Below is a transcript segment from Whistleblower Network News’ interview with Matthew Hoh, EMN’s Associate Director.
“I get to Afghanistan in 2009 . I was done with the Marine Corps in 2008. I was on my commission and then went into the state department I had worked with the state department quite a bit in the past and so I was appointed as a political officer which is a pretty rare thing. I went to Afghanistan that was my purpose.
I was morally and intellectually broken at that point…with thoughts in my head… a desire to see that this war was fundamentally different than the Iraq War and it wasn’t. It was fundamentally the same war.
We have to remember how great of an escalation of the war was when President Obama comes into office. Within a year and a half, there’s a hundred thousand American troops, about forty thousand NATO troops and about a hundred thousand contractors.
The quarter million man army was put into the Afghan war and in the escalation of that war played out exactly as myself and many others understood it would including many many of the people I was working with many many people I was serving with.
And so seeing that again, my own personal issues with being intellectually and morally broken… just seeing where this was going I couldn’t go along with it any longer.
I laid out my case for why escalation was a bad idea and I wrote it up in a letter and resigned officially.”
Listen to the full interview here.
Matthew Hoh
I was morally and intellectually broken at that point.