By Jo Wilding
August 13th

It repeats itself: the main hospital has been closed down by US troops and is being used for military operations, ambulances are being prevented, again by US troops, from moving around the town, which is being pounded from the air while the US and the Iraqi militias, disparate armed groups, fight in the streets and US soldiers drive around with loudspeakers, ordering civilians to leave or be killed.

It could be Falluja in April; this time it’s Najaf. I hear that Kut has been bombed, the hospitals reporting massive casualties which the US says were fighters, the locals say were mostly civilians. I hear nothing about Nasariya, Samawa, although I know that when Najaf kicks off, my friends in the other southern towns just have to lock their doors and wait.

Then the kidnappings. I hate it when my mates become the news. This morning the radio woke me up with the news that James has been kidnapped in Basra. Armed men went to the hotel, went through the books to find out his room number, shot him, dragged him out and have threatened to kill him if the US doesn’t withdraw from Najaf in 24 hours.

Of course they know, all too well, that the US command doesn’t care about life � they wouldn’t have been attacking civilians in Iraq for the last 14 years and a week if they cared about life. Of course, James is only one in a ceaseless flood of civilians caught up in the violence of this occupation, the invasion and the sanctions; he’s only one of dozens that I know personally, but there’s something about hearing your mate’s voice on the radio, hearing the terror in his voice, when the last time you heard it was over a narghila in your apartment in Baghdad, hearing the media commentators pontificating about him in the past tense, remembering what it felt like for me when I had four other people with me and when our captors were so gentle and polite.

By Jo Wilding
July 18th

So the Butler Report came out. This, for the benefit of those who may have missed it, is the report of the committee convened to decide whether the Prime Minister, the intelligence services, the Joint Intelligence Committee or anyone else lied about the evidence relating to Iraq’s alleged weapons which were, in case anyone forgot, the alleged reason for the all-too-real bombardment and invasion of Iraq.

Not too complex a brief, one might suggest. Still, to make sure that only the finest minds were applied to the task, Tony Blair himself handpicked the committee. I’m sure that, as with the Hutton Report on whether the government, the BBC, the deceased’s immediate superiors, the tooth fairy or anyone else bore any responsibility for the death of weapons expert David Kelly, someone will send me an explanation of who Lord Butler is and how close and cosy are his ties to the Prime Minister.

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.

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.

By Jo Wilding
May 29th

“Welcome to Canada,” said the sign at the border. “Not quite as bad as the USA.”

OK, it didn’t but the Canadians who looked after us in Vancouver said it ought to, given how much of their country’s economy and foreign policy had become bound up with theirs next door. Though Canada has troops in Afghanistan, it declined to send any to Iraq but the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) is pressing the federal government for closer economic integration with the US.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994 between Canada, Mexico and the US, forcing among other things large scale restructuring of Canada’s social programmes, not unlike the “structural adjustment policies” foisted on indebted countries by the IMF and World Bank. It gave corporations the right to sue governments for anything which interfered with their profits, even for legislation to protect citizens from harmful chemicals or for public opposition to the building of a factory in a given area.

Negotiations continue over the controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to tighten economic ties but there are also plans in process to co-operate with the US on the National Missile Defence system, to develop a North American identity document giving business people greater mobility, unite the two customs systems, increase US access to Canadian energy and water resources and align Canada more closely with the US on refugee and immigration rules, ‘homeland security’ and regulatory standards, for example on drugs and agricultural chemicals and hormones.