Nancy Townsley And Katie Sipos -

Local mom protests military visits to a Gaston school while a new Marine sees the service as 'another path' to success

Toting a red, white and blue protest sign, Barb Smith showed up outside Gaston Junior-Senior High School last Monday with a singular message: stop recruiting kids.

On the first day back to class after winter break, Smith - a Forest Grove artist and mother whose son, Arlo Gann, is an eighth grader at the tiny rural school - decided she'd let the sign speak her mind for her.

'I seem to have run out of options with the district,' said Smith, who's upset that military recruiters' access to Gaston's junior high students, which was curtailed late in 2010, appears to her to have ramped up again.

'I thought [protesting] might be a way to find other people who think the way I do and get them to come on board,' said Smith. 'Maybe it will start a movement.'

Meanwhile, Marine Pfc. Sara Schaffner, a 2011 Forest Grove High School graduate, has set her sights on continuing a three-generation family tradition in the military. The athletic, strawberry blond 19-year-old joined the USMC when she turned 18 and is stationed in North Carolina, where she's training to become a deployment logistics specialist.

In December Schaffner was home in Oregon, working as a recruiter out of the U.S. Marine Corps Hillsboro office. She visited several high schools, including her alma mater, telling mostly juniors and seniors about her experiences in the service so far.

'[The] military isn't a bad option, especially if you don't have money for college. It's another path that will make you successful in the end,' she says.

Two women, a pair of perspectives

Smith and Schaffner are two different women from separate generations with opposite perspectives about military service - particularly the way young people are recruited in the first place.

In a time of relative peace, when America is active in a single war, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, recruiting by the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines continues unabated. The Army even bumped up its maximum enlistment bonus from $20,000 to $40,000 last year in an effort to woo more recruits.

For Schaffner, joining the military represented a jumping-off point to get to where she wants to go, at least for now.

'I'm not yet sure if this is going to be a career,' she noted. 'I'm still feeling the waters.'

Still, she's proud to be a Marine, following in the soldierly footsteps of her grandfather, her father and her older brother, who's just finishing up his first tour of duty in Afghanistan.

'I wanted to do something with my life that wouldn't be just about me and would impact a lot of people for the better,' said Schaffner. 'I also wanted the honor, the image and the challenge.'

Smith, an admitted pacifist, has started an online blog, stoprecruitingkids.com, which she hopes will pull like-minded folks toward her side of the political spectrum. But even she knows there will always be a need for young people to fill out the ranks of the country's military forces, something that's supported by federal law in the form of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, formerly the No Child Left Behind Act.

'The law allows military recruiters to be in public secondary schools,' said Smith. 'But my kid's secondary school has seventh through 12th grades in it, so the 12- and 13-year-olds are free to visit with the recruiters.

'That is one thing I hope to change.'

The death in August of Navy corpsman Ryley Gallinger-Long of Cornelius provided a sober reminder that the men and women who sign up to defend our country sometimes pay the ultimate price.

But Joshua Woods said he knew what he was getting into when he signed up.

'My whole family's military,' said Woods, who graduated from Forest Grove High last spring. 'If something happens, if I get hurt or killed, I did my job and served my country and protected the people I love.'

Woods said he was familiar with the realities of military life since he'd had the opportunity to visit bases through his family's connections. After graduation, Woods committed to the Air Force, where he hopes to be trained as a security specialist or a psychologist. 'People are often surprised that there are jobs in the military that will set you up for a job outside - not just toting guns around,' said Woods.

The military offers an array of specializations, ranging from dental assistants to engineers and beyond, said Staff Sergeant Todd Miller of the Hillsboro Army Recruiting Office.

And Forest Grove School District assistant superintendent John O'Neill added that the service provides 'a viable alternative to college' as a potential career. '[It's] a means to develop some knowledge of skills [students] haven't had previously that could serve them in future endeavors,' he said.

Informed decisions

Surveys conducted by local high schools show that military-bound seniors such as Schaffner, Woods and Gallinger-Long are a minority, typically representing no more than 6 percent of a graduating class in western Washington County. Still, some community members want to ensure those students are making informed decisions about a vocation that has received less and less attention in the 10-plus years U.S. troops have been in Afghanistan.

'When I was a kid, the [Vietnam] war was on TV and it wasn't controlled like it is now,' said Marcia Camacho of Forest Grove, a teacher at Cornelius Elementary School. 'It was in everybody's living room.'

In 2010, Camacho helped organize a panel at the Forest Grove City Library for the No Soy El Army tour. It was part of the Rural Organizing Project, an Oregon coalition of community peace and justice organizations that focused on informing Latino residents about what enlisting in the military entailed.

Camacho said recruiters aren't 'always telling the kids everything they need to know' and that she hoped the panel provided the first-hand information students needed to make an informed decision.

Regular visits

In Gaston, where military recruiters make regular visits to the junior-senior high school, principal Mike Durbin says their efforts have yielded relatively few students who actually sign on. Between 2007 and 2011, only nine seniors selected the military as their next step after high school.

Durbin said he and his staff attempted to curtail recruiters' contact with younger students last year by moving them from the main hallway into a designated classroom. But he insisted that in the end, the school can't ensure they don't talk to seventh and eighth graders.

'We will do everything in our power to keep the younger kids out of the area where the military is,' said Durbin. 'But we can't ban them from coming into the main building.'

Durbin is comfortable with what recruiters are saying to students. 'I honestly believe their message is simply, 'Stay in school, study hard and graduate,'' he said.

But Smith alleges that young pupils in Gaston rub elbows with recruiters long before they start receiving materials from colleges in their junior and senior years of high school. 'By my rough estimation, a student may have contact with a military recruiter approximately 12 times a year,' Smith wrote in a 2010 letter to the Gaston School Board.

A master calendar on the district's website reveals that one recruiter visit, from the Navy, occurred this month, on Jan. 4. The Air Force is set to visit Feb. 16, March 15 and April 19, while the Navy is due to return March 7, April 4 and May 2.

Smith originally met with Durbin and Gaston superintendent Dave Beasley in 2010 to express her grievances with the school's military recruitment policy. At first, she said, they advised her to tell her then 12-year-old son not to go near the recruiters, who were set up in a main hallway and had given him a free hat, a water bottle and a lanyard.

A few months later, Smith was happy to get an unwritten agreement with Durbin and school counselor Richard Ceder that recruiters would refrain from talking to seventh and eighth graders, who are typically 12 and 13 years old. But she took to protesting last week because, she said, that pact broke down when she had an argument with an Air Force recruiter in November.

After a tense meeting with administrators, Smith said she was permitted to be in the room when recruiters visit, but was instructed not to speak.

Forest Grove district policy states that it must must provide military recruiters and colleges with names, addresses and phone numbers of all secondary school students, unless those students or their parents tell the school in writing that they want that information kept private.

Principal Karen Robinson said military recruiters visit FGHS 'no more than once a month' and that, instead of an annual career fair, the school hosts monthly 'multiple college visits' as well as opportunities for internships as they come available.

Military 'selective'

Military recruiters say they're aware of public concerns about their recruiting methods and mission, but counter that they, like colleges, are selective. 'We're not here for people with nothing else to do,' Miller said. 'The Army isn't a last resort anymore.'

Only one-fourth of people age 17 to 24 qualify to enlist, and many who make the cut choose to wait, Miller noted. Even though he's from a military family, Miller himself didn't enlist until he was 30, because he 'just wasn't ready for it.'

Schaffner, who earned her first stripes earlier this month at Camp Johnson, looks at things another way. 'College graduates work in fast food joints now. But with the military, if you qualify, that's pretty good job security,' she said.

source: http://vvvvvv.portlandtribune.com/fgnt/36-news/18053-recruitment-wars

- Editor's note: Katie Sipos, a Pacific University student, wrote this article for a class project last May. The original story was updated for publication this week.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky -

Campus spies. Pepper spray. SWAT teams. Twitter trackers. Biometrics. Student security consultants. Professors of homeland security studies. Welcome to Repress U, class of 2012.

Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America's towns and cities, its places of work and its houses of worship, its public space and its cyberspace. But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival on campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere -- until, that is, the "less lethal (archived)" weapons were unleashed in the fall of 2011.

Today, from the City University of New York to the University of California, students increasingly find themselves on the frontlines, not of a war on terror, but of a war on "radicalism" and "extremism." Just about everyone from college administrators and educators to law enforcement personnel and corporate executives seems to have enlisted in this war effort. Increasingly, American students are in their sights.

In 2008, I laid out seven steps the Bush administration had taken to create a homeland security campus. Four years and a president later, Repress U has come a long way. In the Obama years, it has taken seven more steps to make the university safe for plutocracy. Here is a step-by-step guide to how they did it.

1. Target Occupy

Had there been no UC Davis, no Lt. John Pike, no chemical weapons wielded against peacefully protesting students, and no cameras to broadcast it all, Americans might never have known just how far the homeland security campus has come in its mission to police its students. In the old days, you might have called in the National Guard. Nowadays, all you need is an FBI-trained, federally funded, and "less lethally" armed campus police department.

The mass pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis was only the most public manifestation of a long-running campus trend in which, for officers of the peace, the pacification of student protest has become part of the job description. The weapons of choice have sometimes been blunt instruments, such as the extendable batons used to bludgeon the student body at Berkeley, Baruch, and the University of Puerto Rico. At other times, tactical officers have turned to "less-lethal" munitions, like the CS gas, beanbag rounds, and pepper pellets fired into crowds at Occupy protests across the University of California system this past winter.

Yet for everything we see of the homeland security campus, there is a good deal more that we miss. Behind the riot suits, the baton strikes, and the pepper-spray cannons stands a sprawling infrastructure made possible by multimillion-dollar federal grants, "memoranda of understanding" and "mutual aid" agreements among law enforcement agencies, counter-terrorism training, an FBI-sponsored "Academic Alliance," and 103 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (which provide "one-stop shopping" for counterterrorism operations to more than 50 federal and 600 state and local agencies).

"We have to go where terrorism takes us, so we often have to go onto campuses," FBI Special Agent Jennifer Gant told Campus Safety Magazine in an interview last year. To that end, campus administrators and campus police chiefs are now known to coordinate their operations with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "special advisors," FBI "campus liaison agents (Archived)," an FBI-led National Security Advisory Board, and a Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which instructs local law enforcement in everything from "physical techniques" to "behavioral science." More than half of campus police forces already have "intelligence-sharing agreements" with these and other government agencies in place.

2. Get a SWAT team

Since 2007, campus police forces have decisively escalated their tactics, expanded their arsenals, and trained ever more of their officers in SWAT-style paramilitary policing. Many agencies acquire their arms directly from the Department of Defense through a surplus weapons sales program known as "1033," which offers, among other things, "used grenade launchers (Archived) (for the deployment of less lethal weapons)... for a significantly reduced cost."

According to the most recent federal data available, nine out of 10 campus agencies with sworn police officers now deploy armed patrols authorized to use deadly force. Nine in 10 also authorize the use of chemical munitions, while one in five make regular use of Tasers. Last August, an 18-year old student athlete died after being tased at the University of Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, many campus police squads have been educated in the art of war through regular special weapons training sessions by "tactical officers' associations" which run a kind of SWAT university. In October, UC Berkeley played host to an "Urban Shield (archived)" SWAT training exercise involving local and campus agencies, the California National Guard, and special police forces from Israel, Jordan, and Bahrain. And since 2010, West Texas A&M has played host to paramilitary training (archive) programs for police from Mexico.

In October, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte got its very own SWAT team, equipped with MP-15 rifles, M&P 40 sidearms, and Remington shotguns. "We have integrated SWAT officers into the squads that serve our campus day and night," boasted UNC Charlotte Chief of Police Jeff Baker. The following month, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a SWAT team staged an armed raid on an occupied building, pointing assault rifles at the heads of activists, among them UNC students.

3. Spy on Muslims

The long arm of Repress U stretches far beyond the bounds of any one campus or college town. As reported by the Associated Press this winter, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and its hitherto secret "Demographics Unit (archive)" sent undercover operatives to spy on members of the Muslim Students Association at more than 20 universities in four states across the Northeast beginning in 2006.

None of the organizations or persons of interest were ever accused of any wrongdoing, but that didn't stop NYPD detectives from tracking Muslim students through a "Cyber Intelligence Unit," issuing weekly "MSA Reports" on local chapters of the Muslim Students Association, attending campus meetings and seminars, noting how many times students prayed, or even serving as chaperones for what they described as "militant paintball trips." The targeted institutions ran the gamut from community colleges to Columbia and Yale.

According to the AP's investigation, the intelligence units in question worked closely not only with agencies in other cities, but with an agent on the payroll of the CIA. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, facing mounting calls to resign, has issued a spirited defense of the campus surveillance program, as has Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "If terrorists aren't limited by borders and boundaries, we can't be either," Kelly said in a speech at Fordham Law School.

The NYPD was hardly the only agency conducting covert surveillance of Muslim students on campus. The FBI has been engaging in such tactics for years. In 2007, UC Irvine student Yasser Ahmed was assaulted by FBI agents, who followed him as he was on his way to a campus "free speech zone." In 2010, Yasir Afifi, a student at Mission College in Santa Clara, California, found a secret GPS tracking device affixed to his car. A half-dozen agents later knocked on his door to ask for it back.

4. Keep the undocumented out

Foreign students are followed closely by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through its Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of 2011, the agency was keeping tabs on 1.2 million students and their dependents. Most recently, as part of a transition to the paperless SEVIS II -- which aims to "unify records" -- ICE has been linking student files to biometric and employer data collected by DHS and other agencies.

"That information stays forever," notes Louis Farrell, director of the ICE program. "And every activity that's ever been associated with that person will come up. That's something that has been asked for by the national security community... [and] the academic community."

Then there are the more than 360,000 undocumented students and high-school graduates who would qualify for permanent resident status and college admission, were the DREAM Act ever passed. It would grant conditional permanent residency to undocumented students who were brought to the U.S. as children. When such students started "coming out" as part of an "undocumented and unafraid" campaign, many received DHS notices to appear for removal proceedings. Take 24-year old Uriel Alberto, of Lees-McRae College, who recently went on hunger strike in North Carolina's Wake County jail; he now faces deportation (and separation from his U.S.-born son) for taking part in a protest at the state capitol.

Since 2010, the homeland security campus has been enlisted by the state of Arizona to enforce everything from bans on ethnic studies programs to laws like S.B. 1070, which makes it a crime to appear in public without proof of legal residency and is considered a mandate for police to detain anyone suspected of being undocumented. Many undocumented students have turned down offers of admission to the University of Arizona since the passage of the law, while others have stopped attending class for fear of being detained and deported.

5. Keep an eye on student spaces and social media

While Muslim and undocumented students are particular targets of surveillance, they are not alone. Electronic surveillance has expanded beyond traditional closed-circuit TV cameras to next-generation technologies (Archived) like IQeye HD megapixel cameras, so-called edge devices (cameras that can do their own analytics), and Perceptrak's video analytics software (archived), which "analyzes video from security cameras 24x7 for events of interest," and which recently made its debut at Johns Hopkins University and Mount Holyoke College.

At the same time, students' social media accounts have become a favorite destination for everyone from campus police officers to analysts at the Department of Homeland Security.

In 2010, the DHS National Operations Center established a Media Monitoring Capability (MMC). According to an internal agency document, MMC is tasked with "leveraging news stories, media reports and postings on social media sites... for operationally relevant data, information, analysis, and imagery." The definition of operationally relevant data includes "media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities," "partisan or agenda-driven sites," and a final category ambiguously labeled "research/studies, etc."

With the Occupy movement coming to campus, even university police departments have gotten in on the action. According to a how-to guide called "Essential Ingredients to Working with Campus Protests" by UC Santa Barbara police chief Dustin Olson, the first step to take is to "monitor social media sites continuously," both for intelligence about the "leadership and agenda" and "for any messages that speak to violent or criminal behavior."

6. Coopt the classroom and the laboratory

At a time when entire departments and disciplines are facing the chopping block at America's universities, the Department of Homeland Security has proven to be the best-funded department of all. Homeland security studies has become a major growth sector in higher education and now has more than 340 (archived) certificate- and degree-granting programs. Many colleges have joined the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium, a spinoff of the U.S. Northern Command (the Department of Defense's "homeland defense (archive)" division), which offers a model curriculum to its members.

This emerging discipline has been directed and funded to the tune of $4 billion over the last five years by DHS. The goal, according to Dr. Tara O'Toole, DHS Undersecretary of Science & Technology, is to "leverag[e] the investment and expertise of academia... to meet the needs of the department." Additional funding is being made available from the Pentagon through its blue-skies research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the "intelligence community" through its analogous Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

At the core of the homeland security-university partnership are DHS's 12 centers of excellence. (A number that has doubled since I first reported on the initiative in 2008.) The DHS Office of University Programs advertises the centers of excellence as an "extended consortium of hundreds of universities" which work together "to develop customer-driven research solutions" and "to provide essential training to the next generation of homeland security experts."

But what kind of research is being carried out at these centers of excellence, with the support of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year? Among the 41 "knowledge products" currently in use by DHS or being evaluated in pilot studies, we find an "extremist crime database," a "Minorities at Risk for Organizational Behavior" dataset, analytics for aerial surveillance systems along the border, and social media monitoring technologies. Other research focuses include biometrics, "suspicious behavior detection," and "violent radicalization."

7. Privatize, subsidize, and capitalize

Repress U has not only proven a boon to hundreds of cash-starved universities, but also to big corporations as higher education morphs into hired education. While a majority of the $184 billion in homeland security funding in 2011 came from government agencies like DHS and the Pentagon, private sector funding is expected to make up an increasing share of the total in the coming years, according to the Homeland Security Research Corporation, a consulting firm serving the homeland security industry.

Each DHS Center of Excellence has been founded on private-public partnerships, corporate co-sponsorships, and the leadership of "industry advisory boards (archived)" which give big business a direct stake and say in its operations. Corporate giants allied with DHS Centers of Excellence include:

*Lockheed Martin at the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), based at the University of Maryland at College Park.

*Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T at the Rutgers University-based Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CICADA).

*ExxonMobil and Con Edison at the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), based at the University of Southern California.

*Motorola, Boeing, and Bank of America at the Purdue University-based Center for Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (archived) (VACCINE).

*Wal-Mart, Cargill, Kraft, and McDonald's at the National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), based at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

What's more, universities have struck multimillion-dollar deals with multinational private security firms (archived)  like Securitas, deploying unsworn, underpaid, often untrained "protection officers" on campus as "extra eyes and ears (archived)." The University of Wisconsin-Madison, in one report, boasts that police and private partners have been "seamlessly integrated."

Elsewhere, even students have gotten into the business of security. The private intelligence firm STRATFOR, for example, recently partnered (archived) with the University of Texas to use its students to "essentially parallel the work of... outside consultants" but on campus, offering information on activist groups like the Yes Men (archived).

Step by step, at school after school, the homeland security campus has executed a silent coup in the decade since September 11th. The university, thus usurped, has increasingly become an instrument not of higher learning, but of intelligence gathering and paramilitary training, of profit-taking on behalf of America's increasingly embattled "1%."

Yet the next generation may be otherwise occupied. Since September 2011, a new student movement has swept across the country, making itself felt most recently on March 1st with a national day of action to defend the right to education. This Occupy-inspired wave of on-campus activism is making visible what was once invisible, calling into question what was once beyond question, and counteracting the logic of Repress U with the logic of nonviolence and education for democracy.

For many, the rise of the homeland security campus has provoked some basic questions about the aims and principles of a higher education: Whom does the university serve? Whom does it protect? Who is to speak? Who is to be silenced? To whom does the future belong?

The guardians of Repress U are uninterested in such inquiry. Instead, they cock their weapons. They lock the gates. And they prepare to take the next step.

source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175519

Revised: 11-04-2019

The Tragic Death of Brian Arredondo

Linda Pershing, with Lara Bell -

Brian Arredondo never really recovered from his brother’s death in the Iraq War. When they were kids, Brian adored his older brother Alexander and tagged along with him whenever he could. They were often seen playing together in parks and schoolyards in communities surrounding Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangor, Maine, where they grew up.

As teens the two boys were perfect targets for military recruiters: first-generation Americans on their father’s side (he emigrated from Costa Rica), working-class youth (Alex attended a technical high school where much of the curriculum focuses on job training), living with their mother after their parents divorced when they were young. Promises of career training, male camaraderie and “becoming a man,” appeals to patriotism, a $10,000 signing bonus, and funding for college enticed Alex Arredondo to join the marines, just a month before September 11, 2011.

Jon Letman - Last week, just before Veterans Day, my seven-year-old son, a second grader at a public school on Kauai, brought home an issue of Scholastic News.