador, which works very closely with USESSC. All of the Salvadoran sister cities working within ESESSC are part of CRIPDES.

History of Cripdes

In 1984, with the Salvadoran Civil War raging, refugees in a camp in the capital city, frustrated with their situation, decided that they wanted to organize themselves in defense of their rights. To do so, they needed an organization of their own and they formed the CHARISTIAN COMMITTEE FOR THE DISPALCED OF EL SALVADOR (CRIPDES).

At its inception, CRIPDES had two main goals: 1) to have the displaced population recognized as civilians whose human rights the Salvadoran government must respect and 2) to organize people to return back to their places of origin in the countryside.

CRIPDES held its founding assembly in 1984 and began organizing displaced persons in the refugee camps in and out of El Salvador. With hundreds of thousands of displaced people affected by the conflict, the organization’s call for rights and return of the displaced struck at the very heart of the US and Salvadoran government’s counter-insurgency strategy of removing all civilians from areas controlled by the FMLN (the revolutionary movement.) As a result, during the war years CRIPDES leaders suffered jailing, torture, slander and the offices were ransacked on more than one occasion at the hands of Salvadoran military and police. Communities affiliated with CRIPDES were continually under attack. To counter this repression, CRIPDES called on the international community for support in defense of the rights of the displaced. The accompaniment and sistering movements grew in El Salvador and in the international community.

In 1986, CRIPDES organized the first repopulation of displaced persons from a refugee camp in the city of San Salvador to the town of San Jose Las Flores in the highly conflictive area of Northern Chalatenango. Soon after, another repopulation was organized to San Antonio El Brillo in equally combative Cuscatlan, the province where El Papturro would soon be located. In 1987, CRIPDES organized the first repatriation of refugees who had settled in Honduras, resettling in villages such as El Papaturro, MAPJ sister city. Often the villages of origin for the refugees no longer existed. New communities were created.

Like CRIPDES itself, these villages suffered frequent repressive attacks at the hands of the government forces. Yet, unlike in the early 80’s these attacks were quickly denounced in the international community because of the effective organization of CRIPDES and the communities, and thanks to their well-established links to accompanier in-country and sister relationships outside El Salvador.

To help minimize some of the repression and to organize the communities regionally, CRIPDES formed regional organizations. PROGRESSO was formed in CUSCATLAN. So El Papaturro is a member of PROGRESSO, which is part of CRIPDES.

The CRIPDES communities played a big part in the overall “popular movement” in El Salvador, whose community organizing and mobilization represented the Salvadoran people’s call for peace and social justice and democratization. The popular movement’s efforts and the FMLN’s revolutionary struggle culminated in the 1992 UN-negotiated Peace accords that resulted in huge transformations in the democratizing and demilitarizing Salvadoran society.

The war was over. CRIPDES’ heroic original objectives of protecting the rights of the displaced and of allowing people to return to their places of origin had been met through incredible struggle, sacrifice, impressive community organization and vital international accompaniment. But the CRIPDES communities continued to struggle with the government.

Through a participative process, the communities decided that they needed to remain organized. The Peace Accords had brought peace, but no development nor social justice, and the communities of CRIPDES needed a national organization to represent their interests in the post-war period. The organization’s new mission was to organize the rural communities into a movement that represented their interests in the struggle for development and social justice. With its new mission, came a change in name. They became THE ASSOCIATION OF RURAL COMMUNITIES FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF EL SALVADOR. (CRIPDES).

CRIPDES currently has roughly 200 rural communities associated with it, representing approximately 80,000 people in the six regions. The organization provides the communities with a national voice on relevant issues (i.e. CRIPDES mobilized participation in the marches organized for the agrarian debt issue), provides training for community leaders on everything from accounting to leadership skills, to how to legalize their community, (this is very important for untrained groups who are organizing a new community), it intervenes as a mediator when communities are having internal disputes and it provides affiliated communities in the different regions with a forum around which to strategize and advocate for their common development and rights. Finally, CRIPDES is developing a special organizing effort towards young people, to help prepare community leadership for years to come.

Our sisters in El Salvador had the vision and courage to unite and organize through CRIPDES as the key step in their historic resettlement. They have also had the vision to transform CRIPDES into their voice in their equally challenging present struggle in the post-war El Salvador, where the poor are marginalized not by bullets, but by economic and social policy. United and organized through CRIPDES, our sisters have a chance to overcome the odds again and establish the opportunity for development in their communities and serve as a model of social organization for rural El Salvador as a whole.

The USESSC works in partnership with CRIPDES, with adjoining office space in San Salvador. The El Salvadoran communities with sister cities have used their regional organizations to help them make the best use of their sister city relationships. Regional activities are often planned, so that all the communities will benefit.

MAPJ is sistered with El Papaturro, Suchitoto, Cuscatlan, El Salvador and is a member of US-El Salvador Sister City, (USESSC) www.us-elsalvador-sisters.org , and belongs to the Kansas Network of El Salvador Sister Cities. A Lawrence, Kansas organization also has a sistering relationship with El Papaturro and we work together on many projects.

Since this relationship began in 1995, MAPJ has supported various projects initiated by El Papaturro, including constructing a community building and a classroom, and supporting teachers in their effort to continue their education and become certified.

We have supported the citizens of El Papaturro in participating in elections, both national and regional, by helping finance transportation to the polling site, which is quite a distance from their village. We also support organizing efforts of CRIPDES and PROGRESSO. See history of CRIPDES and PROGRESSO on this website.

The USESSC sistered cities in El Salvador have their own organization which helps coordinate the many relationships. After several years of concentrating on material projects and local projects, this central organization is now asking for more help with their own regional organizing. More recent sistering projects have involved regional youth leadership training, women's organizing and regional organizing for national human rights issues. MAPJ supports their scholarship program to assist youth in attending college. MAPJ works with PROGRESSO and the USESSC staff on coordinating our efforts.

Over the years we have sponsored various delegates to El Papaturro, both independently and through the KSU Community Service Program. These have proven to be very beneficial to MAPJ, to the delegate and have been a good experience for El Papaturro. Past delegates have continued to work with El Salvador issues for many years following their visits to El Papaturro. In some cases, membership in a delegation has resulted in publication of articles and research projects.

MAPJ is looking for interested future delegates to serve internships either in El Papaturro or in that region. There is an organizational structure from USESSC in El Salvador, which serves as the base of interns. Fluent Spanish is required.

There are also opportunities to be a member of a short term delegation visiting El Papaturro and other regions of El Salvador. Contact MAPJ is you are interested in more information.

MAPJ supports El Papaturro through advocacy work. El Papaturro and the USESSC staff often request letters or phone calls to advocate for various issues that the people of El Salvador are working on. These issues typically concern human rights problems or responses to natural disasters.

Personal communication between MAPJ members and the Directiva of El Papaturro are another part of our relationship. The people of El Papaturro would like to increase the personal communication between our cultures. MAPJ needs volunteers to be part of this advocacy and letter writing. Spanish is not required as we have a volunteer to do the translating.

Over the years the USESSC issues have changed. Presently the major issues are

• Anti-mining
• Privatization of Water
• Right to organize and protest

See separate articles on these issues.

Updated June 1, 2010

WAR RESISTERS SUPPORT CAMPAIGN

For Immediate Release
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
*Federal Court of Appeal rules in favour of Iraq War resister Jeremy Hinzman and family Immigration Minister must act as directed by Parliament and let resisters stay in Canada*

TORONTO—This afternoon the Federal Court of Appeal issued its unanimous judgment that an immigration officer’s decision rejecting Jeremy Hinzman’s application for permanent residence in Canada was “significantly flawed” and “unreasonable.”

The Federal Court of Appeal decided that the Federal Court erred in a June 2, 2009 ruling by dismissing the application by U.S. Iraq war resister Jeremy Hinzman for judicial review of a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA)Officer’s humanitarian and compassionate (H&C) grounds decision. The PRRA
Officer had rejected the application by Hinzman and his family, from within Canada, for permanent residence.

Jeremy Hinzman was the first U.S. Iraq War resister to seek refuge in Canada. He, along with his wife Nga Nguyen and their son Liam arrived in Canada on January 3, 2004. Their daughter Meghan was born in Toronto on July 21, 2008.

“This decision is important for all Iraq War resisters in Canada,” said Michelle Robidoux, spokesperson for the War Resisters Support Campaign. “The Federal Court of Appeal has clearly said that immigration officers can no longer ignore the sincerely held beliefs of these soldiers.

Canadians understand and support the decision these soldiers made in rejecting the Iraq War. It’s time for the Harper government to stop deporting them and to let them stay in Canada.”

The Hinzman-Nguyen family’s Federal Court of Appeal hearing took place on May 25, 2010, the same day that a private member’s bill in support of Iraq War resisters – Bill C-440 – was debated in Parliament at Second Reading. The vote on Second Reading is expected to take place shortly after the
House of Commons resumes sitting in September.

“The House of Commons has twice voted to let Iraq War resisters stay in Canada,” said Bill Siksay, MP (Burnaby—Douglas). “Canadians support Parliament’s demand that the Conservative minority government stop deporting these veterans. When will Immigration Minister Jason Kenney act
as directed by Parliament and use his ministerial authority to give Iraq War resisters permanent resident status?”

Bill C-440, brought forward by Liberal Gerard Kennedy, MP (Parkdale—High Park) on September 17, 2009 and seconded by New Democrat Bill Siksay, will compel the government to respect direction that has already been given twice by Parliament through motions that were adopted on June 3, 2008 and March 30, 2009. The Conservative government has ignored the motions, calling them “non-binding,” and refused to grant Permanent Resident status to Iraq War resisters. Since the first motion was adopted, Iraq War resisters Robin Long and Cliff Cornell have been forced back to the U.S. where they were court martialed, convicted of desertion and jailed. Iraq
War veteran and resister Rodney Watson remains in sanctuary in the First United Church in Vancouver where he sought refuge after being ordered deported by the Harper government.

A public opinion poll conducted by Angus Reid Strategies in June 2008 found that 64 per cent of Canadians supported Parliament’s vote directing the minority Harper government to immediately stop deporting Iraq War resisters and create a program to facilitate the resisters' requests for permanent resident status.

*For more information:*

Michelle Robidoux, War Resisters Support Campaign,
416-465-9180;

Alyssa Manning, legal counsel for the Hinzman-Nguyen family,
amanning@vanlehrer.com, 416-938-2816;

Office of Bill Siksay, MP, 613-996-5597;

Brett Thalmann, Office of Gerard Kennedy, MP, kenneg0@parl.gc.ca,
613-762-8542;

Ken Marciniec, War Resisters Support Campaign,
communications@resisters.ca, 416-803-6066.

*Excerpts from the Federal Court of Appeal ruling – July 6, 2010*

“The beliefs and motivations of Mr. Hinzman were of important significance to the ultimate decision, given the context of an H&C application. The appellants had also provided some evidence that the right to conscientious objection ‘is an emerging part of international human rights law’
(Zoljagharkhani v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration), [1993] 3 F.C. 540 (FCA), at paragraph 15). The Officer had given some weight in her PRRA decision to the views of Amnesty International. Still, there is no assessment of these factors in her H&C decision. … “The H&C Officer had
the duty to look at all of the appellants’ personal circumstances, including Mr. Hinzman’s beliefs and motivations, before determining if there were sufficient reasons to make a positive H&C decision (ibidem,
Chapter 5, section 11.3). She did not. Had the Applications Judge addressed the appellants’ ground of complaint, as stated at paragraph 57 of his Reasons, I am convinced that he would have concluded as I do and found that the H&C decision was significantly flawed and therefore unreasonable.”