Q&A Gordon Sturrock - Founder, Veterans Against Torture EW interviewed veteran Gordon Sturrock, 46, on the drizzly, numbingly cold evening of Dec. 7 at the corner of Pearl St. and 7th Ave. He was with a dozen other activists, including his 8-year-old daughter, holding a sign against torture and wearing Army fatigues adorned with peace buttons. The interview was punctuated by honks from passing cars. What's your history with the military? During the Cold War, I was with the Army in Germany. My tour was three years long, and I was very fortunate in that I didn't see any hostile action. When I got out, I became a civilian and worked multiple jobs over the years. Awhile back I started a website, Squadron13.com, that basically glorifies the weapons of war. I have a picture collection, including some very rare and unusual photographs of airplanes, that's appreciated by modelers, war gamers, historians, veterans and their families. Are you against the Iraq War? At the beginning of the Iraq War, I was more on the side of being for it. I thought we were doing the right thing. Now, I am against it. We shouldn't have gone over there in the first place. They never did have weapons of mass destruction, and if they did they were long gone due to the weapons inspectors that were there. What made you change your mind? Almost two years ago I had an epiphany. I read an article by Jack Dresser called "The Psychology of President Bush," and it talks about how, as a boy, Bush used to insert firecrackers inside of frogs and blow them up. It talked about a bunch of other things, and reading it, I realized that we have a problem. Then the elections came and went, and it turned out that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. The mathematical probability of it happening the way it did is extremely unlikely, and nobody made much of a fuss about it in the media. So, over time, I started putting articles up on my Squadron13 site. How do you feel about war in general? Who could be for a war? Tell me that. War is terrorism. When I joined the Army I was young, I wasn't as smart, and I wanted a career. It seemed like a distinguished way to get some experience, see the world and get an occupation. I got a lot of that stuff, but now I realize that our whole foreign policy is designed to strong-arm smaller governments, coerce them, bribe them, whatever it takes. If that stuff doesn't work, you go in there and you assassinate, you murder, you overthrow and take over the country. When you were in the Army, did you participate in torture? No. We didn't do that kind of work, so we had no reason to be exposed to that. And I honestly don't believe that most of our troops on the ground today participate in torture. I don't think they know what goes on. News is controlled for them, just as it is here for us in the States. We have easy access to television, radio and Internet, but still most of the country doesn't understand that we're not getting all the news. It's being filtered. I'm a news junkie, but I don't watch TV. My sources are all on the Internet. I go mostly to BBC.com, CNN.com, the English version of Al Jazeera, Truthout.org and MichaelMoore.com. Is there a lot of interest in VeteransAgainstWar.com? It's only about a month old, so it's hard to say. We get about 20 hits a day, but it's only advertised on Squadron13.com, which gets anywhere from 500 to 1,000 hits a day. Squadron13.com still glorifies weapons, and it was a very tough decision for me what to do about that. Do I just take it down? But it occurred to me that those pages are drawing traffic that's already predisposed to be the war-glorifying crowd. They're drawing the people who are doing searches on the Internet for the Nordon bomb or a B-26 bomber. They end up on my site, and hopefully they'll see my advertising and realize that maybe not everything's alright anymore. What difference do you hope your activism will make? I hope to get more veterans involved, and more people standing out on corners, holding signs, sending e-mails. There's a lot of activity right now among the veterans. Veterans are waking up as a group and starting to band together in opposition to what's going on, and it's very encouraging. Do you think that the public is sufficiently outraged? No. If the public knew what was going on, they would be screaming. I am. I can't understand how we, as Americans, can go shopping, go to games, go to concerts, while we're shooting depleted uranium all over Iraq, exposing generations of children to radiation for who knows how many decades. That's a war crime. That's a crime against humanity. A lot of Iraqi children that are born today will die before they reach 30 years old from cancers and miscellaneous sicknesses as a result of being exposed to depleted uranium, the same way our Gulf War vets were exposed. How do you define torture? I go by the Geneva Conventions: "Cruel, usual punishment." There's a lot of things that we're doing that fall into that definition, such as white phosphorous weapons. They were designed to illuminate a nighttime battlefield and to generate smoke so that troops can hide their activities. That's permitted under the Geneva Conventions, and other countries have used white phosphorous weapons for many years. But recently, we used them on people in Fallujah. They shoot this white phosphorous, and it rains down and gets into people's skin. It burns them, and it doesn't stop burning. It causes people to panic and jump up and look for water. That's when U.S. troops shoot in the high explosives to kill them all. It's called "shake and bake," which is a very ugly term to use for something like that. We shouldn't be doing that do people at all, whether they're enemies or civilians. But we did. Are there times when torture works to obtain needed information? I don't think so. One of our members, Wolfgang May, was a counter-intelligence officer for the U.S. Army. He says that it's well known that torture is not an effective way to get information from people. John McCain is another living example. He had torture used to get information out of him. Well, what did he do? He gave them the lineup of the Green Bay Packers. It satisfied the torturers, and he went on with his prisoner-of-war duty. Torture doesn't work. How do you feel about the CIA's secret prisons? It's not right. We're getting someone else to do our dirty work for us, and that's how the government is justifying what we're doing. They figure, if we can do it in another country and use civilians to do it, then it's OK. It's not OK. We're sponsoring it, and it's not right. Sturrock administers several war-related websites: Squadron13 Aviation Museum (Squadron13.com), Flights of Thought on War and Politics blog (Squadron13.com/phpBB2/index.php) and Veterans Against Torture (VeteransAgainstTorture.com).
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