Report from Santa Fe; Ann Wright

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future and by a grant from the Healey Foundation. Tell us New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Colonel Anne Wright. Thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Well, you are here at a Truth Dig retreat and for other events that we'll talk about in a minute. I want to tell our audience a little about your background. Those who don't know you by reputation. You're a former U .S. Army Colonel. You're a former high ranking diplomat. You were 29 years in the Army. You taught the Geneva Conventions at Fort Bragg among other things. You crafted some contingency plans for various occupations or invasions of several countries. It turned out when we invaded Iraq in 2003, we did not follow your plans. Maybe things would have turned out better. You have a

master's degree in National Security Affairs from the Naval College and you're quickly your diplomatic career. In 2001, you helped oversee the reopening of the U .S. mission in Afghanistan. You were the ambassador in Sierra Leone and you received a similar award. Talk to me about your heroism award. Well, I was actually the deputy ambassador or deputy chief of mission. However, I was the acting ambassador when the Civil War of Sierra Leone erupted 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 and plundering that was going on, the U .S. government decided we should close the U .S. embassy and evacuate all the U .S. citizens that were there and any Sierra Leoneans particular government officials whose lives might have been in danger. Other diplomats and other international members of other international organizations and during that three -day evacuation we evacuated about 2 ,500 people which was

the largest evacuation after Saigon until the evacuation of Beirut about five years ago. So you were stationed in many, many very interesting places. Did I say that you had overseen the reopening of the mission in Afghanistan? Yes, and then in 2003 you resigned your State Department post to protest the war in Iraq. That's right. I was one of three federal employees who resigned in opposition to the decision of the Bush administration to invade and occupy an oil rich Arab Muslim country that had nothing to do with 9 -11 and where the 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 lengthy intelligence briefing that he gave to the UN Security Council to try to

convince the Security Council to vote for an international intervention into Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. Well he was unable to convince me and he was unable to convince the UN Security Council and they never voted that military operation should take place in Iraq. Prior to that decision of the UN Security Council I had expressed my concerns about the potential of us going into Iraq through what's called the descent 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 Anne right out in Ulambata Mongolia where I was the deputy chief of mission all the way to Colin Powell's desk without any weakening or watering down of my statement. And I did that about a month before I ultimately resigned on March 19, 2003. Well speaking of descent you are an author also of this book

called Descent Voices of Conscience government insiders 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 where did that courage come from? What inspired you? Well I you know I've been a part of the government virtually my whole adult life and between the 29 years I'd been in the Army and Army reserves and then 16 years as a as a U .S. diplomat. I had been part of the system and I had held my nose to plenty of policies of every presidential administration under which I served starting with the Johnson administration back during the Vietnam War. And so if you think of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, you know just the whole list of them. There were plenty of policies in each one of those administrations whether it was Democratic or Republican that I personally you know thought oh this is pretty crazy you know I don't think this is particularly good for our country but because I had

decided I wanted a career in the government I held my nose to policies and found policies that I thought we're not hurting anyone and would try to work on those where even though there might be overarching policies that that were really really harming people in in the world but I chose to stay within the government until this the Iraq war and that I felt was going to be such a horrific war for certainly the Iraqis but also for really the national security of the United States that I felt I must resign and then be free to speak my concerns because 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 in his or her administration and in order to speak out you you need to go ahead and resign. A few people have spoken out while they've been in office so to speak

or in in the government but they are released very quickly generally. Well so you have been practicing nonviolent protest and and very good article writing and discourse creating. I won't saw a piece on YouTube a few last year. Are you and Daniel Ellsberg versus the Virginia state police and I will tell you this was very disturbing footage for me and anybody can find it at YouTube but it was it starts with with five four or five of you holding flowers you were going to put flowers on the well I'll let you tell the story but the part that was so disturbing to me that was the Virginia state police in full riot gear with shields and absolutely as robotic and against people that were Ellsberg's 82 I mean these were who could imagine that these people carrying flowers were in any way a threat and yet they were dragged off. So can you tell us a little about that day and what the event was? Yes

400 of us 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 every day he was being put in a cell and solitary confinement with with a sheet he was not allowed to have any sort of books or anything like that essentially we were the US government the US military was treating him as in the same way that tragically we have we have treated people in Bogrum Air Force Base or Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib and Iraq and Guantanamo and Cuba. We were using the same techniques on this young man who was accused of leaking a huge volume of classified information however under our system he was just accused he should have been in reasonable pretrial confinement

facilities which he wasn't so 400 of us went down to Quantico and had a rally and then five of us including Dan Ellsberg and then World War II veteran and an Iraq veteran and a mother of a veteran and I walked across the street carrying flowers and we were going to put them right at the base of an replica of the Erojima monument which is at the front gate of the marine base they wouldn't let us get close to the monument even though it's on public land it's not it's not even on the marine base it's on Virginia state land and as we you know we protested not being able to get up to the to the monument itself we had to stop it at a fence and then but we ultimately laid the flowers down and on the way back across we decided well we should just go ahead and just sit down peacefully nonviolently and just sit there well we were quickly joined by the other 400 that were across the street and we we were in the intersection

of route one for about two hours and the route the road had been cleared of all traffic stopped on both ends about a mile before and in fact it had virtually been stopped before we even walked down to the front gate the police as you mentioned the ninja turtles the militarization of our our law enforcement agencies whether it be the state police the local police I mean the incredible amount of military equipment that's now been given to domestic law enforcement and the types of techniques that they use to scare people which are techniques that actually I'd seen in in the US military when they were teaching riot control methods but to see it right there and with your own this is the first time I'd ever seen the the ninja turtles coming after and by that you mean they've got the vest on they've got the heavy artillery they're completely there's nothing human left no there's nothing and they had their weapons and

kind of goose stepping very loudly yelling as they took every step and we were going what's going on here we're just sitting here a peaceful nonviolent people and you know ultimately when they decide they're going to arrest us we've been arrested in fact many of us had been arrested the previous day in front of the White House in commemoration of the war in Iraq March 19th and then the next day was March 20th and we'd gone to Quantico and we know how the system works when you're peacefully non violently protesting and you refuse to leave a place when the police tell you to leave then you're liable to be arrested and I've been arrested many many times now in that but I've never been run over by the goose steppers before and they were they were rough they were mean and totally unnecessary nobody was they knew what the situation was if their intelligence you know they always they're always talking about we have to spend so much money because we have to we have to have excellent intelligence in fact in Chicago just last weekend where I was 51 million dollars spent

on on security for the NATO meeting a two -day NATO meeting and they were saying we need to have fusion cells for intelligence we have to know who the people are and all that well it 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 that Ninja Turtles coming after us well you know it is often it's a concern because they're not observing the the the bill of rights and so needs some education on both sides you taught the Geneva conventions at Fort Bragg so one of the things that drew you to the Bradley Manicase was that he was not being handled in accord what whether no matter how you feel about what he did he was still not being handled even even the Red Cross said he was not being handled you know with the that's right the and even the UN Rapa Tour on torture was who was refused to be allowed to talk with Bradley Manning by himself the military said no you can't you can't talk to him by himself

and the UN Rapa Tour 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 by themselves but the US government refused to let him go in and speak with Bradley Manning and we had gotten reports back from the very few people who had seen them to include his lawyer who had written a very detailed description of how he was being held that it was inappropriate I mean the the military was not abiding by its own rules on how you treat people in pretrial 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 this army person needs to be in an army facility a pretrial facility and they removed him from Quantico and took him out to Fort Leavenworth Kansas at the military barracks where he is in an appropriate facility we have so much to get in we're going to leave that subject now and I want you to talk about the biggest military cover up in US history

which is the the plight of women in women soldiers indeed so talk to us about what is happening to our women soldiers well I joined the military in 1967 so it's I've been associated with our US military now well over 40 years 45 years and during that time we went from less than one percent of the military forces to now to in the Air Force it's 18 % our women are in the Air Force and one of 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 the in the military service and usually that's a short amount of time four to six years one in three women who volunteered have been sexually assaulted or raped and is it not said that a female soldier is more likely to be raped by her fellow soldiers

than to be killed in combat yes that's right of the reported rapes for pretty consistently over the last four years the number of rapes that have been reported in the military are about 3 ,200 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 18 ,000 and 20 ,000 people each year are being raped that still I think is a low number of the of the 2 ,300 that reported being raped last year 10 % of them were 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 unit her own chain of command somebody that she knows has actually sexually assaulted or raped her and then trying to report back into that chain of command where the the person that raped her may be actually a member of the chain of command or as good friends with somebody and that and knowing that if you report it

probably you know you're you're the one that's going to be victimized again that people are not going they're going to say well sergeant so and so he's been in for 10 years he's got a wife he's got kids you're just a brand new person in the military that happens so frequently that the military chain of command will not prosecute these cases one of them had them uninvestigated that's what I read that only 8 % of the cases that have reported are prosecuted and only 2 % of all the cases that have reported resulting convictions yes yes it's and those statistics are well known to women and men in the military and therefore a lot of these crimes against them they don't report because it's hard enough to deal with what's happened to them and then if you add on top of it that that if people believe you they're not even going to help you try to get justice in this try to get the the perpetrator prosecuted and it it is important that we as citizens know about this because these perpetrators are coming back into civilian society they're not put on the national sex offenders

list even for military base to military base they don't know who's been convicted or even accused in other on one base and they may be maybe transferred to another most of these sexual predators are serial predators they just just don't strike once they strike numerous times and then if by chance they get out of the military here they're back in your own community and and you don't know about their history now tell us about the movie the prize winning when the audience award at Sundance it's a movie that just come out called Invisible Wars and I think because of the pressure of finally you and other people shining a light on this terrible situation Lee and Panetta in April this very April put out a proclamation the Department of Defense was not going to work to try to stop this sexual abuse that's going on against women's soldiers but talk about invisible wars well the invisible wars is a is a documentary at details the the lives of one woman in particular but about six others in

lesser degree of what happened to her after she was sexually assaulted in the Coast Guard Navy Air Force Marines 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 documentary it really breaks your heart to think about these young women and men because they do have a couple of men that are are 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 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 it's only after women my age started being eligible to go to the veterans administration to get medical services that

the VA started seeing that there were a lot of women and men that were finally saying you know I may need some emotional counseling because I was sexually assaulted 40 years ago and that's really what now they every intake form for the VA has the question were you ever sexually assaulted do you suffer from what the military calls military sexual trauma which is a trauma very similar to post -traumatic stress that you get in combat and yet for women you're there and some men they're they're coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq with post -traumatic stress from combat plus the the post -traumatic stress from from being sexually assaulted well let's take that trauma a last to its ultimate extreme which is suicide talk to me about the suicide numbers for female soldiers well female soldiers as with male soldiers are committing suicide and some of them have committed suicide because specifically because they've not gotten assistance in trying to

deal with this issue of sexual assault there are other women in our military who the military says committed suicide in Iraq or Afghanistan because of combat or because of something that happens over over in those two theaters we've had about 50 women who have died of non -combat related circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan and some of those deaths 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 they they were found dead and the military has said well they you know they just killed themselves because they couldn't cope with having been sexually assaulted I'm not so sure about that and many of the families are not so sure about it so we are urging the military to continue their their investigations and to talk with other members of the unit in greater detail 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 in

in a couple of these cases but on the whole issue of suicide 18 veterans a day commit suicide 18 a day and that goes back to the Korean War Vietnam War but now we've got a whole whole new number of young men and women who are having extraordinary difficulty time difficult time and and coping with what they've seen and what they've done another action that you've been involved in was about the drones because the the drones even again the CIA has made secret concessions on their drone campaign in November of last year because it was affecting a relationship with Pakistan and some of our other allies you were part of the Hancock 38 drone resistors with Ramsey Clark it's a very interesting story we do not have time to tell the whole story but why should we be worried about drones well drones the military says 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 weapon that because it can loiter over an area for a long period of time they can make sure everyone who's killed is somebody that is a target from the United States except that we find women children old men all sorts waiting parties wedding parties so one of the strategies now the U .S. uses which I think is just terrific is that they target an area they send a drone hellfire missile in they blow up whatever car or building they say a militant is in and then they wait for people to come rescue dig out and then whoever is in that group then gets the second hellfire missile as have funeral processions that are carrying the bodies of persons that the United States government says are militants we are now assassinating American citizens with these drones extra judicial assassination and 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 well Ramsey Clark the former Attorney General of the United States of America was with you and he he kept bringing up to the judge the Nuremberg principles in World War II that this really goes back to the Nuremberg judgments that were made about an idea of being responding to a higher law and and although when the Germans were killing the Jews they were okay but when the Nuremberg tried it came back they were held accountable and they were then persecuted we only have a minute Leva could you talk about the you've said citizens have a responsibility to take action when they seek crimes being committed that's right and that's why we feel that we have to go to Hancock Air Force Base or to create Air Force Base in Nevada we'll be coming out here to

New Mexico in September to Harlem and Air Force Base because it's important that citizens let their government know when they feel weapon systems are wrong for our country we had 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 America must stop using these things I mean we've had the whole country of Pakistan refuse to let convoys for NATO and US forces in Afghanistan use Pakistan for the last six months because of these drone strikes that the CIA illegally is is using in Pakistan the CIA has no international by international law the CIA cannot be using those drones and yet they are so to our ordinary citizen listening to this who's maybe never taken action but might have seen something that he thinks is wrong or just doesn't feel right where do you get the courage what what of you know say 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 that there are there are probably a lot of people that that agree with you on whatever issue it is and to try to find allies in the community because when you when you become a whistle war or when you step out of the norm it's not easy a lot of your fellow citizens will think you're crazy that that why should you be taking this issue on and yet it is our it it is our country and if we feel strongly about how our country should be progressing we've 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 you also say 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 yeah it is our it 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 the violations of civil rights that we see particularly under the Patriot Act and now this National Defense Authorization Act which says that the U .S. military can arrest and imprison American citizens on American soil I mean this is totally against what what we have stood for for the last three however old this country is but we've got to stand up for it because if we don't there are powers on both parties sides that will take advantage of of the sheep if we if we don't stand up and I don't intend to be a little sheep you will not and thank you for coming and joining us and and explaining the courage of your convictions and your actions our guest today is Colonel Anne Wright I want to show your book it's called descent voices of conscience and thank you for taking the time to be with us today thank you and I'm Lorraine Mills I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe we'll see you next week

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