July 31, 2005
Send the Poor to War, Go Play Golf (Every Other Day)....
I suppose First Sgt. Olympio Magofna is waiting for poverty to get even worse in his native land, so that he can go play golf every day:
The Army has found fertile ground in the poverty pockets of the Pacific. The per capita income is $8,000 in American Samoa, $12,500 in the Northern Marianas and $21,000 in Guam, all United States territories. In the Marshalls and Micronesia, former trust territories, per capita incomes are about $2,000.The Army minimum signing bonus is $5,000. Starting pay for a private first class is $17,472. Education benefits can be as much as $70,000.
"You can't beat recruiting here in the Marianas, in Micronesia," said First Sgt. Olympio Magofna, who grew up on Saipan and oversees Pacific recruiting for the Army from his base in Guam. "In the states, they are really hurting," he said. "But over here, I can afford go play golf every other day."
What is there to say?
Posted by zeynep at 11:21 PM | Comments (2)
February 16, 2005
Not Your Asimov's Robots
The robo-soldier is coming, we're informed:
The American military is working on a new generation of soldiers, far different from the army it has."They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."
The robot soldier is coming.
The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history.
...
Pentagon officials and military contractors say the ultimate ideal of unmanned warfare is combat without casualties. Failing that, their goal is to give as many difficult, dull or dangerous missions as possible to the robots, conserving American minds and protecting American bodies in battle.
"Anyone who's a decision maker doesn't want American lives at risk," Mr. Brooks said. "It's the same question as, Should soldiers be given body armor? It's a moral issue. And cost comes in."
The article goes on to argue that the robot would be cheaper than a human soldier, etc. etc. About how robots don't need pensions, disability pay, health insurance...
But you know the real issue. Robots do not need to be recruited, nor do they have mothers and fathers who may show up at Pentagon's doorsteps when their child gets killed. They won't vote. They will not come back and talk about what they did and what they saw. Most important of all, they will not do what Camilo Mejia has just finished serving a jail sentence for, become a conscientious objector. "By putting my weapon down, I chose to reassert myself as a human being," Mejia says in his essay titled "Regaining My Humanity."
The sad irony is that robots were first extensively imagined in the fiction of Isaac Asimov, who chose to create them with "the three laws," the first of which stated that "a robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
Posted by zeynep at 11:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 09, 2005
Volunteers to Clear Landmines? Lock Him up and Throw Away The Key!
So, here's what you get for refusing to carry a weapon, instead volunteering to clear landmines and roadside bombs in Iraq:
In February 2003, a month after Lance Cpl. Joel David Klimkewicz was told he was going to Iraq, the young marine filed to become a conscientious objector. More than a year later, his application was denied, and he was again told to prep for duty. Klimkewicz, 24, volunteered to clear land mines and roadside bombs but refused to carry a weapon--a stand that led to his being court-martialed in December, busted to private, and thrown in the brig at Camp Lejeune for seven months.
That jail time comes in spite of a recommendation from the Marine equivalent of a grand jury that "the matter be disposed of by nonjudicial punishment and administrative separation from the military, with an honorable discharge."
Posted by zeynep at 01:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 27, 2004
Equal Pay for All Mercenaries! Justice Now!
Under the Same Sun reader Ripley brings up another instance of the examplary record of the occupation in helping solve the unemployment problems of the unsavory remainders of ex-dictatorships of the world. This bunch is Pinochet's Chile:
The US is hiring mercenaries in Chile to replace its soldiers on security duty in Iraq. A Pentagon contractor has begun recruiting former commandos, other soldiers and seamen, paying them up to $4,000 (£2,193) a month to guard oil wells against attack by insurgents. Last month Blackwater USA flew a first group of about 60 former commandos, many of who had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, from Santiago to a 2,400-acre (970-hectare) training camp in North Carolina.From there they will be taken to Iraq, where they are expected to stay between six months and a year, the president of Blackwater USA, Gary Jackson, told the Guardian by telephone.
"We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals - the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system," he said.
In case you're wondering where you remember the name Blackwater, the mercenary firm doing the hiring -- their employees are implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
Now, here's my question. Where's the justice in this? Why are members of the unit responsible for gunning down school children in Soweto are being offered salaries as little as $1,000 and would-be mercenaries from El Salvador being offered $1,700 -- while commando's who had trained under Pinochet are being offered as much as $4,000? Since Bremer signed a bunch of orders just before his performace art piece called "transfer of sovereignty," isn't it fair for progressives to ask why no equal pay for equal work provisions were included in these orders? After all, if the man can ban the honking of horns and lift controls on capital flight, why couldn't he ensure South African mercenaries --who have a track records as fine as Pinochet's goons-- received a fair piece of the action?
Posted by zeynep at 03:12 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
October 26, 2004
Apartheid Over? Need a Job? Iraq Awaits You.
Just what Iraq needs, South African mercenaries:
Fat pay as high as ten times of wage earned at home has allured dozens of South Africa's special-task police to Iraq to work as security personnel for the country's interim government and the coalition forces, South African media reported on Tuesday.The South African Police Services (SAPS) elite Special Task Force has lost 28 members to Iraqi coalition force recruiters fromits Pretoria base in the past 18 months, with similar numbers leaving the Durban and Cape Town bases, Pretoria News reported.
The newspaper said the Special Task Force "is facing a crisis,"because it is believed nearly 60 percent of its active task force members were lured away throughout the country.
...The latest victims were former soldier Johan Botha and former policeman Louis Campher, who worked for Omega Risk Solutions, a security company to protect construction workers in Iraq. They died in an attack outside Baghdad on Oct. 12.
Here's a brief nugget from the history of this "Special Task Force" that tells you most of what you need to know:
In 1975, the SAP [South African Police] established an elite anti-terrorist unit known as Unit 19 or the Special Task Force. The Special Task Force played an important role in the training of the police Riot Units established at more or less the same time. Based in several centres around the country, its recruits were drawn largely from those with counter-insurgency training. Thus, for example, Colonel Theunis 'Rooi Rus' Swanepoel, veteran of the sabotage squad and Ongulumbashe, was drafted into Soweto on 16 June 1976 to command a riot unit which was responsible for a high number of civilian casualties. Interviewed in the 1980s about the operations of his unit in Soweto, he stated that he regretted only not using more force. "You can only stop violence by using a greater amount of violence".
You may remember that this protest was instigated by the Apartheid government's order that Afrikaans be mandated as the language of instruction at black schools. Here's the his lifeless body of thirteen year old Hector Peterson, fatally shot by members of this unit on that day:
And here are the questions from that day, still with us in many places of the world including Iraq:
And to illustrate how far we've come along, here's how the famous travel guide Fodor's website describes that day (with an official death toll of 23, although many believe it was in the hundreds):
The march turned nasty quickly. The protesters, mostly young students, got somewhat overexuberant, and so, too, did the police. The police started firing into the youthful crowd.
Got that? The protesters got "over"exuberant, so did the police. We all had a bit of a hangover the next day, you know.
Posted by zeynep at 10:13 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack