continues.


Next slide, please. At one point during the siege of Fallujah, it was decided that we were going to allow women and children to leave the city. We thought this was the most magnanimous thing we could have done, and yet our rules were to let only women and children out. And so, any male over the age of fourteen or, as we were told, anyone who was old enough to be in your fighting hole was too old to get out of the city, was turned away. And so, my responsibility during this time at certain points was to go out on this bridge and turn away families. And like I said, we thought this was the most magnanimous thing we could have been doing. However, it’s clear that we’re giving these families an impossible choice, whether they could stay together with their families intact or split their families up and hope that half of them end up with something better. But all that we had to offer them was literally the mosque across the street, good luck. And what happened there can only be described as either the deliberate or careless creation of internally displaced refugees.


During the siege of Fallujah, our rules of engagement changed so often that we were often uncertain of them. And at one point, anyone who was described as a suspicious observer would be a legitimate target: anyone holding a cell phone, binoculars or, at one point, anyone out after curfew. And this led to an incident where Marines were firing at firefighters and cops silhouetted against a fire that our indirect fire had caused who were trying to help out the civilians that were being affected by that fire.


After the siege of Fallujah, my team was tasked with setting up a checkpoint at the Civil Military Operations Center at Fallujah, where we detained various personnel at snap VCPs during the summer of 2004, many of whom were harassed unnecessarily. One such person had a bag of cash in his back seat and was harassed by human intelligence officers before being released. And their abuse of him was such that they were even reprimanded by a higher officer, but they determined that there was no reason to detain him, and he was let go. If that money was not intended for the insurgency before this incident, I have to assume that it was afterwards.


I realized that we in civil affairs were a fig leaf. We were there to make the occupation look good. We even came up with a slogan to justify our existence to the infantry commanders that we had to beg to be able to get out and do our missions. And it was "We care, so that you don’t have to.”


If there are any questions from members of Congress as to the particulars of any incident that I have mentioned here, I would be happy to provide names of all personnel and units involved, dates and grid coordinates. I hope that my testimony has helped shed light into some of the shadows that make up our collective denial of the occupation of Iraq. As a country, we have allowed fear to overwhelm us and have failed ourselves by allowing this criminal occupation to have ever happened.


You do not have to have served to see how recent pressures on the military are making us weaker as a country. You do not have to have witnessed the occupation firsthand to see its absurdity. And you do not have to be an expert on international relations to see the disastrous effects of our foreign policy. Ignorance, propaganda and distraction have made up the last refuge of those Americans who would rather remain in denial about our current state of affairs. Now that we are facing the truth and the majority of America is at least nominally against the occupation of Iraq, what fate will we claim for our nation? For some, their silence will be their hypocrisy, and their inaction will be their complicity with the destruction of our great union.


But I have an unwavering faith in my country, and I know that the self-righting ship of the United States of America will one day regain its course, but only with the great toil, courage

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When An Elder Passes On To Higher Life , Its Like One Of The Library Have Shut Down