“Although only a handful of them have gone public, several hundred U.S. soldiers have applied for conscientious objector (CO) status since January, says …The Center on Conscience and War (CCW), which advises military personnel on CO discharges…

The military granted 111 soldiers CO status in the first Gulf War before putting a stop to the practice, resulting in 2,500 soldiers being sent to prison, says Bill Gavlin from the Center on Conscience and War, quoting a report from the Boston Globe newspaper.

During that war, a number of U.S. COs at the U.S. Marine Camp LeJeune in North Carolina were “beaten, harassed and treated horribly,” Gavlin says. In some cases, COs were put on planes bound for Kuwait, told that they could not apply for CO status or that they could only apply after they’d already gone to war. ” AlterNet [via Brooke, who shares my sense of the importance of tracking this underreported trend]