H16855
Headlines : "War on Terror"Winter Soldiers to Testify Against War
Panels and testimony will be grouped into 12 categories, including killing and wounding noncombatants, mishandling of dead, torture and abuse, sexual assault, discrimination in the military, destruction of civilian property, veterans’ benefits issues and GI resistance. Some testimonies will address acts of large-scale violence and human rights violations, while others will zero in on incidents that are often overlooked, such as racism toward Iraqis, sexual harassment of civilians and the military’s waste and destruction of environmental resources.
[Posted By ShiftShapers]Republished from TruthOut.org
Thirty-seven years ago, in the midst of a bitter-cold Michigan winter, 109 Vietnam veterans gathered at a Howard Johnson Motel auditorium in Detroit to tell their stories. For three days, they told of ransacking undefended villages, attacking civilians, mutilating bodies, torturing Viet Cong suspects, burning houses, destroying Vietnamese property and livestock and killing innocent children. At the conference, entitled Winter Soldier, the veterans accepted responsibility and mourned for their actions. But, taken collectively, their words incriminated a much larger culprit: the war itself.
This year, from March 13 to 16, about 300 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will follow in the footsteps of their predecessors, gathering for a second Winter Soldier conference, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) it will make up the largest gathering ever of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
Their mission? To tell the story of the war in the terms of those who have actually lived it.
“This is a moment when veterans won’t let anyone else speak for us,” said Aaron Hughes, an Iraq veteran who initiated the new Winter Soldier effort. “We hear from the pundits, we hear from the politicians, we hear from the generals, but we don’t…
Posted by ShiftShapers
Warning: Anyone who takes this blog seriously will be shot. Anyone who does not take it seriously will be buried alive by a Mitsubishi bulldozer. Welcome to (A)utonomous Resistance, GNN’s exclusive one-stop infoshop for radical resources and information....
RELATED ITEMS
- Vets Break Silence on War Crimes
Posted by ShiftShapers on Friday, February 29th 2008
Haven’t the NYT and CNN, et. al. been covering this kind of thing all along? Haven’t we already heard all of this adequately? I mean, really. If these stories are so important, wouldn’t these men have already reported everything to their hometown dailies?
If not, well, maybe we should listen carefully to them.