Iraq prison abuse (and Chalabi) pt. 6 -- "U.S. admits to secret interrogation site in Baghdad"

"That's not to say somebody didn't get their head dunked in the water," he said.

oy vey

The documents, which include statements by four of the seven MPs now charged in the abuse scandal, provide several new insights into the unfolding case. For instance, they contain tantalizing hints about the role of military intelligence operating in the shadows of Tier 1A at the prison. One military police officer said in a sworn statement that civilian and military intelligence officers frequently visited Tier 1A at night, spiriting detainees away for questioning out of sight of the MPs inside a "wood hut" behind the prison building.

Also, a bit about Graner which reminds me why I can easily and casually hate conflation of theology and power:

The abuse case began to unfold when Darby returned to Abu Ghraib from leave in November and heard about a shooting at the prison's "hard site," which contains Tier 1A, he told military investigators. He said that he asked the MP in charge of the tier's night shift, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., if he had any photographs of the cell where the shooting took place.

Darby said Graner handed him two CDs of photographs.

"I thought the discs just had pictures of Iraq, the cell where the shooting occurred," Darby told investigators.

Instead, Darby said, he viewed hundreds of photographs showing naked detainees being abused by U.S. soldiers.

"It was just wrong," Darby said. "I knew I had to do something."

He said that he asked Graner, a Pennsylvania prison guard in civilian life, about the photographs. Graner replied: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.' "

Speaking of the Times, though -- "Dogs and Other Harsh Tactics Linked to Military Intelligence" reads the headline, and an interesting paragraph here:

The documents assembled by Army investigators starting in January and obtained by The New York Times cite accounts by American dog handlers who say the use of military working dogs in interrogations at Abu Ghraib was approved by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Previously, Pentagon and Army officials have said that only the top American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, could have approved the use of the animals for interrogations. A "memorandum for the record" issued on Oct. 9 by the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison listed as permissible a number of interrogation procedures that Army officials have said were allowed only with approval from General Sanchez. Among other things, the memorandum said the use of dogs in interrogations and the confining of prisoners to isolation cells was permitted in some cases without a prior approval from General Sanchez.

Over the last two months, state troopers and police officers around New Jersey have donated about 1,000 outdated, surplus bulletproof vests they owned, all in the spirit of making the thin-skinned, vulnerable Humvees safer for the soldiers and marines who ride them, Mrs. Boggiano said.

The war in Iraq has cost more than $100 billion so far, but with fighting dragging on into a second year, troops are complaining that equipment is lacking, and what is there has been worn with time. National Guard troops are saying they are being sent off to Iraq without the necessary gear to protect them from the roadside bombs and sniper shots that have become the everyday business of the war.

The guy said that uncoventional/non-standard modification of humvees was allowed, but i haven't seen pics or any followup confirmation of the guys over there tricking out their humvees Mad Max-style, altho by this point, you think they would.

For fukc's sake. you've got to wonder about the mindset, eh?

Consider, however, another take.

(I have to ask where Stuart and to a lesser extent Don W. have been on these threads for the last couple of days, I'm honestly curious.)

I don't think that, in that so much money, time, diplomatic effort, etc. has been sunk into Iraq that even if they wanted to (and if it was in the slightest way feasible), the resources aren't there at present. Course, if you wanted to then say in turn that it sure is interesting how the US has forces on either side of Iran right now...

Fighters loyal to the radical Shia cleric, Moqtada Sadr, have agreed to withdraw from the centre of Karbala.

The holy Iraqi city has seen heavy fighting between the militia and coalition forces over the past month.

US troops began pulling out on Friday and there has been intense pressure for Mr Sadr's fighters to follow suit.

In Karbala the streets are reported to be quiet, with little sign of the fighters.

A senior member of Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army, Ali al-Kazali, told the AFP news agency that the fighters had laid down their arms, following weeks of efforts by Iraqi tribal and religious leaders to negotiate a truce with the militia.

The US-led coalition has refused to negotiate directly with Mr Sadr, who is wanted in connection with the murder of a rival Shia cleric last year.

Brig Gen Mark Kimmit denied any reports of a truce.

He repeated that the confrontation could only be resolved peacefully if Mr Sadr handed himself in and disbanded his army.

According to an article in the New York Post, of all places, the Bush administration's dramatic turn against Ahmed Chalabi and the INC was precipitated by a dossier which King Abdullah of Jordan brought with him on his recent visit to the White House.

The dossier, writes Niles Lathem, included details of INC "Mafia-style extortion rackets and secret information on U.S. military operations being passed to Iran."

This provides a key piece of background information on the reports from last night that the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that Chalabi's INC 'intelligence operation' was in fact a front for Iranian intelligence, filtering the US WMD disinformation prior to the war and sending highly classified American military intelligence to the Iranians since the beginning of the occupation. The charges center on Aras Karim, Chalabi's intelligence chief.

Presented last fall with a detailed catalog of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the American military responded on Dec. 24 with a confidential letter asserting that many Iraqi prisoners were not entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Conventions.

The letter, drafted by military lawyers and signed by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, emphasized the "military necessity" of isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their "significant intelligence value," and said that prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals.

But the military insisted that there were "clear procedures governing interrogation to ensure approaches do not amount to inhumane treatment."

In recent public statements, Bush administration officials have said that the Geneva Conventions were "fully applicable" in Iraq. That has put American-run prisons in Iraq in a different category from those in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been declared unlawful combatants not eligible for protection. However, the Dec. 24 letter appears to undermine administration assertions of the conventions' broad application in Iraq.

President Bush will share a "clear strategy" for guiding the future of Iraq in a speech intended to convince a world television audience that he is in command of the situation there, the White House said Friday.

Mr. Bush, whose job approval ratings have been dragged to new lows by violence and scandal in Iraq, will address an audience at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., at 8 p.m. Monday, said a White House spokesman, Trent Duffy.

"He realizes, as most Americans do, that we have difficult challenges ahead," Mr. Duffy told reporters.

"The president looks forward on Monday evening to discussing with the American people and with a global audience a clear strategy on how we need to move forward," he said. "We hope that Americans will take the opportunity to listen. It's an important speech. It's an important time."

Yes, it is, isn't it?

"There may have been some kind of celebration," Kimmitt said. "Bad people have celebrations too. Bad people have parties too."

Those darn bad people! And they weren't even carrying wallets, they have to be scum!

Sat May 22, 4:20 PM ET

By ANTHONY DEUTSCH, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military said Saturday it has found "no evidence of a wedding" at the site of an airstrike last week near the Syrian border, and said evidence so far suggested the target was a desert base for foreign terrorists sneaking into Iraq (news - web sites)

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy chief of staff for operations, showed slides of military binoculars, guns and battery packs that could be used to trigger roadside bombs found by U.S. troops at the site.

He said "terrorist manuals," telephone numbers for Afghanistan (news - web sites) and foreign passports, including one Sudanese, were also recovered there.

Survivors of the attack in Mogr el-Deeb, a desert village inhabited by members of the Bou Fahad clan, said they had just finished a wedding celebration when bombs fell before dawn Wednesday. More than 40 people were killed, including women and children.

Associated Press Television News footage taken at the site Thursday showed broken musical instruments, pieces of bloodied women's hair and the bodies of children. Kimmitt said no musical instruments were found, however.

Many of the bodies were taken about 250 miles to the east to Ramadi, the base of the clan and the capital of Anbar province which includes Mogr el-Deeb. According to Lt. Col. Ziyad al-Jbouri, the deputy police chief there, between 42 and 45 people died, including 15 children and 10 women. A local hospital doctor put the death toll at 45.
During a briefing for reporters, Kimmitt said the military was investigating the raid and had reached no final conclusions. However, he displayed pictures of some of the items found at the site.
He said suspicious materials included about 300 sets of bedding, 100 sets of prepackaged clothing as well as a "medical treatment room." He said the clothing could have been for infiltrators seeking to disguise themselves as Iraqis.
He said white powder also was found that could have been cocaine. The border area is a popular route for smugglers.
"None of the bodies had identification of any kind on them, no ID cards, no wallets, no pictures," Kimmitt said. "They had watches, and that was about the only way you could identify one person from another."
He said the absence of identification, as well as the remoteness of the area, suggested "that this was a high-risk meeting of high-level, anti-coalition forces."
The military's finding contrasts sharply with statements by survivors as well as local officials in Ramadi. On Thursday, a well-known wedding singer, Hussein al-Ali, was buried in Baghdad, and his family said he was killed in the airstrike.
Bou Fahad clansmen, who raise livestock, denied the presence of foreign fighters in their group. Members of the clan said the attack began a few hours after the wedding festivities had broken up for the night.
Kimmitt said farm vehicles were found, but that they showed no signs of being used for ranching. Nor, he added, was there evidence of any wedding celebration.
"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," he said. "No gifts. The men were almost all of military age."
"There may have been some kind of celebration," Kimmitt said. "Bad people have celebrations, too. Bad people have parties, too, and it may have been what was seen as some kind of celebration ... may have been just a meeting in the middle of the desert by some people conducting criminal or terrorist activities."
Members of the clan said, however, that the Americans did not question them after the attack and that when some of the survivors tried to approach U.S. ground troops, they were fired on.

I as well have an unreasonable fear of bedding and undocumented clothing and the fact that scary people will use them to terrorize me. Why, just the other day, an undocumented mattress was strolling down the street, and as i yelled for the authorities - let's just say I survived. I wasn't wearing a watch, however.

. . . which could have been used to coordinate terrorist acts.

(not that they're doing it, but that they have to)

The coalition in Iraq wants its troops to remain immune from prosecution by Iraqis after the handover of power, it is reported.

Creating a sovereign Iraq should mean forces become subject to Iraqi laws.

But BBC Correspondent Jonathan Beale says UK and US forces want to remain under their own jurisdictions

oh come on. they haven't seen enough TV shows to have some pick stick a knife into one of the bags, lick it, then nod his head at his partner and say, "oh yeah, it's real"?

A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.

"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."

"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure," retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We are looking into the abyss. We cannot start soon enough to begin the turnaround."

"If the current situation persists, we will continue fighting one form of Iraqi insurgency after another — with too little legitimacy, too little will and too few resources," warned Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad. "There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw: Quagmire."

Hoar and Diamond's assessments were grimmer than most. But the two men were far from alone.

--

"A detailed plan is necessary to prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy, and that we are committed to making it work," Lugar told administration officials at a hearing. "If we cannot provide this clarity, we risk the loss of support of the American people, loss of potential contributions from our allies and the disillusionment of Iraqis."

Leslie H. Gelb, a former president of the private Council on Foreign Relations — and a top Pentagon strategist during the Vietnam War — said he had never seen confidence sink as quickly in Washington as it has in recent weeks.

"I've never heard the kind of dark defeatism I'm hearing now, both in and out of government, including the worst days of the Vietnam War," said Gelb, a Democrat. "Support for this war is plummeting. In Vietnam, that happened much more slowly, and only after much higher casualties."

--

Some traditional Republican conservatives have begun to charge that "neoconservatives" have led their party — and their president — astray with expansive foreign ambitions.

"We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the conservative chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a speech. "Liberty cannot be laid down like so much Astroturf. Law and order must come first."

Some administration officials acknowledge that they are already thinking about deferring the original goal of a thriving multiethnic democracy in Iraq to seek a more modest target of stabilizing the country under a more-or-less "representative" government.

In public, Bush still says he is aiming at nothing less than democracy — and that Iraq is getting there.

"An Iraqi democracy is emerging," the president said last week. "Iraq now has an independent judiciary, a free market, a new currency, more than 200 newspapers in circulation, and schools free of hateful propaganda…. In time, Iraq will be a free and democratic nation at the heart of the Middle East. This will send a message — a powerful message — from Damascus to Tehran: that democracy can bring hope to lives in every culture."

But at lower levels of the administration, Marr said, the goal has changed.

"We are in a desperate state there," she said.

"We don't have any security in the country…. The big agenda now has to be jettisoned. The big agenda was: We're going to create a democracy and spread it around the region," Marr said. "They have a much more realistic goal now in Iraq: stability."

Ahmad Chalabi, the onetime White House favorite who has been implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort to dupe them about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

U.S. investigators are seeking to determine whether the effort — which one U.S. official likened to an attempt to "game the system" — was secretly supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush administration to oust the regime in Baghdad, Tehran's longtime enemy.

"We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the conservative chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a speech. "Liberty cannot be laid down like so much Astroturf. Law and order must come first."

Not that Roberts is in the White House directly or necessarily my friend politically (if anything I read a certain isolationism into this as a subtext, which I'm not fond of), but this is a cold slap of a statement towards the perceived role of us as ever so special, and one hardly to be dismissed as 'liberal whining' or what have you.

Chalabi said the CIA, which had viewed his Iraqi National Congress group with skepticism for years, was trying to discredit him and that CIA Director George Tenet was behind the accusation that he gave American secrets to Iran.

"These charges are being put out by George Tenet. Let him come to Congress. I will come to Congress, and I will lay everything on the table. Let Congress decide," Chalabi said on "Fox News Sunday."

A U.S. intelligence official, calling Chalabi's assertions absurd, said his willingness to testify under oath before Congress "would be viewed as a positive development."

Anthony Cordesman, a leading Iraq expert and early supporter of the war, wrote in a recent report that while the United States is not yet defeated in Iraq militarily or politically, there is now the threat of "a serious strategic defeat."

"It may not be possible to avoid some form of defeat, but the U.S. must make every effort to do so," wrote Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies here.

--

President George W. Bush is still talking about Iraq as if nothing had changed, but even his most zealous Pentagon aides - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - admit serious mistakes for the first time and concede that victory is not necessarily assured.

The Republican Party is increasingly split over Iraq, between isolationist conservatives and interventionist neoconservatives, and between rally-around-the-troops House members and moderate Republicans in the Senate. When Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz testify before a Senate committee now, they are almost as likely to be blasted by Republicans as by Democrats.

--

"It depends on the definition of success," said Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor and former adviser to the U.S. occupation in Iraq. "At this point the most optimistic definition of success - the warmest, fuzziest dreams of Paul Wolfowitz - I think are thoroughly dashed. The creation of a liberal, secular democracy was never realistic and it's understood now that it's not going to happen."

Rashid Khalidy, who heads the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, also says the United States has failed at its original goals, though he defines them differently.

"I'm actually afraid that failure in terms of the objectives that were initially [set] is absolutely an inevitability," he said. "I don't think the U.S. can keep bases in Iraq. I don't think we're going to have a pliable Iraqi government that will do what we want and I don't think we're going to have a privileged position vis-a-vis Iraqi oil."

Certainly, many of the war's original supporters remain optimistic about a positive outcome.

"This war was never about making Iraqis love us," said Danielle Ptelka of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "It was about getting rid of one of the most brutal dictators the world knows, and we did that. This isn't a Hallmark card."

She said, "It's very hard for me to take seriously the gloominess of people who were opposed to the enterprise in the first place. Those are people who never wanted to win."

--

Experts say one positive sign, if expectations are seriously lowered, is that Fallujah, the locus of the Sunni insurgency, is relatively calm after the recent confrontation, though roadside bombs are still exploding just outside the city. But that fragile stability was accomplished at great cost: handing over the city to former generals in Saddam Hussein's army and some fighters who are part of the insurgency.

The implication, some experts say, is that people who resemble Hussein in outlook will control the largely Sunni center of the country in the future.

The decision to hand the city to former generals and insurgents was made by U.S. officers on the ground, not Pentagon civilians, and is seen here as a sign that generals are beginning to reclaim power from neoconservative civilians like Wolfowitz.

Another such sign is that the overall commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, has called for and gotten more troops on the ground when predecessors were told not to even ask.

Another positive sign as seen from Washington is last week's call by Ayatollah Ali Sistani for his fellow Shia Iraqis to stay away from fighting in Najaf, a direct repudiation of Shia insurgent leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

Given a greater realism on the ground, some experts believe there is a moderate chance of achieving a relatively stable and more benign government, at least relative to Hussein's.

"I think that Iraq may indeed, in spite of everything, have a reasonable chance of being a free country," Khalidy said. "It won't be something frankly that the U.S. will have contributed a huge amount to."

"We will not accomplish the transformational outcome that so many people aspired to as the rationale for the war," Feldman said. "So for many people, relative to where we started, it is already a failure."

But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

Also, the article shows a number of photos uncropped, so you see folks like some dude to the side of the guy in hood and with wires checking his fingernails or something equally banal. Hannah Arendt to thread!

She really loses me when she tries talking about how delight in violence is becoming more endemic in American life. While that's a perfectly plausible claim, her evidence is kinda weak. I hafta say that if she wonders "can the video game 'Interrogating the Terrorists' really be far behind?" then she's got only the most schematic understanding of what playing video games are like. (An interrogration game would be waaaaay too static, right?) Plus, while this is cold comfort to those who undergo them now, really, American hazing rituals have always been pretty bad. It was very common in the early part of this century for colleges (and even high schools) to have hazing days where freshman and sophomore classes would gather together and basically beat the fucking crap out of each other in broad daylight, with school administrations at best only making only token efforts to stop the carnage. (The mass entry of American GIs into higher education after WWII pretty much put a stop to that in colleges.) Plus, if you're going to argue that delight in violence and torture has grown in American life in recent years, maybe you don't want to use events in a film that takes place thirty years ago as evidence.

she's explicitly rejected her conclusions in "on photography" for at least a decade now, for what it's worth.

Senior military officers, government officials, diplomats and others working in Iraq, commentators, experts and analysts have all joined a chorus of doubters that is large and growing. And the applause -- in this case, public approval as measured in polls -- is fading.

Already, some of the authors' friends are grabbing them by their rhetorical lapels. "Failures are multiplying," wrote George Will, the conservative columnist, yet "no one seems accountable."

The original script included parts for American soldiers and diplomats, Iraqis, Arabs and Europeans, but many declined to play along or refused to perform as directed. No matter -- the authors promised to "stay the course." A quick look back at the list of promises made and then abandoned demonstrates how little the play now conforms to the original scenario. And by the way, just what is that "course" we are staying on?

--

We have not made a "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror," the words President Bush used when he declared victory in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" on May 1, 2003. Instead we have stimulated new hatred of the United States in precisely the regions from which future terrorist threats are most likely to arise, while alienating our traditional allies. By embracing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, we abandoned the "honest broker" role that U.S. governments tried to play for four decades in the Middle East, and we confirmed the conspiratorial suspicions of every anti-American Arab. Our credibility has been battered.

We set out to put fear into the hearts of our enemies by demonstrating the efficacy of a new doctrine of preemptive war. Instead, we have shown the timeless nature of hubris. Last week we announced the transfer of 3,600 troops of the overstrained U.S. Army away from the border of what might be the world's most dangerous country, North Korea. They will be sent to help with the war in Iraq, for which we now acknowledge we had inadequate resources.

--

The war in Iraq was justified with two arguments that now appear dubious at best. The first was the idea that Iraq was an appropriate and important target in the new war against terror, when the United States had no evidence tying Saddam Hussein to any recent terrorism apart from the rewards he paid to the families of suicide bombers in Israel and other Palestinian "martyrs." The second was that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction threatened the United States, its allies and the entire Middle East region, but of course, those weapons have never been found.

--

The Bush administration was on notice months before 9/11 about the risks and requirements of deploying our forces for military action abroad, and it defied the warnings. They were contained in a most pragmatic memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to President Bush. Rumsfeld wrote the memo in March 2001, at the very beginning of the new administration. Bob Woodward's 2002 book, "Bush At War," quotes briefly from it. The entire document, which Woodward provided, is haunting reading. Excerpts:

• "In fashioning a clear statement of the underpinning for the action, avoid arguments of convenience. They can be useful at the outset to gain support, but they will be deadly later."

• "There should be clear, well-considered and well-understood goals as to the purpose of the engagement and what would constitute success . . ."

• "The military capabilities needed to achieve the agreed goals must be available . . . "

• "Before committing to an engagement, consider the implications of the decision for the U.S. in other parts of the world . . . . Think through the precedent that a proposed action, or inaction, would establish."

• "Finally -- honesty: U.S. leadership must be brutally honest with itself, the Congress, the public and coalition partners. Do not make the effort sound even marginally easier or less costly than it could become. Preserving U.S. credibility requires that we promise less, or no more, than we are sure we can deliver. It is a great deal easier to get into something than to get out of it!"

In other words, Rumsfeld laid out the standards for a serious, pragmatic strategy. The only obviously missing element in his memo was a recognition that military actions inevitably have political components that also require careful planning and shrewd execution.

But when it came time to wage war against Iraq, Rumsfeld ignored his own guidelines. He developed no real strategy for what to do after ousting Saddam Hussein. As James Fallows has reported in the Atlantic Monthly, Rumsfeld actually banned Defense Department officials from participating in CIA- and State Department-led meetings on postwar Iraq. When those meetings produced extensive recommendations, which included warnings about nearly every pitfall we have since fallen into, the Pentagon simply ignored them. We went to war with no political plan for ending it.

Michael Rubin: "Bremer has embarked on a policy which is as damaging in the region as the Abu Ghraib scandal."

Frank Gaffney, Jr.: "The message of the resulting "politician abuse" is clear to those Iraqis who may still be sitting on the fence: It is better to be an enemy of the United States than its friend. If that perception now takes firm hold, it will effectively and tragically close, at least for the foreseeable future, the window of opportunity we had to help build a Free Iraq — the sort of place for which Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress have been more effective and reliable proponents than anyone else."

Michael Ledeen: "Shortly after moving to Washington from Rome — we're talking late Seventies — I did a long interview with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan about the Carter administration's foreign policy. At a certain point, Moynihan elegantly summarized what had happened to us: "being unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies," he said, "Carter has adopted our enemies' view of the world." So, it seems have many of our policymakers in their panicky and incoherent decisions regarding Iraq."

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/23/bush.iraq/vert.scrapes.ap.jpg

But Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska warned Sunday that Bush has isolated himself from veteran lawmakers from both parties who could help the administration find a solution to the problem of Iraq.

"What I'm saying is that at a time that's as complicated and dangerous as any time in modern history, today, a president of the United States needs to hear other opinions," Hagel told CNN's "Late Edition."

"He must reach out. He must understand a bigger view, a wider-lens view of the world. To essentially hold himself hostage to two or three key advisers and never reach beyond that is very dangerous for a president."

Other Iraqis say that another possible prime minister candidate is Adel Abdel Mehdi, a leading Shiite Islamist with the support of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Mr. Mehdi was at a dinner Friday attended by Mr. Brahimi and other top Shiite leaders, along with Ahmad Chalabi.

Mr. Chalabi's attendance at the dinner was surprising to some Iraqis, because Mr. Chalabi has accused Mr. Brahimi of trying to impose a government on Iraq that was not representative.

A military intelligence unit that oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was also in charge of questioning at a detention center in Afghanistan where two prisoners died in December 2002 in incidents that are being investigated as homicides.

For both of the Afghan prisoners, who died in a center known as the Bagram Collection Point, the cause of death listed on certificates signed by American pathologists included blunt force injuries to their legs. Interrogations at the center were supervised by Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which moved on early in 2003 to Iraq, where some of its members were assigned to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. Its service in Afghanistan was known, but its work at Bagram at the time of the deaths has now emerged in interviews with former prisoners, military officials and from documents.

They have both kinds of conservatives: neo- and paleo-.

< a href="http://blog.newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches/archives/000431.html#more">Iraq Dispatches

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was raging, American soldiers were battling Iraqi insurgents near a Shiite shrine, and the Europeans were arguing with the United States over the powers of a new government in Baghdad.

But on that hot, troubled Washington morning of May 14, when President Bush met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with foreign ministers from the Group of 8, the world's leading industrialized democracies, he spoke to them for exactly eight minutes, took no questions, then left.

"We listen to his speeches, and then the president is gone," said a European diplomat who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as criticizing Mr. Bush.

Last week, when the president made a rare trip to Capitol Hill to try to soothe Republicans who are anxious over the increasing chaos of the American occupation, he gave them a 35-minute pep talk, shook hands, took no questions, then left.

"I was hoping the president would have some back and forth," said Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the only Republican in the Senate who voted against the war in Iraq.

Specifically, Mr. Chafee said he would have liked to have asked Mr. Bush one question about Iraq: "If this thing starts spiraling downward, what are our options?"

All presidents live in a bubble, but Democrats, European officials and a group of moderate Republicans say that Mr. Bush lives in a bigger bubble than most. As the problems of the occupation and insurgency in Iraq have intensified, they say, Mr. Bush has appeared to retreat more than ever into his tight circle of aides.

"He needs to break out of that cocoon a little bit, and to listen to more advice than he gets from his vice president and his war cabinet," said Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, a frequent critic of the president. "This administration has seen Congress as an enemy and a constitutional nuisance. The world right now is in trouble, and we need to have a Congress and a president and an executive branch that's working together."

Over the next five weeks, Mr. Bush will take a few steps out of the bubble in a series of speeches, starting on Monday night at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., that will outline his strategy for transferring power to the Iraqis by a June 30 deadline. But in a classic White House public relations offensive, Mr. Bush will in essence be informing the globe of his prelaid plans.

"The president talked about being humble when he was running for office," Mr. Chafee said, "but the opposite seems to be true."

This past weekend, Mr. Bush seemed more inside his bubble than usual. After a commencement speech on Friday in the largely Bush-friendly territory of Louisiana State University, the president ended up at his Texas ranch.

He spent part of Saturday afternoon falling off his mountain bike and sustaining minor injuries on a 17-mile ride, and he skipped the graduation of his twin daughter Jenna from the University of Texas, where university officials had predicted protests if Mr. Bush turned up. Later in the day, Mr. Bush went to a private family dinner in Austin, at a restaurant called Moonshine, to celebrate Jenna's graduation.

The president repeated the pattern in New Haven on Sunday, when he attended a family dinner celebrating the graduation of the other twin, Barbara, from Yale. But once again, he planned to skip the actual commencement, on Monday. Yale officials, too, had predicted that there would be large protests if the president appeared.

The larger question is this: Inside the bubble, what is Mr. Bush's level of concern about the turmoil in Iraq? Does he think that the sunny predictions of Vice President Dick Cheney and the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, were all wrong? Does he blame them, or himself?

In public, a president who is determined not to be Jimmy Carter is relentlessly upbeat. In private, he is described by some people who have seen him recently as grim and subdued.

"I think the president is concerned in the sense that he appreciates some very difficult decisions are going to have to be made," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In an interview, Mr. Lugar said that in a recent meeting the president had been receptive to his ideas, along with those of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. "We were not shy, and it was about a 45- or 50-minute period," Mr. Lugar said.

Nonetheless, the even-keeled Mr. Lugar sent a warning to Mr. Bush on Saturday, when Mr. Lugar questioned the administration's war against terrorism in a commencement speech at Tufts University.

"Military action is necessary to defeat serious and immediate threats to our national security," Mr. Lugar said. "But the war on terrorism will not be won through attrition, particularly since military action will often breed more terrorists and more resentment of the United States."

In the interview, when asked if Mr. Bush was properly handling the troubles in Iraq, Mr. Lugar replied, "I don't know."

The United States on Monday proposed a United Nations resolution that would give a multinational peacekeeping force in Iraq a one-year mandate after Iraq assumes sovereignty June 30.

The mandate could be renewed by the U.N. Security Council or at the request of Iraq's government, Germany's U.N. ambassador Gunther Pleuger said.

The multinational force would be "under unified command," expected to be led by an American.

The mandate would give the interim government control over oil revenues, though proceeds would continue to be deposited in the Development Fund for Iraq.

That fund will continue to be monitored by an independent watchdog agency, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board.

Too many fucking cooks, right there.

Kimmitt is beginning to sound a little frustrated:

"We have witnesses who say there were no children there," he said.

Kimmitt also noted that the video was shot entirely in daylight hours, while the airstrike was under cover of darkness.

But the general said the coalition had "made no determination" and was conducting a full investigation.

"We have nothing to hide," he said.

Kimmitt said coalition forces found weapons, possible illegal drugs, cash and what appeared to be a "production center" for making false identification.

"It appeared to be a smuggler way-station of some kind," he said.

And so far, he added, "we have seen nothing that cause us to significantly change our minds."

ie, "We're investigating but WE'RE RIGHT WE'RE RIGHT FUCK YOU ALL!"

May 24, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Did Somebody Say War?
By BOB HERBERT

President Bush fell off his bike and hurt himself during a 17-mile excursion at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Saturday. Nothing serious. A few cuts and bruises. He was wearing a bike helmet and a mouth guard, and he was able to climb back on his bike and finish his ride.

A little later he left the ranch and went to Austin for a graduation party for his daughter Jenna. And then it was on to New Haven, where daughter Barbara will graduate today from Yale. Except for the bicycle mishap, it sounded like a very pleasant weekend.

Meanwhile, there's a war on. Yet another U.S. soldier was killed near Falluja yesterday. You remember Falluja. That's the rebellious city that the Marines gave up on and turned over to the control of officers from the very same Baathist army that we invaded Iraq to defeat.

It's impossible to think about Iraq without stumbling over these kinds of absurdities. How do you get a logical foothold on a war that was nurtured from the beginning on absurd premises? You can't. Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. The invasion of Iraq was not part of the war on terror. We had no business launching this war. Now we're left with the tragic absurdity of a clueless president riding his bicycle in Texas while Americans in Iraq are going up in flames.

How bad is the current situation? Gen. Anthony Zinni, the retired Marine Corps general who headed the U.S. Central Command (which covers much of the Middle East and Central Asia) from 1997 to 2000, was utterly dismissive about the administration's "stay the course" strategy in Iraq. "The course is headed over Niagara Falls," he said in an interview with "60 Minutes," adding, "It should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up."

When the weapons of mass destruction rationale went by the boards, the administration and its apologists tried to justify the war by asserting that the U.S. could use bullets and bombs to seed Iraq with an American-style democracy that would then spread like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East.

Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, addressed that point last week in a report titled, "The `Post Conflict' Lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan."

"At this point," the report said, "the U.S. lacks good options in Iraq — although it probably never really had them in the sense the Bush administration sought. The option of quickly turning Iraq into a successful, free-market democracy was never practical, and was as absurd a neoconservative fantasy as the idea that success in this objective would magically make Iraq an example that would transform the Middle East."

The president's reservoir of credibility on Iraq is bone dry. His approval ratings are going down. Conservative voices in opposition to his policies are growing louder. And the troops themselves are becoming increasingly disenchanted with their mission. Yet no one knows quite what to do. Americans are torn between a desire to stop the madness by pulling the plug on this tragic and hopeless adventure and the realization that the U.S., for the time being, may be the only safeguard against a catastrophic civil war.

The president is scheduled to give a speech tonight to lay out his "clear strategy" for the future of Iraq. Don't hold your breath. This is the same president who deliberately exploited his nation's fear of terrorism in the aftermath of Sept. 11 to lead it into the long dark starless night of Iraq.

As for the Iraqis, they've been had. We're not going to foot the bill in any real sense for the reconstruction of Iraq, any more than we've been willing to foot the bill for a reconstruction of the public school system here at home. There's a reason why Ahmad Chalabi and the Bush crowd were so simpatico for so long. They all considered themselves masters of the con. They all thought that they could fool all of the people all of the time.

There's a terrible sense of dread filtering across America at the moment and it's not simply because of the continuing fear of terrorism and the fact that the nation is at war. It's more frightening than that. It grows out of the suspicion that we all may be passengers in a vehicle that has made a radically wrong turn and is barreling along a dark road, with its headlights off and with someone behind the wheel who may not know how to drive.

But the big story is contained in this sentence: "An intelligence source confirmed to Newsday reports in Time and Newsweek that the FBI had launched an investigation into who in the administration had passed the classified material to his Iraqi National Congress."

Perhaps we'll find out that Chalabi got his classified info from some obscure analyst at DIA or a Colonel in the field. But both of those possibilities seem highly unlikely.

Chalabi's interlocutors in the US government were a fairly small and well-known group, stacked heavily toward the top of the totem pole and very much on the appointive, civilian side -- start with the acronyms OSD and OVP. For those who know the nature of the relationship it would, quite frankly, be hard to imagine that they weren't sharing highly sensitive information with him.

If one of those guys gets pegged for giving Chalabi info that later ended up in the hands of Iranian intelligence, everything up till now will seem like it was a breeze.

Ledeen, annoyed at the attacks on "my friend Ahmad Chalabi," talks to the dead to feel better. (I guess the living weren't much help).

Owens considers the past and isn't completely sanguine (though somehow he forgets that it wasn't a civil war last year, but let that pass):

There is no reason to suggest that things in Iraq are going the way of Southern Reconstruction. But it is clear that the dynamics are similar. The "center of gravity" in both cases is public opinion. We have to remember that a war doesn't end when the victor says it's over but when the defeated party says it's over. If the defeated party thinks the victor doesn't have the will to go the distance, it has an incentive to raise the cost and defeat the victor's will. During Reconstruction, white Southerners held out longer than Northern will. Let us hope that this is not the case in Iraq.

Stalinsky does Kimmitt one better -- not only do bad people throw parties, they just love death, surely.

The Security Council,

Recalling its previous relevant resolutions on Iraq, in particular resolutions 1483 (2003) and 1511 (2003),

Reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq,

Recognizing the importance of international support, particularly that of countries in the region, Iraq's neighbors and regional organizations, for the people of Iraq in their efforts to achieve security and prosperity,

Determined to mark a new phase in Iraq's transition to a democratically elected government, and looking forward, to this end, to the end of the occupation and the assumption of authority by a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq by 30 June 2004,

Welcoming the ongoing efforts of the Special Adviser to the Secretary-General to assist the people of Iraq in achieving the formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq,

Welcoming the progress made in implementing the arrangements for Iraq's political transition referred to in resolution 1511 (2003),

Affirming the importance of the principles of rule of law, including respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and of democracy, including free and fair elections.

Recalling the establishment of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) on 15 August 2003, and determined that the United Nations should play a leading role in assisting the Iraqi people in the formation of institutions for representative government,

Recognizing that international support for restoration of stability and security is essential to the well-bring of the people of Iraq as well as to the ability of all concerned to carry out their work on behalf of the people of Iraq, and welcoming Member State contribution in this regard under resolution 1483 (2003) of 22 May 2003 and resolution 1511 (2003) of 16 October 2003,

Recalling the report provided to the Security Council on 16 April 2004 under resolution 1511 (2003) on the efforts and progress made by the multinational force authorized under that resolution, welcoming the willingness of the multinational force to continue efforts to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq in support of the political transition, especially for upcoming elections, and to provide security for the UN presence in Iraq, as further described in the letter to the President of the Security Council and recognizing the importance of the consent of the sovereign government of Iraq for the presence of the multinational force and of close coordination between the multinational force and that government,

Noting that the multinational force will operate in accordance with generally accepted principles of international law and cooperate with relevant international organizations,

Affirming the importance of international assistance in reconstruction and development of the Iraqi economy,

Recognizing the benefits to Iraq of the immunities and privileges enjoyed by Iraqi oil revenues and by the Development Fund for Iraq, and noting the importance of providing for continued disbursements of this fund by the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority,

Determining that the situation in Iraq continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security,

Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,

1. Endorses the formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq that will take office by 30 June 2004;

2. Welcomes the commitment of the occupying powers to end the occupation by 30 June 2003, at which time the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist and the Interim Government of Iraq will assume responsibility and authority for governing a sovereign Iraq;

3. Endorses the proposed timetable for Iraq's political transition to democratic government, including:

a. formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq that will assume governing authority by 30 June 2004:

b. convening of a national conference; and

c. holding of direct democratic elections by 31 December 2004 if possible, and in no case later than 31 January 2005, to a Transitional National Assembly which will, inter alia, have responsibility for drafting a permanent constitution for Iraq under which democratic elections to a national government will be held;

4. Calls on all Iraqis to implement these arrangements peaceably and in full, and on all States and relevant organizations to support such implementation;

5. Decides that, in implementing its mandate to assist the Iraqi people, the Special Representative of the Secretary General and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI)

a. shall in particular:

i. assist in the convening, no later than XX XX 2004, of a national conference to select a Consultative Council;

ii. advise and support the Interim Government of Iraq and the Transitional National Assembly, as required, on the process for holding elections;

iii. promote national dialogue and consensus-building on the drafting of a national constitution by the people of Iraq; and

b. shall as circumstances permit:

i. advise the Interim Government of Iraq in the development of effective civil and social services;

ii. contribute to the coordination and delivery of reconstruction, development and humanitarian assistance;

iii. promote the protection of human rights, national reconciliation, and judicial and legal reform in order to strengthen the rule of law in Iraq; and

iv. advise and assist the Interim Government of Iraq on initial planning for the eventual conduct of a comprehensive census;

6. Reaffirms the authorization for the multinational force under unified command established under resolution 1511 (2003), having regard to the letter referred to in preambular paragraph 10 above, decides that the multinational force shall have authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq including by preventing and deterring terrorism, so that inter alia the United Nations can fulfill its role in assisting the Iraqi people as outlined in paragraph five above and the Iraqi people can implement freely and without intimidation the timetable and program for the political process and benefit from reconstruction and rehabilitation activities, and decides further that the mandate for the multinational force shall be reviewed 12 months from the date of this resolution or at the request of the Transitional Government of Iraq;

7. Notes the creation by the multinational force of a distinct entity within the multinational force and under its unified command with a dedicated mission to provide security for the UN presence in Iraq and requests Member State and relevant organizations to provide resources to support that entity;

8. Recognizes that the multinational force will also assist in building the capability of the Iraqi security forces and institutions, through a program of recruitment, training, equipping, mentoring and monitoring, to enable the Iraqi forces progressively to play a greater role in creating conditions of security and stability in Iraq and welcomes in that regard the arrangements that are being put in place to establish a partnership between the multinational force and the sovereign Interim Government of Iraq and to ensure coordination between the two;

9. Requests Member States and international and regional security organizations to contribute assistance to the multinational force, including military forces, to help meet the needs of the Iraqi people for security and stability, humanitarian and reconstruction assistance, and to support the efforts of UNAMI;

10. Emphasizes the importance of developing effective Iraqi police, border enforcement and Facilities Protection Service for the maintenance of law, order, and security, including combating terrorism and requests Member States and international organizations to assist the Interim Government of Iraq in building the capability of these Iraqi institutions;

11. Condemns all acts of terrorism in Iraq, and decides that, in accordance with their obligations under resolutions 1373 (2001), 1267 (1999), 1333 (2000), 1390 (2002), 1455 (2003) and 1526 (2004) and with other relevant international obligations, all States shall take immediate and necessary steps, inter alia, to freeze funds and other financial assets or economic resources of relevant individuals and entities, to prevent the entry into or transit through their territories of relevant individuals, to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer of arms and related material to relevant individuals and entities, to refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to relevant individuals or entities, to prevent individuals and entities from using their respective territories for the purpose of financing, planning, facilitating or committing terrorist acts against Iraq or its citizens, and to ensure that such individuals are brought to justice;

12. Welcomes efforts by Member States to support the Interim Government of Iraq through the provision of technical and expert assistance;

13. Decides that the prohibitions related to the sale or supply to Iraq of arms and related materiel under previous resolutions shall not apply to arms or related materiel required by the multinational force or the sovereign government of Iraq to serve the purpose of this resolution, calls upon the multinational force and the sovereign government of Iraq each to ensure appropriate implementation procedures are in place, and stresses the importance for all States, particularly Iraq's neighbors, to strictly abide by them;

14. Reiterates its request that Member States, international financial institutions and other organizations strengthen their efforts to assist the people of Iraq in the reconstruction and development of the Iraqi economy, including by providing international experts and necessary resources through a coordinated program of donor assistance;

15. Notes that upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority that funds in the Development Fund for Iraq shall be disbursed at the direction of the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors, and decides that the Development Fund for Iraq shall be utilized in a transparent manner and through the Iraqi budget including to satisfy outstanding obligations against the Development Fund for Iraq, that the arrangements for the depositing of proceeds from export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas and its products established in paragraph 20 of resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue to apply, that the International Advisory and Monitoring Board referred to in resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue its activities in monitoring the Development Fund for Iraq and shall include as an additional member a duly qualified representative of the sovereign government of Iraq, and that the provisions above shall be reviewed no later than 12 months from the date of this resolution or at the request of the Transitional Government of Iraq, and that appropriate arrangements shall be made for the continuation of deposits of the proceeds referred to in paragraph 21 of resolution 1483 (2003);

16. Decides that in connection with the dissolution o the Coalition of Provisional Authority, the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors shall assume the rights, responsibilities and obligations relating to the Oil for Food Programme that were transferred to the Authority pursuant to Resolution 1483 (2003), including all operational responsibility for the Programme and any obligations undertaken by the Authority in connection with such responsibility, and responsibility for ensuring independently authenticated confirmation that goods have been delivered, and further decides that, following a 120 day transition period, the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors shall assume responsibility for certifying delivery of goods under contracts prioritized in accordance with that resolution, and that such certification shall be deemed to constitute the independent authentication required for the release of funds associated with such contracts;

17. Further decides that the provision of paragraph 22 of resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue to apply, except that the privileges and immunities provided in that paragraph shall not apply with respect to any claim arising out of an obligation entered into by Iraq after 30 June 2004;

18. Welcomes the commitment of creditors, including those of the Paris Club, to identify ways to reduce substantially Iraq's sovereign debt, urges the international financial institutions and bilateral donors to take immediate steps to provide their full range of loans and other financial assistance to Iraq, recognizes that the Interim Government of Iraq has the authority to conclude and implement such agreements as may be necessary in this regard, and requests creditors, institutions and donors to work as a priority on these matters with the Interim Government of Iraq;

19. Recalls the continuing obligation of Member States to freeze and transfer certain funds, assets and economic resources to the Development Fund for Iraq in accordance with paragraph 23 of resolution 1483 (2003);

20. Calls upon all Member States to take appropriate steps within their respective legal systems to stay for a period of 12 months from 30 June 2004 all legal and other similar proceedings before their courts or other tribunals involving claims by or against the State of Iraq, its Government, or any of its agencies or instrumentalities, including its State-owned enterprises or similar bodies;

21. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Security Council within three months from the date of this resolution on UNAMI operations in Iraq, and on a quarterly bases thereafter on the progress made toward national elections and fulfillment of all UNAMI's responsibilities;

22. Decides to remain actively seized of this matter.

For the hard-liners at the Defense Department, the raid came as a surprise. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, got the news from the media. When Iraqi police, guarded by American GIs, burst into the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, looking for evidence of kidnapping, embezzlement, torture and theft, the men who run the Pentagon were left asking some uncomfortable questions. "Who signed off on this raid?" wondered one very high-ranking official. "What were U.S. soldiers doing there?" asked another, according to a source who was present in the room.

Until at least very recently, Chalabi had been the darling of these top Pentagon officials. How could it be that the men who run the most powerful military in the world could not know that their own troops were about to run a raid on a man once regarded as the hope of free Iraq?

--

It is telling that the ground commanders in Baghdad who participated in the raid on Chalabi headquarters did not bother to inform their chain-of-command higher-ups at the Pentagon. (The raid was apparently OK'd by the American proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, probably with tacit approval of White House officials.) Embarrassed by horrific images from Abu Ghraib, a growing number of uniformed soldiers are blaming their political bosses in Washington—Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith—for whatever goes wrong in Iraq.

Americans may be beginning to wonder: is anyone in charge over there? For an administration that prides itself on clarity of leadership, the Bushies seem to be lost in the Mesopotamian sandstorm. Everyone and no one was responsible for the prisoner-abuse scandal; the deadline for turning over the country to a new government is five weeks away, and the outcome is highly uncertain. Chalabi, who was supposed to be Our Man in Baghdad, is now whipping up anti-American sentiment. It wasn't long ago that Chalabi was touted as a great democrat, a friend of Israel, an Arab who "thought like us." He was going to help Americans reshape the troubled Middle East in our own image. But just as Chalabi once seemed to personify the utopian dreams of the true believers—remember those bouquets that would greet the troops?—his fall from grace suggests a more depressing turn in the Iraq reality show.

Chalabi should not be a scapegoat for all that ails the American occupation of Iraq. When it served their own ideological agenda, his neocon sponsors engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief. The ideologues at the Defense Department were warned by doubters at the State Department and CIA that Chalabi was peddling suspect goods. Even so, the Bushies were bamboozled by a Machiavellian con man for the ages. Chalabi (who vigorously denies wrongdoing and has donned a martyr's robes) has survived a fraud conviction, betrayals and scandals before. He may yet emerge on top. His story would be darkly entertaining, even funny after the fashion of a late John le Carre novel, if the consequences were not so serious.

Etc. etc., nobody is running the ship. I wonder if Bush's speech will even allude to Chalabi and what happened on Thursday?

Sanchez being rotated out of Iraq -- which is indeed typical practice (hey, Franks is long gone, after all), but the timing isn't the best, I'd say. The fact that it's rumored his replacement will be the second-in-command of the Army is also interesting.

The CIA wanted to keep some prisoner names off the roster at Abu Ghraib, something Taguba wasn't thrilled over.

That story also says that Karpinski has been officially suspended -- and she's now saying she was set up.

A number of locals in the Maryland area where the 372nd MP Company is based, meanwhile, aren't feeling sanguine about either their actions or those of people in the White House.

Car bomb in Baghdad. Another US soldier dead elsewhere. Another lovely, lovely day in the mess we made.

HYNDMAN, Pa.—Here among the string of tiny communities straddling three states, now inextricably bound by the Iraqi prison abuse scandal, there are stories of Stars and Stripes, yellow ribbons and prayers of support.

There are also tales of regret, embarrassment and broken rules. But in a twist that would confound any Hollywood scriptwriter, the praise and placards expressing admiration are for the first soldier convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners.

The admonishments are reserved for the soldier who blew the whistle.

Hours before a remorseful Spc. Jeremy Sivits was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, Barb Lehman was passing out yellow ribbons at a vigil in support of their native son.

"He was the son any mother would have loved to have," said Lehman, who drove the bus which took Sivits to and from school for three years.

But ask Lehman about Joe Darby, the fellow army specialist, hailed as a hero by U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for exposing the abuse.

"Oh, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes," Lehman said. "We don't believe in ratting people out like that."

...

There won't be any parades for Darby when he comes home to Corriganville, Md.

His home is shuttered, plastered with "No Trespassing" signs.

Neighbours won't talk about him and most in a community so tiny it is not even on most maps, claim not to know him.

"He should have kept his mouth shut," said Billy Joe Davis, a 65-year-old Corriganville resident with blunt views expressed in equally blunt language.

"Ask him if he thinks it's cruel to have them dragging the bodies of our people up and down the street. Ask him if he thinks it's cruel hanging our people off the bridges.

"We should just blow the place up and get the hell out of there."

Tim Flesher, a 40 year old who runs the town's auto dealership also believes Darby should have kept to himself.

He believes the abuse of prisoners was wrong, but added: "The mistake we made was taking prisoners in the first place. We should shoot the sons of bitches or let them go.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Tell me again where the problem is?

Following removal of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the Iranian clerical dictatorship began a covert effort to set up an allied Shi'ite Islamist extremist regime in 60 percent Shi'ite Iraq. Iran has prepared this for many years and recruited political, military and covert agent assets among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites who fled Iraq to live in Iran.

Has W telling the King of Jordan that he "can piss on Chalabi" made one of these threads? Cause I loved that, I really did.

nature abhors a vacuum
So does my cat.

Haha! Please give me a source for that one!

The contrast between the situations in Iraq/Afghanistan (do not forget that, also) and heavy protests outside with the painted-on smiles and smug backslapping of a Convention will surely be picked up by the media (unless the tone of the convention is remarkably different from in 2000; though I don't sense it will be considering how stage-managed the whole Bush 'enterprise' is)...

Not folly at all. When the protest circus comes, as it will, the Republicans can point to the more ridiculous or violent aspects and that it's *this* they're up against, not the comparatively colorless Kerry.

Sorry for delay on request, Ned, I got distracted. The "piss on Chalabi" quote has been floating around. W rule #1--be loyal. You can be inept, just be loyal. Bad Ahmed, bad!

Free Republic--ha! Let your freep flag fly, ILE.

By the way, the protest zone for the GOP Convention is gonna be in New Jersey. I think it'll be big enough by then to be heard all the way in Manhattan though.

eep

no....irony....left

John B. Israel, an Iraqi-American Christian and one of two civilian contractors implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, returned home to California a few weeks ago and, until Monday, was living quietly with his wife, Rosa.

In an interview on Monday at their home in Santa Clarita, Calif., Ms. Israel said that her husband had not even hired a lawyer.

Mr. Israel, who was born in Baghdad in 1955, was one of three Iraqi-Americans working as translators at Abu Ghraib. The Army report on the abuses described him as "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib."

On Monday, his employer, SOS Interpreting, with offices in New York and suburban Washington, called Mr. Israel here for talks. That same evening, SOS issued its first statement about Mr. Israel, saying simply that the company, a subcontractor for the Titan Corporation for the work in Iraq, "fully intends to cooperate with the Army and with Titan" in the investigations. SOS said it would have nothing more to say.

Almost nothing was known about Mr. Israel before now. Among a raft of documents from the Army investigation, obtained by The New York Times, is a brief statement by Mr. Israel in which he denies any knowledge of the abuses. In it he says he arrived in Iraq on Oct. 14 and served as a translator for military intelligence. Asked if he had "witnessed any acts of abuse," he wrote: "No I have not."

Ms. Israel said her husband was "just a translator" and knew nothing of the Abu Ghraib abuses. She said a fellow employee had given his name to investigators. She would not say when he expected to return home, and he could not be reached for comment.

The Army report said that Mr. Israel's statement of ignorance ran contrary to the testimony of several witnesses. It also said he did not have a security clearance, and recommended that he be disciplined.

Prosecuting civilian contractors in United States courts would be "fascinating and enormously complicated," said Deborah N. Pearlstein, director of the U.S. law and security program of Human Rights First.

It is clear, on the other hand, that neither Iraqi courts nor American courts-martial are available.

In June 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator in Iraq, granted broad immunity to civilian contractors and their employees. They were, he wrote, generally not subject to criminal and civil actions in the Iraqi legal system, including arrest and detention.

That immunity is limited to their official acts under their contracts, and it is unclear whether any abuses alleged can be said to have been such acts. But even unofficial conduct by contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted there, Mr. Bremer's order said, without his written permission.

Similarly, under a series of Supreme Court decisions, civilians cannot be court-martialed in the absence of a formal declaration of war. There was no such declaration in the Iraq war.

Meanwhile, well well WELL indeed. Looks like our saintly General Miller is, according to sworn testimony as part of Taguba's investigation, the one who inspired the use of guard dogs to, shall we say, intimidate Iraqi prisoners. The interesting fly in this ointment is that the claim comes from a military intelligence officer:

A U.S. Army general dispatched by senior Pentagon officials to bolster the collection of intelligence from prisoners in Iraq last fall inspired and promoted the use of guard dogs there to frighten the Iraqis, according to sworn testimony by the top U.S. intelligence officer at the Abu Ghraib prison.

According to the officer, Col. Thomas Pappas, the idea came from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who at the time commanded the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and was implemented under a policy approved by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. military official in Iraq.

"It was a technique I had personally discussed with General Miller, when he was here" visiting the prison, testified Pappas, head of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and the officer placed in charge of the cellblocks at Abu Ghraib prison where abuses occurred in the wake of Miller's visit to Baghdad between Aug. 30 and Sept. 9, 2003.

"He said that they used military working dogs at Gitmo [the nickname for Guantanamo Bay], and that they were effective in setting the atmosphere for which, you know, you could get information" from the prisoners, Pappas told the Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, according to a transcript provided to The Washington Post.

Last fall, Bush requested $400 million to build two maximum-security prisons in Iraq, but Congress reduced the request to $100 million, about the cost of one medium-security facility in the United States. In April, the U.S.-led occupation authority informed Congress it would build a single 4,400-bed prison near Nasiriyah, south of Baghdad.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said U.S. taxpayers will finance a second prison to replace Abu Ghraib. She said there is sufficient flexibility within the $18.4 billion in Iraq reconstruction aid approved in October to build the prison.

But Tim Rieser, a Democratic aide on the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, which is monitoring the reconstruction, said Bush would have to consult Congress on such a large transfer of money. "For all intents and purposes, the money is not there," Rieser said.

It is clear that Bush's dramatic promise to raze Abu Ghraib will take quite some time to fulfill. The prison -- notorious for torture and killing during Saddam Hussein's reign and a still-growing prisoner abuse scandal under U.S. control -- will not be torn down until its replacement is ready, Bush said. And aides in Congress and the occupation authority said construction of a bare-bones facility would take 18 months to two years.

If the White House intends the new prison to be "a showcase for progressive Western penal thinking," it may take longer to build health, athletic and rehabilitation facilities along with the cellblocks, a House Republican aide said.

The prison in Nasiriyah is already behind schedule, occupation documents indicate. In January, occupation authorities said they would direct $33 million to the project. By April, nothing had been spent. The occupation authority cited only one accomplishment in its latest report to Congress: approval of "the initial scope of work for the new prison."

The 280-acre prison compound 20 miles west of Baghdad was notorious under former president Saddam Hussein and is now at the center of an embarrassing scandal for the U.S. military after a number of its soldiers were captured in photographs and on video beating and humiliating detainees there. But for some Iraqis, the prison is just a prison, not the symbol of death and torture and disgraceful conduct that Bush declared it to be in a speech from the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania on Monday night.

There has been no groundswell of support here for razing the facility. In fact, earlier this month, the Iraqi Governing Council discussed the possibility of turning part or all of it into a museum.

Interior Minister Sameer Shaker Sumaidaie, who is in charge of police and security in Iraq, said the building is not the problem.

"I can understand the rush to abolish Abu Ghraib," Sumaidaie said on Monday, but added, "I personally don't think the building itself has a meaning positive or negative."

Sumaidaie said the stain of Abu Ghraib would be erased simply by making it more open and making the people who run it more accountable.

Not every woman is doing a great job, Schlafly said. She said the photograph of England holding a leash attached to the neck of an Iraqi prisoner appalled her. "This later picture is a feminist fantasy," she said. "That's how feminists think about men."

Mm.

U.S. troops wanted Jeanan Moayad's father. When they couldn't find him, they took her husband in his place.

Dhafir Ibrahim has been in U.S. custody for nearly four months. Moayad insists that he is being held as a bargaining chip, and military officials have told her that he will be released when her father surrenders. Her father is a scientist and former Baath party member who fled to Jordan soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

"My husband is a hostage," said Moayad, 35, an architect who carries a small portrait of Ibrahim in her purse. "He didn't commit any crime."

In a little-noticed development amid Iraq's prison abuse scandal, the U.S. military is holding dozens of Iraqis as bargaining chips to put pressure on their wanted relatives to surrender, according to human rights groups. These detainees are not accused of any crimes, and experts say their detention violates the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. The practice also risks associating the United States with the tactics of countries that it has long criticized for arbitrary arrests.

"It's clearly an abuse of the powers of arrest, to arrest one person and say that you're going to hold him until he gives information about somebody else, especially a close relative," said John Quigley, an international law professor at Ohio State University. "Arrests are supposed to be based on suspicion that the person has committed some offense."

U.S. officials deny that there is a systematic practice of detaining relatives to pressure Iraqi fugitives into surrendering. "The coalition does not take hostages," said a senior military official who asked not to be named. "Relatives who might have information about wanted persons are sometimes detained for questioning, and then they are released. There is no policy of holding people as bargaining chips."

But Iraqi human rights groups say they have documented dozens of cases similar to Moayad's, in which family members who are not accused of any crimes have been detained for weeks or even months and told that they would be released only when a wanted relative surrenders to U.S. forces.

Sontag for free. It's IMO the best thing she's done since 9/11, sicen it so well ties into her photography stuff and she's OTM abt digital camera culture. 'One Hour Photo' is an interesting relic in this regard. None of my relatives have 'prints' of their photos these days.

Karpinski told CNN the U.S. Army was aware of prisoner abuses well before January when a soldier made a direct report of misconduct, prompting the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, to order a criminal investigation.

Karpinski said she saw an International Committee for the Red Cross report detailing human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib at an "impromptu meeting" at Combined Joint Task Force-7 ( CJTF-7) headquarters in late November 2003.

"The people that were there at this meeting -- it was very informal -- they were all aware of the report," she said. "As a matter of fact when I asked a question about the report, the SJA to the CJTF-7 -- the lead lawyer -- responded very quickly and said I have a copy of the report right here, you can see it.

"So clearly they had already seen the report, maybe it had been intercepted or routed to them in this particular case, and they were already working on a response for my review."

Karpinski has taken partial responsibility for the prisoner abuse scandal, but insists the military police officers implicated in the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners were being given instructions by military intelligence, as part of the process of interrogating prisoners.

"Those cell blocks, 1-A and 1-B in particular, were under the control of the MI [military intelligence] brigade before they took control of the whole facility in November," Karpinski said. "We had 16 facilities. Interrogations were run at one of those facilities, Abu Ghraib, and in two cell blocks, 1-A and 1-B, and it is the only place where these infractions and these photographs have been taken and reported."

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In doing so — reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation — we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

Washington Post story reporting on same.

Filmmaker Moore Offers Berg Interview to Family
Fri May 28, 3:09 PM ET
By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore interviewed Nick Berg, the American contractor beheaded in Iraq, for his latest film and has offered to show the footage to Berg's family before he would release it, a family spokesman said on Friday.

Bruce Hauser, the spokesman and Bergs' neighbor in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said Moore called him to confirm reports that the footage existed and that Moore wanted to send a copy to the Bergs for their approval before its release.

The clip was made during the filming of "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore's new movie attacking the Bush administration, which won this year's Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Berg interview was not used in the film.

"I was very surprised to hear from him," the family spokesman said of Moore.

"He said, 'Yes, there is such a video,' and if they are OK with it, then he will go ahead and release it," he said.

Moore's office in New York confirmed it has the 20-minute interview but said there were no plans to release it.

"We are not releasing it to the media. It is not in the film. We are dealing privately with the family," a statement from Moore's office said. Moore was not available for comment.

The contents of the interview were unknown, as was the date it was made. Moore's office did not say why it was not used in the film.

Berg's decapitation in Iraq was shown in a video on a Web site on May 11, in which his masked executioners said they were retaliating for the U.S. military abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Berg's parents would not receive Moore's clip until they return from a trip this weekend, Hauser said.

hstencil, I think we should all try to figure things out, and if that means honestly arriving at conspiracy theories, why be afraid of those conclusions? I don't think conspiracy should be ruled out
a priori.

Probably be led around by a leash and made to simulate sex acts with other prisoners.

A senior US general says a set of four special interrogation techniques have been used on two key detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
But he insisted the techniques conform to the Geneva Conventions and that all the prisoners are treated humanely.

June 8, 2004
LEGAL OPINIONS
Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, June 7 — A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.

One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."

Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. "It was not a legal analysis."

Mr. Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantánamo, four of which required Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval, did not constitute torture and were consistent with international treaties.

The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law.

A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.

The previously disclosed Justice Department memorandum concluded that administration officials were justified in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.

Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the administration's top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department's position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.

The March memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was prepared as part of a review of interrogation techniques by a working group appointed by the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes. The group itself was led by the Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker, and included military and civilian lawyers from all branches of the armed services.

The review stemmed from concerns raised by Pentagon lawyers and interrogators at Guantánamo after Mr. Rumsfeld approved a set of harsher interrogation techniques in December 2002 to use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot.

Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair, on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group's review. Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military's Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, told reporters last Friday that the working group "wanted to do what is humane and what is legal and consistent not only with" the Geneva Conventions, but also "what is right for our soldiers."

Mr. Di Rita said that the Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel's office.

The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.

The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith," the report said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."

The adjective "severe," the report said, "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be `severe.' " The report also advised that if an interrogator "has a good faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture."

The report also said that interrogators could justify breaching laws or treaties by invoking the doctrine of necessity. An interrogator using techniques that cause harm might be immune from liability if he "believed at the moment that his act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm."

Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration's confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.

Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch, said Monday, "We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the criminal consequences of doing so."

The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.

Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article.

ps: I want to stab John Ashcroft

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8872673.htm

Big John also worked in a 'how dare you question dear leader in this serious time of war' comment. bastard.

By TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - A California National Guardsman says three fellow soldiers brazenly abused detainees during interrogation sessions in an Iraqi police station, threatening them with guns, sticking lit cigarettes in their ears and choking them until they collapsed.

Sgt. Greg Ford said he repeatedly had to revive prisoners who had passed out, and once saw a soldier stand on the back of a handcuffed detainee's neck and pull his arms until they popped out of their sockets.

"I had to intervene because they couldn't keep their hands off of them," said Ford, part of a four-member team from the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion that questioned detainees last year in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Ford's commanding officers deny any abuse occurred, and say investigations within their battalion and by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division determined they had done nothing wrong.

"All the allegations were found to be untrue, totally unfounded and in a number of cases completely fabricated," said the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Drew Ryan.

Ford's allegations are being further investigated by the CID, which would not comment on the probe.

Ford told The Associated Press that when he reported the problems last June to his commanding officers, they pressured him to drop his claims.

"Immediately, within the same conversation, the command said, `Nope, you're delusional, you're crazy, it never happened.' They gave me 30 seconds to withdraw my request for an investigation," Ford said. "I stood my ground."

When he insisted on an official investigation, they ordered him to see combat stress counselors, who sent him out of Iraq, he said.

Ford said he did not hear from investigators until the release of photographs of mistreatment inside the Abu Ghraib prison provoked worldwide outrage and prompted a review of other allegations of abuse.

Ford, 49, said has worked for 18 years as a state prison guard and has more than 30 years of military experience. He was sent out of Iraq last June and, after about six months in Fort Lewis, Wash., returned home to the Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks.

He said his three fellow team members were not properly trained to do interrogations and got carried away with their power.

"You weren't supposed to stand on their neck or put lit cigarettes in their ears. Twice I had to pull burning cigarettes out of detainees' ears," Ford said. "I said, `Look, this is not going to go over well with the community of Samarra.' Our people basically ignored all the warnings."

Ford said the soldiers routinely brought guns into the interrogation room, and he once saw his team leader pointing a pistol at a detainee's head.

The three accused soldiers were not available for comment, a California National Guard spokesman said.

Ford was one of about 100 members of the San Francisco-based 223rd who arrived in Iraq last spring and spread out in teams of three to six interrogators, Arabic linguists and counterintelligence officers. The battalion returned home in March.

The abuse Ford said he witnessed took place from April to June in a small interrogation room. Whenever a prisoner collapsed, his team's leader would emerge and say, "Greg, I think we've got another accident," said Ford, who has medical training. "Then I'd have to bring them out and revive them."

Ford said he told the team leader that if one of the Iraqis died, he would testify against him in a court-martial. "He basically laughed it off. At that point, I was persona non-grata," the sergeant said.

So Ford asked to be relieved from his position, prompting a visit by his commander, Capt. Vic Artiga, and Lt. Col. Ryan, who "were too busy threatening me to do any proper investigation," Ford said.

Ryan and Artiga would not discuss the details of Ford's allegations but denied pressuring Ford to drop his claims. They said they did an immediate investigation, which cleared all the soldiers.

"I'm very confident that my soldiers acted professionally, ethically and within the law, as did I," Artiga said.

But Ford said nobody interviewed him while he was in Iraq and he does not think anyone has interviewed the Iraqi detainees. Artiga also said he does not believe Iraqis were interviewed for the battalion's investigation.

After leaving Iraq, Ford underwent psychiatric evaluations at military installations in Germany and San Antonio, and said those evaluations found nothing wrong with him.

Well, it's been all over NPR, for what that's worth. That's where I heard about it.

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (LETTER)

The generous spirit that is uniquely American
Advertisement
Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), Chairman, Committee on International Relations U.S. House of Representatives

June 9, 2004

Washington, D.C. -- I am writing in regard to "Pope despairs of America's `soulless' vision; Pontiff warns George, Midwest bishops not to let flock stray amid lure of materialism" (Page 1, May 29). As a practicing Catholic, I revere the Holy Father. In addition to his spiritual guidance, he has been a consistent voice for freedom and was the single greatest force in the defeat of communism.
It, therefore, is painful when the Holy Father, or those who speak for him, fall into the error of depicting America and Americans as having a "soulless vision of the world," one characterized by an excessive materialism and a drift away from our "spiritual roots."
I am not so foolish as to believe that the U.S. is not capable of mistakes and errors of judgment. And it would be hubris to overlook our many failings. Certainly our society's tolerance of abortion and its attendant culture of death is a far more damning indictment than is the pope's most recent criticism.
But these papal remarks, coming as they did near Memorial Day, need to be answered, because, despite my admiring reverence for the Holy Father, he is absolutely wrong in referring to the U.S. as "soulless." The most direct response to this characterization would be to cite the persistent religiosity of Americans, a striking quality repeatedly remarked upon by foreigners throughout our history. The high levels of attendance at formal religious services and the widespread belief in a supreme being are in sharp contrast with Europe, where secularism reigns as an unquestioned ideology and the legacy of Marxist materialism has devastated the spiritual capabilities of half of the continent.
As for our broader culture, any depiction of it as "soulless" can arise only from a profound misperception, given that its exuberance and endless creativity emerge from the "pursuit of happiness" that our founding documents declare to be a God-given right. It is pervaded by a celebration of life, in sharp contrast to the desiccation and frozen tradition that so often characterizes the swaddled cultures of our critics.
Nor should our wealth be equated with materialism. No one is more obsessed with material needs and desires than a hungry man. We have been blessed with enormous wealth, but what is too often overlooked is our unprecedentedly generous sharing of this blessing with others.
It would take several pages of this newspaper to recount even a fraction of the resources that the United States has devoted toward alleviating the world's poverty and disease--resources unparalleled in scale and breadth by any other country or international organization.
But that recounting should not be limited merely to the efforts undertaken by our government. The enormous scale of private philanthropy and the ubiquity of volunteering by individuals throughout our society simply have no parallel in any other country. These are uniquely American. In other countries, the obligations each human owes to his fellow creatures are too often disposed of by shedding these duties to the distant cold sterility of a government program, thereby freeing citizens from the onerous weight of caring for others. Curiously this refusal to burden themselves with a personal responsibility for others is coupled with a self-image of moral superiority and a determination to instruct us and others regarding our duty.
More often than not, our critics in Europe and elsewhere who are so quick to point out our failings, real and imagined, regard themselves as members of an elite class and thus reflexively dismiss what they see as our crude, populist, non-elitist culture. Their characterization is in many ways correct, as our culture was, in fact, created by and for the common man and grants to each individual, no matter how lowly his origin or station, a basic dignity that need not be earned or bestowed by his betters because it is his by right.
The reality is that the United States attracts so much criticism because our ideals are so high, our record so consistently positive, that others eagerly seize upon our inevitable blemishes in an effort to demonstrate that our achievements are but pretensions and that we are, in fact, no different from all the rest. But who expects shining results from Russia, China, France, Brazil, Nigeria, Iran or any other country? Or is surprised by their meager contribution to the world?
The reality is that the standards others set for us, that we set for ourselves, rest in a class by themselves, so gloriously higher than that of any other country. In his heart, I know the Holy Father knows these things, and he has expressed his love for our beloved country many times.
I salute the flag because we remain the strongest, bravest, most compassionate nation that has ever existed. To an extent unparalleled in history, whatever security, happiness and prosperity that exist in the world rest heavily on sacrifices this country has made, sacrifices that include our dear warriors fighting for our country and for nameless others on foreign soil, sacrifices that we do honor to ourselves in remembering.

yeah, this had me seeing red.

Scientists Say Dirty Bomb Would Be a Dud
Wed Jun 9, 1:59 PM ET

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

NEW YORK - The "dirty bomb" allegedly planned by terror suspect Jose Padilla would have been a dud, not the radiological threat portrayed last week by federal authorities, scientists say.

At a June 1 news conference, the Justice Department said the alleged al-Qaida associate hoped to attack Americans by detonating "uranium wrapped with explosives" in order to spread radioactivity.

But uranium's extremely low radioactivity is harmless compared with high-radiation materials — such as cesium and cobalt isotopes used in medicine and industry that experts see as potential dirty bomb fuels.

"I used a 20-pound brick of uranium as a doorstop in my office," American nuclear physicist Peter D. Zimmerman, of King's College in London, said to illustrate the point.

Zimmerman, co-author of an expert analysis of dirty bombs for the U.S. National Defense University, said last week's government announcement was "extremely disturbing — because you cannot make a radiological dispersal device with uranium. There is just no significant radiation hazard."

Other specialists agreed. "It's the equivalent of blowing up lead," said physicist Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists.

When Padilla was arrested in June 2002, after returning to Chicago from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the ex-Chicago gang member and Muslim convert had planned a dirty bomb that could "cause mass death and injury." Washington, D.C., was the likely target, his department said.

But it wasn't until Deputy Attorney General James Comey's briefing for reporters last week that authorities said Padilla had uranium in mind for his radiological dispersal device, or RDD, the technical term for such a weapon. Comey said the detainee disclosed he'd also been sent to set off natural gas explosions in U.S. apartment buildings.

"Just saying the word `uranium,' the public automatically assumes, `Oh, it sounds bad,'" said physicist Charles Ferguson of the Washington office of California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. He co-authored one of the most detailed reports on the dirty-bomb threat.

Those studying the RDD potential envision a combination of explosives with a lethal radioisotope, such as cesium-137, diverted from use in cancer radiotherapy, for example, or from machines that irradiate food. Particularly if in powder form, it could spew intense radioactivity over a section of a city, making it uninhabitable.

Radiation from uranium, on the other hand, is billions of times less intense than that of cesium-137, cobalt-60 and other radioisotopes. It's not radioactivity but another property of uranium — its ability in some forms to sustain atomic chain reactions — that makes it a fuel for nuclear power and bombs.

The Justice Department didn't respond directly when asked this week whether it had consulted with experts and knew that uranium wouldn't make a dirty bomb.

Instead, spokesman Mark Corallo said Padilla's statements, in view of his al-Qaida links, made clear that he was "willing to cause devastating harm to innocent Americans."

Padilla has been held by the U.S. military since 2002 as an enemy combatant, without charge and with little access to lawyers. The Bush administration has been criticized for denying a U.S. citizen normal access to the courts. The Supreme Court is considering whether the government, in defending against terrorism, has such power.

Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, said Wednesday of the dirty-bomb allegation that U.S. authorities "should have known that this was nonsense."

"When they frightened everybody, what were they trying to do, if they knew better? To show the administration is on top of things?" she asked.

She wants the government to attempt to indict and try her client. "Maybe the problem is the evidence is so weak, it's laughable," she said.

Comey said the news conference was called "to help people understand the nature of the threat" Padilla posed.

Based on what he said were Padilla's admissions to interrogators, he described a "highly trained al-Qaida soldier" who accepted an assignment to blow up U.S. apartment buildings, and "planned to do even more by detonating a radiological device, a dirty bomb, in this country."

Spokesman Corallo reaffirmed this week that it was Padilla who said uranium would be used.

"If that's what he planned," physicist Oelrich said of Padilla, "it shows he doesn't know what he's talking about and hasn't done even rudimentary homework."

He wasn't the only one, according to a Justice Department summary of interrogations.

It said Abu Zubaydah, a top al-Qaida lieutenant now in U.S. custody, also envisioned a uranium device when urging Padilla to mount a U.S. attack. At another point, however, the summary said Zubaydah told Padilla the dirty bomb was "not as easy to do as they thought."

Padilla claims "he was never really planning to go through with" any of the terrorist assignment, Comey told reporters.

As a heavy metal, like lead, uranium poses one health risk: If ingested or inhaled, it can damage kidneys or other organs. But unlike radioisotopes, byproducts of nuclear reactors, uranium doesn't emit penetrating gamma rays that cause acute radiation poisoning. Instead, it slowly radiates weak alpha particles, which don't even penetrate skin.

"Granted, it (uranium) could have a psychological effect" because of unfounded fears, said physicist Ferguson. But he said a government information campaign should quell any panic if such a weapon appeared.

Though Hyde lent such eloquence to his position, there are specific reasons to reject the reasons Hyde gave and therefore all of his rhetoric, based upon his past. The reason to reject the self-righteous attitude he took in terms of Clinton’s cheating is because for eight years including some time in Congress, he was having an affair with a married woman. What discredits his rule of law argument is the stance he took during the trial of Senator Dan Crane and during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Eight years of his married life Hyde enjoyed having an affair with a married woman named Cherie Snodgrass. The relationship even continued for two years after Hyde’s wife found out about it, which incidentally was the same time that Cherie found out that that there even was a Mrs. Hyde. How could a man who held a very public seven year affair while in office even begin to cast judgment on someone who traveled the same path, much less in the name of family values? The whole Snodgrass family blamed Hyde for their split, which occurred because Cherie’s husband found out and Cherie wanted to stay with Hyde who encouraged her to do so:

On September 16, 1998, Hyde issued the following statement: "The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions. Suffice it to say Cherie Snodgrass and I were good friends a long, long time ago. After Mr. Snodgrass confronted my wife, the friendship ended, and my marriage remained intact. The only purpose for this being dredged up now is an obvious attempt to intimidate me and it won’t work. I intend to fulfill my constitutional duty and deal judiciously with the serious felony allegations presented to Congress in the Starr report." (Bernstein, 54)

Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Something Smells
Padilla's alleged gas plot reeks; so does Justice's 'openness'
June 8th, 2004 10:30 AM
Related:

When Jose Padilla was arrested by the FBI at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on May 8, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft enthusiastically announced he had caught a man set to explode a radioactive dirty bomb in New York City or Washington. The White House subsequently suggested that Ashcroft had overstated the case. And others thought Padilla didn't amount to much. "Jose Padilla is a throwaway," says ex-CIA agent Vincent Cannistraro. "He was not involved in any core Al Qaeda operations." Last week, Deputy Attorney General James Comey said that if he tried to bring criminal charges against Padilla in federal court, they wouldn't stick, and Padilla "would likely have ended up a free man."

Padilla went to the Middle East, was trained in explosives in Afghanistan, and met the Al Qaeda top command, according to the Justice Department. In June 2001, according to Comey's account, Mohammed Atef, the Al Qaeda military chief (later killed by the Americans), "asked his American disciple if he was willing to undertake a mission to blow up apartment buildings in the United States using natural gas. Padilla told him he would do it." Comey said Padilla and another man "learned about switches and circuits and timers. They learned how to seal an apartment, trap the natural gas, and to prepare an explosion using that gas that would have maximum yield and destroy an apartment building."

Padilla, said the government, was then given $15,000, a cell phone, travel documents, and an e-mail address, and was sent on his way to O'Hare, where the FBI arrested him.

Blowing up a building with natural gas could turn out to be a pretty dubious proposition. Chris Olert, a spokesperson for Con Ed, when asked whether he had ever come across a case of natural gas being used to intentionally blow up an apartment building, replies, "No." Asked whether this was something Con Ed feared might happen, Olert says, "No, I don't believe so."

Daphne Magnuson, a spokesperson for the American Gas Association, which represents natural gas utilities, says, "You would have to have the perfect mix of factors" to use natural gas for an explosion, and "it would have to be mixed with the right amount of oxygen." And you must have a source of ignition. In addition, she notes, gas has the very strong odorant mercaptan added to it, which makes it difficult to have a leak without people noticing it.

The only such incident in recent history in New York was the Stuyvesant Town explosion in February 2003, says New York Fire Department spokesperson Michael Loughran. A judge was convicted of reckless endangerment for causing the blast. "The explosion did not cause a fire," Loughran adds. "It was a flash explosion. The only damage was to an interior wall of the apartment, and there was no structural damage to the building.

Reversing itself, the Army said Tuesday that a G.I. was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The Army had previously said Specialist Sean Baker's medical discharge in April was unrelated to the injury he received last year at the detention center, where the United States holds suspected terrorists.

Mr. Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four American soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. He said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American.

Bruce Simpson, Mr. Baker's lawyer, said his client is considering a lawsuit.

I suspect this phrase will be increasingly common.

*kick, punch, gouge. kick kick kick*
"Dude, Abdul here is wearing a Creed t-shirt. Should we like, stop yet?"

*chorus* NO!

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

After Welch's dressing-down and a burst of applause from the gallery, the rattled McCarthy turned to Cohn and said, "What happened?

Biden's treatment of Asscroft was spot on "that's not hypothetical" indeed.

Rumsfeld approved Guantanamo interrogation methods such as "stress positions" and "fear of dogs" amid a terror alert in December 2002.

The lame responses by John Ashcroft to the evidence in leaked memos that the Bush administration condoned torture with the personal approval of the president are damning. It's even more damning that Ashcroft will not release a critical memo, prepared by his department, making the point that some forms of torture, if approved by the president, would not be illegal. I'm hoping to write at length about this, but let me say one thing. I should have spoken up earlier. The signs were there - including the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to al Qaeda in Guantanamo. In a very small number of cases, this might have been a debatable question. But what we have clearly seen is a green light from the very top condoning at best mistreatment and abuse of prisoners of war in a whole slew of cases. We'll see as more facts emerge what the truth is. But the brutality of U.S. forces against prisoners in their care and custody is now public record - and a permanent mark of shame for the United States.

Meanwhile, Talking Points found this editorial condemning the twists and turns. Should I mention that this editorial was published in Bush's home state?

The United States' moral authority to call for the rule of law and respect for human rights has been undermined by legal machinations the Bush administration undertook to justify torturing prisoners taken in the war on terror.

Administration officials have attempted to downplay the significance of a March 6, 2003, Justice Department memorandum that concluded that, as commander in chief in time of war, President George W. Bush is bound neither by federal law nor the tenets of the Geneva Conventions that ban torture as a means of extracting information from detainees.

Most Americans will have difficulty believing that this memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, and others were merely ruminations on the law not meant to guide how prisoners would be treated in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The March memo asserts that interrogators could inflict severe pain on a detainee with impunity as long as the intent was something other than to torture. An interrogator would be culpable only if he knew his actions would inflict suffering that is severe enough to induce "prolonged" physical or mental effects. An interrogator would be immune from punishment if he believed he acted to prevent a larger harm, the lawyers determined.

The memos were obviously concocted to defend acts that are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation.

Stuart really must be gone for good from here, I guess. His house of cards really is starting to crumble, though. I am still amazed (and amused) at his sheer naivete.

Iraq prison abuse pt. 7 -- the post-G8/Reagan funeral crash

Could a mod lock this one? Thanks.