Community | July 01, 2009 | 3 comments

The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,

source: http://dahrjamailiraq.com/

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Dahr Jamail's new book, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now available for pre-order.

Pre-order book here http://tinyurl.com/cnlgyu





Refusing to Comply
The Tactics of Resistance in an All-Volunteer Military

By Dahr Jamail

[Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.]

On May 1st at Fort Hood in central Texas, Specialist Victor Agosto wrote on a counseling statement, which is actually a punitive U.S. Army memo:

“There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan. The occupation is immoral and unjust. It does not make the American people any safer. It has the opposite effect.”

Ten days later, he refused to obey a direct order from his company commander to prepare to deploy and was issued a second counseling statement. On that one he wrote, “I will not obey any orders I deem to be immoral or illegal.” Shortly thereafter, he told a reporter, “I’m not willing to participate in this occupation, knowing it is completely wrong. It’s a matter of what I’m willing to live with.”

Agosto had already served in Iraq for 13 months with the 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion. Currently on active duty at Fort Hood, he admits, “It was in Iraq that I turned against the occupations. I started to feel very guilty. I watched contractors making obscene amounts of money. I found no evidence that the occupation was in any way helping the people of Iraq. I know I contributed to death and human suffering. It’s hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it.”
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3 comments // The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,

  • Highr0ller
    • 0
      Highr0ller [removed]  

    • Interview: Major Upswing in Iraq Violence

      April 29th, 2009

      US soldiers have been dying in larger numbers, one per day for the past five days. There had been thirty five bombings in Baghdad alone during the month of April, by the time we phoned Jamail April 27th.

      Hundreds of civilians have been killed, hundreds more wounded, and there is no end in sight. Does this mean the Obama administration will change withdrawal plans? The administration confirmed US combat troops will leave Iraq by August of 2010.

      Could the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki survive without the US occupation to prop it up?

      We’ll discuss these questions and more with Dahr Jamail, author of ‘Beyond the Green Zone, Dispatches from an unembedded journalist in occupied Iraq’.

    • 2 years ago
  • Highr0ller
  • Highr0ller
    • 0
      Highr0ller [removed]  

    • Pre-order book here http://tinyurl.com/cnlgyu

      As one of the first and few unembedded Western journalists to report the truth about how the United States has destroyed, not liberated, Iraqi society in his book Beyond the Green Zone, Jamail now investigates the under-reported but growing antiwar resistance of American GIs. Gathering the stories of these courageous men and women, Jamail shows us that far from "supporting our troops," politicians have betrayed them at every turn. Finally, Jamail shows us that the true heroes of the criminal tragedy of the Iraq War are those brave enough to say no.

    • 2 years ago
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