DAVID CLINE
Currently national president of Veterans for Peace and a longtime coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Cline is a disabled combat veteran. He said today: “Bush is using the terrorist attacks of September 11 to wage endless war abroad and reduce freedom here at home. The veterans are one of the groups who have some sense of the reality of war. We’ve been used by our government to enforce unjust policies. We’re also used to justify future military attacks; the government doesn’t care about us much until they need us to wave the flags for a new generation of recruits. War is a tool for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld now. They want to control the oil. Moreover, they are chickenhawks; they used their privilege so they didn’t put themselves on the line, even though they have been for war.”
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S. BRIAN WILLSON
Willson, a former officer in Vietnam who is active in Veterans For Peace, is producing a documentary about U.S. intervention in Korea. He said today: “Many veterans intimately know the savagery of wars and their fraudulent, political pretexts. Our nation’s pathological addiction to insatiable consumption and its corresponding dependency upon war to protect disproportionate global privilege is leading to species suicide unless we experience an evolutionary shift integrating ecological mindfulness. People are capable of replacing oligarchy with participatory democracy. This is a pivotal evolutionary moment, begging people to choose nonviolence and conscious living as an alternative to mindless, impending extinction. We need genuine global justice, not more veterans or war memorials.”
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ELLEN BARFIELD
Barfield was stationed in South Korea just after the 1979 coup there. She said today: “My focus this ‘Veterans’ — more properly Armistice — Day is the strong connection between U.S. training and/or supplying troops in other countries, and later terroristic acts against their own people or against the United States. A prime example of this is the U.S. Army School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Ft. Benning, Georgia.” Barfield will be participating in a School of the Americas Watch demonstration November 15-17.
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ERIK GUSTAFSON
Co-founder of the newly-formed Veterans for Common Sense, Gustafson is also executive director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center.
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MARC LIGGIN
Liggin spent five years in the Army and got out as a conscientious objector with the help of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors organization. He now volunteers for the GI Rights Hotline. Liggin said today: “In my day job I supervise a 9-1-1 medical and fire emergency dispatch center. I can honestly tell you that working the GI Rights Hotline is a bit more stressful than working 9-1-1…. Callers often pour out their life story. I hear about the grief and pain they’ve caused themselves and their family by joining the military. Many want to kill themselves just to get out. Parents and spouses call, pleading for the freedom of their loved ones. The calls and e-mails are endless.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167