Yeah, it kind of sucks, doesn't it. Here are some of the people I admire, whose names deserve to be known at least as much as those of the LC boyz, IMO.

Most recently, I heard Augustin Aguayo and his very articulate and smart wife Helga Aguayo speak here in Portland. Augustin realized in the middle of basic training that he was a conscientious objector in the narrowest sense -- that he couldn't kill another human being in any war. He spent his first tour in Iraq with an unloaded weapon and when it was time to go back he deserted and subsequently spent almost a year in prison. I heard Darrell Anderson speak in Portland in December -- he went to Iraq, came back, and rather than return to Iraq split to Canada and then came back to go public. Darrell came to the 9/11 conference in Arizona. He has severe PTSD, owes a lot for legal fees, and is broke. Ehren Watada is the first commissioned officer to refuse to go to Iraq -- he is NOT a conscientious objector but an objector to an illegal war. (He offered to go to Afghanistan instead... oh well.) I took Lily out of school for a day in February and she and I went on a little road trip up to Fort Lewis, where his court martial was being held. (Lily saw a guy with a button that said "Give the pretzel another chance" and has been obsessed with that slogan ever since.)

Anyway, none of them are perfect. You can argue they all knew what they were getting into and then bailed (which I don't really think is true, because my impression is that war is far worse than what we can imagine before we go fight in one or have to live in the middle of one.) Rowe is certainly not perfect, but in my mind he does get credit just for the act of desertion -- even if his motivation was simply to have more time to make a slick piece of disinfo. Really. Any desertion challenges the meme that once you're in you're in and you're staying in and doing what they tell you to do, and just the example of someone NOT staying in might encourage another person to resist, possibly for better reasons.

Anyway, I had time to check out some of the AJ coverage and it's pretty gross. They're painting him as a "political prisoner" who was taken in because of his involvement with Loose Change. I'd say depicting it that way is premature at best and uh, well, you know what at worst.

The local police received a tip about Rowe's warrant from "outside the department." Mmm hmm. I certainly wouldn't presume to speculate about that... not!

Rowe has an enormous opportunity here to do what you suggest he should already have done, and that is to make his status as a deserter public and an act of resistance against the war.