> http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=11103
>
> March 16th, 2008 3:54 am
> Veterans recall horrors of war in live broadcast
> By Anna Badkhen / Boston Globe
> CAMBRIDGE, MA - Liz Jackson's eyes were fixed on a screen showing a live
> broadcast of anguished testimonies by Iraq and
> Afghanistan war veterans describing what they had seen and done during their
> combat tours.
> Jeffery Smith recalled how his Army unit beat and humiliated Iraqi prisoners.
> Former Marine Bryan Casler recounted how
> fellow Marines urinated and defecated into food and gave it to Iraqi
> children. Former Marine Matthew Childers talked
> about how he used to humiliate Iraqi civilians during predawn raids on their
> homes. When he described turning away an
> Iraqi father who was asking American troops to help the badly burned baby he
> carried in his arms, Jackson began to weep
> silently.
> "These soldiers are saying: 'I'm complicit,' " said Jackson, 29, a community
> organizer from Cambridge. "But every
> American citizen who saw this happen and isn't out there protesting is
> complicit. I include myself."
> Hundreds of soldiers and Marines from across the country are testifying this
> weekend in the "Winter Soldier: Iraq and
> Afghanistan" hearings, a four-day event held at the National Labor College in
> Silver Spring, Md. The event is named
> after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings in which Vietnam War veterans
> testified in a Detroit hotel about war crimes they
> had participated in or witnessed.
> The hearings, which began Thursday and end today, were organized by the Iraq
> Veterans Against War, a national antiwar
> organization, and broadcast live in locations across the country. The
> veterans who testified called for an immediate
> withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
> "In the United States today people's minds have gotten off the war. We are
> trying to get their attention," said Paul
> Shannon, whose New England United antiwar network organized the live
> screening shown yesterday in First Parish Unitarian
> Church in Harvard Square, in a side room that was packed with about 300
> antiwar activists, former troops, local
> residents like Jackson, and curious passersby.
> On Friday, more than a dozen Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from Massachusetts
> drove to Silver Spring to observe and
> participate in the hearings.
> One of them, Ian J. Lavallee, an Iraq war veteran from Jamaica Plain, said in
> a phone interview yesterday that although
> he was not planning to testify, he wanted to attend the hearings because it
> was his "duty to the people of the world" to
> condemn an "occupation that is being waged in our name and with our tax
> dollars."
> "We dehumanized people. The way we spoke about them, the way we destroyed
> their livelihoods, their families, doing
> raids, manhandling them, throwing the men on the ground while their family
> was crying," recalled Lavallee, 23, who
> served in Iraq in 2005 and was honorably discharged from the Army in 2006
> after he attempted suicide.
> "I became a person I never thought I would become," he said. "It really upset
> me that I did these things."
> From a folding chair in the Cambridge church, a fellow veteran, Patrick
> Dougherty, watched the hearings intently.
> "It just takes me back there," he said. The testimonies reminded him "how
> malicious we were over there."
> Dougherty, who was deployed to Baghdad and Mahmoudiya for 14 months beginning
> in 2003, "felt from the start that we had
> no intention to win hearts and minds," he said, his hands nervously running
> from the stubble on his chin to his hair and
> back to his chin.
> "The way we treated our detainees like animals, kept them in cages in the hot
> sun all day - " said Dougherty, 24, who
> studies biology at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Fields
> Corner.
> Dougherty was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He said he had
> considered testifying at the Winter Soldier
> hearings, but his doctor talked him out of it because the event could conjure
> memories too difficult for the veteran to
> bear.
> Most of the people who came to watch the testimonies were members of antiwar
> groups in Massachusetts. Jennifer Magee,
> who works at Harvard University Art Museums, came because her roommate, an
> antiwar activist, had told her about it.
> "These are the stories you never hear in the paper," said Magee. "It's really
> powerful to hear from the veterans."
> Charles Gluck, a social worker from Long Island who was visiting Cambridge
> yesterday, wandered in after he saw a poster
> outside the church advertising the event.
> "Some of the things I heard were shocking," Gluck said after listening to
> several testimonies. "My hope is that a
> movement like this would expand and . . . give people opportunity to make a
> more informed decision as to who the next
> president will be."
> No public screening of the hearings will be held today. Recordings of the
> testimonies are available at
> ivaw.org/wintersoldier/howtowatch.