It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself.
This is in the context of the US making Iran a terrible, implacable foe, despite the fact that (as Greenwald points out) “it’s a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and could not possibly threaten us.”
Well, well—those weapons made in Iran and given to Iraqi insurgents? They weren’t made in Iran after all. Take a look:
In a sharp reversal of its longstanding accusations against Iran arming militants in Iraq , the US military has made an unprecedented albeit quiet confession: the weapons they had recently found in Iraq were not made in Iran at all.
According to a report by the LA Times correspondent Tina Susman in Baghdad: “A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin. When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.”
In his new book, Torture Team, renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands documents the fact that Bush’s torture program was approved at the highest levels of the administration.
Speaking with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday, Sands noted that these architects of torture refuse to acknowledge they were “complicit in the commission of a crime.” “There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility,” he said of his interviews with key torture advocates.
When you read my account with Doug Feith and with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Feith’s book. on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it’s as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it’s about individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject failure on that account.
Watch it:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently argued that torture is not unconstitutional. Speaking with Moyers, Sands slammed Scalia for being “foolish” and not considering the implications of his words:
I’ve listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there’s nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that?
“You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers,” Sands concluded.
Bruce Falconer is calling out the mainstream media for ignoring the disturbing testimony that dominated recent U.S. Senate hearings into corruption by private contractors in Iraq. The testimony came from whistleblowers Frank Cassaday, Linda Warren (both former employees of Kellogg, Brown and Root) and Barry Halley (who worked in Iraq for Worldwide Network Services, the Sandi Group and CAPE Environmental Management. They told stories of widespread theft of materials and supplies needed by soldiers, looting Iraqi treasures (in one case melting down Iraqi gold to make cowboy spurs), and a prostitution ring run by the manager of a “major defense contractor,” which led to the death of a colleague whose armored car was diverted “to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.” Cassaday, Warren and Halley say they were punished and harassed when they tried to alert their companies to these abuses. Aside from Mother Jones, the only news outlet to file a report on their testimony was David Ivanovich of the Houston Chronicle, although a transcript of the hearings is available on the Senate’s website.
Because they’re making money from it? See this article by Richard Skaff:
What do war, Congressmen, Senators, and the defense/offense industry have in common? The answer, if you haven’t already guessed is “profits.”
Conflict makes money for the military industrial complex, and the cronies they place in Congress, the Senate, and the White House.
An investigation by Ralph Forbes from American Free press reported on May 05, 2008 that more than a quarter of US senators and congressmen have invested at least $196 million of their own money in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD) that profit from the death and destruction in Iraq [1].
The report also edifies that 151 members of congress invested close to a quarter-billion dollars in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. These companies got more than 275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to Fedspending.org [2]. In 2004, the first full year after the current Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers-both hawks and doves invested between $74.9 million and 161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD [1]. No wonder the Democratic congress kept approving the enormous spending bills on the war, since a significant portion of it happens to end up in their deep pockets.
Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, an Iraqi vegetable farmer, walked down to the ramshackle pump house along the banks of the Euphrates. Each day at midmorning, he would start the seven-horsepower pump to water his crops.
Khudair passed through the tall grass and palm trees of his farm in Jurf as Sakhr, a predominantly Sunni area 30 miles south of Baghdad dominated by sprawling patches of farmland, irrigation canals and regular eruptions of lethal violence. Daytime temperatures had lately been over 115 degrees, and it was already sweltering as he crossed the 500 meters for the last time.
As Khudair approached the pump house on May 11, 2007, he stumbled upon a team of five sweat-soaked U.S. Army snipers, dazed with heat and fatigue, hidden in the grass of a small hill. It’s hard to say who was more surprised, the Iraqi or the American troops. The sniper on guard at the “hide” was so shocked to see Khudair wander up to his position that he froze for a moment, staring. Then he approached Khudair and pointed a 9 mm pistol at the farmer’s head.
The latest in a long, long line of scandals plaguing Iraq contracting company KBR, today the Times of London reports that British employees of KBR working in the British Embassy in Iraq have been accused of sexual harassment. One Iraqi woman, a cleaner at the embassy, says that the KBR employee offered to double her pay if she slept with him; when she refused, she was fired:
The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.
The complainants — the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen — say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.
All three Iraqis lost their jobs in the Green Zone. Two KRB employees who worked in the embassy spoke out in support of the women; a few days later, KBR sent them home on paid leave and later fired them. The women also say KBR never interviewed them when conducting their internal review.
Via the Seminal, this CBS report solves its own mystery. Following are excerpts from the report. See if you can find the solution:
A Kuwaiti who had been imprisoned in Guantanamo for more than 3 1/2 years carried out a recent suicide attack in Iraq, the U.S. military said Wednesday.
Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi took part in one of three suicide bomb attacks last month in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, said U.S. Navy Cmdr. Scott Rye, a military spokesman.
… Rye said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that al-Ajmi’s family has confirmed his death and that authorities determined he entered Iraq through Syria.
“It is unknown what motivated him to leave Kuwait and go to Iraq,” Rye said. [That's the mystery. See if you can figure out the answer. - LG]
… Military documents previously released to AP show that al-Ajmi was “constantly in trouble” while in Guantanamo and held in disciplinary blocks during his detention. He also allegedly told officials in August 2004 that “he now is a jihadist, an enemy combatant, and that he will kill as many Americans as he possibly can.”
Tom Wilner, a lawyer who represented Kuwaiti prisoners at Guantanamo, said al-Ajmi had a broken arm during one of their meetings at the base in Cuba and that he alleged he had been injured by guards who interrupted him while he prayed.
If we could only figure out why some of these guys turn against the US…
On April 9, ABC News reported that in 2002, President Bush’s most senior advisers approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics. Days later, Bush confirmed to ABC he “approved” of the tactics. Since the ABC report, the media have largely ignored the story. Morever, it took 14 days for a reporter to raise the issue in a White House press briefing.
During an interview this morning on NPR, former Vice President Al Gore criticized Bush for approving the techniques, calling it “obscene,” adding that his use of signing statements is “a raw assertion of authority outside the boundaries of the law”:
GORE: Ultimately the guarantor of our freedoms are the people. And these kinds of outrages, a president saying that he has the right turn George Washington’s 200-plus year prohibition against torture and torture anyone he wants with his assistants gathering in the basement of the White House — according to recent revelations — personally reviewing the kinds of torture techniques being used prisoner by prisoner, its obscene.
Highlighting Bush’s “arrogation of authority,” Gore also noted that the Bush administration has “refused to comply with the Supreme Court decision” requiring it to regulate “global warming pollution” under the Clean Air Act.
While Gore called Bush’s abuses of power “outrages,” the media does not seem to be as concerned. However, the House Judiciary Committee provided a bright spot today, voting to subpoena David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, to compel him to testify about the administration’s interrogation programs.
Is there a smoking gun on how the US tortures its prisoners if people refuse to look at the smoking gun? Errol Morris writes in the Huffington Post:
Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.i.45
It is now four years since the Abu Ghraib photographs were placed before the world by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and by Dan Rather in 60 Minutes II. The military and the administration did everything to prevent their release. Calls from the White House, calls from the Pentagon, the whole nine yards. Mary Mapes who produced the story for 60 Minutes II, talked about the endless pressure that came from the government not to run the story. At one point Dan told me, “Just walk away. Walk away. God damn them.” He was enraged. The photographs were eventually published - despite the hesitancy of bigwigs at CBS.
The photographs inaugurated a storm of international protest. In America hand wringing and regret quickly devolved into buck-passing and finger pointing. The President commented, “This is the worst day of my Presidency.” But quickly, the story changed. We were told that the photographs depicted the actions of “a few bad apples.” Both the left and the right agreed, the bad apples were bad, really bad, and although the reasons for this were disputed, everyone could agree the pictures were beyond the pale.
Ironically, the abuse photographs helped George W. Bush win the 2004 election. When the photographs came out, Bush said that it was the worst day of his presidency. That was doubtlessly true, but on the other hand, the photographs opened up an opportunity. He had an excuse. To the questions: why is the war going badly? Why is the insurgency growing? Why does the Arab world hate us? He had an answer. Because of these soldiers, because of the bad apples. They betrayed us. They stabbed America in the back. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. The insurgency had been growing by leaps and bounds before the first photographs at Abu Ghraib were taken. The war had gone south from the very beginning.
I’m not surprised: this gang will do anything to keep its machinations secret. Of course, not keeping copies of official emails is illegal, but breaking the law never slowed down the Bush White House. Matthew Blake reports:
The intricate legal battle over missing White House emails could be going somewhere. Theresa Payne, the White House’s chief information officer,has admitted that there are no backup tapes of Executive Office of the President emails between March 1, 2003 and May 22, 2003. This timeframe roughly coincides with the invasion of Iraq (which was March 19, 2003) and “Mission Accomplished” victory declaration (May 1, 2003).
A court order in a civil suit- filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive- instructed Payne and the president’s office to release all email backup tapes from March 2003 to October 2003.
In her declaration to the court, Payne said that the earliest back-up tape was May 23, 2003. It has already been established that these emails are not on a White House hard drive, as the White House erased the hard drives when they switched their archiving program in October 2003. In other words, it is likely that there is no archive of White House emails during these two critical months of White House activity. Some experts say this would constitute a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which is why the White House is being sued in the first place.
As to the 438 backup tapes the White House did produce between May 23, 2003 and September 29, 2003, Payne said it would be “extraordinarily burdensome” and “extremely costly” to prove the White House’s claim that these backup tapes actually contain executive office of president correspondence. “They’re hoping that they can avoid giving information as long as possible,” said Meredith Fuchs, of the National Security Archives, a plaintiff in the case, “Time is ticking away for the administration and they know it.”
But, interestingly, this one is brought against the contractors, not the US government. So perhaps this one can go to trial instead of being quashed by the Bush Administration. Here’s the story:
An Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months.
Emad al-Janabi’s federal lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003.
Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as “Big Steve.” The suit claims he directed some of the torture tactics.
Thomas Insel — director of the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. government’s top psychiatric researcher — said today that “the number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care.” Bloomberg reports:
Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.
Based on those figures and established suicide rates for similar patients who commonly develop substance abuse and other complications of post-traumatic stress disorder, “it’s quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,” Insel said.
“He is a very energetic guy. He is very confident - overconfident to an extent - and he is very superficial in his understanding of the requirements of his job,” Sanchez said. “His whole contribution was a waste of time and effort.”…Sanchez said Kerik focused more on “conducting raids and liberating prostitutes” than training the Iraqis.
“They’d get tips and they’d go and actually raid a whorehouse,” Sanchez told The News. “Their focus becomes trying to do tactical police operations in the city of Baghdad, when in fact there is a much greater mission that they should be doing, which is training the police.”…
Kerik denied arresting any prostitutes in Iraq and said the Army always knew about his operations.
Jon Town has spent the last few years fighting two battles, one against his body, the other against the US Army. Both began in October 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq. He was standing in the doorway of his battalion’s headquarters when a 107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. The impact punched a piano-sized hole in the concrete facade, sparked a huge fireball and tossed the 25-year-old Army specialist to the floor, where he lay blacked out among the rubble.
“The next thing I remember is waking up on the ground.” Men from his unit had gathered around his body and were screaming his name. “They started shaking me. But I was numb all over,” he says. “And it’s weird because… because for a few minutes you feel like you’re not really there. I could see them, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything. I started shaking because I thought I was dead.”Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town’s neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.
But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town’s wounds were actually caused by a “personality disorder.” Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.
Self-policing and self-regulation depend on the willingness of organizations to embarrass themselves by washing their dirty linen in public. Surprise: they won’t do it. That’s why independent oversight is required: Federal regulators for business, for example, and Congress for the Executive branch. For example:
Almost two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon’s military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Media Matters of America (MMA) reports that, according to a search of the Nexis database, “the three major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — have still not mentioned the report at all.” In contrast, they note, on April 28 all three reported on the controversy over a photo of scantily-clad Miley Cyrus, the star of Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana program. “ABC devoted about two and a half minutes to that story, while CBS and NBC each devoted about two minutes to it,” MMA reported. The Pew Excellence in Journalism project has a chart showing that ” there was virtually no mainstream media follow up to The Times’ expose” with the only national TV coverage being the introduction segment and live debate featuring CMD’s John Stauber on the PBS NewsHour.
Much has happened in the five years since President Bush flew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in “Top Gun” style, stood under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” and proudly declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
Five years ago, 139 American troops had died in Iraq. Now that number is 4,064. Five years ago, 542 American troops had been wounded in Iraq. Now that number is 29,395.
Five years ago, the national debt was $6.5 trillion. Now it’s $9.3 trillion. Five years ago, your average gallon of gas cost $1.44. Now it costs $3.57. Five years ago, Bush’s job-approval rating was at 70 percent. Now it’s at 28.
Five years ago, Bush’s appearance on the carrier was widely hailed as a brilliant PR move, imbuing the president with the aura of a conquering hero. Now, it’s possibly the single most potent image of Bush’s hubris.
And then he quotes more stories. Go read. For example, his quotes include this gem:
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino chose an unfortunate turn of phrase when asked yesterday about the anniversary — saying the White House has “paid a price for not being more specific on that banner.” But the banner’s wording reflected Bush’s central message that day. And when it comes to who’s “paid the price” for his tragic miscalculation, well, the White House isn’t at the top of my list.
On May 1, 2003, Richard Perle advised, in a USA Today Op-Ed, “Relax, Celebrate Victory.” The same day, exactly five years ago, President Bush, dressed in a flight suit, landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declared an end to major military operations in Iraq — with the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner arrayed behind him in the war’s greatest photo op.
Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a “hero” and boomed, “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” PBS’ Gwen Ifill said Bush was “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.” On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, “The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a — on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military.”
When Bush’s jet landed on an aircraft carrier, American casualties stood at 139 killed and 542 wounded.
The following looks at how one newspaper — it happens to be The New York Times — covered the Bush declaration and its immediate aftermath. One snippet: “The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today.”
Continue reading the amazing stories from the Times at the time.
How did Paul Wolfowitz ever manage to get a paying job? The guy’s hopeless. Phil Carter has a great takedown of Woflowitz in this column, which includes this snippet:
… Oh, Wolfie. Seriously. Can we talk?
When you say the American government was “pretty much clueless on counterinsurgency,” you really mean that you were pretty much clueless, right? Because within an hour’s drive of your office, you would have found thousands of people with actual experience in post-conflict stability operations and counterinsurgency. That group includes (but is not limited to):
- Gen. Eric Shinseki, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee it would take “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” to secure post-war Iraq.
- The team lead by RAND’s James Dobbins, who put together estimates of what it would take to secure Iraq based on historical analysis. Using troops-to-population ratios from previous occupations, RAND projected that it would require anywhere from 258,000 troops (the Bosnia model), to 321,000 (post-World War II Germany), to 526,000 (Kosovo) to secure the peace.
- The entire Army and Marine Corps peacekeeping and small wars community, which developed tremendous institutional knowledge about these issues in such places as Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Latin America.
- The State Department’s Future of Iraq project — for although they were not planners writing an operational plan per se, they understood something about the resources required to provide stability in post-war Iraq.
- National security experts at the Army War College, who, prior to the invasion, provided insights into the challenges of post-war security, stability and reconstruction in Iraq.
So Wolfie, it’s simply not true that the American government was “clueless” about counterinsurgency. Not true at all. Rather, officials like you chose to keep yourselves in the dark by refusing counsel from those who knew something about counterinsurgency. And you actively stifled dissenting views by criticizing officers like Shinseki as “wildly off the mark.” Clueless is not the word I would use to describe your mistakes.
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