Good god:

Just out: the hot new list of general-officer assignments. Who’s getting what, General Casey?

The Army chief of staff announces the assignment of the following officers:

Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commanding general, First Army Division East, Fort Meade, Md., to chief, Office of the Defense Representative, Pakistan.

*Smacks forehead.* Seriously? We’re going to send a former commanding general of the indefinite-detention complex at Guantanamo Bay to Pakistan? A walking symbol of injustice and, rightly or wrongly, disrespect to Islam? Just so we can tick off as many Pakistanis as possible? So we can come one step closer to a Teheran-Embassy-in-1979-style crisis? So we can give a corrupt dictator advice on how to imprison people forever and torture them while we’re at it, just for a change of pace?

From Slate:

The early retirement of a lieutenant colonel ordinarily wouldn’t merit the slightest mention. But today’s news that Lt. Col. John Nagl is leaving the Army is a big deal.

It’s another sign, more alarming than most, that the U.S. military is losing its allure for a growing number of its most creative young officers. More than that, it’s a sign that one of the Army’s most farsighted reforms—a program that some senior officials regard as essential—may be on the verge of getting whacked.

Nagl, 41, has been one of the Army’s most outspoken officers in recent years. (This is a huge point against him, careerwise; the brass look askance at officers, especially those without stars, who draw attention to themselves.) He played a substantial role in drafting the Army’s recent field manual on counterinsurgency. His 2002 book, Learning To Eat Soup With a Knife, based on his doctoral dissertation at Oxford (another point against him in some circles), is widely hailed as a seminal book on CI warfare. (It was after reading the book that Gen. David Petraeus asked Nagl to join the panel that produced the field manual.) From 2003-2004, he served as the operations officer of a battalion in Iraq’s Anbar province, where he tried to put his ideas into action (and, in the process, became the subject of a 9,200-word New York Times Magazine profile by Peter Maass, titled “Professor Nagl’s War“). And since then, he’s written thoughtful, if provocative, articles for Military Review and the “Small Wars Journal” Web site.

In short, Nagl was precisely the sort of officer whose cultivation and promotion has been encouraged by the likes of Gen. Petraeus and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—a dedicated warfighter who also thinks strategically.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good and informative article in the Washington Monthly, which begins:

Matt Kapinos was born into the military, at a U.S. Army hospital outside Frankfurt, Germany. It was 1979, and his father was an Army officer, one of thousands of soldiers stationed along the plains of central Europe. Kapinos moved around a lot growing up—thirteen places in all, including upstate New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Kansas, and Korea. From his perspective, these locations all appeared pretty much the same. No matter where he lived, at 5 p.m. everyone paused as the American flag was lowered to the sound of a bugle. He attended schools run by the Defense Department, where many of the teachers were married to soldiers, and where military police chaperoned the school bus at times of heightened security. It wasn’t until he was a high school junior that his family first lived “off post.” His father, then a colonel, got a job at the Pentagon, and so the family moved to Springfield, Virginia. Unsurprisingly, by then Kapinos could imagine only one career for himself: he wanted to be an officer in the Army.

One spring afternoon in his senior year, Kapinos came home from track practice to find a FedEx envelope on the doorstep. It contained his acceptance to the military academy at West Point, the alma mater of great American generals going back to Ulysses S. Grant. Kapinos’s father, who had also attended West Point, “tried to let me know what I was getting into, that you lose a little bit of control over your life and that the Army is not always fun and games,” Kapinos recalled. “[But] my dad always pushed us to, you know, do something to contribute. I guess I wanted to do something that seeks glory, to do great things.”

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Really, I can’t imagine why the Army—after all those fine ideals at West Point—so often turns in performances like this:

In a nondescript conference room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside listened last week as an Army prosecutor outlined the criminal case against her in a preliminary hearing. The charges: attempting suicide and endangering the life of another soldier while serving in Iraq.

Her hands trembled as Maj. Stefan Wolfe, the prosecutor, argued that Whiteside, now a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed, should be court-martialed. After seven years of exemplary service, the 25-year-old Army reservist faces the possibility of life in prison if she is tried and convicted.

Military psychiatrists at Walter Reed who examined Whiteside after she recovered from her self-inflicted gunshot wound diagnosed her with a severe mental disorder, possibly triggered by the stresses of a war zone. But Whiteside’s superiors considered her mental illness “an excuse” for criminal conduct, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

At the hearing, Wolfe, who had already warned Whiteside’s lawyer of the risk of using a “psychobabble” defense, pressed a senior psychiatrist at Walter Reed to justify his diagnosis.

“I’m not here to play legal games,” Col. George Brandt responded angrily, according to a recording of the hearing. “I am here out of the genuine concern for a human being that’s breaking and that is broken. She has a severe and significant illness. Let’s treat her as a human being, for Christ’s sake!”

In recent months, prodded by outrage over poor conditions at Walter Reed, the Army has made a highly publicized effort to improve treatment of Iraq veterans and change a culture that stigmatizes mental illness. The Pentagon has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to new research and to care for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, and on Friday it announced that it had opened a new center for psychological health in Rosslyn.

But outside the Pentagon, the military still largely deals with mental health issues in an ad hoc way, often relying on the judgment of combat-hardened commanders whose understanding of mental illness is vague or misinformed. The stigma around psychological wounds can still be seen in the smallest of Army policies. While family members of soldiers recovering at Walter Reed from physical injuries are provided free lodging and a per diem to care for their loved ones, families of psychiatric outpatients usually have to pay their own way.

“It’s a disgrace,” said Tom Whiteside, a former Marine and retired federal law enforcement officer who lost his free housing after his daughter’s physical wounds had healed enough that she could be moved to the psychiatric ward. A charity organization, the Yellow Ribbon Fund, provides him with an apartment near Walter Reed so he can be near his daughter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Kevin Drum, who notes, “Hey, the Pentagon has underreported brain trauma injuries among returning vets by about 500%. What a surprise, eh?” (I continue to marvel at how totally and quickly West Point graduates seem to slough off “Duty, Honor, Country” and the rule “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do.” They apparently discard all that upon graduation.)

From USA Today:

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon’s official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.

 

HIDDEN WOUNDS: Marine didn’t recognize signs of brain injury

The number of brain-injury cases were tabulated from records kept by the VA and four military bases that house units that have served multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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The American Prospect:

No one pities retired Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez quite like he pities himself. His reputation destroyed after his disastrous year as U.S. ground commander in Iraq — including, most notoriously, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal — Sanchez took a surprising move toward rehabilitation on Friday, delivering a blistering indictment of the war’s history and its prospects before a military reporters’ convention in Arlington. The war is “a nightmare with no end in sight,” declared its former commander. President Bush, having failed to accept “the political and economic realities of this war,” has adopted the surge in “a desperate attempt” to salvage his political fortunes, but will, at best, “stave off defeat.” The press portrayed the speech as the latest in a series of volleys by retired generals furious with the Bush administration. Liberals eager for a cudgel against Bush may suddenly discover Sanchez’s previously hidden virtues.

Except that Sanchez’s speech is very different from the criticisms offered during the so-called “general’s revolt” of 2006. Those accounts indicted the strategy of Donald Rumsfeld, the wisdom of commanders like Sanchez, and the opportunism of the administration as a whole. Sanchez’s occasionally hysterical speech represents a triumph of embitterment, coupled with a cynical willingness to blame practically every civilian institution — prowar, antiwar, whatever — for the war’s failures. “Our nation has not focused on the greatest challenge of our lifetime,” Sanchez said. “The political and economic elements of power must get beyond the politics to ensure the survival of America.” That’s right: the survival of America.

Read the rest of this entry »

How about all that fraud from Halliburton (whose CEO was, famously, Dick Cheney, though that of course is not why Halliburton got all those no-bid contracts)?

Vanity Fair is again on the case, with a lengthy article that begins:

On first meeting him, one might not suspect Alan Grayson of being a crusader against government-contractor fraud. Six feet four in his socks, he likes to dress flamboyantly, on the theory that items such as pink cowboy boots help retain a jury’s attention. He and his Filipino wife, Lolita, chose their palm-fringed mansion in Orlando, Florida, partly because the climate alleviates his chronic asthma, and partly because they wanted their five children to have unlimited access to the area’s many theme parks.

Grayson likes theme parks, too. Toward the end of two long days of interviews, he insists we break to visit Universal Studios, because it wouldn’t be right for me to leave his adopted city without having sampled the rides. Later he sends me an e-mail earnestly inquiring which one I liked best.

He can be forgiven a little frivolity. In his functional home-office in Orlando, and at the Beltway headquarters of his law firm, Grayson & Kubli, Grayson spends most of his days and many of his evenings on a lonely legal campaign to redress colossal frauds against American taxpayers by private contractors operating in Iraq. He calls it “the crime of the century.”

His obvious adversaries are the contracting corporations themselves — especially Halliburton, the giant oil-services conglomerate where Vice President Dick Cheney spent the latter half of the 1990s as C.E.O., and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, now known simply as KBR. But he says his efforts to take on those organizations have earned him another enemy: the United States Department of Justice.

Over the past 16 years, Grayson has litigated dozens of cases of contractor fraud. In many of these, he has found the Justice Department to be an ally in exposing wrongdoing. But in cases that involve the Iraq war, the D.O.J. has taken extraordinary steps to stand in his way. Behind its machinations, he believes, is a scandal of epic proportions—one that may come to haunt the legacy of the Bush administration long after it is gone.

Consider the case of Grayson’s client Bud Conyers, a big, bearded 43-year-old who lives with his ex-wife and her nine children, four of them his, in Enid, Oklahoma. Conyers worked in Iraq as a driver for Kellogg, Brown & Root.

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ThinkProgress:

Approximately 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard recently returned home after serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq. They served 22 months — “longer than any other ground combat unit” — received nine fatalities, and were awarded dozens of Purple Hearts.

But the Army wrote the orders for 1,162 of these soldiers for 729 days, making them ineligible for full educational benefits under the GI Bill, which requires written orders saying they were deployed for 730 days or more. These soldiers were shorted more than $200 per month for college.

First Lt. Jon Anderson believes that the military deliberately cut short their orders to avoid paying the soldiers’ education benefits:

It’s pretty much a slap in the face. I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership…once again failing the soldiers.

Watch CNN’s report on the issue.

Six members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation, as well as Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D) and Norm Coleman (R), have asked Secretary of the Army Pete Geren to investigate the matter. Coleman said that it’s “simply irresponsible to deny education benefits to those soldiers who just completed the longest tour of duty of any unit in Iraq.”

Geren has reportedly assured the lawmakers that the cases “will be reviewed on an expedited basis, so that those who qualify can attend school next semester.”

In Iraq the Army is placing weapons and explosives as “bait” and then killing those who pick them up. So an Iraqi civilian walking along sees an explosive and thinks, “Oh, my God. Terrorists are going to get that and kill us with another car bomb,” and picks up the explosive to take it to the police station. The civilian is then shot dead.

Let’s face it, if you were taking a walk and found an AK47 in the road, would you just leave it there? Or would you pick it up and take it to the police station?

The story:

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

In documents obtained by The Washington Post from family members of the accused soldiers, Didier said members of the U.S. military’s Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later passed along ammunition boxes filled with the “drop items” to be used “to disrupt the AIF [Anti-Iraq Forces] attempts at harming Coalition Forces and give us the upper hand in a fight.”

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a baiting program should be examined “quite meticulously” because it raises troubling possibilities, such as what happens when civilians pick up the items.

“In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,” Fidell said.

Read the rest of this entry »

From ThinkProgress:

On March 12, the Pentagon announced that Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, who oversaw neglect at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, was resigning, effective immediately. NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported that it was “very likely” Kiley “would be reduced in retirement, at least one rank” and “be forced to retire at that two-star level.”

In order to retire as a three-star general, Kiley would have had to do at least three years of active-duty service in that grade. The higher the grade, the greater the retirement pay and benefits a general receives.

Kiley was appointed Army Surgeon General on Sept. 30, 2004. Therefore, as Miklaszewski noted, he retired before serving out his three-year term at the three-star level.

But ThinkProgress has learned that Kiley is still serving at the Pentagon, despite announcing his “retirement” in March. An official in the Department of the Army Public Affairs told ThinkProgress:

He [Kiley] is no longer serving as the Army Surgeon General but is in a transition status pending his retirement. … Currently Maj. Gen Kiley does not have a specific retirement date. He is no longer performing any duties related to The Surgeon General and is pending retirement.

When asked why the Army didn’t immediately ask for Kiley’s retirement in March, we were told that such information was “protected under the Privacy Act which restrict disclosure of information pertaining to administrative actions or personal communication.”

The law states that if an officer does not serve at that grade for three years, “the Secretary of Defense may authorize the Secretary of a military department to reduce such period to a period not less than two years.” Therefore, the Army may still be holding open the door to the possibility that Kiley may serve through September and retire with the pay and benefits of a three-star general.

During his time overseeing Walter Reed and serving as Army Surgeon General, Kiley ignored the neglect at Walter Reed. As far back as 2003, Kiley was told “that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds.” He also ignored Beverly Young, the wife of Rep. Don Young (R-AK), when she told him about a soldier at Walter Reed “lying in urine on his mattress pad.” Even after the Washington Post investigation, Kiley claimed that the problems at Building 18 “weren’t serious.”

Interesting story, though:

Several U.S. Army soldiers killed in a helicopter crash in Iraq last week were to be witnesses in the homicide trial of their former superior.

Honolulu’s KITV reported Sunday that some of the soldiers who died in the crash had been scheduled to testify in the trial of Sgt. 1st Class Trey Corrales, who is accused of orchestrating the death of an Iraqi detainee this year.

Corrales, who was in the same Hawaii-based platoon as the soldiers killed in Wednesday’s crash, allegedly shot the detainee repeatedly June 23. He is accused of then ordering his subordinate and fellow defendant, Spc. Christopher Shore, to continue shooting the man. The detainee died from those wounds.

Retired military lawyer Earle Partington said the loss of the witnesses could prove detrimental to the prosecution’s case against the pair.

“If these witnesses are no longer alive, there is no way for the accused or their counsel to question them. Unfortunately, it could mean that there is no trial,” Partington told the TV station. “Obviously, it depends on what witnesses the government still has.”

The younger officers offer some hope. An article by Fred Kaplan in the NY Times Sunday Magazine:

 On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”

Yingling’s article — published in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal — noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means,” he wrote, “he shares culpability for the results.” Today’s generals “failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly,” and they failed to advise policy makers on how much force would be necessary to win and stabilize Iraq. These failures, he insisted, stemmed not just from the civilian leaders but also from a military culture that “does little to reward creativity and moral courage.” He concluded, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”

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ThinkProgress:

Contradicting previous claims by the military that soldier’s personal blogs (milbogs) “needlessly place lives at risk,” a series of audits by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007 “suggests that official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual’s blog.” The audits found “found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites” compared to “28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.”

There’s something odd about this news story in the NY Times.

 An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

The brief statement, however, left many questions unanswered. Just last week The New Republic published on its Web site the results of its own investigation, stating that five members of the same company as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who had written the anonymous pieces, “all corroborated Beauchamp’s anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one soldier, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)”

The report goes on to detail the claims that Beauchamp made, along with other details.

What the report (mysteriously) does not include is any mention whatsoever of the many official statements by the Army that turned out to be lies: Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, the Abu Gharib scandal (”only a few enlisted soldiers”), and so on. You’d think that, when an organization demands that we believe its statements, that a reminder of a pattern of prevarication and falsehoods would be relevant and even important.

First, of course, was the report in the Washington Post about all the arms going astray—the military cannot account for about 30% of the weapons distributed to Iraqi forces:

A Government Accountability Office report last week found that the U.S. military has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces, and experts worry that many of those weapons could have fallen into the hands of enemies in Iraq. The report noted that 125,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 helmets also were missing from inventory records.

And then it’s worse: The Anonymous Liberal today:

In the New York Times this morning is Part 47 of Michael Gordon’s ongoing series devoted to uncritically passing along unsubstantiated allegations against Iran. As usual, Iran is up to no good (say military sources). The allegation is a familiar one by now:

Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.

The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, according to American military officials.

As with previous versions of this story, Gordon doesn’t do nearly enough pushing back. How, for instance, can we be sure that these devices are being supplied by Iran when, as has been reported elsewhere, we’ve actually found factories in Iraq that are making them? And even if these devices are being supplied by Iranians, what reason is there to believe the Iranian government is responsible, as opposed to regular Iranians trying to make a buck or support their fellow Shia in Iraq? To date, the U.S. military hasn’t done much of anything to substantiate these allegations publicly or to address obvious questions, and until they do, their claims deserve far less deference than Gordon is giving them.

Gordon is more precise is one key respect, though. In previous versions of this story, the military was intentionally vague about whom the Iranians were supposedly supplying these bombs to. Was the military claiming that Iran was arming Sunni insurgents? It was never clear. Military briefers would cryptically refer to “extremist groups” or “militants” in an obvious attempt to imply, without actually saying so, that Iran was somehow in league with al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents groups, who were responsible for the vast majority of American deaths. This never made any sense, but to the extent people believed it, it helped shore up the narrative the administration wanted to tell.

In this morning’s piece, however, Gordon is quite clear:

Such bombs, which fire a semi-molten copper slug that can penetrate the armor on a Humvee and are among the deadliest weapons used against American forces, are used almost exclusively by Shiite militants.

This makes sense, of course. It would be strange indeed if Iran was supplying Sunni militants. But this is also a key fact, one that, at least to my knowledge, has never been stated quite so clearly. Remember, many of these Shiite militants are allied with the Malaki government, which we are fighting to protect. Most of our military efforts in Iraq have been directed at fighting Sunni insurgents. Gordon reports:

While the group [al Qaeda] is seen by the American military as the most serious near-term threat, there are other signs that Shiite militias remain active. According to General Odierno, the day-to-day commander of American troops in Iraq, Shiite militants carried out 73 percent of the attacks that killed or wounded American troops in Baghdad in July.

That’s a staggering number, if true. The administration would have us believe, particularly of late, that our primary enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda of Mesopotamia. But if 73% of attacks in Baghdad in July were carried out by Shiite militants, who are certainly not al Qaeda fighters, then that’s a major story, one that underscores just how unmanageable the situation in Iraq is.

We are simultaneously under attack by Sunni and Shiite militants, who, when not attacking us, are attacking each other. Both Sunni and Shiite militant groups are (apparently) being supplied, whether with official blessing or not, by sympathetic parties in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Some have suggested that we are in a proxy war with Iran. I think it’s far more accurate to say that we are stuck in the middle of a proxy war between Iran and its Sunni rivals.

Meanwhile, in order to root out al Qaeda, we’ve started arming the very Sunni militants we were previously fighting. And we continue to support a Shiite-led central government that is openly allied with Shiite militias who, when not ethnically cleansing Sunnis in the Baghdad area, are apparently blowing up our troops with Iranian-made bombs. There’s a word for this type of situation and it rhymes with fustercluck.

From Associated Press:

Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

“The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,” a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.

The doctors - whose names were blacked out - said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.

Ultimately, the Pentagon did conduct a criminal investigation, and asked Tillman’s comrades whether he was disliked by his men and whether they had any reason to believe he was deliberately killed. The Pentagon eventually ruled that Tillman’s death at the hands of his comrades was a friendly-fire accident.

The medical examiners’ suspicions were outlined in 2,300 pages of testimony released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Among other information contained in the documents:

– In his last words moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop “sniveling.”

– Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.

– The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman’s death from his family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memory and couldn’t recall details of his actions.

– No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene - no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.

The Pentagon and the Bush administration have been criticized in recent months for lying about the circumstances of Tillman’s death. The military initially told the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by enemy fire. Only weeks later did the Pentagon acknowledge he was gunned down by fellow Rangers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Even some in the Army can’t stomach the sloppy and unjust procedures the military is following in the “tribunals.” Read this:

An Army officer with a key role in the U.S. military hearings at Guantanamo Bay says they relied on vague and incomplete intelligence and were pressured to declare detainees “enemy combatants,” often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only “generic” material that didn’t hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

Despite repeated requests, intelligence agencies arbitrarily refused to provide specific information that could have helped either side in the tribunals, according to Abraham, who said he served as a main liaison between the Combat Status Review Tribunals and those intelligence agencies.

“What were purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” Abraham said in the affidavit, filed in a Washington appeals court on behalf of a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, who is challenging his classification as an “enemy combatant.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently not. See this:

U.S. commanders in Iraq are rejecting a recommendation by Army mental health experts that troops receive a one-month break for every three months in a combat zone, despite unprecedented levels of continuous fighting and worsening risks of mental stress.

Instead, commanders are trying to give troops two to three days inside heavily fortified bases after about eight days in the field, said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, chief aide to the ground forces commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno. “We would never get the job done of securing (of Baghdad) if we went out for three months and came back” for one, Anderson said.

U.S. forces in Iraq spend more time in combat without a break than those who fought in Vietnam or World War II, according to Army psychologists who studied troops in Iraq.

U.S. commanders can’t match the World War II policy, Odierno said in a news conference late last month. “Even in World War II and other times … we would pull forces off the line and bring them back on. Here we don’t do that,” Odierno said. “They (U.S. troops) are out there consistently every single day. So you have to be mentally and physically tough.”

Read the rest of this entry »

ThinkProgress:

Cpl. Cloy Richards, who earlier this month attempted suicide, is listed by the military as “80-percent combat disabled,” as he previously “punched out all his windows and cut major arteries,” has knee and arm injuries, suffers from traumatic brain injury, and has pending claim for post-traumatic stress disorder. Nevertheless, Richards now “faces the possibility of a third deployment to Iraq.”

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter has a column beginning:

Henry Waxman looks like your accountant, but he acts more like a dog with a bone—the hard bone of truth. This short, bald, mustached California congressman is digging up what really happened inside the U.S. government during the early years of the new century. Last week, for instance, Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform heard startling testimony about how the Army lied repeatedly to protect its image, covered up those lies, then lied again. Instead of depressing me, the hearings left me strangely exhilarated. Historians will likely see the 2006 midterm election returns as indispensable to their work. Without a change in party control, we would never have a chance to get to the bottom of what has happened to this country.

That made me think again about the US Military Academy (West Point) and its highly vaunted honor code which places such emphasis on telling the truth. What happens to make the graduates later so quick to lie—and lie and lie and lie? I would love to see some serious research on this, though I doubt the USMA itself will look into the question.

Does having such an honor code paradoxically encourage later lying? Is there some sort of two-track implicit teaching going on, “tell the truth here, lie later”? What happens to promote such a total turnabout? I would be very interested to know—and I would think the military should share that interest, but I doubt that they do. Perhaps some social scientists can take up the question sometime.

BTW, I suspect that, at the Military Academy, this is one of those things that cannot be mentioned nor can you discuss the fact that you’re not mentioning it. I hope I’m wrong.

UPDATE: The Wife points out that, alongside the Honor Code, cadets are also taught to cover up problems. They constitute the opposite of a “let it all hang out” attitude. The need to circle the wagons and cover up problems necessarily conflicts with telling the truth, and clearly “hide the problem” is a higher imperative than “tell the truth.” The problem is that an organization that systematically hides problems is the very opposite of a learning organization, and that certainly seems to be the case with the Army, which is busy now repeating all the mistakes of Vietnam, as a Lt. Col. recently pointed out. Cf. preceding post.