Preventing War with Iran

by: Noam Chomsky

April 07, 2007

Source:
http://www.alternet.org/
http://www.alternet.org/story/50197/


Unsurprisingly, George W. Bush's announcement of a "surge" in Iraq came despite the firm opposition to any such move of Americans and the even stronger opposition of the (thoroughly irrelevant) Iraqis. It was accompanied by ominous official leaks and statements - from Washington and Baghdad - about how Iranian intervention in Iraq was aimed at disrupting our mission to gain victory, an aim which is (by definition) noble.

What then followed was a solemn debate about whether serial numbers on advanced roadside bombs (IEDs) were really traceable to Iran; and, if so, to that country's Revolutionary Guards or to some even higher authority.

This "debate" is a typical illustration of a primary principle of sophisticated propaganda. In crude and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed - or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern. In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is simply presupposed; then, vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy. The cruder of the two systems leads, naturally enough, to disbelief; the sophisticated variant gives an impression of openness and freedom, and so far more effectively serves to instill the Party Line. It becomes beyond question, beyond thought itself, like the air we breathe.

The debate over Iranian interference in Iraq proceeds without ridicule on the assumption that the United States owns the world. We did not, for example, engage in a similar debate in the 1980s about whether the U.S. was interfering in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and I doubt that Pravda, probably recognizing the absurdity of the situation, sank to outrage about that fact (which American officials and our media, in any case, made no effort to conceal). Perhaps the official Nazi press also featured solemn debates about whether the Allies were interfering in sovereign Vichy France, though if so, sane people would then have collapsed in ridicule.

In this case, however, even ridicule - notably absent - would not suffice, because the charges against Iran are part of a drumbeat of pronouncements meant to mobilize support for escalation in Iraq and for an attack on Iran, the "source of the problem." The world is aghast at the possibility. Even in neighboring Sunni states, no friends of Iran, majorities, when asked, favor a nuclear-armed Iran over any military action against that country. From what limited information we have, it appears that significant parts of the U.S. military and intelligence communities are opposed to such an attack, along with almost the entire world, even more so than when the Bush Regime and Tony Blair's Britain invaded Iraq, defying enormous popular opposition worldwide.


"The Iran effect"

The results of an attack on Iran could be horrendous. After all, according to a recent study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, using government and Rand Corporation data, the Iraq invasion has already led to a seven-fold increase in terror. The "Iran effect" would probably be far more severe and long-lasting. British military historian Corelli Barnett speaks for many when he warns that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III."

What are the plans of the increasingly desperate clique that narrowly holds political power in the U.S.? We cannot know. Such state planning is, of course, kept secret in the interests of "security." Review of the declassified record reveals that there is considerable merit in that claim - though only if we understand "security" to mean the security of the Bush Regime against their domestic enemy, the population in whose name they act.

Even if the White House clique is not planning war, naval deployments, support for secessionist movements and acts of terror within Iran, and other provocations could easily lead to an accidental war. Congressional resolutions would not provide much of a barrier. They invariably permit "national security" exemptions, opening holes wide enough for the several aircraft-carrier battle groups soon to be in the Persian Gulf to pass through - as long as an unscrupulous leadership issues proclamations of doom (as Condoleezza Rice did with those "mushroom clouds" over American cities back in 2002). And the concocting of the sorts of incidents that "justify" such attacks is a familiar practice. Even the worst monsters feel the need for such justification and adopt the device: Hitler's defense of innocent Germany from the "wild terror" of the Poles in 1939, after they had rejected his wise and generous proposals for peace, is but one example.

The most effective barrier to a White House decision to launch a war is the kind of organized popular opposition that frightened the political-military leadership enough in 1968 that they were reluctant to send more troops to Vietnam - fearing, we learned from the Pentagon Papers, that they might need them for civil-disorder control.

Doubtless Iran's government merits harsh condemnation, including for its recent actions that have inflamed the crisis. It is, however, useful to ask how we would act if Iran had invaded and occupied Canada and Mexico and was arresting U.S. government representatives there on the grounds that they were resisting the Iranian occupation (called "liberation," of course). Imagine as well that Iran was deploying massive naval forces in the Caribbean and issuing credible threats to launch a wave of attacks against a vast range of sites - nuclear and otherwise - in the United States, if the U.S. government did not immediately terminate all its nuclear energy programs (and, naturally, dismantle all its nuclear weapons). Suppose that all of this happened after Iran had overthrown the government of the U.S. and installed a vicious tyrant (as the US did to Iran in 1953), then later supported a Russian invasion of the U.S. that killed millions of people (just as the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran in 1980, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, a figure comparable to millions of Americans). Would we watch quietly?

It is easy to understand an observation by one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld. After the U.S. invaded Iraq, knowing it to be defenseless, he noted, "Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy."

Surely no sane person wants Iran (or any nation) to develop nuclear weapons. A reasonable resolution of the present crisis would permit Iran to develop nuclear energy, in accord with its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but not nuclear weapons. Is that outcome feasible? It would be, given one condition: that the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies in which public opinion had a significant impact on public policy.

As it happens, this solution has overwhelming support among Iranians and Americans, who generally are in agreement on nuclear issues. The Iranian-American consensus includes the complete elimination of nuclear weapons everywhere (82% of Americans); if that cannot yet be achieved because of elite opposition, then at least a "nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East that would include both Islamic countries and Israel" (71% of Americans). Seventy-five percent of Americans prefer building better relations with Iran to threats of force. In brief, if public opinion were to have a significant influence on state policy in the U.S. and Iran, resolution of the crisis might be at hand, along with much more far-reaching solutions to the global nuclear conundrum.


Promoting democracy - at home

These facts suggest a possible way to prevent the current crisis from exploding, perhaps even into some version of World War III. That awesome threat might be averted by pursuing a familiar proposal: democracy promotion - this time at home, where it is badly needed. Democracy promotion at home is certainly feasible and, although we cannot carry out such a project directly in Iran, we could act to improve the prospects of the courageous reformers and oppositionists who are seeking to achieve just that. Among such figures who are, or should be, well-known, would be Saeed Hajjarian, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, and Akbar Ganji, as well as those who, as usual, remain nameless, among them labor activists about whom we hear very little; those who publish the Iranian Workers Bulletin may be a case in point.

We can best improve the prospects for democracy promotion in Iran by sharply reversing state policy here so that it reflects popular opinion. That would entail ceasing to make the regular threats that are a gift to Iranian hardliners. These are bitterly condemned by Iranians truly concerned with democracy promotion (unlike those "supporters" who flaunt democracy slogans in the West and are lauded as grand "idealists" despite their clear record of visceral hatred for democracy).

Democracy promotion in the United States could have far broader consequences. In Iraq, for instance, a firm timetable for withdrawal would be initiated at once, or very soon, in accord with the will of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis and a significant majority of Americans. Federal budget priorities would be virtually reversed. Where spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over US$100,000 a year would be immediately rescinded.

The U.S. would have adopted a national health-care system long ago, rejecting the privatized system that sports twice the per-capita costs found in similar societies and some of the worst outcomes in the industrial world. It would have rejected what is widely regarded by those who pay attention as a "fiscal train wreck" in-the-making. The U.S. would have ratified the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and undertaken still stronger measures to protect the environment. It would allow the UN to take the lead in international crises, including in Iraq. After all, according to opinion polls, since shortly after the 2003 invasion, a large majority of Americans have wanted the UN to take charge of political transformation, economic reconstruction, and civil order in that land.

If public opinion mattered, the U.S. would accept UN Charter restrictions on the use of force, contrary to a bipartisan consensus that this country, alone, has the right to resort to violence in response to potential threats, real or imagined, including threats to our access to markets and resources. The U.S. (along with others) would abandon the Security Council veto and accept majority opinion even when in opposition to it. The UN would be allowed to regulate arms sales; while the U.S. would cut back on such sales and urge other countries to do so, which would be a major contribution to reducing large-scale violence in the world. Terror would be dealt with through diplomatic and economic measures, not force, in accord with the judgment of most specialists on the topic but again in diametric opposition to present-day policy.

Furthermore, if public opinion influenced policy, the U.S. would have diplomatic relations with Cuba, benefiting the people of both countries (and, incidentally, U.S. agribusiness, energy corporations, and others), instead of standing virtually alone in the world in imposing an embargo (joined only by Israel, the Republic of Palau, and the Marshall Islands). Washington would join the broad international consensus on a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which (with Israel) it has blocked for 30 years - with scattered and temporary exceptions - and which it still blocks in word, and more importantly in deed, despite fraudulent claims of its commitment to diplomacy. The U.S. would also equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, cutting off aid to either party that rejected the international consensus.

Evidence on these matters is reviewed in my book Failed States as well as in The Foreign Policy Disconnect by Benjamin Page (with Marshall Bouton), which also provides extensive evidence that public opinion on foreign (and probably domestic) policy issues tends to be coherent and consistent over long periods. Studies of public opinion have to be regarded with caution, but they are certainly highly suggestive.

Democracy promotion at home, while no panacea, would be a useful step towards helping our own country become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international order (to adopt the term used for adversaries), instead of being an object of fear and dislike throughout much of the world. Apart from being a value in itself, functioning democracy at home holds real promise for dealing constructively with many current problems, international and domestic, including those that literally threaten the survival of our species.

Injured In Iraq, A Soldier Is Shattered At Home

by: Deborah Sontag

April 05, 2007

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/us/05VET.html

DUNBAR, Pa. — Blinded and disabled on the 54th day of the war in Iraq, Sam Ross returned home to a rousing parade that outdid anything this small, depressed Appalachian town had ever seen. “Sam’s parade put Dunbar on the map,” his grandfather said.

That was then.

Now Mr. Ross, 24, faces charges of attempted homicide, assault and arson in the burning of a family trailer in February. Nobody in the trailer was hurt, but Mr. Ross fought the assistant fire chief who reported to the scene, and later threatened a state trooper with his prosthetic leg, which was taken away from him, according to the police.

The police locked up Mr. Ross in the Fayette County prison. In his cell, he tried to hang himself with a sheet. After he was cut down, Mr. Ross was committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where, he said in a recent interview there, he is finally getting — and accepting — the help he needs, having spiraled downward in the years since the welcoming fanfare faded.

“I came home a hero, and now I’m a bum,” Mr. Ross, whose full name is Salvatore Ross Jr., said.

The story of Sam Ross has the makings of a ballad, with its heart-rending arc from hardscrabble childhood to decorated war hero to hardscrabble adulthood. His effort to create a future for himself by enlisting in the Army exploded in the desert during a munitions disposal operation in Baghdad. He was 20.

He was also on his own. Mr. Ross, who is estranged from his mother and whose father is serving a life sentence for murdering his stepmother, does not have the family support that many other severely wounded veterans depend on. Various relatives have stepped in at various times, but Mr. Ross, embittered by a difficult childhood and by what the war cost him, has had a push-pull relationship with those who sought to assist him.

Several people have taken a keen interest in Mr. Ross, among them Representative John P. Murtha, the once-hawkish Democrat from Pennsylvania. When Mr. Murtha publicly turned against the war in Iraq in 2005, he cited the shattered life of Mr. Ross, one of his first constituents to be seriously wounded, as a pivotal influence.

Mr. Murtha’s office assisted Mr. Ross in negotiating the military health care bureaucracy. Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit group based in Massachusetts, built him a beautiful log cabin. Military doctors carefully tended Mr. Ross’s physical wounds: the loss of his eyesight, of his left leg below the knee, and of his hearing in one ear, among other problems.

But that help was not enough to save Mr. Ross from the loneliness and despair that engulfed him. Overwhelmed by severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including routine nightmares of floating over Iraq that ended with a blinding boom, he “self-medicated” with alcohol and illegal drugs. He finally hit rock bottom when he landed in the state psychiatric hospital, where he is, sadly, thrilled to be.

“Seventeen times of trying to commit suicide, I think it’s time to give up,” Mr. Ross said, speaking in the forensic unit of the Mayview State Hospital in Bridgeville. “Lots of them were screaming out cries for help, and nobody paid attention. But finally somebody has.”

Finding a Way Out

Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania, once a prosperous coal mining center, is now one of the poorest counties in the state. The bucolic but ramshackle town of Dunbar sits off State Route 119 near the intersection marked by the Butchko Brothers junkyard.

Past the railroad tracks and not far up Hardy Hill Road, the blackened remains of Mr. Ross’s hillside trailer are testament to his disintegration. The Support our Troops ribbon is charred, the No Trespassing sign unfazed.

Mr. Ross lived in that trailer, where his father shot his stepmother, at several points in his life, including alone after he returned from Iraq. Its most recent tenant, his younger brother, Thomas, was in jail when the fire occurred.

Many in Mr. Ross’s large, quarreling family are on one side of the law or the other, prison guards or prisoners, police officers or probationers. Their internal feuds are so commonplace that family reunions have to be carefully plotted with an eye to who has a protective order out against whom, Mr. Ross’s 25-year-old cousin, Joseph Lee Ross, joked.

Sam Ross’s childhood was not easy. “Sam’s had a rough life from the time he was born,” his grandfather, Joseph Frank Ross, said. His parents fought, sometimes with guns, until they separated and his mother moved out of state. Mr. Ross bore some of the brunt of the turmoil.

Private Ross says that from his first days of basic training, he was hooked. But just months into his tour in Iraq, an explosion left him with several disabilities.

Joseph Frank Ross, outside the trailer that his grandson is accused of burning down. Mr. Ross said, “Sam’s had a rough life from the time he was born.”

“When that kid was little, the way he got beat around, it was awful,” his uncle, Joseph Frank Ross Jr., a prison guard, said.

When he was just shy of 12, Mr. Ross moved in with his father’s father, who for a time was married to his mother’s mother. The grandfather-grandson relationship was and continues to be tumultuous.

“I idolized my grandpaps, but he’s an alcoholic and he mentally abuses people,” Mr. Ross said.

His grandfather, 72, a former coal miner who sells used cars, said, “I’m not an alcoholic. I can quit. I just love the taste of it.”

The grandfather, who still keeps an A-plus English test by Mr. Ross on his refrigerator, said his grandson did well in school, even though he cared most about his wrestling team, baseball, hunting and fishing. Mr. Ross graduated in June 2001.

“Sammy wanted me to pay his way to college, but I’m not financially fixed to do that,” his grandfather said.

Feeling that Fayette County was a dead end, Mr. Ross said he had wanted to find a way out after he graduated. One night in late 2001, he said, he saw “one of those ‘Be all you can be’ ads” on television. The next day, he went to the mall and enlisted, getting a $3,000 bonus for signing up to be a combat engineer.

From his first days of basic training, Mr. Ross embraced the military as his salvation. “It was like, ‘Wow, man, I was born for the Army,’ ” he said. “I was an adrenaline junkie. I was super, super fit. I craved discipline. I wanted adventure. I was patriotic. I loved the bonding. And there was nothing that I was feared of. I mean, man, I was made for war.”

In early 2003, Private Ross, who earned his jump wings as a parachutist, shipped off to Kuwait with the 82nd Airborne Division, which pushed into Iraq with the invasion in March. The early days of the war were heady for many soldiers like Private Ross. He was assigned to an engineer squad given the task of rounding up munitions.

On May 18, Private Ross and his squad set out to de-mine an area in south Baghdad. Moving quickly, as they did on such operations, he collected about 15 UXO’s, or unexploded ordnances, in a pit. Somehow, something — he never learned what — caused them to detonate.

“The initial blast hit me and I went numb and everything went totally silent,” he said. “Then I hear people start hollering, ‘Ross! Ross! Ross!’ It started getting louder, louder, louder. My whole body was mangled. I was spitting up blood. I faded in and out. I was bawling my eyes out, saying, ‘Please don’t let me go; don’t let me go.’ ”

A Casualty of War

When his relatives first saw Mr. Ross at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, he was in a coma. “That boy was dead,” his grandfather said. “We was looking at a corpse lying in that bed.”

As he lay unconscious, the Army discharged him — one year, four months and 18 days after he enlisted, by his calculation. After 31 days, Mr. Ross came off the respirator. Groggily but insistently, he pointed to his eyes and then to his leg. An aunt gingerly told him he was blind and an amputee. He cried for days, he said.

It was during Mr. Ross’s stay at Walter Reed that Representative Murtha, a former Marine colonel, first met his young constituent and presented him with a Purple Heart.

From the start of the war, Mr. Murtha said in an interview, he made regular, painful excursions to visit wounded soldiers. Gradually, those visits, combined with his disillusionment about the Bush regime’s management of the war, led him to call in late 2005 for the troops to be brought home in six months.

“Sam Ross had an impact on me,” Mr. Murtha said. “Eventually, I just felt that we had gotten to a point where we were talking so much about winning the war itself — and it couldn’t be won militarily — that we were forgetting about the results of the war on individuals like Sam.”

Over the next three years, Mr. Ross underwent more than 20 surgical procedures, including: “Five on my right eye, one on my left eye, two or three when they cut my left leg off, three or four on my right leg, a couple on my throat, skin grafts, chest tubes and, you know, one where they gutted me from belly button to groin” to remove metal fragments from his intestines.

But, although he was prescribed psychiatric medication, he never received in-patient treatment for the post-traumatic stress disorder that was diagnosed at Walter Reed. And, in retrospect he, like his relatives, said he believes he should have been put in an intensive program soon after his urgent physical injuries were addressed.

“They should have given him treatment before they let him come back into civilization,” his grandfather said.

A Hero’s Welcome

The parade, on a sunny day in late summer 2003, was spectacular. Hundreds of flag-waving locals lined the streets. Mr. Ross had just turned 21. Wearing his green uniform and burgundy beret, he rode in a Jeep, accompanied by other veterans and the Connellsville Area Senior High School Marching Band. The festivities included bagpipers, Civil War re-enactors and a dunking pool.

“It wasn’t the medals on former Army Pfc. Sam Ross’s uniform that reflected his courage yesterday,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote. “It was the Dunbar native’s poise as he greeted well-wishers and insisted on sharing attention with other soldiers that proved the grit he’ll need to recover from extensive injuries he suffered in Iraq.”

For a little while, “it was joy joy, happiness happiness,” Mr. Ross said. He felt the glimmerings of a new kind of potential within himself, and saw no reason why he could not go on to college, even law school. Then the black moods, the panic attacks, the irritability set in. He was dogged by chronic pain; fragments of metal littered his body.

Mr. Ross said he was “stuck in denial” about his disabilities. The day he tried to resume a favorite pastime, fishing, hit him hard. Off-balance on the water, it came as a revelation that, without eyesight, he did not know where to cast his rod. He threw his equipment in the water and sold his boat.

“I just gave up,” he said. “I give up on everything.”

About a year after he was injured, Mr. Ross enrolled in an in-patient program for blind veterans in Chicago. He learned the Braille alphabet, but his fingers were too numb from embedded shrapnel to read, he said. He figured that he did not have much else to learn since he had been functioning blind for a year. He left the program early.

Similarly, Mr. Ross repeatedly declined outpatient psychiatric treatment at the veterans hospital in Pittsburgh, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. He said he felt that people at the hospital had disrespected him.

After living with relatives, Mr. Ross withdrew from the world into the trailer on the hill in 2004. That year, he got into a dispute with his grandfather over old vehicles on the property, resolving it by setting them on fire. His run-ins with local law enforcement, which did not occur before he went to Iraq, the Fayette County sheriff said, had begun.

But his image locally had not yet been tarnished. In early 2005, Mr. Murtha held a second Purple Heart ceremony for Mr. Ross at a Fayette County hospital “to try to show him how much affection we had for him and his sacrifice,” Mr. Murtha said.

A local newspaper article about Mr. Ross’s desire to build himself a house came to the attention of Homes for Our Troops.

“He’s a great kid; he really is,” said Kirt Rebello, the group’s director of projects and veterans affairs. “Early on, even before he was injured, the kid had this humongous deck stacked against him in life. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to help him.”

Mr. Ross, who had received a $100,000 government payment for his catastrophic injury, bought land adjacent to his grandfather’s. Mr. Rebello asked Mr. Ross whether he might prefer to move to somewhere with more services and opportunities. But Mr. Ross said that Dunbar’s winding roads were implanted in his psyche, “that he could see the place in his mind,” Mr. Rebello said.

A Life Falls Apart

In May 2005, Mr. Ross broke up with a girlfriend and grew increasingly depressed. He felt oppressively idle, he said. One day, he tacked a suicide note to the door of his trailer and hitched a ride to a trail head, disappearing into the woods. A daylong manhunt ensued.

Mr. Ross fell asleep in the woods that night, waking up with the sun on his face, which he took to be a sign that God wanted him to live. When he was found, he was taken to a psychiatric ward and released after a few weeks.

The construction of his house proved a distraction from his misery. Mr. Ross enjoyed the camaraderie of the volunteers who fashioned him a cabin from white pine logs. But when the house, which he named Second Heaven, was finished in early 2006, “they all left, I moved in, and I was all alone,” he said. “That’s when the drugs really started.”

At first, Mr. Ross said, he used drugs — pills, heroin, crack, and methadone — “basically to mellow myself out and to have people around.” Local ne’er-do-wells enjoyed themselves on Mr. Ross’s tab for quite some time, his relatives said.

“These kids were loading him into a car, taking him to strip clubs, letting him foot the bills,” his uncle, Joseph Ross Jr., said. “They were dopies and druggies.”

Mr. Ross’s girlfriend, Barbara Hall, moved in with him. But relationships with many of his relatives had deteriorated.

“If that boy would have come home and accepted what happened to him, that boy never would have wanted for anything in Dunbar,” his grandfather said. “If he had accepted that he’s wounded and he’s blinded, you know? He’s not the only one that happened to. There’s tens of thousands of boys like him.”

Some sympathy began to erode in the town, too. “There’s pro and con on him,” a local official said. “Some people don’t even believe he’s totally blind.”

After overdosing first on heroin and then on methadone last fall, Mr. Ross said, he quit consuming illegal drugs, replacing them with drinking until he blacked out.

Mr. Ross relied on his brother, Thomas, when he suffered panic attacks. When Thomas was jailed earlier this year, Mr. Ross reached out to older members of his family. In early February, his uncle, Joseph Ross Jr., persuaded him to be driven several hours to the veterans’ hospital in Coatesville to apply for its in-patient program for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Due to the severity of his case, they accepted him on the spot and gave him a bed date for right after Valentine’s Day,” his uncle said. “Then he wigged out five days before he was supposed to go there.”

It started when his brother’s girlfriend, Monica Kuhns, overheard a phone call in which he was arranging to buy anti-depressants. She thought it was a transaction to buy cocaine, he said, and he feared that she would tell his sister and brother.

After downing several beers, Mr. Ross, in a deranged rage, went to his old trailer, where Ms. Kuhns was living with her young son, he said.

“He started pounding on the door,” said Ms. Hall, who accompanied him. “He went in and threatened to burn the place down. Me and Monica didn’t actually think he was going to do it. But then he pulled out the lighter.”

Having convinced himself that the trailer — a source of so much family misery — needed to be destroyed, Mr. Ross set a pile of clothing on fire. The women and the child fled. When a volunteer firefighter showed up, Mr. Ross attacked and choked him, according to a police complaint.

A judge set bail at $250,000. In the Fayette County prison, Mr. Ross got “totally out of hand,” the sheriff, Gary Brownfield, said. Mr. Ross’s lawyer, James Geibig, said the situation was a chaotic mess.

“It was just a nightmare,” Mr. Geibig said. “First the underlying charges — attempted homicide, come on — were blown out of proportion. Then bail is set sky high, straight cash. They put him in a little cell, in isolation, and barely let him shower. Things went from bad to worse until they found him hanging.”

Now Mr. Geibig’s goal is to get Mr. Ross sentenced into the post-traumatic stress disorder program he was supposed to attend.

“He does not need to be in jail,” Mr. Geibig said. “He has suffered enough. I’m not a bleeding heart, but his is a pretty gut-wrenching tale. And at the end, right before this incident, he sought out help. It didn’t arrive in time. But it’s not too late, I hope, for Sam Ross to have some kind of future.”