Smith: Can you tell me your name, rank, and what service you were in?

Talib: My name is Tim Talib and I was a hospital corpsman third class in the United States Navy, and I served in Iraq with the Marine Corps.

S: How long did you serve in Iraq?
T: I was in country for seven months.

S: Why are you here today?
T: I’m here today to protest the on going occupation in Iraq. I believe that it’s immoral and illegal under international law and I believe that we went into Iraq that our motivation had more to do with oil and imperialism than to do with Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction which were never found or connections to 9/11 which were never made.

S: How did you come to that conclusion?
P: I believed much of that before I went over but my experiences in Iraq reinforced what I’d already believed, particularly with regard to weapons of mass destruction. We spent some of our time searching for WMDs, and nothing was ever found. Nothing was ever brought to light by the Bush administration. Their claims were completely false, and all the NBC [Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical] officers and other people that I talked with in country that were working on WMD searches never found any thing either.

S: Did you have any contact with the Iraqi people?
T: Yes, I had a good amount of contact with the Iraqi people in the Sunni triangle region so it was mostly Sunnis and a few Shiites. I didn’t meet any Kurds at all.

S: Did your opinion of the Iraqi people differ from what the military said it would be like?
T: I never believed what the military told me about the Iraqi people to begin with. I went over there with the belief that the majority of the Iraqi people were good people that they didn’t necessarily support Saddam either but they equally did not want us occupying their country and those beliefs were confirmed. I found that a lot of people in Iraq were intelligent, well educated people who already had some understanding of what they wanted for their country and the democratic processes that they wanted to implement and they didn’t need us to come over and force those ideas on them.

S: What would you say to somebody that might be thinking of joining the military today?
T: Consider other options. It’s not a good idea. It’s not a good time to be in and you don’t want to be forced to participate in an occupation.