Newsgroup: it.economia.borsa
Titolo: [OT]  CORTE MARZIALE - MA PER ALTRI MOTIVI

May 21, 2004
'Gooks' to 'Hajis'
By BOB HERBERT
he hapless Jeremy Sivits got the headlines yesterday. A mechanic whose job
was to service gasoline-powered generators, Specialist Sivits was sentenced
to a year in prison and thrown out of the Army for accepting an invitation
to take part in the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib
prison.
But there's another soldier in serious trouble to whom we should be paying
even closer attention. His case doesn't just call into question the
treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces. It calls into question this entire
abominable war.
Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia is a 28-year-old member of the Florida National
Guard who served six harrowing months in Iraq, went home to Miami on a
furlough last October, and then refused to return to his unit when the
furlough ended.
Sergeant Mejia has been charged with desertion. His court-martial at Fort
Stewart, Ga., began Wednesday, the same day that Specialist Sivits pleaded
guilty to the charges against him. If Sergeant Mejia is convicted, he will
face a similar punishment, a year in prison and a bad-conduct discharge.
Sergeant Mejia told me in a long telephone interview this week that he had
qualms about the war from the beginning but he followed his orders and went
to Iraq in April 2003. He led an infantry squad and saw plenty of action.
But the more he thought about the war - including the slaughter of Iraqi
civilians, the mistreatment of prisoners (which he personally witnessed),
the killing of children, the cruel deaths of American G.I.'s (some of whom
are the targets of bounty hunters in search of a reported $2,000 per head),
the ineptitude of inexperienced, glory-hunting military officers who at
times are needlessly putting U.S. troops in even greater danger, and the
growing rage among coalition troops against all Iraqis (known derisively as
"hajis," the way the Vietnamese were known as "gooks") - the more he thought
about these things, the more he felt that this war could not be justified,
and that he could no longer be part of it.
Sergeant Mejia's legal defense is complex (among other things, he is seeking
conscientious objector status), but his essential point is that war is too
terrible to be waged willy-nilly, that there must always be an ethically or
morally sound reason for opening the spigots to such horror. And he believes
that threshold was never met in Iraq.
"Imagine being in the infantry in Ramadi, like we were," he said, "where you
get shot at every day and you get mortared where you live, [and attacked]
with R.P.G.'s [rocket-propelled grenades], and people are dying and getting
wounded and maimed every day. A lot of horrible things become acceptable."
He spoke about a friend of his, a sniper, who he said had shot a child about
10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. "He realized it was a
kid," said Sergeant Mejia. "The kid tried to get up. He shot him again."
The child died.
All you really want to do in such an environment, said Sergeant Mejia, is
"get out of there alive." So soldiers will do things under that kind of
extreme stress that they wouldn't do otherwise.
"You just sort of try to block out the fact that they're human beings and
see them as enemies," he said. "You call them hajis, you know? You do all
the things that make it easier to deal with killing them and mistreating
them."
When there is time later to reflect on what has happened, said Sergeant
Mejia, "you come face to face with your emotions and your feelings and you
try to tell yourself that you did it for a good reason. And if you don't
find it, if you don't believe you did it for a good reason, then, you know,
it becomes pretty tough to accept it - to willingly be a part of the war."
A military court will decide whether Sergeant Mejia, who served honorably
while he was in Iraq, is a deserter or a conscientious objector or something
in between. But the issues he has raised deserve a close reading by the
nation as a whole, which is finally beginning to emerge from the fog of
deliberate misrepresentations created by Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al.
about this war.
The truth is the antidote to that crowd. Whatever the outcome of Sergeant
Mejia's court-martial, he has made a contribution to the truth about Iraq.

scordata la fonte
New York Times di oggi
visto che la settimana borsistica sta finendo .....
:-))
saluti
V.