PROTECT THE ʻĀINA, PROTECT THE PEOPLE, STOP MILITARY EXPANSION
Monday, July 6th
1pm
Palama Settlement
Potluck, bring a dish
We ready to Paint the mural
808 Urban Malama Hale Project will be making a mural about hawaiian independence and sovereignity. It will be displayed at palama settlement and mayor wright homes.
SPONSORED by 808 Urban Malama Hale Project, John Hina and Tommy Wong.
Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, June 18, 2009
(06-18) 18:44 PDT — Without fanfare, a federal judge in Oakland today threw out voter-approved laws in two upper Northern California cities barring military recruiters from contacting minors.
U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled that laws passed in Arcata and Eureka in November were unconstitutional and invalid.
The finding was not unexpected by proponents of the laws, which passed with 73 percent of the vote in Arcata and 57 percent in Eureka. The federal government quickly sued to overturn the laws, which have been stayed ever since.
But Dave Meserve, the former Arcata councilman behind the laws, said he was disappointed that the judge ruled without hearing arguments on the case. Armstrong ruled on filed pleadings after a hearing scheduled this month was canceled.
“She doesn’t respond to any of our arguments in any way,” he said. “The order reads like a restatement of the government’s case.”
Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller said “We are pleased with the court’s ruling.”
Eileen Lainez, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, declined comment on the suit but said “It is important for recruiters to provide information to youth and their parents.”
The Arcata and Eureka laws join a long list of failed attempts to restrict military recruiting.
Opponents of recruiting have tried to keep recruiters off college campuses nationwide. Berkeley issued and then rescinded a letter calling Marine recruiters “unwelcome intruders.”
And the San Francisco school board in 2006 killed the local Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, which some members saw as a recruiting tool, launching a three-year battle that ended last month with JROTC back in place.
The Arcata and Eureka laws represented a new tactic that experts said appeared to have been the first of its kind in America: a counter-recruitment law passed not by a handful of elected activists, but by a plurality of voters.
Many voters in Arcata and Eureka who supported the measures saw the laws not as anti-military, but as an expression of a community’s right to set its own rules – particularly relating to children.
Opponents said the laws were unpatriotic, pointlessly quixotic, and imposed a government regulation on a domain that would be better handled by parents.
The laws made it illegal to contact anyone under the age of 18 to recruit that person into the military or promote future enlistment. Minors could still initiate contact with recruiters if they chose.
“The judge said that the question of military recruitment is a subject which must be regulated by the federal government and may not be regulated by states and localities,” said Stanford Law School Senior Lecturer Allen Weiner, who read the opinion but did not take part in the case.
Under the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, federal laws trump state laws on issues the federal government is responsible for, like foreign affairs and national defense.
The cities tried to head off that finding by arguing that the United States is party to international treaties prohibiting the recruiting of children under 17. The treaties, the cities argue, hold equal standing to the supremacy clause, so recruitment aimed at children under 17 – such as posters or recruiter calls – is unconstitutional.
Armstrong did not address that argument. Brad Yamauchi, a San Francisco attorney who represented Arcata pro bono, said the reason she didn’t may have been because the treaty addresses recruitment of children under age 17, but the laws in Arcata and Eureka barred recruiting anybody under 18.
Recruits must be 18 to enlist in the U.S. military, or 17 with parental permission, although contact with recruiters may begin earlier.
If the cities choose to appeal or draft a new law, Yamauchi said, they might focus on the 17-and-under crowd. But they would still need to solve other constitutional concerns raised by Armstrong – a task he said will be difficult at best.
But Yamauchi said an appeal might still be worth pursuing.
“Everything has to be done to put this pressure (on policymakers), and having an appeal could be part of that pressure,” he said. Arcata City Attorney Nancy Diamond said the city has made no decision on whether to pursue an appeal.
But Meserve said that no matter what, the effort was worthwhile.
“Whatever the outcome, I think it’s been very positive,” he said. “It has opened people’s eyes across the country to the fact that recruiters target kids.”
E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.
Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/18/MNC3189PQJ.DTL
José Alvarado Vega – PR Daily Sun
Civic and political groups denounced plans Wednes- day by the Fortupo administration to establish Army Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps programs in at least eight local public high schools, and vowed to organize campaigns to discourage their implementation.
Veterans Advocate Jorge Mas Marrero disclosed Monday that his office is pushing for Junior ROTC programs in public schools, saying the initiative aims to discourage students from dropping out of school, impart discipline, develop leadership and encourage the learning of English.
While denying the initiative seeks to increase recruitment of students into the U.S. armed forces or “militarize” schools, Mas Marrero acknowledged the Junior ROTC programs aims to sign up 10 percent of high school students.
Mas Marrero, a former military sciences professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s ROTC program, said Junior ROTC programs would only be established in schools with more than 800 students and which have backing from communities and parents. Education Secretary Carlos Chardon said Tuesday he has no qualms with including the program in public schools, but he noted it must be requested by school boards.
Puerto Rico Independence Party General Secretary Juan Dalmau said Wednesday that Mas Marrero’s justification that the program seeks to avoid school dropouts is “an insult to the intelligence of this country [sic] and a lie.”
“I call on the governor to stop hiding behind the Veterans Advocate and tell us if he believes in a culture of peace and education for our students, or if his mission is to transform our public schools into centers for military recruitment, so that our youth can serve as cannon fodder in American wars,” said Dalmau during a press conference at PIP headquarters in Puerto Nuevo.
Dalmau, who rejected the notion that the program benefits the Education Department by bringing in more federal funding, said the push for Junior ROTC programs is part of an “agenda to indoctrinate the youth with a pro-American and pro-war vision.”
Dalmau said the party will include a campaign against Junior ROTC presence in public schools in its periodic talks to public school students on how they can deny giving their personal information to military recruiters. He called on parents to discourage their children from joining the program.
“The reality is you don’t solve the school dropout problem by dressing up our youth in military drag and encouraging a militarist vision,” said Dalmau, who noted that the problem can only be addressed by providing schools with needed psychologists and social workers, designing “modern” and “dynamic” school curricula, and providing teachers with “the tools they need to do their work.”
Dalmau said ROTC officials are targeting schools with large student populations from low-income families, which he said are the most vulnerable to the “pipe dreams” offered by military recruiters.
The head of the National Union of Educators and Education Workers, or Unete by its Spanish acronym, said that having Junior ROTC programs in public schools would turn them into “centers of military recruitment”.
“Schools exist to promote the principles of peace, justice, service and other values and principles that make us better citizens. Schools don’t exist to promote war and militarism,” Unete President Emilio Nieves said in a press release, in which he called on Chardon to “assume a firm position in defense of the mission of public schools.”
Militarization through the kitchen
Mothers Against War spokeswoman Sonia Santiago said the initiative was an attempt by the Fortune administration to sneak military curricula “through the kitchen.” She also criticized the commonwealth Environmental Quality Board’s recent authorization of construction of training facilities to be used by the U.S. armed forces and the Homeland Security Department at the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Ceiba and in a Mayagiiez facility.
“We call on parents not to sign any document authorizing military officials to teach their children, because maternity is life and war is the anti-thesis of maternity,” said Santiago, a clinical psychologist whose son was injured in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “We also denounce the building of military training centers on the island, where yoga exercises are not going to be taught but strategies on how to exterminate fellow men and women.”
Santiago said Mas Marrero should desist from becoming a military recruiter and stick to his job defending veterans, who, she said, are being mistreated despite their service. She cited news reports in which the Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledges the huge backlog of unfinished disability claims. This situation has led veterans to wait an average of six months to receive disability benefits and as long as four years for their appeals to be heard in cases where their benefits were denied.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Source: http://www.independencia.net/noticias3/cp_JD_jrROTC_baseRRCeiba17jun09.html#ingles
Predictably, Sen. Inouye has penned an editorial supporting the Army’s proposed expanded training in Makua valley. Let’s analyze his argument:
1. Army is a “good neighbor”.
The US military was the force that overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom and occupied Hawai’i. Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan to Teddy Roosevelt (1897): “take (Hawaii) first and solve (political questions) afterwards.” I wouldn’t consider anyone who covets and takes over his neighbor’s house a “good neighbor”.
2. Hawaii soldiers will be called to war; they need training.
What are the troops training for? The US is engaged in illegal, imperial wars to invade and occupy other peoples’ countries. Phiippines, Korea, Vietnam, and even WWII, the “good war”, was a struggle between two imperial camps. In the Pacific, Japan lost and the US took the spoils, creating an “American Lake”. Hawai’i’s sacred places should not be used to perpetuate empire.
3. The Army has trained in Makua for more than 60 years, virtually forever.
The US military illegally occupies lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom and seized private lands. The military evicted families from Makua and destroyed their community. They promised to return the lands after WWII, but lied.
4. The Army’s concern for the environment goes beyond Makua; they helped to pay for the purchase of lands to be placed in public land trusts.
Many people saw this coming: The use of military funds to help purchase and protect certain areas as “buffers” for military training would be used as part of the psychological operations to win the hearts and minds of, or at least neutralize resistance from the community, in this case environmentalists.
5. The Army is part of our ‘ohana.
The military is taking our ‘ohana to fight wars for the empire, much like the Romans enlisted subjugated peoples to fight in its legions. Military training in Hawai’i, going back to the earliest JROTC programs at Kamehameha Schools and McKinley High School in the early 1900s were intended to indoctrinate Hawaiian, Japanese and other Local youth into military/American identity and ideology. In 1924 General Charles P. Summerall, commander of the Hawaiian Department for the US Army and one of the more open-minded racists, wrote: “the Japanese students showed themselves to be capable of becoming very efficient military students. There is no better way of securing the loyalty of such people than to incorporate them in our military forces with the environment of obligation to duty that cannot fail to win their allegiance in most if not all cases. Such a course would also tend to remove the resentment that Japanese citizens now feel at the discrimination that is made against them.” From Senator Inouye’s editorial, you might conclude that the military’s social engineering experiment worked.
+++
June 7, 2009
By Daniel K. Inouye
On Friday, the Army released the final environmental impact statement for military training activities at the Makua Military Reservation. Completion of this EIS culminates a seven-year effort that studied the effects of live-fire training on the cultural and natural resources of the valley. This includes an extensive marine resources study and a subsurface archaeological survey.
I encourage the people of Hawai’i to review all the information. In doing so, I hope you will come to the same conclusion: Let them train.
The Army is a good neighbor and longtime member of our community. It has taken its responsibility very seriously, and has come to the conclusion that it can sufficiently mitigate the risks inherent in conducting live-fire training exercises in the valley. Rather than continuing to nitpick at one thing or another, and force a return yet again to court, serving only to delay critical training that could provide the difference between life and death, I respectfully suggest that we, as a community, stand up and say, “We’ve had enough of these delay tactics – let them train.”
Today, there are about 6,200 Hawai’i Army, Marine and National Guard warriors deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. With an increased military presence planned for Afghanistan, we should expect continued deployments in the foreseeable future. North Korea’s irresponsible taunting, as evidenced by its recent missile launches and its provocative future launch plans, have heightened already soaring tensions in the Pacific region. No doubt if there were an incident, our Hawai’i-based units could be among the first to respond. They must be able to train.
Our warriors should not be penalized and placed in harm’s way in faraway places without receiving the training they need to protect themselves, get the job done and return home safely. We also should not extend their time away from their families by forcing them to train in another state. Keep in mind that less than 1 percent of Americans are willing to make the sacrifice to wear our nation’s uniform. They deserve our support, as they serve to preserve our way of life. Let them train.
Makua Valley is a critical training asset for the Army, Marines and National Guard. It has been used as a live-fire training area for more than 60 years. In 1998, training was halted as a result of a lawsuit. Training was then allowed on a negotiated, limited basis following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, while the EIS was being prepared. As the memory of Sept. 11 faded, training was again halted in the summer of 2004, pending completion of the EIS. So, here we are today, with the final EIS in front of us.
The Army has maintained Makua Valley as a training area, while at the same time steadfastly continuing its efforts to protect the endangered species and cultural sites, including removing ordnance to allow reasonable access for cultural practitioners. About $4 million annually is spent for this purpose. In addition, more than $6 million to date has been set aside for the removal of ordnance in Makua Valley, and in near-ocean waters opposite the valley.
More than 30 technically-trained field biologists manage the natural resources in Makua Valley. They have planted about 4,000 endangered plants, controlled the weeds, and built fences to protect endangered species. Another $1 million is spent annually to preserve archeological sites in the valley. To date, 121 sites have been identified for study and protection. I would venture that very few other entities have the resources and the commitment to take as good care of Makua Valley as the Army.
The Hawai’i Army’s environmental stewardship goes beyond the valley. It is a willing public partner in conserving special lands, and has invested more than $10 million in recent years alone to support the acquisition of Waimea Valley, Pupukea-Paumalu, Moanalua Valley and, very shortly, the Honouliuli preserve along the Wai’anae mountain range.
Each year, the Army spends about $365 million for its support in Hawai’i. Estimated spending for privatized Army housing construction and maintenance already tops $736 million. Add another $598 million for military construction provided just in the past two years including stimulus funds. All of this supports our economy during these difficult times.
Most important to me, however, the Hawai’i Army is a part of our ‘ohana. It’s not about “us and them,” but rather a much larger “we and our.” We volunteer together at the Food Bank and Special Olympics. Our children are learning side-by-side with one another. Our moms and dads are coaching young athletes together on the soccer and baseball fields.
Our soldiers deserve our support. They deserve the best training we can provide to prepare them for battle in faraway lands. The Army has done their part. It’s time to do ours – let them train.
Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090607/OPINION03/906070342/Let+Army+resume+training+at+Makua
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090601_war_is_sin/
Posted on Jun 1, 2009
By Chris Hedges
The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.
Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.
The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.
War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.
But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.
The Rev. William P. Mahedy, who was a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam, tells of a soldier, a former altar boy, in his book “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” who says to him: “Hey, Chaplain … how come it’s a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it’s okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?”
“Consider the question that he and I were forced to confront on that day in a jungle clearing,” Mahedy writes. “How is it that a Christian can, with a clear conscience, spend a year in a war zone killing people and yet place his soul in jeopardy by spending a few minutes with a prostitute? If the New Testament prohibitions of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, why, then, are Jesus’ injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words, what does the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really mean?”
Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war.
There is a difference between killing someone who is trying to kill you and taking the life of someone who does not have the power to harm you. The first is killing. The second is murder. But in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, murder occurs far more often than killing. Families are massacred in airstrikes. Children are gunned down in blistering suppressing fire laid down in neighborhoods after an improvised explosive device goes off near a convoy. Artillery shells obliterate homes. And no one stops to look. The dead and maimed are left behind.
The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions-whose texts are unequivocal about murder-to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.
We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.
Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. They turn the moral order upside down. It was the criminal class that first organized the defense of Sarajevo. When these goons were not manning roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army they were looting, raping and killing the Serb residents in the city. And those politicians who speak of war as an instrument of power, those who wage war but do not know its reality, those powerful statesmen-the Henry Kissingers, Robert McNamaras, Donald Rumsfelds, the Dick Cheneys-those who treat war as part of the great game of nations, are as amoral as the religious stooges who assist them. And when the wars are over what they have to say to us in their thick memoirs about war is also hollow, vacant and useless.
“In theological terms, war is sin,” writes Mahedy. “This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.”
The young soldiers and Marines do not plan or organize the war. They do not seek to justify it or explain its causes. They are taught to believe. The symbols of the nation and religion are interwoven. The will of God becomes the will of the nation. This trust is forever shattered for many in war. Soldiers in combat see the myth used to send them to war implode. They see that war is not clean or neat or noble, but venal and frightening. They see into war’s essence, which is death.
War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in the nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090603/ap_on_re_us/us_recruiter_sex_charges
AP
Tue Jun 2, 11:04 pm ET
HEMET, Calif. – Police have arrested a U.S. Marine Corps recruiter on charges of felony pimping and kidnapping and are looking into whether he used sex with a 14-year-old girl to entice potential recruits.
Staff Sgt. Bryan Damone Cunningham, 33, of San Pedro pleaded not guilty to seven felonies last Thursday after police in Orange discovered the teenage girl in a car with Cunningham and two other men. The two men, ages 18 and 19, were potential Marine recruits, police said.
The girl, who has since been returned to her parents in Hemet, told police that she met Cunningham online and had sex with all three men. She also told police Cunningham wanted her to work as a prostitute and had tried to take her to Los Angeles County against her will.
Police said they are trying to determine if Cunningham may have been using the girl to entice Marine recruits.
“It’s not proven … but when you look at it, this is a grown man, a Marine staff sergeant,” said Hemet police Lt. Joe Nevarez. “Why would he be taking them out to have sex with a 14-year-old girl?”
Cunningham’s attorney, Dane Levy, did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.
The two potential Marine recruits face felony charges on having sex with a minor.
Cunningham is being held on $1 million bail and has a court hearing June 18, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County district attorney’s office.
Hemet is east-southeast of Los Angeles.
May 20, 2009
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
Schools will be required to provide military opt-out forms to 9th- and 10th-grade students and to develop a plan to monitor on-campus recruiting by the armed forces, according to new guidelines announced by the city’s Department of Education on Monday night.
The requirements, set to go into effect this fall, follow months of criticism from civil liberties groups, which had pushed to curtail recruiters’ access after school officials decided last year to give military recruiters access to a central database of students’ names, addresses and telephone numbers. Previously, recruiters had been forced to go from school to school to collect students’ data.
The new guidelines extend the requirement to include opt-out forms in orientation packets to younger high school students; in the past, only 11th- and 12th-grade students received the forms. The Department of Education will also add information on opting out to its instructions on their rights and to materials for students who take an armed services aptitude test.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, praised the changes, which include a requirement that principals appoint a staff member to oversee a military recruiting plan for each school. Ms. Lieberman said that too often there was not enough oversight of the recruiters and that in some cases they were too aggressive.
“They are not to get unfettered access to the students in the school,” she said. “They have to be regulated.”
The Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, who had also lobbied education officials to make the changes, called the guidelines “real and substantive.”
“This is really going to protect our kids,” he said.
Last year, when the city’s decision to centralize the recruiting process drew an outcry from civil liberties advocates, the Department of Education defended the change. Education officials said it would allow the city to improve its monitoring of students’ use of opt-out forms and tell schools with unusually low numbers to make sure they were being properly distributed.
Last fall, the number of students submitting opt-out forms increased to 45,717, up from 38,227 in 2007 and 22,357 in 2003, according to data released at a meeting of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy on Monday night.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/nyregion/20recruit.html
Monday, 11 May 2009
by Jude Lizama | Variety News Staff
THE Guåhan Youth, an umbrella group for the island’s youth and grassroots organizations, will hold a rally that will amplify their collective voice that has been muffled amid rapid changes resulting from the ongoing military buildup and what some people consider “federal interference.” The rally, billed “Reclaim Guåhan: Chule’ Tatte Guåhan,” will be a venue for education, expression and empowerment, featuring honored speakers, poetry, art, film showings and local music among others.
Danny Jackson
The overall goal to teach those in attendance about the island’s critical issues and the ability to express various opinions will be highlighted throughout.
The rally is scheduled to be held from 2 to 8 p.m. on May 23 at Skinner’s Plaza in Hagåtña.
“It stems from the $1 million a week put forth by Judge [Frances] Tydingco-Gatewood, which we saw as federal interference on local governance,” stated primary event coordinator Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero.
She cited such factors as the military buildup, land grabbing and lack of self determination as central reasons that prompted the Guåhan Youth to initiate a rally that centralizes on indigenous people’s self determination and other fundamental freedoms.
“It’s amazing that a lot of it is coming from the youth. People shouldn’t have to resign to hopelessness. The rally is intended to empower future generations to take leadership,” said Leon Guerrero, adding that the Guåhan Youth will show what they are “capable of as a community.”
“It’s frustrating to know that no one has spoken out,” said Leon Guerrero. “We need to focus on our language and culture in order to help stop all of this, and keep it as the land of the Chamorros. We don’t have power as a nation, but it is something that we are entitled to.”
I Nasion Chamoru’s Maga’ Håga, Debbie Quinata, said I Nasion Chamoru is a supporter and that in no way should I Nasion Chamoru take any credit for the upcoming Chule’ Tatte Guåhan rally, which has been materialized and bolstered by the island’s youth movement.
“It’s important for young people to take responsibility for what will be their future. I will not take credit for this ingenious movement,” Quinata said. “It’s a great way to get information out to the community.”
Howard Hemsing and (top) Danny Jackson, two of the most vocal activists on Guam, hold placards during a protest rally at the legislature in this Jan. 3, 2008 file photo. The island’s young people will take over the scene of activism during an upcoming rally in Hagatna. Photos by Paul Blas
She added that “It’s very important to have our young generation take firm grip of the reality of what’s happening on our island. They’re being responsible and forthright.”
May 10, 2009
American Album
By TAMAR LEWIN
MIAMI – Every morning before school starts, Miles Woolley, a drafting teacher at Southwest Miami High School, gets a reminder of military life when the Junior R.O.T.C. honor guard marches by his classroom.
“Their marching and parading around in uniforms stirs bad memories in me,” he said.
Mr. Woolley, 61, is a Vietnam veteran whose service left him with a bullet in his head, a mostly useless left hand and a dragging left foot. He was drafted at age 19, not much older than his students are now, and transformed from a small-town newlywed into a fast-shooting reconnaissance soldier.
The prospect that his students might follow that path haunts him.
Southwest Miami High is a sprawling but orderly place that offers a wide range of classes, including cosmetology, auto shop and Advanced Placement calculus, to 2,800 students, most of whom are Hispanic and from low-income families.
Like many such high schools, it is also a focus for military recruiting. Hundreds of students take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or Asvab, test each year. More than 100 are enrolled in the Army J.R.O.T.C., drilling, marching and using dummy guns. And every Tuesday and Wednesday, recruiters from the Army, Navy and Marines set up tables in the lobby outside the cafeteria, handing out water bottles, key chains and stickers and talking up the benefits of a military career.
“There’s a lot of student interest,” said Sgt. Juan Montoya, an Army recruiter who visits the school and calls students’ homes. “The big obstacle is the parents, who think we’re going to send their kids off into combat.”
Mr. Woolley avoids the lobby.
“I don’t go there if I can help it,” Mr. Woolley said. “I don’t want to see it.”
In his three decades of teaching in Miami, Mr. Woolley’s way of handling his wartime memories has evolved.
At first, he said, he rarely talked about the war. “When I got back from Vietnam, I couldn’t imagine myself being civilized ever again,” he said.
In the 1980s, when Americans were held hostage in Iran, he was hospitalized with post-traumatic stress disorder. “The hostages, the yellow ribbons, that all hit me hard,” he said.
In the 1990s, he wrote about his Vietnam experiences, sending copies of his memoir to family and friends. “It was cathartic,” he said.
Mr. Woolley later became an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, posting thoughts on a libertarian Web site, LewRockwell .com, and, closer to home, trying to get the military out of his school.
“I love my school and my students, and in a way they’ve become my children, so the intensity of recruitment struck me as wrong,” Mr. Woolley said. “I recognize the need for a national defense, but high school students are too young and unformed to really question what they’re being told, and it feels to me like exploitation.”
In his classroom, where students independently worked on their long-term drafting assignment, Mr. Woolley, a tall man with a white beard and a warm manner, was a gentle presence, patiently offering guidance when a student ran into trouble adjusting a tracking machine or centering a line.
Mr. Woolley does not discuss the military, unless students ask.
“I can’t tell them what to do,” he said. “I can tell them what happened to me. And answer questions. Honestly.”
Even that has been a struggle for him.
“Sometimes students ask about what happened to me, and I tell them as much as I think they can stand to hear,” he said. “Some come talk to me after they’ve already been recruited and signed their papers. I don’t want them to think that this is a mass murderer who’s been in the classroom with them. But I do want them to know that we weren’t peacemakers, we weren’t freeing anybody. Those bombs and guns do one thing. They kill.”
Mr. Woolley did his share of killing, he said, as part of a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol unit that went into enemy territory to gather intelligence. He has vivid memories of a firefight in which he and his unit shot not only enemy soldiers, but three women, two children and a boy about 6 months old – the same age as his own son back home.
Mr. Woolley estimates that he was shot at about 100 times without being hit. But on Aug. 13, 1969, he was ambushed on a nighttime operation, took a bullet in the head and was airlifted out, paralyzed on the left side of his body. In months of rehabilitation, he regained the ability to walk and some use of his left hand. After trying the construction business and earning a degree in civil engineering, Mr. Woolley moved to Florida and began teaching. His marriage broke up after his third child was born. Remarried now, he and his wife are raising two of their seven grandchildren.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, passed two years before the war in Iraq began, military recruiters are given access to high school students on the same basis as college recruiters. In many parts of the country, with varying success, opponents of the war organized a counter-recruitment movement to try to limit both recruiters’ access to students and the use of the Asvab. The test is widespread in Texas and Florida, like J.R.O.T.C.
When the Iraq war started, Mr. Woolley began researching the law on how the school was required to help the military, and discovered that schools have a good deal of wiggle room. He worked with a journalism student at his school on a lengthy analysis of those requirements – only to be bitterly disappointed when the article in the school newspaper last spring was cut short.
Mr. Woolley talked with the principal, James Haj, about how Southwest could, lawfully, limit the military presence. He told the principal that, for example, recruiters could be kept to rare visits and confined to an out-of-the-way room. And if the school wanted to keep offering the Asvab for career counseling, it could block recruiters from accessing the results, a change Southwest adopted last year.
The young principal and the older veteran express great mutual respect, but where Mr. Woolley wants the military presence erased, Mr. Haj is striving for a middle ground.
“It’s a delicate issue,” Mr. Haj said. “I think all voices should be heard.”
So he lets recruiters come every week but keeps them in the lobby. “Some schools let recruiters wander the halls, but I want to be able to keep my eyes on them,” Mr. Haj said. “I know Mr. Woolley doesn’t like J.R.O.T.C., but I’ve never had a single parent complaint.”
Mr. Woolley, who grew up in a small town near Buffalo, said he was content with his life and happy to be a good husband and grandfather, but was still troubled by his military actions.
“I did a very good job for the military, but it’s torn me up for my whole life,” he said. “I was a good guy when I was drafted, a good guy from a good family. I wonder a lot, how did that good guy turn into something else?”
With J.R.O.T.C. and the drafting classroom both housed in the same wing of the school, Mr. Woolley often sees the cadets in their uniforms.
“I am repulsed by what the uniforms represent,” he said. “At the same time, if a kid walks past me with his or her shirt not tucked in, or the belt not properly buckled, I stop them and tell them, ‘If you want to play this game, you have to play it by the rules. In the military, the uniform isn’t worn like this, and you know it.’ I want them to know it is not a joke.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/education/10veteran.html?_r=1&ref=education&pagewanted=print
washingtonpost.com
Gunman Opened Fire at Baghdad Base, Wounded Three Others
By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 11, 2009 1:30 PM
BAGHDAD, May 11 — An American soldier opened fire on comrades Monday on a large military base in Baghdad, killing five and wounding three, the U.S. military said.
The shooting at Camp Liberty, one of the largest bases in Baghdad, occurred about 2 p.m.
Lt. Col. Brian Tribus, a U.S. military spokesman, said the gunman was taken into custody.
A U.S. military officer in Baghdad said the shooting occurred at the base’s combat stress clinic.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the incident shook up soldiers, many of whom are in their third and even fourth tours. Some broke down in tears, he said.
“A lot of soldiers are wondering why,” the official said. “We will be asking as leaders: What could we have done? How could have we protected the soldiers?”
Most military facilities in Iraq have combat stress clinics, where soldiers seek counseling and are at times prescribed medicine for anxiety and depression.
The Army is grappling with a growing incidence of suicide cases, which military leaders attribute to the stress inflicted by multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
A Defense Department official in Washington said three people were wounded, but he did not know if they were military or civilians.
“It’s some form of isolated incident, an unfortunate one at that,” he said.
The military did not immediately say what the motive might have been.
“Anytime we lose one of our own, it affects all of us,” said U.S. military spokesman Col. John Robinson. “Our hearts go out to the families and friends of all the service members involved in this terrible tragedy.”
The incident was among the deadliest attacks for U.S. troops in recent months. It appears to be the deadliest incident in which U.S. deaths were caused by a fellow U.S. soldier since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The shooting was particularly chilling for soldiers based at Victory Base Compound, which includes Liberty, because it is regarded as one of the safest installations for U.S. troops in Iraq.
Control to the compound is tightly restricted, but American soldiers carry weapons on base.
Also on Monday, the military said an American soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq. The attack occurred Sunday at 2 p.m. in Basra province. U.S. soldiers recently deployed additional troops to the province to replace British troops, who formally ended their mission there last month.
Liberty is one of three U.S. military bases adjacent to Baghdad International Airport.
Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this article.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051100265_pf.html