By Karin Zeitvogel, Middle East Online:

Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American U.S. military recruiters love.

“I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school,” the now 24-year-old said.

“I was ‘filet mignon’ for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade,” or around 16 years old, he added.

Chiroux joined the U.S. army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.

He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.

On Thursday, he refused to go, saying he considers Iraq an illegal war.

“I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq,” Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

“My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation… I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation,” he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.

The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.

Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told a half-dozen US lawmakers and scores of people who packed into a small hearing room of “lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis.”

He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq, to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.

Goldsmith said he had “self-medicated” for several months to treat the wounds of the war.

Another soldier said he had to boost his dosage of medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia — two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq — before testifying.

Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the psychological traumas of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

A group of veterans sitting in the hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades’ testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.

Almost to a man, the soldiers who testified denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.

Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking U.S. officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of U.S. contractors.

Ex-Marine Jason Lemieux told how a senior officer had altered a report he had written because it slammed U.S. troops of using excessive force, firing off thousands of rounds of machine gun fire and hundreds of grenades in the face of a feeble four rounds of enemy fire.

Goldsmith accused U.S. officials of censorship.

“Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or MySpace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission,” Goldsmith said after the hearing.

“You’re almost always denied before you are allowed to send them home.”

Officials take “hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president — and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq,” Goldsmith added.

Chiroux is one of thousands of U.S. soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began in 2003, according to figures issued last year by the US army.

But while many seek refuge in Canada, the young soldier vowed to stay in the United States to fight “whatever charges the army levels at me.”

The US army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for 30 days.

Chiroux stood fast in his resolve to not report for duty on June 15.

“I cannot deploy to Iraq, carry a weapon and not be part of the problem,” he said.

Watch video footage of Matthis Chiroux’s announcement here.

The Raw Story:
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., May 14 - Former Democratic U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama’s White House bid on Wednesday, a campaign spokeswoman said, giving a big boost to the Illinois senator in his effort to rally the party around his candidacy.

Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee, dropped out of the Democratic race in January and was heavily courted by both Obama and rival Hillary Clinton in the past few months. He made the endorsement at a Grand Rapids rally Wednesday evening.

“I am fired up!” were Obama’s first words to the raucous crowd, who cheered wildly when the Illinois senator introduced his “special guest,” Edwards. The former North Carolina senator took time before endorsing Obama to kindly acknowledge Sen. Clinton’s efforts.

The endorsement comes the day after Clinton defeated Obama by more than 2-to-1 in West Virginia. The loss highlighted Obama’s work to win over the “Hillary Democrats” — white, working-class voters who also supported Edwards in large numbers before he exited the race.

The blog Michigan Messenger has a rough transcript of the endorsement. Video follows…

OpenLeft, Chris Bowers:

Obama has won North Carolina’s pledged delegates 63-52, according to Green Papers. Their estimates are usually accurate to within one delegate either way, so I trust them. Obama also appears to have won the North Carolina popular vote by 226,500 or so, which is almost identical to Clinton’s margin in Pennsylvania and Indiana combined.

The delegate count in Indiana is murkier, largely because the votes are coming in slower. In the extremes we have Democratic Convention Watch, which currently projects Clinton 35-33 Obama with four undecided, and CBS, which projects Clinton 38-29 Obama with five undecided. While these are not incompatible projections I am strongly prone to lean toward the DIY independent site, since such sites have shown, time and time again, to be way ahead of established news sites in delegate counts. In terms of the popular vote, Clinton is currently ahead by 20,000 and dropping with 92% reporting. I don’t regret declaring her the popular vote winner at all, since I’ll still be proven correct and since only one delegate is decided by the popular vote. I’ve been wrong about individual delegates before, and really that is all that is at stake in the popular vote.

Still, a very, very big night for Obama. The media has been giving him stupid rules to follow (pierce your nipples with flag pins or we will run Rev. Wright 24 / 7!), and he beat those rules tonight. I don’t like those rules, but Obama played them, and won. The narrative will reward him as a result.

Raw Story:

The White House does not have archival copies of e-mails exchanged between administration officials during the weeks leading up to President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq nor for the first two months of the war there, according to a just-released filing concerning millions of e-mails alleged to have gone missing or been deleted.

“A White House declaration filed late last night … makes the stunning admission that the White House failed to preserve ANY backup tapes for the period March 1, 2003 through May 22, 2003, a period of time during which the U.S. went to war in Iraq,” says a release from Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, a watchdog group suing for public records concerning the disappearance of internal White House e-mails.

Without computer backup tapes from this critical pre-Iraq war period, future researchers may be deprived a vital resource as the delve into the inner workings of the Bush administration as it decided to invade a country that had not attacked the United States and possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

“The harm is that we’ve lost a huge piece of history,” says Anne Weismann, a lawyer for CREW.

Weismann estimated the total number of missing White House e-mails at “10 million-plus.”

Investigations into the missing White House e-mails already have shown that e-mails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office were not archived on critical dates during the Justice Department’s investigation of the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. The White House already has said it also does not have backup tapes for those dates, Sept. 30, 2003, through Oct. 6, 2003.

“I’m sure there are other holes,” Weismann told RAW STORY Tuesday. “We just can’t get in to have the kind of forensic review that needs to be done” of what the White House has.

E-mails were missing from internal servers on a total of 473 days, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee, including dates around when Saddam Hussein was captured and during a court battle surrounding Cheney’s energy task force.

CREW is joined by the National Security Archive, an open-government group at in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the White House Office of Administration, which maintains internal computer systems and archives.

The White House filing revealed it had 483 backup tapes from May 23, 2003 to Sept. 29, 2003. CREW has posted the court documents here.

Think Progress:

Today, Sister Julie McGuire had to turn away 12 fellow Indiana nuns — all in their 80s or 90s — from a polling place because they lacked a state or federal photo ID, as mandated by the recent Supreme Court decision. AP reports:

“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”

Sister McGuire also underscored the difficulty in obtaining IDs for these women: “We’re going to take from now until November to get them out and get this done. You can’t do this like school kids on a bus. I wish we could.” More on the ID Divide here.

Think Progress:

This morning, the House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, to compel him to testify about the administration’s interrogation programs. He has said he will agree to testify if subpoenaed. The AP also reports that John Yoo, author of legal memos that sanctioned torture, has reversed course and agreed last night to testify before the committee as well, along with Douglas Feith and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Former CIA Director George Tenet “is still in negotiations with the committee, according to House Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Melanie Roussell.”

The Bush-McCain Challenge

Take this challenge and see if you can tell the difference between these two War Mongers!

Think Progress:

Speaking in Cleveland earlier today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended President Bush, saying he should not be held responsible for the “Mission Accomplished” banner that was visible aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln when Bush declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” on May 1, 2003:

“Do I blame him for that specific banner? I can’t,” McCain said. “But I do say that statements are made, ‘a few dead-enders,’ ‘last throes,’ those are, as opposed to the banner, direct statements which were contradicted by the facts on the ground.”

McCain then said of the banner: “I thought it was wrong at the time.” But while the White House has actually acknowledged making an error, McCain himself used the term “mission accomplished” when talking about the Iraq war on at least two occasions in 2003:

– “Their morale could not be higher. This is a mission accomplished. They know how much influence Saddam Hussein had on the Iraqi people, how much more difficult it made to get their cooperation.” [This Week, ABC, 12/14/03]

– During an appearance on Fox News, host Neil Cavuto said, “many argue the conflict isn’t over.” McCain answered, “Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier? Look, the — I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict — the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished.” [FOX, Your World With Neil Cavuto, 6/11/03]

Watch it:

Because McCain is running for president while an unpopular war –- which he supports — is raging in Iraq, it seems he must both defend Bush on “mission accomplished” and, at same time, distance himself from it. But despite McCain’s similar rhetoric on the war “at the time,” Washington Post reporter Michael Abramowitz seemed happy to help McCain in his effort during a “Post Politics Hour” web chat today on washingtonpost.com:

ABRAMOWITZ: I think McCain will certainly be attacked over the war during the campaign but I doubt that he will be blamed for “Mission Accomplished” because he was always more sober than than the White House about progress in Iraq.

Here are some of McCain’s past assessments of the Iraq war that, according to Abramowitz, have been “more sober” than Bush’s:

– “I believe that this conflict is still going to be relatively short.” [NBC, 3/30/03]

–- “It’s clear that the end is very much in sight.” [ABC, 4/9/03]

–- “I think the situation on the ground is going to improve,” he says. “I do think that progress is being made in a lot of Iraq. Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course. If I thought we weren’t making progress, I’d be despondent.” [The Hill, 12/8/05]

Someday the media will realize that a McCain presidency will actually be a “third Bush term.”

The Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON — The White House said Wednesday that President Bush has paid a price for the “Mission Accomplished” banner that was flown in triumph five years ago but later became a symbol of U.S. misjudgments and mistakes in the long and costly war in Iraq.

Thursday is the fifth anniversary of Bush’s dramatic landing in a Navy jet on an aircraft carrier homebound from the war. The USS Abraham Lincoln had launched thousands of airstrikes on Iraq.

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush said at the time. “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001, and still goes on.” The “Mission Accomplished” banner was prominently displayed above him _ a move the White House came to regret as the display was mocked and became a source of controversy.

After shifting explanations, the White House eventually said the “Mission Accomplished” phrase referred to the carrier’s crew completing its 10-month mission, not the military completing its mission in Iraq. Bush, in October 2003, disavowed any connection with the “Mission Accomplished” message. He said the White House had nothing to do with the banner; a spokesman later said the ship’s crew asked for the sign and the White House staff had it made by a private vendor.

“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. “And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”

She said what is important now is “how the president would describe the fight today. It’s been a very tough month in Iraq, but we are taking the fight to the enemy.”

At least 49 U.S. troops died in Iraq in April, making it the deadliest month since September when 65 U.S. troops died.

Now in its sixth year, the war in Iraq has claimed the lives of at least 4,061 members of the U.S. military. Only the Vietnam War (August 1964 to January 1973), the war in Afghanistan (October 2001 to present) and the Revolutionary War (July 1776 to April 1783) have engaged America longer.

Bush, in a speech earlier this month, said that “while this war is difficult, it is not endless.”