More Real Heroes of Gulf War II

U.S. Army Major Refuses Order to Seize Iraq TV Station

May 12, 2003 (AGR)- An American officer was removed from command in Iraq after courageously disobeying orders to seize a TV station.

The only TV station in Mosul, an Iraqi city of two million people, lost its cameras to looters and so turned to outside programming. The station aired programs from various Arabic news channels and from NBC. When it televised some programs from al-Jazeera, however, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus ordered his troops to seize the station.

The U.S. has criticized al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, as being biased against the U.S. because it broadcast footage of civilian casualties from American bombs.

Major Charmaine Means, the head of the Army public affairs office in Mosul, said that she could not agree to the seizure, saying that to do so would mean that the station would be intimidated into airing only material approved by the U.S. military.

What happened next was reported by Yochi J. Dreazen in the Wall Street Journal: "Maj. Means was told to pick up a nearby telephone. On the other end, Col. Thomas Schoenback, chief of staff of the division, ordered her to go along with Gen. Petraeus's plan to take the station, according to people familiar with the matter. When she again refused, he relieved her of her duties. A short time later, she was told that she would be flown out of Mosul on an Army helicopter..."

The refusal of any officer in any army to obey a command is an extremely rare event. It was an uncommon act of great courage, and yet Maj. Means' refusal was reported only in a small story on page 4A of the Journal. There was no report of the event in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, or anywhere else. An internet search for Maj. Charmaine Means turned up only the March 2003, listing by the Department of the Army of her promotion to major. A day after the Journal story ran, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. was "considering" taking over the station, and made no mention of Maj. Means' refusal to carry out her orders or her removal from command. Maj. Means' action could well result in a court martial, and will almost certainly end her Army career. Her courage in resisting an illegal order would undoubtedly be cause for great commendation from those who favor freedom of speech if the incident were widely reported.

That an important story like this went virtually unreported shows the importance that the military places on controlling the media in Iraq and, and the same time, hiding that control.

Excerpted from article by Charlie Thomas, Media Watch Asheville Global Report.

Hundreds of U.S. Soldiers Emerge as Conscientious Objectors

NEW YORK - Although only a handful of them have gone public, at least several hundred U.S. soldiers have applied for conscientious objector (CO) status since January, says a rights group.

The Center on Conscience and War (CCW), which advises military personnel on CO discharges, reports that since the start of 2003-when many soldiers realized they might have to fight in the Iraq war-there has been a massive increase in the number of enlisted soldiers who have applied for CO status.

"The bare minimum is several hundred, and this number only includes the ones that have come to my group and to groups we're associated with," CCW official J.E. McNeil told IPS... Only a small percentage of people who apply receive a CO discharge. But military statistics lag about one year behind, and the decisions on CO applications take on average six months to one year-sometimes as long as two years-so the exact number of COs in the present war will not be known for some time.

Also, military figures do not count applications from servicemen who are absent without leave, so they will not include Stephen Funk, a marine reserve who was on unauthorized leave before he publicly declared himself a conscientious objector and reported back to his military base in San Jose, California, April 1...[See Funk page 10.]

"People in other countries are proud that an American can stand up to the hegemony and the violence of the war in Iraq."

Soldiers in other countries, including Turkey, have refused to fight in the current war sparked by last month's U.S.-led attack. Three British servicemen were sent home from the Persian Gulf after objecting to the conduct of the invasion and a member of the British Parliament, George Galloway, says he "is calling on British forces to refuse to obey the illegal orders" involved in the war.

As it is in the British army, CO discharge is a long-established practice in the U.S. armed forces and always peaks in wartime. CCW says there were an estimated 200,000 COs in the Vietnam War, 4,300 in the Korean War, 37,000 in World War II and 3,500 in World War I.

The military granted 111 COs from the army in the first Gulf War before putting a stop to the practice, resulting in 2,500 soldiers being sent to prison, says Bill Gavlin from the Center on Conscience and War, quoting a report from the Boston Globe newspaper. During that war, a number of U.S. COs in Camp LeJeune in North Carolina state they were "beaten, harassed and treated horribly," Gavlin says. In some cases, COs were put on planes bound for Kuwait, told that they could not apply for CO status or that they could only apply after they'd already gone to war...

Exerpted from article by Gabriel Packard, Published on Tuesday, April 15, 2003 by Inter Press Service.