SUN CITY – Jill Morgenthaler, the featured guest at the April 12 meeting of Huntley Seniors for Progressive Action, opened her presentation with a war story.
A colonel in the Iraq War leading strategic communications and public affairs, Morgenthaler had an inside look into Saddam Hussein’s court trial after being captured.
“What you didn’t see, because the media was all inside, is that he was shackled, and as he got off the bus, he was walking, totally trembling in fear, and I thought ‘Wow, he thinks he’s going to die today,'” she said.
Morgenthaler said that upon finding out he was not to be executed that day, Hussein grew bolder and threatened the judge and his family over what he would do once rightly back in power.
“And finally this young, brave Iraqi judge kicked him out, so he comes out, he sees me, and he checks me out. Ew,” she said.
Morgenthaler stared back. She remembered what General Ricardo Sanchez, then commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq, had told her about seeing “pure evil” when he looked at Hussein.
“So as he’s staring at me and I’m staring back and I’m looking, I don’t know what pure evil looks like, so I’m looking, and I don’t know that I see pure evil – I just see a dirty old man,” she said. “So we’re both staring, and neither one of us backing off, and finally he barks off some command in Arabic, the guards burst out laughing, and then they take him away.”
The command the guards turned down? “Kill her.”
Hussein would have to learn he no longer had the power to have people killed for any reason.
“I don’t know if we should have gone to Iraq or not, but I’m very proud to be part of getting rid of someone like that, and I am very proud of the freedoms that we brought to Iraq,” she said. “I was there when they got to vote for the first time, and they used their fingerprint and people were just walking out holding their fingers up so proudly.”
As the first woman to enter the ROTC and train as an equal to men, then serving in the army for nearly 30 years, Morgenthaler knows much about war in the literal sense.
Having served as homeland security advisor to former governor Rod Blagojevich and having run for Congress in 2008 before losing to republican Peter Roskam, Morgenthaler also is aware of the political battlefield.
With this frame of reference, she proceeded to tell HSPA members about the war on veterans, seniors, and women being played out in state and federal legislatures.
On veterans, Morgenthaler spoke of the consequences they faced under plans to cut the federal budget. She mentioned Congresswoman Michele Bachman’s proposed $400 billion budget cuts, which included cutting $4.5 billion from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“We have over 75,000 veterans homeless in America. We are the greatest nation in the world; this is not right,” she said.
Morgenthaler then mentioned H.R.1, a bill that would have cut housing for the elderly by $587 million. She also discussed how current efforts to repeal Obama’s health care reform would lead to a reintroduction of gender discrimination in the healthcare and insurance systems, ultimately costing senior women more.
“Women we are healthier. We live longer; why would we pay higher premiums? Well, because we have preconditions such as pregnancy, things like that,” Morgenthaler said.
The war on women was the biggest topic of focus at the meeting. Morgenthaler listed a series of bills that restricted abortion and reproductive rights, citing a figure from the Guttmacher Institute that states enacted 135 new reproductive laws in 2011.
Morgenthaler criticized the proposed H.R. 358 Protect Life Act which would allow hospitals to refuse to perform life-saving abortions. The bill did not pass, but Morgenthaler made a point of its dealing in absolutes.
She pointed to state bills that she considered were attacks on women, such as Georgia House Bill 14, which call for victims of various crimes – including sexual crimes – to be labeled as “accusers” in court. Another was South Dakota House Bill 1171, which expanded the state’s justifiable homicide conditions to include not only self defense, but defense of an unborn child, something Morgenthaler believes alluded to abortion doctors.
In Illinois, Morgenthaler examined Rep. Joe Lyons’ House Bill 4085, which would require women to view an ultrasound image of their fetus before undergoing an abortion.
“Fortunately women and men in our state legislatures were so insulted that he tried to put this through an [agriculture] bill that, first of all, what the women did in the house is they killed the bill by offering amendments requiring men to watch a video on potentially painful side effects of Viagra and requiring men to get ultrasounds,” she said.
