By Jo Wilding
June 17th

“If a school takes even a single dollar of Federal funding they’re obliged to hand over all of their confidential information to the State, for the military recruiters. By the time the kids leave high school they’ve had 50 to 60 phone calls at home from the recruiters, visits, cold calls from them at home, a mailbox full of glossy brochures, as well as careers advice from them.”

It’s part of a programme called ‘No Child Left Behind’. Or No Child Left Alive, if anyone was ever honest about these things. Susanne said recruiters have even been known to take kids on ski-ing trips to seduce them into the army. Veterans for Peace had a table at the talk, full of leaflets about recruitment issues. The recruiters frequently promise work-related training and money for college to kids without many opportunities in those departments.

The veterans say the training you receive in the military rarely translates into useful qualifications for civilian jobs. On average in 31 months of active duty a service person receives 1.78 moths � less than 8 weeks � of job training. 12% of male and 6% of female veterans make any use of the skills they gained in the military in their subsequent civilian jobs and more than 50,000 unemployed veterans are waiting for re-training. On average, veterans earn 85 cents per hour or $1700 a year less than non-veterans of comparable socio-economic status.

They say the money for college often depends on a series of conditions and the real funding is rarely forthcoming. Less than a third of recruits ever get any money for college and colleges can reduce their financial aid to students by the amount of the army scholarship so there’s no net gain at all. Even among those who pay a non-refundable deposit into the Montgomery G.I. Bill scheme, two thirds get no money at all, not even the amount that was deducted from their pay, and the programme made a profit of $720 million in its first 10 years, to 1995.

They say once you find out that the options you wanted aren’t going to be available to you after all, it’s too late to get out except with a dishonourable discharge which wipes out any pensions and healthcare you might have been entitled to and makes it hard to get anywhere in civilian life afterwards.

They say that pensions, benefits and healthcare are being dismantled leaving lots of them destitute. Around a third of homeless people in the US are military veterans. Two thirds of army families are living on food stamps or other public aid. It’s common for the Veterans’ Administration to refuse health claims arising out of military service, relating to depleted uranium, to Agent Orange and to radiation sickness for example.

Dick Cheney, more truthful than the military recruiters, which is a fairly damning indictment of the latter, declared that the military is “to fight and win wars… It’s not a jobs program.” Quite.

July 12, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 11 - A few feet from a gray waterfall of stinking untreated sewage, Firas Shihab Ahmed, a chemical engineer at the Iraqi Ministry of the Environment, reached over the side of his boat on Sunday and plunged an amber glass bottle into the Tigris River.

He filled the bottle, holding it with a latex-gloved hand, and marked it as his 14th sample of the day, taken at a place known as the Wahda discharge point - the source of the sewage cascading into the river.

As humdrum and low-tech as that action is by American standards, Mr. Ahmed had just performed an act of great courage. Three months ago, for making exactly the same measurement in the Tigris, he and several other colleagues from the ministry were shot at, rounded up, hooded and handcuffed by the Iraqi police working with American troops who apparently decided that he had been acting suspiciously.

A letter from Tom Cahill to OFAC, July 7, 2004

David H. Harmon
Chief, Enforcement Division
Office of Foreign Assets Control
US Department of the Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Annex)
Washington, DC 20220

July 7, 2004

Dear Mr. Harmon,

This is to inform you I was a peace volunteer in Iraq last year from February 19 to March 30, 2003. I traveled there without a license from your office.

This is not a confession; it is a denouncement of you, your office and the entire United States Government for the following:

(1) The war on Iraq from 1991 to present.

(2) Sanctions against Iraq responsible for the deaths of many tens of thousands of Iraqi children of low income families due to lack of medicine for their illnesses that include those due to radiation from depleted uranium munitions dropped or fired on Iraq from 1991 to the present.

(3) Singling out for punishment Faith J. Fippinger of Sarasota, Florida, from among the dozens of us American peace volunteers in Iraq last year.

(4) The utter hypocrisy of punishing one, elderly and frail, woman peace volunteer and using fear of Iraq to extort money from taxpayers to pay defense contractors such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Kellog, Brown and Root and others that kick-back heavily to the Republican Party. Not one of us peace volunteers profited financially from our stay in Iraq while some U.S. firms are receiving corporate welfare for questionable work in Iraq.

Proof of my time in Iraq is enclosed. So come and get me! But send your enforcers at a civilized time between 9 AM and 8 PM or they just might get a pail of cold water splashed on them. I’m a cranky old man before I fully awake and after my bedtime. Since I live on the edge of wilderness, upon request I’ll send you a map to the barn in which I live.

Most sincerely,

Tom Cahill
PO Box 632
Fort Bragg, CA 95437

By Jo Wilding
June 14th

Victor has been a lawyer for 25 years, mostly in criminal defence. His was the case that established that Native American prisoners have the right to refuse to have their hair cut in jail.

In the US, lawyers can only practise in the state in which they passed their bar exam. You can study at home for another state’s bar qualification but there’s no process of apprenticeship as there is in the UK. Once you pass the bar you can start advertising and practising. The purely market-based system of entry to law colleges means there are more lawyers than there is demand (or people who can afford their services). Hence, Victor explained, the preponderance of adverts for class action lawsuits in the US. An excess of lawyers produces an excess of cases.

The pay for a public defender is good enough, Victor said � the equivalent of a lawyer paid for by legal aid in the UK. It’s just that judges will rarely approve the funding for finding and calling expert defence witnesses, whereas the state is able to access experts for the prosecution.

There’s a strong systemic tilt in favour of the prosecution, Victor said. The judge won’t be responsible for hearing the appeal so, once he’s made the judgement, it’s out of his hands. But a conviction makes almost everyone happy: the police, the prosecution, the victim or victim’s family; even the jury feel like they’ve done something useful.

Victor came from Boston, moved to Phoenix 35 years ago: “And I should’ve left 34 years ago,” he muttered with apparently characteristic grumpiness. A factory worker, he spent his nights spraying stencil graffiti against the Vietnam war. Eventually arrested, he was charged with something to do with unauthorised advertising. He went to the university law library, defended himself on the basis that the legislation invoked was intended to prevent � as you might assume � unauthorised commercial advertising, not political expression.

“Case dismissed,” the judge said. “Now go to law school.” And he did.

The first interview with Voices in the Wilderness co-coordinator Kathy Kelly since being released from the Women’s Detention Center in Pekin, Illinois for charges resulting from her protest at the School of the Americas last November.

The interview was conducted by Chuck Mertz from This is Hell, a radio program that is broadcast every Saturday morning live from 9 am till 1 PM (central time), in Chicago on WNUR 89.3 FM , and live on the web via RealAudio and Windows Media Player through WNUR’s website. Just go to WNUR’s website and click on “live webcast.”

Stream the Interview (43:29 - 19.9 MB)

or Download (43:29 - 19.9 MB)