Guest article by Aidan Delgado

Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.

-Albert Einstein

On the morning of September 11th 2001, I enlisted in the United States Army Reserve. As I signed my contract, everyone was suddenly distracted by something on the television. The disaster unfolded. Yet I, as a naïve eighteen year old, felt myself filling with moral certainty and righteousness: The homeland is under attack. This is the reason we have a military. I never considered that what happened that day, the feelings it unleashed in the American people, would lead us far so astray. I could not have conceived that three years after that day, I would be standing inside Abu Ghraib prison looking at photographs of prisoners that my colleagues, other US soldiers, had just shot and desecrated.

We as a nation responded to Sep. 11 with righteous indignation. We were ready to follow a man to a war on the slimmest of pretexts, on no credible evidence and against worldwide condemnation. We were so sure of ourselves. That moral certainty is the most dangerous force in the universe. As a young soldier deployed to Iraq in March of 2003, I saw the same certainty in the faces of other soldiers around me as they sneeringly joked they would ‘burn some rag-heads’ and not return home without killing someone.

My own feelings had changed. I was becoming a Buddhist. I was looking around me at war and its consequences, thinking to myself, is this justice? I saw a guy in my unit whip an Iraqi child with a steel antennae for bothering him about food and candy. I saw members of my unit and others, shoot three prisoners at Abu Ghraib for demonstrating against their abysmal living conditions1. Is this the face of the United States, defender of peace and liberty? Ultimately I had to make a decision, to draw my own line in the sand and say aloud, “This is as far as I go.” I applied for conscientious objector status as a Buddhist. A year and a half later, long after I returned from Iraq, I was honorably discharged from the Army.

So now I walk the peace road. I travel, I speak, I show slides of Abu Ghraib and the men who died there, I talk about the war everyday and still sometimes I feel like I’m trying to hold back the ocean. Even now there is a chorus of pundits and chicken-hawks doing their best to make light of every abuse, to trivialize every misdeed, to sell us that old poison pill: you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. At Haditha a massacre of civilians, at Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, at Mahmoudiya the rape and murder of a 15 yr old girl and her family, and still we have TV personalities and government mouth-pieces telling us that these events never happened, or if they did, they were only the work of isolated madmen. No. Those are the inevitable consequences of war. As a veteran of the Iraq War, as a conscientious objector and a Buddhist, as a soldier who served at Abu Ghraib, I refuse to let my country continue down this path. Somewhere behind us there was a line in the sand, and we as a nation have crossed it. We’ve taken the easiest road, the simple road that requires us to think and empathize the least: they’re terrorists, they attacked us, so whatever we do in response is justified. No. Not everything is justified.

Aidan Delgado is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, an activist and a writer. His peace work has been featured on Democracy Now, CNN, and The New York Times among others. His new book, The Sutras of Abu Ghraib, tells the story of his deployment to Iraq and Abu Ghraib prison as well as his transformation into a Buddhist and conscientious objector.

http://www.aidandelgado.com

1see Taguba Report, “Findings and Recommendations,” Part 2, section 34, subsection i: “November 24th 03, - Shooting of Detainee at Abu Ghraib (320th MP Battalion),” p. 29

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