WarCriminalsWatch Events

By Kevin Gosztola

Iraq war veteran Tomas Young was shot in the spine and paralyzed from the waist down in 2004. Nine years after being wounded, Phil Donahue will be marking the anniversary at an event in New York City on Thursday, April 4 with a screening of the film on Tomas that Donahue co-directed, “Body of War.”

The screening will begin at 6 pm at The Culture Project on 45 Bleecker Street. There will be a 5-to-10 minute intermission and some time between 7:30 and 8 pm an interactive discussion between Donahue and the audience will begin.

I will be moderating this discussion. I’ll conduct a 15-minute interview with Donahue and then open the floor to questions or brief comments from the audience until it is time to wrap up the event around 8:45 pm.

Tomas has recently chosen to undertake a powerful act and end his life because his “body of war” is increasingly failing and causing him to suffer. Some time in the next few months, Tomas will likely die. His death will be one of the most profound antiwar statements in recent American history.

Ahead of the date when he will leave his war-ravaged body behind, he wrote a letter to former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and other criminals behind the Iraq War:

…I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

[…]

I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Organized by the NYCLU Young Professionals and sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Bertha Social Justice Institute at CCR and the Culture Project’s “Blueprint for Accountability” series, along with the “Right to Heal” initiative launched by Iraq Veterans of the War and CCR, the event with a TV legend should be enlightening and exceptional.