Forum Post: Don't Join the Military, why I joined the cause

Don't join the military.

I was trained to do interrogation analysis for the US Air Force.

The lives of those men and women who were in the custody of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the command under which I “served” for six months from late 2005 to early 2006, their lives were changed forever because of us. I'm not trying to say that I witnessed what the military would define as abuse or humiliation. We followed regulation to a tee. So no, I never saw any American or otherwise lay a finger on any of our detainees, I never saw any of them get stripped down naked and laughed at, but the mind games they play with these poor people to get them to talk are just fucked up, and you don't have to strip someone naked to humiliate them.

Did you know that the US military can detain an Iraqi citizen for up to 18 months without trial? A year and a fuckin half of their lives, gone. The US military just goes to the Iraqi government and says, “This guy is a threat to US or coalition forces,” and he's ours for 18 fucking months.

And the Geneva Conventions that protect prisoners of war from bad treatment...they don't apply. These guys aren't prisoners of war, they're terrorists, or insurgents, so those conventions don't apply them.

Most of the guys in that detainee camp weren't there because they did anything wrong. They were there because someone got intelligence from somewhere that there might be a bad guy somewhere within a 4 block radius, and so we roll in and capture and detain every “military-aged male” in the area. Wrong place, wrong time seriously takes on a whole new meaning here...

And yes, military-aged-male means exactly what it sounds like it means: old enough to hold a gun.

There were children in that camp. They were just kids.

Sometimes I think about the atrocities that everyone saw in the pictures from the scandal that involved Abu Ghraib in 2003, and I think, I never saw anything that bad. And then I think, If people were starting to come down on interrogation technique as a human rights violation, it would be kind of smart to publicize something like that. If the American people could see the complete and total extreme, then they'd look at the US military's slightly less extreme interrogation techniques and think they weren't so bad.

And yes, it was the United States Air Force, THE authority figure in my life at the time, that instructed me to do these things, but the fact that an authority instructed me to take an action does not alleviate my responsibility for my own actions.

They were my feet that carried me into that country and my hands that held that gun. They were my eyes that watched it all happen and my mouth that remained silent.

No more.

The US military is neither at war with nor are they benefiting the Iraqi people. It is an occupying force in the country. Yes, the US military did topple Sadam, but being released from Sadam's power only to then be controlled by the US military is not a victory in the Iraqi fight for freedom. While many would have us believe that the US military is helping Iraq take it's first steps toward democracy and therefore freedom, it is in fact THE largest obstacle that the Iraqi people face in their fight for freedom. If a military force tried to enter America and force the kind of control on us that the US military forces has been forcing on the Iraqi people for more than eight years now, we wouldn't stand for it for a second. We would fight back. The Iraqi people are doing nothing that the American people wouldn't do if we were placed in the same situation.

When I joined the US Air Force I truly believed that any fighting I would be doing would be to protect the freedoms of the people of the United States of America...imagine my surprise. The only “people” who's freedoms I was defending in Iraq were the freedoms of Occidental Petroleum and Exxon Mobile. Imagine my surprise to find out that instead of defending freedom, I was participating in a campaign to deny the Iraqi people of their freedom in order to further the global financial agenda of the United States.

This is not what the United States military was meant to do, and it is certainly no what they lead the people who join to believe they will be doing.

This is my burden. I have done a terrible wrong. And in a thousand lives I couldn't do enough good to make up for it. And so I am left with nothing but to try. To be as positive an influence on the universe as I can be and to change a mind, so that other people don't have to know what this is like.

Thank you for reading.