Iraq veteran slams the 'Poverty Draft'

"You go into an Arab nation, you kill people, you steal their oil, you destroy their country and charge them to have it rebuilt," Mejia said.

"You are giving terrorism a whole new life."

"I think poor people are definitely targeted. We refer to it as a poverty draft. What that really means is that recruiters target low-income people. So when they choose which high schools to recruit people from, they spend a lot more time in high schools in poor areas," Robert Dove, an administrator with the Quaker peace group American Friends Committee, told Aljazeera.net.

" He said the benefits of joining the US military were usually less than many recruits were led to believe.

"You can get up to $70,000 in assistance once you have completed your service. Almost no one gets that... Most people who get any money at all get considerably less than that and a lot of people get nothing," he said.