Report from Santa Fe; Ann Wright

reports from santa fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the national education association of new mexico an organization of professionals who believed that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future and by a grant from the healy foundation post new mexico hello i'm willie nelson welcome to report from santa fe i guess it is colonel ann wright thank you for joining us as a pleasure thank you well you're here at a truth the retreat and for other events and we'll talk about in a minute and when i tell our audience a little of it back and those who don't know you buy right be patient your former us army colonel year a former hired by ranking diplomat you're twenty nine years in the army you time on the geneva conventions at fort bragg know everything's you crafted some contingency plans for various occupations are invasions of several countries it turned out when we invaded iraq in two thousand three we did not follow your plants maybe things would've turned out better your

master's degree in national security affairs for the naval college and you're quickly get your diplomatic career in two thousand when you helped oversee the reopening of the us mission in afghanistan you were very vague investor in sierra leone and you received a similar talk to me about your here was in a word was actually the deputy ambassador or deputy chief admission however i was the acting ambassador when the civil war of sierra leone interrupted and to the extent that the rebels came into the capital city and took over the capital city and then as it turned out in cooperation with some of the military because of the rate pillaging of plundering that was going on at the us government decided we should close the us embassy and right away all the us citizens that were there and any sierra leone in particular government officials whose lives might've been in danger other diplomats and other international members of other and international organizations and during that three day evacuation we evacuated about twenty five hundred people which

was the largest evacuation after saigon until the evacuation of a route to about five years ago now so you are decision in many many very interesting places that i say that you had overseen the reopening of the mission in afghanistan yes yes and then i'm two thousand three resigned his seat different posts to protest the war in iraq that's right i was one of three federal employees who resigned and opposition to the decision of the bush administration to and vaden occupy an oil rich arab muslim country that had nothing to do with nine eleven and where the rationale that was being given by the bush administration and particularly my boss colin powell who was the secretary of state at the time and in the very linked the intelligence briefing that he gave to the un security council to try to convince the security council to vote out for an international

intervention into a rack because of weapons of mass destruction well he was unable to convince me any was unable to convince the un security council and they never voted that third that a military operation should take place in a rack prior to that decision of the un security council i had expressed my concerns about the potential of us going into a rack through what's called the dissent channel within the state department where you as a as a foreign service officer can kind of bypass the whole chain of command and go from and ride out and loaned barter mongolia where i was the deputy chief of mission all the way to calm pow status without any weakening a watering down of my statement and i did that about a month before i ultimately resigned on march nineteenth two thousand three well speaking of dissent you're an author also this book called dissenting voices of conscience government insider speak out against the war in iraq the amount of courage that it took for you and other

government people to speak out is just amazing where did you read that courage come from what inspired you wow you know i'd been a part of the government first like my whole adult life and between the twenty nine years i'd been in the army and army reserves and then sixteen years as a as a us diplomat i had been part of the system and i'd hold my nose to plenty of policies of every presidential administration under which i serve starting with the johnson administration back during the vietnam war and so if you think of johnson nixon ford carter reagan and you know just the whole list and there are plenty of policies each one of those illustrations where as democratic or republican that i personally know thought oh it's pretty crazy you know i don't think this is particular good for our country but because i decided i wanted a career in the government i held my nose to policies and failed

policies that i thought were not hurting anyone and would try to work on those where even though there might be over arching policies that that were really really harming people in and the world but i and chose to stay within the government until this the rapport and that i felt was going to be such a horrific war for over certainly the iraqis but also for really the national security of the united states that i felt i i must resign and then be free to speak my concerns is it when you're in when you're in the government your job is to implement the policies of the presidential of whoever's president and his image in his or her administration and in order to speak out do you need to go ahead and resign a few people have spoken out while they been in office so the speaker and in the government that they are released very quickly general well so you have been practicing a long

nonviolent protest and then very good article writing and discourse creating art what's our piece on youtube a few last year i you and i daniel ellsberg versus the virginia state police and i'll tell you it this was very disturbing footage from anybody can find it at you too but it was it starts with with five and for five of you holding flowers you're going to put flowers on the fisk well the gully telesur but the part that was so disturbing to me that was the veggies say please inform riot gear with shields and actually as robotic against people that were in that ellsberg's eighty two and he's well who could imagine that these people carrying flowers were in any way a threat and yet they were dragged off yes so can you tell us a little about that day and what the van wert yes well four hundred i was had gone out to quantico marine base just outside of washington dc to protest the conditions under which the alleged

whistleblower for wikileaks private first class bradley manning was being held at the time he was being stripped naked everyday he was being put in a as cell in solitary confinement with with a sheet it was not allowed to have any sort of books or anything like that as actually we were the us government us military was treating him as in the same way that tragically we have we have treated people and barred from air force base for air base in afghanistan and abu ghraib and a rack in guantanamo in cuba we're using the same techniques on this young man who was accused of leaking out a huge volume of classified information however under our system he was just accused he should've been in and reasonable tree pre trial confinement facilities which he wasn't so four hundred of us went down the quantico and hadn't rally and then five of a certain cleaning daniels work and then

i'd know were were two veteran anorak veteran and a mother of a veteran and i walked across the street caring flowers and we're going to put them now right at the base of a replica of the region the monument which was at the front gate of the marine base and they wouldn't let us get close to a monument even though it's on public land it's not it's not even on the marine base it on virginia state land and now as we you know we protest not be able to get up to go to the monument itself we had stopped at a defense and then that we ultimately lay the flowers down and on the way back across we decided well we should just go ahead and just sit down peacefully non violently an and just sit there while we were quickly joined by the other four hundred that were across the street and we we were in the intersection of rwanda for about two hours and through the dough rolled it been cleared of all traffic stop on both ends about a mile before an infected virtually been stopped before we even walk down to the front gate

of the police so as you mentioned the ninja turtles leave voters asian of our power law enforcement agencies whether it be the state police the local police and the incredible amount of military equipment it's now been given to domestic law enforcement and the types of farm now techniques that they use to scare people which are techniques that actually i'd seen and in the us military when they were teaching riot control methods but to see it right there in with your own this the first time i'd ever seen though the ninja turtles coming after an hour there you mean the death of their son and get their heavy artillery their completely is anything humanly of noses there's no and they had their weapons in that kind of goose stepping very loudly yelling as they tipped at every step we're going to say you're a peaceful nonviolent people and it ultimately and when they decide they're going to arrest us we'd been arrested and that many others have been

arrested the previous day in front of the white house in commemoration of the war iraqi on march nineteenth and then the next day was march twentieth and we'd gone too far so we know how the system works when your peacefully non violently protesting and he refused to leave a place where the police tell you to leave then we are liable to be arrested and i've been arrested many many times now when that but i've never been run over by the two steppers before and they were they were rough they were meaning and not totally unnecessary nobody was so they knew what the situation was if their intelligence you know they always there are always talking about we have to spend so much money because we have to we have to have excellent intelligence effect in chicago just last weekend where i was fifty one million dollars spent on on security for the nato meeting at today's nato meeting and they were saying we need to have fusion cells for intelligence we have to know who the

people aren't all that well turns out they don't seem to know who the people are if they really had had looked at who we were they certainly didn't mean the ninja turtles coming after us well you know is often it is a concern because they're not observing the bill of rights and seventies an education and both sides you taught the geneva conventions at fort bragg so one of things to do you to the bradley manning case was that he was not being handled in the court wasn't whether it no matter how you feel about what he did he was surviving handle even even the red cross said he was not being handled you know with a mix that's right at the end even the un robert war on torture was who was refused to be allowed to talk with bradley manning of buy himself the military said no you can you can talk to him by himself and the un robert orr said well it is it is the common practice all over the world that someone in my positions gets gets to

speak with political prisoners hour out by themselves with us government refused to let him go and speak with bradley manning and we've gotten reports back from the very few people who had seen them to include his lawyer who had written very detailed description of how he's being held there was inappropriate timing of the military was not abiding by its own rules on how you treat people in pre trial confinement so it took citizen activism a lot of pressure and people getting arrested two weeks after we were arrested the army finally said okay he is this army person used to be in an army facility a pre trial for silly and they removed him from monaco and take him out to fort leavenworth kansas at the military barracks where he is an inappropriate facility we have some icy and we believe that subject and i want you to talk about the biggest military cover up in us history which is the plight of women in that women soldiers

indeed yes so talk to us about what is happening to our women soldiers well oh i joined the military in nineteen sixty seven and so it's i've been associated with or our us military now well over forty years forty five years and during that time we went from less than one percent of the military forces to now up to in the air force's eighteen percent parliamentarian are in the air force and one of them the real tragedies of what's happened is that women are being sexually preyed upon in the military one in three women who have been in our military the estimates are have been sexually assaulted or raped during the time that they've been in that in the military service and usually that's a short of our time forty six years one in three women who volunteered have been sexually assaulted a right and they said that said that a female soldier is more likely to be raped by her fellow soldiers and to be killed in combat yes that's right and of the

reported rapes for a pretty consistently over the last four years the number of raids had been reported in the military are about three thousand two hundred even the department of defense says this is a very low number because most people don't report being raped they estimate that some between eighteen thousand and twenty thousand people each here are being raped and that's still i think is a low number of the other twenty three hundred that reported being raped last year ten percent of them are actually men and that really is the tip of the iceberg because if you think how difficult it is for a woman to acknowledge that somebody in her own her own you know their own chain of command somebody that she knows essentially sexually assaulted or raped her and then trying to report back into that chain of command where the person that raped her maybe actually a member of the train man or is good friends with somebody and that and knowing that if you report it

properly you know you're you're the one that's going to be victimized again people are not going to say will sergeant so it's always been and for ten years he's got a wife he's got kids you're just a random person in the military that happens so frequently that that the military chain of command will not prosecute these cases one in harriman investigate that's what i read that only eight percent of the cases in the report of a promising to and only two percent of all the cases at a reported resulting convictions yes yes it's out and those statistics are well known to women and men in the military and and therefore a lot of these crimes against them they don't report because it's hard enough to deal with what happened to them and then if you add on top of it that that if people believe you they're not even that help you try to get justice in this try to get them the perpetrator prosecuted and it it is and for that we as citizens know about this because these

perpetrators are coming back into civilian society they're not put on the national guard sex offenders list and i even from military base to military base they don't know who's been convicted or even accused another one base and then it may be transferred to another most of these sexual predators are serial predators they'd us just on strike once they strike numerous times and then if by chance they get out of the military here they are back in your own community and and you dont know about their history now tell us about the movie the prize winning it won the audience award at sundance movie pitches chemical invisible war zone i think because of the pressure of filing you and other people shining a light on this terrible situation leon panetta an outlet in april this very april arm a bright and a proclamation that the department of defense was able to work to try to stop the sexual abuse is going on because when the soldiers attacked about invisible war a world away

and the civil wars assad there's a documentary i could get to details the lives of one woman in particular but about six others in a lesser degree of what happened to her after she was sexually assaulted a dip in the coast guard navy air force marines are army and what impact it had on her psyche and then what happened when when nothing was done to the perpetrator it is a very very moving our documentary it really breaks your heart to think about these young without women and men because they do have a couple of men that are far in the movie that were brave enough to come forward and be identified that what happens over a long period of time in the movie they talked to several people who were sexually assaulted years ago and in fact but when i joined the military in in the late sixties

we didn't have a clue how many people were being sexually assaulted we knew it was going on but there was no database to determine how many women is only after women my age story being eligible to go to the veterans' administration to get medical services that the va started saying that there were a lot of women and then there were finally saying you know i may need some with emotional counseling because i was sexually assaulted forty years ago and that's really where now they hit every intake form for the va has the question were you ever sexually assaulted you use everyone what the military calls military sexual trauma which is a trauma of very similar to post traumatic stress they get in combat and yet for women and some men there they're coming home from afghanistan interact with posttraumatic stress from combat plus the the post dramatic stress from from being sexually assaulted so it's a character alas to his ultimate shame which is suicide actually about the suicide numbers for female

soldiers well the female soldiers as with male soldiers are committing suicide and asked some of them have committed suicide because specifically because they've not gotten assistance and trying to deal with this issue of sexual assault there are other women in our military who the military says committed suicide and a rack or afghanistan because of combat or because of something that happens over over in those two theaters we've had about fifty women who have died of non combat related circumstances interact in afghanistan and some of those debts are now being identified as as suicides and i have some questions about some of this because we know that at least three of the women were sexually assaulted before a vague they were found dead and the military has said well they got they just kill themselves because aig couldn't cope with having been sexually assaulted i'm not so sure about that in many of the families are not so sure about it so we're

urging the military to continue the year their investigations and talk with other members of the unit i in greater detail that as years go by sometimes people finally in the unit will start talking about what really happened and i think that's what's going to happen and a couple of these cases but on the whole issue of suicide eighteen veterans a day commit suicide eighteen a day and that goes back to the korean war vietnam war but now we got a hold whole new number of young men and women who are having extraordinarily difficult to tie a difficult time in and coping with what they've seen and what they've done and then you know actually even involved in was about the drones because the the drones even again the cia has made secret concessions on the drone campaign i in november of last year because it was affecting our relationship with pakistan some of her other allies you our part of the hancock truly a drone resisters with ramsey clark you know it's a very interesting so we do not have time to tell the whole story

but why should we review we were at a red grooms well drawn so the military says so drones are a much better weapon system because we don't have people on the ground that might get killed if we use that weapon system against enemies and they say it's a very precise so web one that though because it can later over an area for a long period of time they can make sure everyone who's killed is somebody that has a target from the united states except that we find women children old mann also waiting for the wedding parties so one of the strategies now the us uses which i think is just horrific is that they target an area they send a drone hellfire missile and they blow up who whatever car or building they say a militant is an and then they wait for people to come rescue to get out and then whoever is in that group dan gets a second hellfire missile as half funeral procession senator during the bodies a person said the united states government says are militants out we're now

assassinating american citizens with these drones extra judicial assassination and an execution which is totally against our our own constitution and the morality of this whole thing of assassinating people rather than trying to capture them and bring them to a court of law and have have their innocence or guilt adjudicated particularly american citizens will ramsey clark the former attorney general of the united states of america was with you and i he he kept bringing up to the judge of a nerd principles and world war two that this really goes back to nuremberg jazz was a word made about an idea being was responding to a higher law and and although when the germans were killing the jews they were ok but when the nuremberg trials skin back they were held accountable and they were then persecuted we only have a minute left a creature talk about the us as citizens have the responsibility to take action when they see crimes being committed that's right and that's why we feel that we have to go to

hancock air force base or to creech air force base in nevada will be coming out here to to new mexico in september to holloman air force base because it's important that citizen it's not let their government know when they feel weapon systems are wrong for our country we have to do that with the nuclear bombs with the atomic bombs and we'll continue to work on that to prohibit the use of that weapon system and we think the blowback from these drones will is so easy that that they added that america must stop using these things i mean we've had the whole country pakistan refuse to let out convoys were made on us forces in afghanistan use pakistan the last six months because of these drone strikes that the cia illegally is is using in pakistan the cia has no internet by international law the cia cannot be using those drones and yet they are so too poor ordinary citizen listening to this is maybe never taken action that might have seen something that he thinks is wrong or

just as if you're right where do you get the courage what would you know to see a person who has convictions but not the courage of those convictions what would you say to someone who who sees things that they think are not quite right how do you move them to take action well to know that you're not alone but they're all they're probably a lot of people that don't agree with you on whatever issue it is to try to find allies in the community because when you when you become a whistleblower or when you step out of the norm it's not easy out a lot of your fellow citizens will think you're crazy that the you know why should you be taking this issue on and that is our age it is our country and if we feel strongly about how our country should be progressing we got to have the courage of our convictions just to say so and to let our government know when we think that it's taking us as as a country down the wrong road one thing us this is what more should i do what should i be doing for democracy to fight and protect my democracy of my country well that's right the

ideas our it is our system of government that we're proud of and if we see that the government itself may be committing criminal actions in our name either domestically on some of the violations of zte civil rights and we see critically and under the patriot act and now this national defense authorization act which says that the us military can arrest an imprisoned american citizens on american soil i mean this is totally against what wiped out our we have stood for for the last three how a row all this country its head but we've got a stand up for because if we got their powers on both parties sides that we'll take advantage of she if we are if we don't stand up and i don't need to be a real treat you will not and thank you for coming and joining us in and explaining the courage of your convictions in your actions our guest is colonel and i don't want to show your book it's called dissident voices of

conscience and thank you for taking the time to be rising a thank you and i'm really knows i like to think your audience from being with a sedan report from santa fe see you next week pastor tribal programs of report from santa fe are available at the web site reports from santa fe dot com if you have questions or comments please email in full ap report from santa fe dot com reports from santa fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the national education association of new mexico an organization of professionals who believed that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future and by a grant from the healy foundation post new mexico