A P.O.V. PBS film, produced and directed by Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan.

If you missed this film you can rent the DVD. It is a thoughtful look at the issues facing soldiers today.

For a trailer and background, go to www.soldiers-themovie.com,

It's very good, and was made with the full cooperation of the U.S. military, which allowed the producer to film recruits getting training to kill. It lets the viewer decide what to think about the subject, as all different sides are presented.

SIGN THE 50,000 SIGNATURES PETITION FOR RELEASE OF IRAQI JOURNALIST WHO THREW SHOES AT BUSH

The 50,000 Signatures Campaign for Zaidi

The campaign will proceed in demand of the release of the Iraqi Journalist, Montadhar Al-Zaydi who hurled a pair of shoes at George Bush on 12/14/2008 in Baghdad in reaction to Bush's immoral invasion of Iraq and the war-crimes committed by the occupying forces with the aid of local warlords.

We hereby sign below to demand the immediate release of the Journalist Montadhar Al-Zaydi, without any constraints or conditions. We also hold Al-Maliki's government and the Bush administration accountable and responsible for his life, dignity, and well-being.From the Barack Obama Website:  "On December 13th and 14th, supporters all across the country are coming together to reflect on this monumental journey and plan on how they can bring change to both Washington and their own communities."

> sign petition

I beg your pardon,
Mr President

Dear Mr Bush,

Hey! Congratulations on the way you dodged those shoes! You made it look so easy – like you'd being dodging stuff all your life! And that smart remark likening the incident to "driving down the street and having people not gesturing with all five fingers" – whatever it meant it sounded cool, man! Fantastic!

But I'm a bit worried about what's happened since. Muntazar al-Zaidi has become a bit of a hero – with all those rallies in Sadr city and Fallujah, with people marching around holding up their shoes like the crowd scenes in Monty Python's Life of Brian. And the longer he stays in custody of the Iraqi police the more of a martyr he is likely to appear. His brother, Dargham, says he's already had his hand and several ribs broken, and is suffering from internal bleeding and has an eye injury. And some say he's liable to seven years imprisonment (some even say 15), but as long as he remains being beaten up in prison he's liable to be seen as a martyr.

So would it would it be OK for me to offer you a little bit of advice, Mr President? You know it's customary for US presidents on their last day of office to issue a slew of pardons, so why not pardon Zaidi as you go – you know, just to undermine his position as hero/martyr of the Muslim world.

Now, I know he's officially in the hands of the Iraqi police, but you and I and the rest of the world knows that Nouri al-Maliki will do more or less whatever you like and he's bound to take a lenient view, if you do.

Of course, you'll be reluctant to damage your reputation as the president who has granted the fewest pardons and commutations since the second world war, apart from your father, but it really might be worth it.

I admit that Zaidi is guilty of throwing his shoes at you, but you've pardoned people for things almost as bad as that. You pardoned Scooter Libby when he was indicted for obstruction, perjury and making false statements to federal investigators. And now Dick Cheney has admitted that he did authorise the use of torture it looks probable that you'll have to pardon him – otherwise he'll be up on a charge of war crimes once you leave office.

Come to think of it, Donald Rumsfeld might also be in need of a pardon, after the Senate armed services committee said that he bore a major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Graib, Guantanamo Bay and other military detention centres.

The report also implied that Rumsfeld wasn't exactly being honest when he claimed that the abuses were nothing to do with him and were the result of a few bad apples amongst the soldiery. According to the report the abuse "was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own", but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Rumsfeld and other top officials, who "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees".

The report, which was jointly issued by Senators John McCain and Carl Levin, also rejects Cheney's assertion that torture paid off. It says the techniques used, "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority".

And while I'm thinking about it, it might be advisable to pardon yourself before you leave office for any possible war crimes, such as your involvement in killing and maiming over a million Iraqi civilians over the last few years, destroying their country's infrastructure, destabilising the place and creating chaos in the Middle East.

If Zaidi gets 15 years for throwing his shoes at you, Mr President, there could be problems getting away with all that. Best to pardon him, as well as Cheney, Rumsfeld and yourself, and get it over with.

What d'you say?

Recent News Interviews (Democracy Now)

AWOL US Soldier Seeks Asylum in Germany Over Returning to "Illegal" War in Iraq

A US soldier who went absent without leave a year and a half ago to avoid returning to Iraq has applied for asylum in Germany. Specialist Andre Shepherd served in Iraq between September 2004 and February 2005 as an Apache helicopter mechanic. When his unit was called up to return to Iraq in early 2007, he went AWOL to avoid redeployment, calling the war “illegal.” He lived underground in Germany for a year and a half before applying for asylum two weeks ago. We speak with Shepherd in his first international broadcast interview. Democracynow.org

US Use of Bases in Germany for Iraq War Goes Against German Constitution that Forbids Launching Wars from German Soil, Says Activist

Germany is home to tens of thousands of US troops and the largest number of US bases in the world outside of America. We speak with US activist Elsa Rassbach. She moved to Berlin, where she is part of the American Voices Abroad Military Project. Democracynow.org

Senate Report Finds Rumsfeld Directly Responsible for US Torture of Prisoners

A bipartisan Senate report has accused former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials of being directly responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and other US prisons. We speak with the man who sued Donald Rumsfeld in Berlin, German, attorney Wolfgang Kaleck. Democracynow.org

Turn it down, it's torture
Artists condemn use of music as weapon of war

NEARLY 20 years ago, the US armed forces in Panama used the music of Guns N’ Roses and Elvis Presley, played at maximum volume over loudspeakers, to try and drive the country’s leader, Manuel Noriega, to surrender.

A tactic was born. Since then, music played at unbearable volumes has been frequently deployed in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere by the CIA, as part of a sophisticated portfolio of torture against detainees.

Now a collective of bands and artists, including some whose recordings have been used against their wishes, has demanded that the US stops using its work as an instrument of war.

Bruce Springsteen has already voiced anger at the use of Born in the USA. Now, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he has been joined by artists including Massive Attack, Elbow, Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, Unkle’s James Lavelle, Matthew Herbert, the Magic Numbers and Bill Bailey.

“What we’re talking about here is people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music blaring at them,” said musician David Gray. “That is nothing but torture. It doesn’t matter what the music is.”

Among the songs most used are: Metallica’s Enter Sandman, Eminem’s White America, AC/DC’s Hells Bells and the Sesame Street theme song. One of the reasons for using loud music in this way is that it leaves no marks on the body. – (Guardian service)

Reuters adds: Two dozen people who lost loved ones in the September 11th attacks issued a statement yesterday denouncing the Guantánamo war crimes trials as illegitimate, shameful and politically motivated.

“These prosecutions have been politically motivated from the start, are designed to ensure quick convictions at the expense of due process and transparency, and are structured to prevent the revelation of abusive interrogations and torture engaged in by the US government,” said the 24 relatives who signed yesterday’s statement, distributed through the American Civil Liberties Union.

For Bush - and Obama -
a Gut Check

George Bush's candid interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson has one moment of awful truth - when the president, asked if he'd have gone to war had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, stated: "That's a do-over that I can't do." If only he could.

More than 4,207 US service members, 314 coalition troops (including 176 British fatalities) and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis might be alive, including, of course, Saddam Hussein, the former ruler of Iraq whom Bush promised to disarm together with America's "friends of freedom". Saddam, Bush proclaimed in the weeks leading up to his decision to invade, and subsequently occupy, Iraq, was "a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons." The Iraqi dictator was "a danger to America and our friends and allies, and that is why the world has said 'disarm'".

Bush, in his revealing interview, claimed he wished "that the intelligence had been different", but that was never really the point. Bush, like so many others, had made up his mind regarding Saddam independent of the facts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Try as he might to spread responsibility for his actions by pointing out that "a lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," the fact is WMD was simply an excuse used by the president to fulfil his self-proclaimed destiny as a war-time president who would avenge his father's inability (or, more accurately, sage unwillingness) to finish the job back in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war.

Talk Peace

As pre-war British government discussions with Bush administration officials reveal, there was never a solid case to be made on Iraq's possession of WMD in the months leading up to the decision to invade, simply a sophomoric cause-effect relationship linking regime change (the preferred policy) and WMD (the excuse) "in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD" (quoting Blair).

The intelligence on Iraq's WMD was whatever the president and his cronies (including his erstwhile ally at 10 Downing Street) wanted it to be. Over seven years of UN-mandated weapons inspection activity, conducted from 1991 until 1998, had produced a well-defined (and documented) record of disarmament which, while not providing absolute verification of the disposition of every aspect of Saddam's WMD programmes, did allow any observer interested in the facts to ascertain that Iraq was fundamentally disarmed from a qualitative perspective. This, coupled with the presence of the world's most technologically advanced and intrusive arms control regime monitoring the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure, provided a high degree of confidence that Saddam had neither retained nor reconstituted his WMD programme.

There was a gap in inspection coverage of Iraq from December 1998 until November 2002, brought on by the removal of weapons inspectors at the behest of the United States (during the administration of Bill Clinton). However, no verifiable intelligence emerged during this time to credibly suggest that Iraq had sought to reconstitute its WMD programme. Instead, the Bush administration developed arguments that spoke of a "re-examination" of the "facts" from the perspective of a "post-9/11 world".

But the diversionary tactic of bait and switch, where the so-called global war on terror was used to justify an attack on Iraq, did not in any meaningful way alter the reality that Iraq had been disarmed. The Pentagon tried to provide glossy satellite images and hyped-up speculation about what Saddam was up to in September 2002 (and the British followed suit, publishing their since-discredited "dossier"), but by that November UN weapons inspectors were back in Iraq, and by January 2003 had discredited the entire intelligence case the Pentagon (and the British) had so clumsily cobbled together.

I and others did our very best to highlight the factual vacuum in which Bush and Blair operated while making their case for war, but to no avail. The decision to invade had been made months before the UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq. Their work, and the intelligence they provided, was not only ignored, but indeed was never relevant to the larger issue, centred as it was on regime change, not disarmament.

The most important aspect of Bush's interview rests not in what he admits, but rather in what he avoids, when he stated that the failure to find WMD in Iraq was "the biggest regret of all the presidency." He doesn't regret the decision that led America to war, or the processes that facilitated the falsification of a case for war. He doesn't regret the violation of international law, the deaths of so many innocents, the physical destruction of Iraq or America's loss of its moral high ground. He merely regrets the fact that his "gut feel" on Saddam's WMD arsenal was wrong.

In this, truth be told, Bush is no different from the majority of society in both America and Great Britain. It is easy to moralise today, armed with the certainty of 20/20 hindsight, that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, the case for war a fabrication. But how many people will admit that Iraq was better off under Saddam than it is today, ruined by conflict generated by the destruction of Iraqi society prompted by the toppling of the Iraqi dictator? How many people will decry the kangaroo court and the lynch mob that convicted and executed Saddam as a travesty of both law and justice? Unless one is willing to repudiate all aspects of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, inclusive of the termination of Saddam's regime, then any indignation shown over the so-called intelligence failure represents nothing more than hypocrisy.

American policy in Iraq must not be viewed in isolation, but rather as part of a larger problem set, one that Barack Obama will have to deal with if he is to avoid repeating Bush's mistakes. America, and indeed the world, may very well have serious issues with the governments of nations such as Syria, North Korea and Iran. However, the solutions to these problems rest not in the form of unilateral policies formulated and implemented from Washington DC. That is how we got into Iraq to begin with. Rather, Obama must put action to his promise to embrace multilateral solutions to the problems of the future.

This means foregoing ideologically (or politically) driven pressure to act void of international consensus driven by a collective appreciation of international law (ie, no regime change, unless the world properly mandates it). It means trusting in the integrity and ability of organisations such as the UN Special Commission (the UN weapons inspectors), even if their product contradicts US intelligence sources. It also means trusting such organisations enough to share such intelligence so that it might be thoroughly investigated. And, if and when a rogue regime is overthrown and its leaders brought to justice, it means supporting an international court of law in which to try them for any of their alleged crimes.

The latter is of particular importance, especially when it comes to Obama, given his proclivity for announcing his intention to "hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden". Such bravado could become his undoing, just as gunning for Saddam was the undoing of Bush. America seemed content to let the perpetrators of the Srebrenica atrocities, who murdered some 8,000 Bosnian men and boys, be apprehended in accordance with accepted international practice, and be tried in an international court. Yet somehow the murderer of 3,000 Americans deserves special, unilateral American justice. There is an inherent inconsistency here.

In order for a multilateral solution to be genuine, it must be the product of a multilateral consensus driven by accepted ideals and principles, and not simply a unilateral dictate imposed on others by the strong. Let there be no doubt, the Iraq war was a product of American bullying, not just of Iraq, but the entire world. The current conflict in Afghanistan, threatening as it is to spill over into neighbouring Pakistan, is no different.

The unilateral desire of the US to exact revenge disguised as justice for the crimes committed on 9/11 has overshadowed the mission of creating a stable and moderate government in post-Taliban Afghanistan, to the detriment of both missions and the people of the region. Obama's singular focus on bringing bin Laden to heel will simply perpetuate this failure.

Obama would do well to embrace those international multilateral institutions, such as the UN and the International Court of Justice in the Hague, which his predecessor eschewed. Subordinating the American desire for revenge in the interest of regional and international stability would represent the living manifestation of the multilateralism Obama has stated he wants to pursue. Leadership is the product of much more than simple rhetoric, and simply saying something "is" does not make it so. Putting action to words is the challenge, and the mark, of any true leader. I am hopeful Barack Obama can be the genuine leader he aspires to be. America, and the world, will much better for it.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998 and is the author of Iraq Confidential (IB Tauris, 2006).

NPR Morning Edition, December 19, 2008

A judge in Iraq says the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush was beaten after the incident and had bruises on his face and around his eyes. The judge told the Associated Press that the court has filed a complaint on behalf of Muntadhar al-Zeidi and will try to identify those who beat him.

Judge Rejects Watada Retrial
A new court-martial for the Hawaii-born soldier and Iraq war objector would amount to double jeopardy, a federal judge rules
October 22, 2008, Associated Press/Honolulu Star-Bulletin: Mary Adamski

Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, of Honolulu, cannot be retried on key charges stemming from his refusal to deploy to Iraq with his unit, a federal judge has ruled.

Watada's court-martial for missing his unit's deployment and conduct unbecoming of an officer ended in a mistrial in February 2007. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle of Tacoma, Wash., ruled that the Army's attempt to retry him on several charges would violate his constitutional protection against double jeopardy.

The judge sent back to the military court two charges against Watada that were related to interviews he did with reporters about his objections to the Iraq war. But it was unclear if he would face another court-martial. Army officials did not comment, saying they had not yet reviewed Settle's ruling.

Watada, a 1996 graduate of Kalani High School, is the first commissioned officer to be court-martialed for refusing to go to Iraq. He contended that the war is illegal and that he would be a party to war crimes if he served in Iraq.

He had faced four years in prison and a dishonorable discharge if convicted.

Guantanamo: prosecutor who quit had 'grave misgivings' about fairness Convinced that key evidence was being withheld from the defense, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld went from being a 'true believer to someone who felt truly deceived' by the tribunals. Josh Meyer, LA Times, October 12, 2008 WASHINGTON -- Darrel J. Vandeveld was in despair. The hard-nosed lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a self-described conformist praised by his superiors for his bravery in Iraq, had lost faith in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals in which he was a prosecutor. His work was top secret, making it impossible to talk to family or friends. So the devout Catholic -- working away from home -- contacted a priest online. Even if he had no doubt about the guilt of the accused, he wrote in an August e-mail, "I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country. . . . "I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they suffer, I'll lose a lot of friends." Two days later, he took the unusual step of reaching out for advice from his opposing counsel, a military defense lawyer. "How do I get myself out of this office?" Vandeveld asked Major David J.R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who represented the young Afghan Vandeveld was prosecuting for an attack on U.S. soldiers -- despite Vandeveld's doubts about whether Mohammed Jawad would get a fair trial. Vandeveld said he was seeking a "practical way of extricating myself from this mess." Last month, Vandeveld did just that, resigning from the Jawad case, the military commissions overall and, ultimately, active military duty. In doing so, he has become even more of a central figure in the "mess" he considers Guantanamo to be. Vandeveld is at least the fourth prosecutor to resign under protest. Questions about the fairness of the tribunals have been raised by the very people charged with conducting them, according to legal experts, human rights observers and current and former military officials. Vandeveld's claims are particularly explosive. In a declaration and subsequent testimony, he said the U.S. government was not providing defense lawyers with the evidence it had against their clients, including exculpatory information -- material considered helpful to the defense. Saying that the accused enemy combatants were more likely to be wrongly convicted without that evidence, Vandeveld testified that he went from being a "true believer to someone who felt truly deceived" by the tribunals. The system in place at the U.S. military facility in Cuba, he wrote in his declaration, was so dysfunctional that it deprived "the accused of basic due process and subject[ed] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct." Army Col. Lawrence J. Morris, the chief prosecutor and Vandeveld's boss, said the Office of Military Commissions provides "every scrap of paper and information" to the defense. Morris said that Vandeveld was disgruntled because his commanding officers disagreed with some of his legal tactics and that he "never once" raised substantive concerns. Morris said last week that he had no idea why Vandeveld had become so antagonistic toward the tribunal process, adding that the lieutenant colonel's outspokenness angered him because it was unfair and was a "broad blast at some very ethical and hardworking people whose performances are being smudged groundlessly." Vandeveld, who was prosecuting seven tribunal cases -- nearly a third of pending cases -- has declined to be interviewed about the particulars of the Jawad case. But he did engage in a series of e-mails with The Times about his general concerns, before being "reminded" last week that he could not talk to the press until his release from active duty was final. In the future, he said, he plans to speak out. "I don't know how else the creeping rot of the commissions and the politics that fostered and continued to surround them could be exposed to the curative powers of the sunlight," he said. "I care not for myself; our enemies deserve nothing less than what we would expect from them were the situations reversed. More than anything, I hope we can rediscover some of our American values." Some tribunal defense lawyers are preparing to call Vandeveld as a witness, saying that his claims of systemic problems at Guantanamo, if true, could alter the outcome of every pending case there -- and force the turnover of long-sought information on coercive interrogation tactics and other controversial measures used against their clients in the war on terrorism. For years, defense lawyers and human rights organizations have raised similar concerns in individual cases. "But we never had anyone on the inside who could validate those claims," said Michael J. Berrigan, the deputy chief defense counsel for the commissions. Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vandeveld led a relatively placid life outside Erie, Pa., with his wife and four children. He worked as a senior deputy state attorney general in charge of consumer protection in the region, and he served on his local school board in Millcreek Township. Anyone who knows him, Vandeveld, 48, told The Times, "will probably tell you that I've been a conformist my entire life, and [that] to speak out against the injustice wrought upon our worst enemies entailed a weather shift in my worldview." Mark Tanenbaum, an English teacher whose children are friends with Vandeveld's, remembers talking to him while sitting around campfires at high school gatherings. "We talked a lot about religion. I'm Jewish. We'd talk about faith, value-based philosophy. We were kindred spirits in this. "With him, it is all about doing the right thing." Vandeveld, called to active duty after 9/11, received glowing evaluations as a Pentagon legal advisor and judge advocate in Bosnia, the Horn of Africa and Iraq. "An absolutely outstanding, first-class performance by an extraordinarily gifted, intelligent, knowledgeable and experienced judge advocate, whose potential is utterly unlimited," his commanding officer, Gen. Charles J. Barr, wrote in his June 2006 evaluation. "One of the corps' best and brightest. Save the very toughest jobs in the corps for him." Continued top of next column

(Continued from left column) From his Iraq assignment, Vandeveld went to Guantanamo, where he began locking horns over the Jawad case with Frakt -- a law professor at Western State University in Fullerton and a former active-duty Air Force lawyer who volunteered for the tribunals. Frakt believed that his Afghan client was, at worst, a confused teen who had been brainwashed and drugged by militant extremists who coerced him into participating in a grenade-throwing incident with other older -- and more guilty -- men. He insisted that the prosecution was withholding key information or not obtaining it from those at the Pentagon, CIA and other U.S. agencies that had investigated and interrogated Jawad. Vandeveld believed that Jawad was a war criminal who had been taught by an Al Qaeda-linked group to kill American troops and, if caught, to make up claims he had been tortured and was underage. Vandeveld insisted that he had been providing all evidence to the defense. But by July, Vandeveld told The Times, he had grown increasingly troubled. He kept finding sources of information and documents that appeared to bolster Frakt's claims that evidence was being withheld -- including some favorable to the defense, such as information suggesting that Jawad was underage, that he had been drugged before the incident and that he had been abused by U.S. forces afterward. Vandeveld also was having difficulty obtaining authorization to release documents in his possession to the defense. On Aug. 5, he e-mailed Father John Dear, a well-known Jesuit peace activist. Dear, who boasts of being arrested 75 times in protests, encouraged him to act, saying he might "save lives and change the direction of the entire policy." With Frakt pressing for the charges against Jawad to be dismissed due to "outrageous government misconduct," Vandeveld proposed a plea agreement under which Jawad, now thought to be 22, could return to Afghanistan for rehabilitation. But his superiors rejected it, Vandeveld said. By late August, he had told Frakt that there were other "disquieting" things about Guantanamo and that his superiors were refusing to address them or to let him quietly transfer out, Frakt said in an interview. "Now might be a good time to take a courageous stand and expose some of the 'disquieting' things that you have alluded to, whatever they may be," Frakt replied in a Sept. 2 e-mail, noting that there would soon be a change of administrations in Washington. "It wouldn't be a bad idea to distance yourself from a process that has become largely discredited, or at least distinguish yourself as one of the good guys, an ethical prosecutor trying to do the right thing," Frakt wrote. On Sept. 9, Vandeveld e-mailed Dear to say he had resigned from the Guantanamo military tribunals: "The reaction was the expected outrage and condemnation. I have and will maintain my equanimity and, while scared for me and for my family, know that Christ will watch over me." That, however, was only the beginning. In late September -- after the military, according to Frakt, initially tried to block it -- Vandeveld testified by video link for the defense, saying he believed that insurmountable problems with the tribunals might make them incapable of meting out justice fairly. Morris said that Vandeveld is not qualified to speak about systemwide problems at Guantanamo. But Frakt said that he is and that Vandeveld's testimony and declaration only scratched the surface of his concerns, judging by their extensive conversations and hundreds of e-mail exchanges. "There is a lot more that he knows," Frakt said. josh.meyer@latimes.com Iraq Vet Injured at Hofstra Debate NYCLU Calls for Investigation October 16, 2008, New York Civil Liberties Union (Photo: Bill Perry) - The New York Civil Liberties Union today called for an immediate investigation by the Nassau County Police Department into the use of horses by the department’s mounted unit after an Iraq War veteran’s cheekbone was broken by a horse outside the presidential debate Wednesday night at Hofstra University. Nick Morgan, an Army veteran and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, was outside of the debate hall last night with a group of people engaged in a peaceful demonstration when, at approximately 7:30 p.m., Nassau County police officers used horses to move the group onto the sidewalk. One of the horses kicked Morgan in the head, knocked him unconscious and broke his cheekbone. Other peaceful protesters were also hit by the horses. Morgan was not part of a group that engaged in an act of non-violent civil disobedience that had been coordinated with the Nassau County Police Department and that had concluded. The directors of the NYCLU’s chapters in Nassau and Suffolk counties were on the scene after monitoring protests throughout the day and both watched as it happened. “It is shocking that someone who served his country would be treated so disgracefully by the Nassau County Police Department,” said Tara Keenan-Thomson, director of the Nassau County Chapter of the NYCLU. “It is the duty of the police to respect and protect the First Amendment rights of peaceful protestors. We must find out immediately what went wrong.” The NYCLU is preparing a letter to the department that will call for an investigation into the use of horses by officers as well as a copy of the policy and training materials utilized by the mounted unit. “It is indeed ironic that the presidential debate – an event that epitomizes American democracy – became the occasion to trample on an American’s First Amendment rights,” said Andrea Callan, director of the NYCLU’s Suffolk County Chapter. “It is our hope that this was a freak incident and not a regular occurrence.” photo bill perry