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Hundreds of US soldiers emerge
as conscientious objectors
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Pentagon draws fire for Franklin Graham engagement

Apr. 20— The Bush administration has scored an apparent “own goal” in its effort to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world.
Muslims in the US are outraged that evangelist Reverend Franklin Graham preached on Good Friday to the Defense Department. Graham stirred controversy in 2001 when he called Islam a “very evil and wicked religion.”
Muslim employees at the Pentagon have urged officials to find a “more inclusive and honorable” religious leader to replace Graham.
Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Yantis, spokesperson at the Pentagon, told Reuters that Graham had been invited several months ago to deliver the Good Friday service, and that the invitation would not be rescinded.
“We are in a balancing act between accommodating the interests and requests of many faiths and we will do our utmost to keep that balance in mind in providing religious support to workers in the Pentagon,” said Yantis.
Spokesperson for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ibrahim Hooper, said that inviting Graham to the prayer service “sends entirely the wrong message to the Muslim and Arab world that the Pentagon will host someone who has such Islamophobic views.” Hooper stressed concern over the perception that this will give people around the world. “This kind of incident can undo any kind of bridges built by a hundred public affairs officers at the Pentagon,” he said.
In any case, the criticism from Muslims at the Pentagon is an embarrassing incident for the Bush administration that has strived to portray an image to Arab nations and Muslims around the world that the United States is not at war with Islam.
However, the Graham family, although highly feted within the Christian-right wing and among American Zionist groups, is no stranger to controversy.
In released audio tapes of late president Richard Nixon, Graham’s father, Reverend Billy Graham is heard making anti-Jewish remarks to the president. He said that Jews have a “stranglehold” on American media and that it must be broken, “or the country’s going down the drain.” He added that his Jewish friends “swarm” around him, but “they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country,” Graham said.
Reverend Franklin Graham’s relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse, has also been the source of further controversy. It is accused of using the crisis in Iraq as a means to convert Muslims to Christianity rather than solely providing physical assistance.
In a recent opinion column written by Graham in the Los Angeles Times, Graham states, “In Iraq, as is the case wherever we work, Samaritan’s Purse will offer physical assistance to those who need it with no strings attached.”
“Sometimes the best preaching we can do is simply being there with a cup of cold water, exhibiting Christ’s spirit of serving others,” Graham wrote.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Hundreds of US soldiers emerge
as conscientious objectors

By Gabriel Packard

New York, New York, Apr. 15 (IPS)— Although only a handful of them have gone public, at least several hundred US soldiers have applied for conscientious objector (CO) status since January, says a rights group.
The Center on Conscience and War (CCW), which advises military personnel on CO discharges, reports that since the start of 2003 — when many soldiers realized they might have to fight in the Iraq war — there has been a massive increase in the number of enlisted soldiers who have applied for CO status.
“The bare minimum is several hundred, and this number only includes the ones that have come to my group and to groups we’re associated with,” said CCW official J.E. McNeil.
“There will be others who will have gone through different channels, and some people do it on their own,” she added.
Generally, COs possess a sincere conviction that forbids them from taking part in organized killing. This objection may apply to all or to only particular aspects of war.
Only a small percentage of people who apply receive a CO discharge. But military statistics lag about one year behind, and the decisions on CO applications take on average six months to one year — sometimes as long as two years — so the exact number of COs in the present war will not be known for some time.
Also, military figures do not count applications from servicemen who are absent without leave, so they will not include Stephen Funk, a marine reserve who was on unauthorized leave before he publicly declared himself a conscientious objector and reported back to his military base in San Jose, California, Apr. 1.
Funk, 20, realized that he was against all war during his training, which including having to bayonet human-shaped dummies while shouting, “kill, kill.”
Since publicly declaring his opposition to war, he has become a symbol of resistance both in the United States and around the world.
“Since Stephen went public,” said Aimee Allison, a CO from the first Gulf War who has been supporting Funk, “some people from Yesh Gvul [a group of Israeli soldiers who have refused to fight in the occupied territories in Palestine] have contacted me to pledge their support for Stephen and to show solidarity and to thank him for making a stand.”
“People in other countries are proud that an American can stand up to the hegemony and the violence of the war in Iraq,” she added.
Soldiers in other countries, including Turkey, have refused to fight in the current war sparked by last month’s US-led attack. Three British servicemen were sent home from the Persian Gulf after objecting to the conduct of the invasion and a UK member of parliament, George Galloway, says he “is calling on British forces to refuse to obey the illegal orders” involved in the war.
As it is in the British army, CO discharge is a long-established practice in the US armed forces and always peaks in wartime. CCW says there were an estimated 200,000 COs in the Vietnam War, 4,300 in the Korean War, 37,000 in World War II and 3,500 in World War I.
The military granted 111 COs from the army in the first Gulf War before putting a stop to the practice, resulting in 2,500 soldiers being sent to prison, says Bill Gavlin from the Center on Conscience and War, quoting a report from the Boston Globe newspaper.
During that war, a number of US COs in Camp LeJeune in North Carolina were “beaten, harassed, and treated horribly,” said Gavlin. In some cases, COs were put on planes bound for Kuwait and told that they could not apply for CO status, or that they could only apply after they’d already gone to war.
As far as Gavlin knows, that type of treatment has not happened this time. But he has counseled service members who were harassed. For example, one woman was told that if she applied for CO status she would be court marshaled. It is not an offense to apply, and her superiors did it, Gavlin says, “to intimidate her.”
Funk is being treated “with kid gloves” in his home camp, where he is on restricted duty, according to Allison. But he is poised to be transferred to a “remote” camp, a standard procedure for COs, says Gavlin.
Allison says she was both supported and condemned when she became a CO.
“Privately I received overwhelming personal support from the other members of my unit,” she said. “But publicly I was isolated by my unit.”
“I was a senior at Stanford at the time, and again, in private I got lots of support — for example anti-war groups on campus asked me to speak at events,” she added. “But there were also detractors on campus and in the broader community.”
Even though conscientious objection is well established, Funk — like many others — found it difficult to find information about it within the military system.
“It took him six or seven months,” says Allison. “And eventually he was searching the internet .... and found the G.I. Rights website.”
G.I. Rights is a network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that give advice and information to service members about military discharges and about complaint procedures. CCW belongs to this network.
The NGOs advise soldiers on whether they meet the criteria for CO status, and help them complete a CO application. The process involves filling in a 22-question form, being interviewed by a military chaplain, a psychologist and an investigating officer. To succeed in getting CO status, soldiers must demonstrate that their beliefs about war have changed since they enlisted.
Soldiers that have this change of heart fall into three main groups, says McNeil.
The first group contains “those who go into the military understanding war and are willing to accept it,” she says. “But then something happens during their service and they are no longer OK with war.”
The second group contains people who have “sought out spiritual growth and have come to believe that God doesn’t want them to participate in war.”
The third, and biggest, group, she says, is made up of young, often naive, people who join the military in their late teens. They are often poor whites, blacks, or Hispanics, who either have limited employment opportunities, or are looking for a way to fund their college education.
Because military recruiters target poor youth in urban centers — the so-called “poverty draft” — this is probably the fastest-growing group of COs as well as the biggest, added McNeil.