Ask Not Who Bankrolled Fallujah

By GREG MOSES

For three weeks beginning October 14, say sources at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the assault on Falluja was pure PSYOPS, a mere announcement of assault, designed to provoke "the opposition" into premature response. The lie worked pretty well. "The opposition" abandoned their so-called safe havens and " melted into the night." For this reason, many residents of the city expected the PSYOPS theater to let out early, too.

One hapless doctor, Hakim Mirzoev, says he expected the Americans to surround the city, fire a few shots, and declare victory. He didn't realize that a greater PSYOPS scheme was in the making, a plan to flatten Falluja under boot and mortar so that the City of Mosques could be rebuilt by Christian Soldiers into a Model City--a Pasadena by the Euphrates. With this world-historical Crusade in mind, Falluja was crushed, thousands were killed and wounded, hundreds of thousands displaced, so that America could perceive itself great in the gaze of the world.

So who made Falluja possible? Who enabled budgets to be filled with imperial plans? American taxpayers did. The moral tracer on this funding leads to me and you, the co-investors who backed this pre-holiday discount on the lives of Fallujans, thousands of lives, forever lost and unlived. To pay for this moral bankruptcy, we got up in the morning, worked all day, and sent money to the war machine. Ask not who bankrolled Falluja.

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Texas school teacher Shirley Smith made the connection between her tax dollars and the war in Iraq during the first week of the invasion. It was March 27, 2003, and she was listening to Bitta Mostofi speak at the University of Texas campus at Austin. Mostofi had been to Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, serving witness to sufferings caused by USA-supported sanctions.

It was right after the invasion and only a few weeks before the tax deadline, recalls Smith. Mostofi said it would be an effective protest against the war if everyone refused to pay taxes. And that's when the light went on. Right away, Smith submitted a new W-4 form, so that no taxes would be withheld. No more money would go from her to the war. On April 15, 2003, Smith joined an annual protest at the downtown Austin post office. Camera crews captured her image as she helped to pass out leaflets. The next day a couple of colleagues spoke to her about seeing pictures on the local news. One colleague got excited.

"She told me she would like to stop paying her taxes, too," recalls Smith. "So I explained to her that we re-direct our tax money into groups that work for peace. And then she wasn't quite as interested. I think it's important to stress that we're not in this for personal gain." Like many war tax resisters, Smith sends her tax money to an escrow fund, where interest gets applied to peace work.

When tax day rolled around this year, Smith enclosed a letter with her tax form, explaining why she would not send money. In August she received her first reply from the Internal Revenue Service. On November 16, she received her third. It arrived by certified mail, warning Smith that the IRS would begin looking for property or other assets to attach.

IRS Public Affairs officer Ken Vargas of the Austin office explains that the collections office sends out "soft notices" first, followed by "harder notices" later. Vargas says the IRS doesn't keep a handy record of war tax resisters, and he insists that "normal collection procedures" apply to all subjects, regardless of whether they write letters stating their war tax resistance.

In fact, the tax reform act of 1998 makes it illegal for the IRS to designate tax protesters as a special class. A June 2004 audit by the Treasury Inspector General reported "233 isolated instances" where subjects had been identified as tax protesters nevertheless. The only time the IRS can justify this practice, warned the IG, is when case notes reflect what subjects say about themselves. The IRS office most likely to abuse its classification of tax resisters was the office of Chief Counsel.

Andy McKenna, who began his war tax resistance after the First Gulf War, says that the three letters sent to Smith this year may serve as one example of more aggressive collections. In a press release, prepared for distribution this week, McKenna joined with other war tax resisters to warn of increased enforcement in the Austin area. At a mid-November meeting of the Austin Conscientious Objectors to Military Taxation (ACOMT), members shared their impressions that a long season of relative neglect by the IRS is now being followed by a spate of collection activities. In mid-October, McKenna himself was hit up for his first wage garnishment, which left him only $330.00 per paycheck, twice a month.

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