Conscientious Objection on Trial: The Court Martial of Keith Benderman

This Wednesday, May 11, the court martial of Sgt. Keith Benderman begins. Sgt. Benderman, who has served in the military for eight years including one tour of duty in Iraq, filed for conscientious objector status after seeing the reality of war in Iraq. He has been denied and now faces court martial on two counts, for desertion with the intent to avoid hazardous duty and missing movement by design. He could spend five years incarcerated if found guilty of the first charge and up to two years for the second.

Keith Benderman's opposition to war – all war – is based on his experience in Iraq. As Rep. Cynthia McKinney said on the floor of the House of Representatives on April 28:

Unjustice Sunday

I was brought up in a very Republican family. What is being called GOP these days is not my father's Republican Party.

I suppose people could accuse me of being a little "out there" when I say that there is a well organized move by the extreme rite to overthrow the government of the USA and replace it with a theocracy that is the opposite of anything Christian or American.

The circus we saw last Sunday during [Un]Justice Sunday from a mega-church in Louisville is a graphic illustration of the mechanics of this overthrow. Now, having Dominists pontificating on "activist judges" is nothing new -- anyone paying any attention to these subversives knows that the buzz phrase “activist judges" indicates the attack of the rite on our tradition of checks and balances.

But what really underlined and highlighted the approach of the American Inquisition was the tape of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, Dr. Frist, joining these cultists in the attack on our tradition of discussion and respect for minority opinion, in the name of religion.

Who are these nominees who are so important to this religious agenda?

To add to Wasserman's article...

Here is an anecdote about the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" of 1964. I had a childhood friend named Bob Revenue who enlisted in the marines in 1963 and was a radioman with the 1st Marine Division floating around Tonkin on the night in question. In 1970 he related his side of the story. He was on radio watch the night the shooting happened. His duty was to monitor the radio frequencies between the command networks ane do the things that radiomen do. When he went on watch that night at midnight he said that the network was dead. No radio traffic, no noise, no nothing. In all his time at sea with that fleet (his division was deverted to Da Nang shortly afterword) there had never been a time when the network shut down. The attack took place around three of four in the morning if memory serves me but Bob swore that in the six hours he was on duty from 00:00am to 06:00am there was nothing but static. Of course you can speculate that when the fleet went into "action" the command switched over to krypto secure communication of whatever but there was no abrupt stop of radio traffic because there was NO radio traffic that night. Bob said that none of the

Meanwhile, back in Iraq

AUSTIN, Texas -- Meanwhile, back in Iraq. I was going to leave out of this column everything about how we got into Iraq, or whether it was wise, and or whether the infamous "they" knowingly lied to us. (Although I did plan to point out I would be nobly refraining from poking at that pus-riddled question.)

Since I believe one of our greatest strengths as Americans is shrewd practicality, I thought it was time we moved past the now unhelpful, "How did we get into his mess?" to the more utilitarian, "What the hell do we do now?"

However, I cannot let this astounding Downing Street memo go unmentioned.

On May 1, the Sunday Times of London printed a secret memo that went to the defense secretary, foreign secretary, attorney general and other high officials. It is the minutes of their meeting on Iraq with Tony Blair. The memo was written by Matthew Rycroft, a Downing Street foreign policy aide. It has been confirmed as legitimate and is dated July 23, 2002. I suppose the correct cliche is "smoking gun."

With Voinovich still undecided, key global security groups organize a campus debate on John Bolton

COLUMBUS, OH – The nomination of John Bolton to be Ambassador to the United Nations has sharpened a debate about the U.S. role in the international community. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is deadlocked on the nomination, with Ohio Senator George Voinovich playing a pivotal role. His critical position on Bolton prevented the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from proceeding ahead with the nomination last month.

  To crystallize the debate, 20/20 Vision, a global security educational organization based in Washington, D.C., and Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, have teamed up with several other organizations to coordinate a debate on campus between Lawrence J. Korb, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and an opponent of Bolton’s confirmation, and Prof. Ruth Wedgwood, a current member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee for International Law, and a supporter of the nomination.

New Textbooks

Barnum on Steroids

Yes, Phineas Taylor Barnum would be green with envy. The master of the hoodwink would be in awe of the Religious Right were he alive today. Snake-charming, beguiling, conning, and flimflamming are at the heart of their repertoire, and their leaders leave Barnum looking like a bush leaguer.  If the religious conversion business cycle hits a lull, there will be a glut of highly talented salespeople looking for work. This week, this Evangelical movement is flexing its muscle, and flashing its propagandistic cunning, as it soaks up the spotlight of national media attention in Topeka, Kansas.

Four bloody lies of war, from Havana 1898 to Baghdad 2003

The Bush Administration's lies about its rationales for attacking Iraq fit a pattern of deceit that has dragged America into at least three other unjust and catastrophic wars.

The "smoking gun" documents that emerged in the recent British election confirm the administration had decided to go to war and then sought "intelligence" to sell it.

But conscious, manipulative lies were also at the root of American attacks on Cuba in 1898, US intervention into World War I in 1917 and in Vietnam. These lies are as proven and irrefutable as the unconscionable deception that dragged the US into Iraq in 2003.

In each case, these lies of war have caused horrific human slaughter, the destruction of human rights and liberties, and financial disaster.

Mother’s Day Without Mom

A few months ago, I was admitted to a club I would have preferred not to join.  There is no secret handshake, and no initiation ritual.  Its membership is far bigger than you might imagine.  And once you are admitted, you remain a member for the rest of your life.

I keep bumping into fellow members everywhere I turn.  When I called a midwest cookie company to order a gift recently, the telephone salesperson told me that, "Part of my training is to imagine what I am going to say to my own mother when I present her with a box of cookies, but my mom died when I was 16, over twenty years ago." 

How does she deal with this situation year after year?  “For the first few years, a question like that would have made me cry out loud, but now I just see her in my mind’s eye and try to get through the training.”

Another friend lost her mom a few years ago, and even though she herself has been a mother for 21 years, she still thinks of her mom when the seasonal ads start to play.

The oddest thing about the five months since my mom died is that somehow the world has

Franklin County, Ohio Election Procedures – April and May 2005

It was the last week in April 2005 and I received a call from the Franklin County Board of Elections wanting to know if I would want to help out as an Election Official for the May 3, 2005 Election. After a few moments of thought on the matter, and revisiting my memories of the traumatic and fraudulent November Presidential Election, the memories of months of work I put into assisting the many heroic citizens from Ohio and across the nation that tried to figure out how big, and how far reaching the apparent theft of the Ohio Election was, I thought I should continue my education on elections. I called and got it set up, that I would be trained in the art of working the polls, and that I would become a Judge, for the May 3 primary election. It seems kind of humorous that Kim Spangler, the Deputy Director of the Delaware County Board of Elections (BOE) is who recommended me to the Franklin County BOE. I had brought some protestors to the Delaware Courthouse and Ohio Wesleyan University in the fall regarding Delaware legally blocking the recount of the presidential election. I was also the Delaware County Coordinator for the Green Party and was there for the recount.

Pages

Subscribe to Freepress.org RSS