Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Friday, May 28, 2004

Gone To New York...

It is almost dawn and I am writing this in a hotel near the Tokyo airport, where we spent a sleepless night on the first leg of a quick trip from Beijing to Manhattan. My blogging has been at a minimum this past week or so due to a deadline on a chapter of a book that I had to get to my publisher before leaving for the trip. While it took two all-nighters, the chapter was finished an zipped off to my editor only a few hours ago.

Unfortunately, my blogging will remain spotty due to the trip to New York. It is a short trip; we will return next Thursday, June 3rd. Thank you all for your patience and support.
 


5:15 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Several Choice Words From the Man Who Should Be President

Ms. Dowd and Al Gore do quite a linguistic number on a president who most likely will not know of it--he doesn't read, which is only one reason he has such difficulty talking above the junior high school level. Not wanting to slight so many bright young Americans, I should clarify the analogy by mentioning that I meant only Texas junior high schools, where the required reading includes the wacky creation myth of the Bible.
An outraged president called yesterday for the immediate resignations of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the president in the White House. It was the shadow president, the one who won the popular vote.

Thundering at New York University about the man the Supreme Court chose over him, Al Gore said, "He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation." Holy Nixon!

The former vice president accused the commander in chief of being responsible for "an American gulag" in Abu Ghraib, as depraved as anything devised by the Marquis de Sade. It was hard to tell whether President Bush would be more offended by the sadomasochism or by the fact that the marquis was French.

Mr. Gore blasted the administration's "twisted values" and dominatrix attitude toward the world: "Dominance is as dominance does."

"George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility," he said, in one of the most virulent attacks on a sitting president ever made by such a high-ranking former official. "Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world."
There is more of Ms. Dowd at The New York Times

 


4:44 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The President of Fear

This man who likes to be called the "warrior President" has yet again demonstrated that he is the same one-trick pony who went from an "asterisk" president, a disrespected usurper without a mandate, a vision, or any popularity on September 10, 2001, to the "War on Terror" chest-thumper on September 12--after coming out of his shameful "hiding and flying" on 9/11.

Now, with the country more polarized than at any time since the Vietnam War era, with much of the world openly wishing for our continued comeuppance--and that's from our friends, everyone else is wishing for our demise--and his poll numbers worse than "Poppy's" in his re-election debacle, what does Dubya do? He tries to again turn us into a nation of cowards, so afraid of "seven shadows" that we must have our "Mission Accomplished" stud around for another 4 years of humiliation as he protects us from the "evil-doers"!

How is it that even forty-something percent of Americans can't see through this scam and affront upon the nation and people that beat Hitler and Tojo at the same time without all of this whimpering and cowering and changing of who we are? Are we even remotely similar Americans to that "Greatest Generation"? Or are we hide-and-fly Bushies, ghostly zombies who answer only to the call of a fear-monger?
WASHINGTON, May 26 - The Bush administration said on Wednesday that it had credible intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the United States in the next several months, a period in which events like an international summit meeting and the two political conventions could offer tempting targets.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a news conference that intelligence reports and public statements by people associated with Al Qaeda suggested that the terrorist group was "almost ready to attack the United States" and harbored a "specific intention to hit the United States hard."

But some intelligence officials, terrorism experts - and to some extent even Mr. Ashcroft's own F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III - offered a more tempered assessment, saying, "For the next few weeks we have reason to believe there is a heightened threat to the U.S. interests around the world.'' And some opponents of President Bush, including police and firefighter union leaders aligned with Senator John Kerry, the expected Democratic presidential candidate, said the timing of the announcement appeared intended in part to distract attention from Mr. Bush's sagging poll numbers and problems in Iraq.

The administration did not raise the terrorist threat advisory from its current level of elevated, or yellow, and the White House said Mr. Bush would not alter his schedule because of security concerns.

"There's no real new intelligence, and a lot of this has been out there already," said one administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There really is no significant change that would require us to change the alert level of the country." ...

Mr. Ashcroft called for greater public vigilance, especially in looking out for seven people sought by the F.B.I. who are suspected of being Qaeda members or sympathizers.

The names of six of the seven were publicly circulated by the authorities months ago, and officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that they had no reason to believe any of the seven suspects were in the United States.

Asked about the timing of his new warnings about the suspects, Mr. Ashcroft said, "We believe the public, like all of us, needs a reminder."

Some intelligence officials said they were uncertain that the link between the fresh intelligence and the likelihood of another attack was as apparent as Mr. Ashcroft made it out to be. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security said just a day before Mr. Ashcroft's announcement that they had no new intelligence pointing to the threat of an attack.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who is a member of the intelligence committee, said in an interview that the committee had received no word of any new information of the type Mr. Ashcroft described. Mr. Durbin said that if there were credible new information about a possible strike, he believed the intelligence committee should have been told about it.
There is a whole lot more in The New York Times
 


3:52 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Gephardt Is On The McCain For Vice President Train

I know it is improbable that John McCain will in fact be John Kerry's running-mate in the presidential election campaign. However, I can't give up on the idea primarily because more and more influential political figures seem to share my enthusiasm for the idea. It probably won't happen for the very reason that it should: It makes too much sense, and we all know that common sense and the good of the whole are not common denominators in the bellies of politicos. But these precarious days call for healthy doses of both from all whom hold themselves out to be "leaders."
Representative Richard A. Gephardt, the Missouri Democrat who has often been mentioned as a running mate for Senator John Kerry, is talking kindly about another choice: Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Asked after a speech in California on Monday what he thought of Mr. McCain's potential for the Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Gephardt described him as a "very attractive figure in American politics" who "would be accepted by the Democratic Party," according to CNN.

Mr. McCain is "someone a lot of Democrats could get interested in," Mr. Gephardt said at the Leon Panetta Center in Monterrey.
The New York Times
 


12:14 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, May 27, 2004

The New York Times Is Still The Best Newspaper In The World

The proof of the title to this post is in the "FROM THE EDITORS" editorial review excerpted below. Would that more people, organizations and particularly governments had the courage and integrity to own up to mistakes. In many ways, the Times' responsible self-reproach is actually a glaring condemnation of the Bush administration which lacks neither the courage nor the integrity to admit making the very same mistakes the Times did with far more institutional resources and expertise in the area of foreign intelligence than the "old Grey Lady."
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.

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.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.
The New York Times
 


11:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




It Just Keeps Getting Worse and Worse...

So now it's murder by strangulation and blunt force trauma; the dogs were approved all the way up the command; a female intelligence officer is in on the kills and torture from Afghanistan to Iraq. Damn! Is this the new American way?
WASHINGTON, May 25 - An Army summary of deaths and mistreatment involving prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan shows a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known.

The cases from Iraq date back to April 15, 2003, a few days after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in a Baghdad square, and they extend up to last month, when a prisoner detained by Navy commandos died in a suspected case of homicide blamed on "blunt force trauma to the torso and positional asphyxia."
Among previously unknown incidents are the abuse of detainees by Army interrogators from a National Guard unit attached to the Third Infantry Division, who are described in a document obtained by The New York Times as having "forced into asphyxiation numerous detainees in an attempt to obtain information" during a 10-week period last spring.

The document, dated May 5, is a synopsis prepared by the Criminal Investigation Command at the request of Army officials grappling with intense scrutiny prompted by the circulation the preceding week of photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. It lists the status of investigations into three dozen cases, including the continuing investigation into the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The Army summary is consistent with recent public statements by senior military officials, who have said the Army is actively investigating nine suspected homicides of prisoners held by Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan in late 2002.

But the details paint a broad picture of misconduct, and show that in many cases among the 37 prisoners who have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army did not conduct autopsies and says it cannot determine the causes of the deaths.
The New York Times
 


6:13 AM / Editor / permalink    4 comments



Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Fact: Nicholas Berg Was Not Alive When His Head Was Cut Off

After a typical knee-jerk reaction to the video of Nicholas Berg's murder, I had a nagging sense that something just wasn't right. So, I went back and reviewed the video over and over again. Actually, with some emotional distance, it didn't take very long for me to realize how stupid my anger had rendered me. Since then, I have been leaving the story alone even as it bubbled and boiled with controversy in blogdom--indeed, it was particularly for that reason that I removed an earlier post and kept my silence. Why? Because it is a no-win situation for anyone to state the obvious: he will be vilified from every viewpoint. However, for various reasons, I have decided to state it here in brief and see the tenor of the discussion it brings.

As a journalist who has specialized in murder, and the forensics of murder, let me simply say this: Nick Berg's heart was not pumping when his head was cut off. If it had been, the arterial gushing would have been massive, very much like an old-fashioned oil-well coming in. Blood loss would have been so forceful and plentiful that it would have dominated the video. But, it did not.

There are several other reasons to believe that Nick Berg was already dead when his head was cut off, but the absence of arterial gushing is all one needs to note to prove it. It in no way lessens the brutality of the crime; and I am offering no opinions on what else a careful study of the video tells me--which is plenty. I will sit this out in further silence until some rationality will be possible in the discourse.

For those who wish to confirm the obvious, the video can be viewed HERE.
 


1:02 AM / Editor / permalink    1 comments



Monday, May 24, 2004

Is General Sanchez Involved in Abu Ghraib "Up to his Ears"?

The Abu Ghraib scandal is spreading faster than a Southern California brush fire. According to The Washington Post, in a hearing back in April, well before the photos went public on CBS, an army attorney, as an officer of the court, stated for the record, that an officer he was assigned to defend in the abuse case, if granted immunity from prosecution, would testify that General Sanchez himself was present at Abu Ghraib during incidents of abuse.

Disgraced General Janis Karpinski also places General Sanchez at the prison at precisely the time when the abuse began, on at least three occasions.
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. ...

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." ...

Sanchez visited the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade's operation, which encompassed Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib, at least three times in October, according to Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who was in charge of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade. That month, the serious abuses documented in published photographs -- naked detainees shackled together, a guard posing with a prisoner on a dog leash -- began.

In an interview yesterday, Karpinski said the number of visits by a commanding general struck her as "unusual," especially because Sanchez had not visited several of the 15 other U.S. detention facilities in Iraq. ...

The general, a reservist from South Carolina, said she was not present during Sanchez's visits because her brigade had surrendered authority over that part of the prison to intelligence officers. She said she was alerted as a courtesy while the three-star general was planning to travel to the prison. Karpinski added that Sanchez might have visited without her knowledge after the intelligence officers were given formal authority over the entire prison on Nov. 19.

"He has divisions all over Iraq, and he has time to visit Abu Ghraib three times in a month?" Karpinski asked yesterday. "Why was he going out there so often? Did he know that something was going on?" ...

"I think General Miller's visit gave them ideas, inspired them, gave them plans, told them what they were succeeding with in Gitmo," Karpinski said. She added that intelligence officers were "under great pressure to get more actionable intelligence from those interrogations."

Karpinski said she believes that intelligence officers were central to the abuses because the MPs arrived in mid-October at the prison, just weeks before serious abuses began. The general also said she believes officers in the military intelligence chain of command knew what was going on, and that Sanchez later tried to shift the blame to her unit, in January, after an MP reported the abuse and provided photos to military investigators.

"I didn't know then what [Sanchez] probably knew, which was that this was something clearly in the MI, maybe that he endorsed, and he was already starting a campaign to stay out of the fray and blame the 800th," Karpinski said. "I think the MI people were in this all the way. I think they were up to their ears in it. . . . I don't believe that the MPs, two weeks onto the job, would have been such willing participants, even with instructions, unless someone had told them it was all okay."
The Washington Post
 


12:44 AM / Editor / permalink    2 comments



Sunday, May 23, 2004

Bay of Goats...?

Having traveled halfway across China and back by train--hard sleeper--for a visit to Xi'an, traveling back in time first to the Tang Dynasty, via the Shaanxi History Museum, then to the Qin Dynasty, via the Terra-cotta Warriors and environs, without a peep of news of any kind--the TV didn't work in the hotel, and I didn't bring the laptop--for almost four days, it is comforting to find Ms. Dowd at her finest. I, on the other hand, am far less than even my worst: I need a rest from the "vacation"--12-hour, over-night train rides in China are great for mixing with the populace, but hell on fleshly wear and tear. Therefore my first post upon the resumption of the LongBow Papers will be:
So let me get this straight:

We ransacked the house of the con man whom we paid millions to feed us fake intelligence on W.M.D. that would make the case for ransacking the country that the con man assured us would be a cinch to take over because he wanted to run it.

And now we're shocked, shocked and awed to discover that a crook is a crook and we have nobody to turn over Iraq to, and the Jordanian embezzler-turned-American puppet-turned-accused Iranian spy is trying to foment even more anger against us and the U.N. officials we've crawled back to for help, anger that may lead to civil war.

The party line that Paul Bremer was notified about the raid on Ahmad Chalabi's house after the fact is absurd. The Iraqi police, who can't seem to do anything without us, were just proxies. We were going after the very guy who persuaded us to go after Saddam, the con man the naοve neo-cons cast as de Gaulle; the swindler who sold himself to Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as Spartacus.

One diplomat from the region grimly cited an old Punjabi saying: "It's very bad when grandma marries a crook, but it is even worse when she divorces the crook."

Mr. Chalabi's wealthy family was swept out of Iraq in a coup in 1958 and he spent much of his life plotting a coup to take back his homeland, a far-fetched scheme that took on life when he hooked up with Mr. Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Doug Feith, who had their own dream of staging a coup of American foreign policy to do an extreme Middle East makeover.

The hawks dismissed warnings from their own people — such as the Bush Middle East envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni — that the Iraqi National Congress was full of "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London." As General Zinni told The Times in 2000: "They are pie in the sky. They're going to lead us to a Bay of Goats, or something like that."

The C.I.A. and State Department, too, grew disgusted with Mr. Chalabi, even though State paid his organization $33 million from 2000 to 2003.

Cheney & Company swooned over Mr. Chalabi because he was telling them what they wanted to hear, that it would be simple to go back and rewrite the Persian Gulf war ending so that it was not bellum interruptus.

The president and his hawks insisted that only a "relatively small number" of "thugs," as Mr. Perle told George Stephanopoulos last month, were keeping the country from peace. Mr. Perle said the solution was "to repose a little bit of confidence in people who share our values and our objectives . . . people like Ahmad Chalabi." The neo-cons still think he can be Churchill.

On Thursday, an Iraqi judge, Hussain Muathin, also lamented the actions of "a small number of thugs." But he was announcing warrants for the arrest of thugs around Mr. Perle's own George Washington, Chalabi henchmen suspected of kidnapping, torture and theft. Didn't we sack Saddam to stop that stuff?

Now we're using Saddam's old generals to restore order — reversing the de-Baathification approach that Mr. Chalabi championed — while Mr. Chalabi snakes around like a bus-and-truck Tony Soprano, garnering less trust than Saddam in polls of Iraqis.

A half-dozen dunderheads who thought they knew everything assumed they could control Mr. Chalabi and use him as the instrument of their utopian fantasies. But one week after getting cut off from the $335,000-a-month Pentagon allowance arranged by his neo-con buddies, he glibly accepts the street cred that goes with bashing America. And he still won't give us all of Saddam's secret files, which he confiscated and is using to discredit his enemies.

Going from Spartacus to Moses, he proclaims to America, "Let my people go" — even as he plays footsie with the country that once denounced the U.S. as the Great Satan.

On Friday at Louisiana State University, President Bush told graduates: "On the job and elsewhere in life, choose your friends carefully. The company you keep has a way of rubbing off on you — and that can be a good thing, or a bad thing. In my job, I got to pick just about everybody I work with. I've been happy with my choices — although I wish someone had warned me about all of Dick Cheney's wild partying."

Mr. Bush thought he was kidding, but too bad he didn't get that warning before Dick Cheney took the world on such a wild ride.
The New York Times
 


11:41 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, May 20, 2004

Gone To Xi'an...

Folks, we're outa here...for a few days, anyway. The university has gifted us with a weekend trip to Xi'an. We'll be back Sunday evening. I need the rest--badly!
 


3:39 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, May 19, 2004

The Army Brought Down McCarthy, Will It Bring Down Bush?

The infamous Senator Joe McCarthy rode roughshod over every American institution during his "Red Witch Hunt" until, in his ignorant arrogance, he went after the U. S. Army. In very short order, with the help of the legendary broadcast journalist, Edward R. Murrow, the Army ended McCarthy's reign of intellectual terror that had gripped the entire nation in the early 50's.

It appears that George W. Bush has made the same ignorant, arrogant mistake. He has compounded his problems, however, by also making powerful enemies within the C.I.A and his own Republican Party. Fellow blogger, and dear friend, Richard, author of the Peking Duck, has already posted in full the UPI article below. I do not wish to steal his thunder, however, I want a record of it in these pages. It is below; it is a devastating blow to the Dynastic Restoration of the House of Bush.
Army, CIA want torture truths exposed

WASHINGTON, May 18 (UPI) -- Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day.

Over the past weekend and into this week, devastating new allegations have emerged putting Stephen Cambone, the first Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, firmly in the crosshairs and bringing a new wave of allegations cascading down on the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when he scarcely had time to catch his breath from the previous ones.

Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3 1/2 years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it's payback time.

Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate.

None of those groups is chopped liver: Taken together they comprise a devastating Grand Slam.

The spearhead for the new wave of revelations and allegations - but by no means the only source of them - is veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In a major article published in the New Yorker this week and posted on to its Web-site Saturday, Hersh revealed that a high-level Pentagon operation code-named Copper Green "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation" of Iraqi prisoners. He also cited Pentagon sources and consultants as saying that photographing the victims of such abuse was an explicit part of the program meant to force the victims into becoming blackmailed reliable informants.

Hersh further claimed in his article that Rumsfeld himself approved the program and that one of his four or five top aides, Cambone, set it up in Baghdad and ran it.

These allegations of course are anathema to the White House, Rumsfeld and their media allies. In a highly unusual step for any newspaper, the editorially neo-conservative tabloid New York Post ran an editorial Monday seeking to ridicule and discredit Hersh. However, it presented absolutely no evidence to query, let alone discredit the substance of his article and allegations.

Instead, the New York Post editorial inadvertently pointed out one, but by no means all, of the major sources for Hersh's information. The editorial alleged that Hersh had received much of his material from the CIA.

Based on the material Hersh quoted, his legendary intelligence community contacts were probably sources for some of his information. However, Hersh has also enjoyed close personal relations with many now high-ranking officers in the United States Army, going all the way back to his prize-winning coverage and scoops in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

Indeed, intelligence and regular Army sources have told UPI that senior officers and officials in both communities are sickened and outraged by the revelations of mass torture and abuse, and also by the incompetence involved, in the Abu Ghraib prison revelations. These sources also said that officials all the way up to the highest level in both the Army and the Agency are determined not to be scapegoated, or allow very junior soldiers or officials to take the full blame for the excesses.

President George W. Bush in his weekly radio address Saturday claimed that the Abu Ghraib abuses were only "the actions of a few" and that they did not "reflect the true character of the Untied States armed forces."

But what enrages many serving senior Army generals and U.S. top-level intelligence community professionals is that the "few" in this case were not primarily the serving soldiers who were actually encouraged to carry out the abuses and even then take photos of the victims, but that they were encouraged to do so, with the Army's well-established safeguards against such abuses deliberately removed by high-level Pentagon civilian officials.

Abuse and even torture of prisoners happens in almost every war on every side. But well-run professional armies, and the U.S. Army has always been one, take great pains to guard against it and limit it as much as possible. Even in cases where torture excesses are regarded as essential to extract tactical information and save lives, commanders in most modern armies have taken care to limit such "dirty work" to very small units, usually from special forces, and to keep it as secret as possible.

For senior Army professionals know that allowing patterns of abuse and torture to metastasize in any army is annihilating to its morale and tactical effectiveness. Torturers usually make lousy combat soldiers, which is why combat soldiers in every major army hold them in contempt.

Therefore, several U.S. military officers told UPI, the idea of using regular Army soldiers, including some even just from the Army Reserve or National Guard, and encouraging them to inflict such abuses ran contrary to received military wisdom and to the ingrained standards and traditions of the U.S. Army.

The widespread taking of photographs of the victims of such abuses, they said, clearly revealed that civilian "amateurs" and not regular Army or intelligence community professionals were the driving force in shaping and running the programs under which these abuses occurred.

Hersh has spearheaded the waves of revelations of shocking abuse. But other major U.S. media organizations are now charging in behind him to confirm and extend his reports. They are able to do so because many senior veteran professionals in both the CIA and the Army were disgusted by the revelations of the torture excesses. Now they are being listened to with suddenly receptive ears on Capitol Hill.

Republican members in the House of Representatives have kept discipline and silence on the revelations. But with the exception of the increasingly isolated and embarrassed Senate Republican Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, other senior mainstream figures in the GOP Senate majority have refused to go along with any cover-up.

Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Pat Roberts of Kansas and John Warner of Virginia have all been outspoken in their condemnation of the torture excesses. And they did so even before the latest, most far-reaching and worst of the allegations and reports surfaced. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, lost no time in hauling Rumsfeld before it to testify.

The pattern of the latest wave of revelations is clear: They are coming from significant numbers of senior figures in both the U.S. military and intelligence services. They reflect the disgust and contempt widely felt in both communities at the excesses; and at long last, they are being listened to seriously by senior Republican, as well as Democratic, senators on Capitol Hill.

Rumsfeld and his team of top lieutenants have therefore now lost the confidence, trust and respect of both the Army and intelligence establishments. Key elements of the political establishment even of the ruling GOP now recognize this.

Yet Rumsfeld and his lieutenants remain determined to hang on to power, and so far President Bush has shown every sign of wanting to keep them there. The scandal, therefore, is far from over. The revelations will continue. The cost of the abuses to the American people and the U.S. national interest is already incalculable: And there is no end in sight.
United Press International

 


12:20 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dubya, Is It Time To Sing "Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over"?

I do not know how many of my readers will remember the Dallas Cowboy's Quarterback, Dandy Don Meredith, who with Howard Cosell helped make Monday Night Football the great success it is when his playing days were over. But once a ballgame was no longer in doubt, Don would loosen up his vocal chords and sing a refrain from a great old country song, "Turn out the lights, the party's over...". Well, I think Mr. Bush might just be reflexively humming a few bars to himself in jelly-leg dread. Why? My dear friend Richard, the author of The Peking Duck, has just posted an...
UPDATE: "It's a cover-up." This is big. Out goes the "bad apples" theory. This was policy. Who initiated it?
As always, Richard's instincts are on target. Here is just the headline and the first graph of the ABC News report:
"Definitely a Cover-Up"

Former Abu Ghraib Intel Staffer Says Army Concealed Involvement in Abuse Scandal

May 18, 2004 — Dozens of soldiers — other than the seven military police reservists who have been charged — were involved in the abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and there is an effort under way in the Army to hide it, a key witness in the investigation told ABCNEWS.
Get the whole story at The Peking Duck and ABC News
 


10:52 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dubya, The Wastrel Son

I could not pass up blogging Paul Krugman's column in today's The New York Times if for no other reason than its title, "The Wastrel Son." You get three guesses as to which wastrel son he's writing about, and the first two don't count. Of course, it's Bush the Second (and Last, I'll wager). I cannot tell you how much fun it is just typing the words--the wastrel son. See, I did for a third time. It's just too much fun. It's addictive.
He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors. In the novels such characters always come to a bad end. Either they bring ruin to their families, or they eventually find themselves disowned.

George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he's still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country.

One by one, our erstwhile allies are disowning us; they don't want an unstable, anti-Western Iraq any more than we do, but they have concluded that President Bush is incorrigible. Spain has washed its hands of our problems, Italy is edging toward the door, and Britain will join the rush for the exit soon enough, with or without Tony Blair.
Read the rest of the story in The New York Times


 


1:17 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Do You Think Dubya Has The Smarts To Know It's Endgame?

George W. Bush is so beyond the pale of rational cognition that he probably doesn't see it coming. Or, in the language of the game he allegedly loves so much, baseball--although it is very hard for me to swallow that; I've never known another baseball man I couldn't like in some fashion or another--he's looking fastball all the way, but a wicked yacker is suddenly enroute and he's frozen solid as it darts from the direction of his quivering mid-section and breaks down and away painting black and it's a called strike three.

He's in a whale of hurt, and even though a Lt. Colonel is now falling on his sword for the team over Abu Ghraib, it will not stop there:
WASHINGTON, May 17 -- The American officer who was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked and to shackle them before questioning them. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason."

The officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, also told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that his unit had "no formal system in place" to monitor instructions they had given to military guards, who worked closely with interrogators to prepare detainees for interviews. Colonel Pappas said he "should have asked more questions, admittedly" about abuses committed or encouraged by his subordinates.

The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police. Portions of Colonel Pappas's sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript. ...

Colonel Pappas confirmed in his statements that his unit had enacted several changes recommended by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the head of detention operations at Guantαnamo Bay, Cuba, whom the Pentagon sent to Iraq in August and September to review detention operations.

A major finding of General Miller's visit, Colonel Pappas said, was "to provide dedicated M.P.'s in support of interrogations."

Several military police officers and their commanders at Abu Ghraib have said that military intelligence officers directed them to "set the conditions" to enhance the questioning. When General Taguba asked what safeguards existed to ensure that guards "understand the instructions or limits of instructions, or whether the instructions were legal," Colonel Pappas acknowledged that there were no assurances.

"There would be no way for us to actually monitor whether that happened," Colonel Pappas told General Taguba. "We had no formal system in place to do that."
The New York Times

No, this is a White House-seeking missile of a scandal that, frankly, is not another Iran-Contra or even Watergate. I believe Iraqgate is worse, all of it. To this reporter's thinking, the accumulation of sins of commission and sins of omission in the entire Iraq misadventure, not just the ever-worsening prisoner-abuse scandal, will send Dubya back to sandlot ignominity come November. He will leave a legacy of such willful infamy behind him that historians will have to revisit the latter part of the 19th Century to find a worse president that George W. Bush.

Hyperbole, you say? Just another media liberal whistling past a graveyard, you think? Just Bosco being melodramatic? Nope. Read just how much trouble Shrub & Twigs are in. I have already blogged Seymour Hersh's latest tale of prisoner woe in this week's The New Yorker. And by now you know that the White House has already sicced the attack dogs on Seymour. But what are they going to do with Newsweek, which is also out with a parallel story that is independent of Seymour's work?

Now, I wish to give a tip of the keyboard to Richard at The Peking Duck for alerting us to another damaging article--actually three in one--on this story that is getting uglier by the day--where you will also find links to both the latest New Yorker article, but also the Newsweek trilogy.

I strongly urge you to visit Fred Kaplan's column at Slate; you will quickly realize just how big this scandal is and how far up the leadership chain it goes--suffice it to say, while there is no sign of it in the Oval Office, that is where this "buck" is going to stop.

The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration.
By Fred Kaplan

Locked in Abu Ghraib
The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration.

If today's investigative shockers—Seymour Hersh's latest article in The New Yorker and a three-part piece in Newsweek—are true, it's hard to avoid concluding that responsibility for the Abu Ghraib atrocities goes straight to the top, both in the Pentagon and the White House, and that varying degrees of blame can be ascribed to officials up and down the chain of command.

Slate
 


12:43 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Fickle or Feckless?

It's been a long day, a hectic weekend, and before that a monstrous marathon week, so please allow me to chortle a little bit. Over what? And at whom (we mostly chortle over other human's follies)? And I take such great pleasure in snorting gleefully at the comeuppance of my enemies: The Neo-Cons. Below is a round up of defeatist bleating by some of that ilk's worst and dullest from The Week In Review feature in The New York Times.
WASHINGTON -- Not long ago, the word "triumphalist" was being applied to the neoconservatives and other intellectuals who championed the war in Iraq. Now the buzzwords are "depressed," "angst-ridden" and "going wobbly."

After the setbacks in Falluja and Najaf, followed by the prisoner abuse scandal, hawks are glumly trying to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the predictions they made before the war. A few have already given up on the idea of a stable democracy in Iraq, and many are predicting failure unless there's a dramatic change in policy - a new date for elections, a new secretary of defense, a new exit strategy.

Most blame the administration for botching the mission, and some are also questioning their own judgment. How, they wonder, did so many conservatives, who normally don't trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East? To these self-doubting hawks, the conservatives now blaming American officials for Iraq's problems are reminiscent of the leftists who kept blaming incompetents in the Kremlin for the failure of Communism.

* The National Review has dismissed the Wilsonian ideal of implanting democracy in Iraq, and has recommended settling for an orderly society with a non-dictatorial government. David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, wrote that America entered Iraq with a "childish fantasy" and is now "a shellshocked hegemon."

* Andrew Sullivan, the conservative blogger, has questioned whether it was foolish to trust the Bush administration to wage the war competently. After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Mr. Sullivan posted such pained thoughts questioning the moral justification for the war that he was inundated with e-mail messages telling him to buck up.

"Now I'm being bashed for going wobbly," Mr. Sullivan said. "I'm still in favor of this war and still desperately want it to succeed, but when the case we made for war is undermined by events, we have to acknowledge that and explain why the case for war still stands. Sometimes politicians have to stick to scripts regardless of the facts, but a writer has an obligation to be more honest."

* The columnist George Will suggested the administration get a dose of conservatism without the "neo" prefix...

* [A]nd Tucker Carlson, of CNN's "Crossfire," said he, too, had gained respect for old-fashioned conservatism. "I supported the war and now I feel foolish," Mr. Carlson said. "I'm just struck by how many people like me who were instinctively distrustful of government forgot to be humble in our expectations. The idea that the federal government can quickly transform the Middle East seems odd to me for a conservative. A basic tenet of conservatism is that it's much easier to destroy things than to create them - much easier, and more fun, too."

The New York Times
 


11:38 PM / Editor / permalink    1 comments



Monday, May 17, 2004

A Brief History Of The Atrocities Of War

Below are excerpts from an excellent article in the current The Village Voice by an eminent military historian. It should be must reading for anyone who wishes to engage in informed debate on the relativity of who has the moral highground in matters of war atrocities
"Kill one man, terrorize a thousand," reads a sign on the wall of the U.S. Marines' sniper school at Camp Pendleton in California. While the marines work their mayhem with M-40A3 bolt-action sniper rifles, most recently in Fallujah, a different kind of terror has been doled out in Iraq by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib prison, where, according to an army probe first reported by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, 'sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses' were the order of the day between October and December of 2003. One of the many questions arising from the Abu Ghraib scandal is how widespread is the brutality and inhumane treatment of Iraqis.

Just last month, the Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing a series of brutal war crimes committed by American troops during the Vietnam War. It took more than 35 years for the horrors committed by a "Tiger Force" unit to be fully exposed, but the Blade got more ink in the national press and TV for winning the Pulitzer than the stories themselves got when they were published last fall. The paper detailed the army's four-and-a-half-year investigation, starting in 1971, of a seven-month string of atrocities by an elite, volunteer, 45-man Tiger Force unit of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division that included the alleged torture of prisoners, rapes of civilian women, mutilations of bodies, and the killing of anywhere from nine to well over 100 unarmed civilians. The army's inquiry concluded that 18 U.S. soldiers committed crimes including murder and assault. However, not one of the soldiers, even those still on active duty at the time of the investigation, was ever court-martialed. Moreover, as the paper noted, six soldiers were allowed to resign from military service during the criminal investigations specifically to avoid prosecution. The secretary of defense at the time that decision was made, in the mid '70s, was Donald Rumsfeld.

But even the Blade's powerful stories didn't put the Tiger Force atrocities in context; the paper portrayed them largely as an isolated killing spree carried out by rogue troops. The Tiger Force atrocities were not the mere result of rogue G.I.'s but instead stem from what historian Christian Appy has termed a "doctrine of atrocity"Β?an institutionalized brutality built upon official U.S. dicta relating to body counts, free-fire zones, search-and-destroy tactics, and strategies of attrition, as well as unofficial tenets such as "shoot anything that moves," intoned during the Tiger Force atrocities and in countless other tales of brutality. ...

The Toledo Blade articles, some of the best reporting on a Vietnam War crime during or since that war, tell only a small part of the story. As a historian writing a dissertation at Columbia University on U.S. war crimes and atrocities during the Vietnam War, I have been immersed in just the sort of archival materials the Blade used to flesh out one series of incidents. My research into U.S. military records has revealed that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of analogous violations of the laws of war. ...

As the case of the 172nd MI unit demonstrates, U.S. troops in Vietnam not only beat enemy prisoners and civilian detainees but also used a wide variety of brutal methods, including a particular torture in which water was forced down a person's throat until he or she passed out or drowned--what U.S. troops had called the "water cure" during their battle against Filipinos in the early 20th century. One particularly heinous method was known among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam as "The Bell Telephone Hour," in which a hand-cranked military field telephone was used to generate electrical shocks through wires to hands, feet, nipples, and genitals. ...

Underlying attitudes apparently haven't changed either. Captain Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, told the Times late last year, "You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force. . . . " Nearly 40 years earlier, in Vietnam, another U.S. captain told The New Yorker's Jonathan Schell, "Only the fear of force gets results. It's the Asian mind." That thinking has long been evident in U.S. campaigns against racial and ethnic "others," from the Indian Wars to the Philippine-American War and occupation; the terrorizing of people in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti; on to more conventional wars against the Japanese and Koreans; and perhaps most spectacularly in Vietnam. And now in IraqΒ?and not only at Abu Ghraib. Late last year, at another detention center, it was reported that Lieutenant Colonel Allen B. West allowed his soldiers to beat an Iraqi prisoner as a method of interrogation. When the illegal thrashing failed to induce the prisoner to talk, West threatened the man with death, forced his head into a sandbox, and conducted a mock execution, firing a shot next to the Iraqi's head. West confessed to the abuse, but he was not court-martialed; instead, he was simply allowed to retire.

Nicholas Turse is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and a regular contributor to the Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com.

The Village Voice
 


10:43 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




There Are No Oopsies In Preventative War

Unfortunately, there are no do-overs in war. Invading a nation is an extreme example of the concept of not being able to un-ring the bell. If we invaded Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking the United States, or territories vital to our national interests, then Secretary Powell has just announced to the world, and more importantly to the America people, that it was a mistake--a very costly one, in lives, money, diplomatic capital, and credibility.

It will be said, however, that WMD wasn't the real reason, only an excuse, that a stable democracy in the center of the Middle East was the noble motivation for invading a sovereign nation. That is an increasingly tough sell also, since the situation in Iraq is rapidly moving towards a state of longterm chaos and civil war. Nation building should be a forever tainted notion if and when we are able to get out of this godawful mess. I can only imagine how I would feel today if my son had given his "last full measure of devotion" in Bush's misadventure in Biblical tit-for-tat with the "evil-doers."
WASHINGTON, May 16 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said for the first time on Sunday that he now believes that the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately misled about evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing unconventional weapons.

He also said, in his comments on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," that he regrets citing evidence that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories in his presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003.

The assertion about the mobile labs was one of the most dramatic pieces of the presentation, which was intended to make public the Bush administration's best case for invading Iraq. For days before his speech, Mr. Powell sat in a conference room at the C.I.A., examining the sources for each charge he planned to make. ...

On Sunday, Mr. Powell hinted at widespread reports of fabrications by an engineer who provided much of the most critical information about the labs. Intelligence officials have since found that the engineer was linked to the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that was pressing President Bush to unseat Mr. Hussein.

"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading," Mr. Powell said in the interview, broadcast from Jordan. "And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it."

That was a sharp contrast to comments four months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the administration still believed that the trailers were part of a program of unconventional weapons, and added that he "would deem that conclusive evidence" that Mr. Hussein in fact had such programs. ...

Taken with past admissions of error by the administration or its intelligence agencies, Mr. Powell's statement on Sunday leaves little room for the administration to argue that Mr. Hussein's stockpiles of unconventional weapons posed any real and imminent threat.

"Basically, Powell now believes that the Iraqis had chemical weapons, and that was it," said an official close to him. "And he is out there publicly saying this now because he doesn't want a legacy as the man who made up stories to provide the president with cover to go to war."
The New York Times
 


10:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Biden Wants McCain On Democratic Ticket

Senator McCain keeps saying "no," but more and more influential pols are pushing him to step up and accept the role of "unifier." They believe he can marginalize the extreme wings of both parties. With his unquestioned integrity on issues both domestic and foreign he can silence the nutcases who appear intent upon thrusting American democracy towards a rabid level of ideological partisanship that threatens to spin the nation into a political "civil war," wherein destroying ideas takes precedence over rational governance. Let us hope Senator McCain will seriously consider putting national interests over loyalty to a party that has certainly done him no favors outside of Arizona, in fact far to the contrary.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sen. Joseph Biden, a senior Democrat, on Sunday urged Republican Sen. John McCain to run for vice president with the Democratic hopeful, Sen. John Kerry, in order to heal the "vicious rift" dividing America.

McCain, of Arizona, "categorically" ruled out standing with Kerry, but Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he had no second choice.

"I'm sticking with McCain," Biden said.

"I think John McCain would be a great candidate for vice president," Biden, from Delaware, said on NBC's "Meet the Press," where the two senators appeared together to take questions on Iraq and other subjects.

"Do I think it's going to happen? No," he said. "But I think it is a reflection of the desire of this country and the desire of people in both parties to want to see this God-awful, vicious rift that exists in the nation healed, and John and John could go a long way to heal in that rift."

McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and in line to take over the Senate Armed Services panel in two years, endorsed Biden's call for bridging the political gap between Democrats and Republicans.

"There's too much partisanship in America, and there's too much partisanship in the Senate," he said. "And we're not doing our job as our constituents expect us to do."

"I will always take anyone's phone calls," McCain said of any call he might get from Kerry, a fellow decorated Vietnam War veteran. "But I will not, I categorically will not do it."

Kerry said on Wednesday that McCain would be his first choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush's secretary of defense now wrestling with the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.
Reuters
 


10:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, May 16, 2004

"Black Ops" Back In The Glaring Light Of Public Scrutiny

Seymour Hersh’s third prisoner abuse article in this week’s New Yorker was no surprise to me. I had, in fact, predicted it, and had predicted that this scandal would almost surely go as high up as Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, and perhaps even the White House. Why? I know how good of an investigative journalist Seymour is, as I have already posted.

Another reason is a bit more complicated, and not as well known to many of the readers of these pages: I have a journalistic and research background in the various intelligence services’ “Special Ops” (Special Operations), “SAPs” (Special Access Program), and most particularly “Black Ops,” as these programs and operations are more commonly spoken of by insiders and practitioners.

Some of this background comes from my work as the biographer of Leonid Shebarshin, the last Chairman of the KGB. However, on its application to the issue directly at hand, my expertise comes from my work with the archives and private papers of the legendary Air Force Colonel, L. Fletcher Prouty, who passed away in 2001. From 1955 until his abrupt retirement in 1964—not long after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but that is another story for another time—Col. Prouty served as “the first ‘Focal Point’ officer between the CIA and the Air Force for Clandestine Operations per National Security Council Directive 5412. He was [also] Briefing Officer for the Secretary of Defense (1960-1961), and for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

At another time I might further explain the circumstances of my work with Colonel Prouty’s private and public papers; for this post, it is sufficient only to say how much I admired him personally and how much I learned from him about the “secret” history of America’s intelligence services from World War II to the end of the 20th Century.

Everything I have learned due to the work mentioned above, and from other sources on other stories, assures me of the accuracy of Seymour Hersh’s reporting of the who, how and why of the prisoner abuse scandal. Frankly, for me much of it reads like old history--because, operationally, it is, only the names of the operatives and the countries have changed. I have excerpted a fairly large amount of the article, however, there is a great deal more; Seymour is given the luxury of writing long with the New Yorker (a tip of the keyboard to Richard, at The Peking Duck, who also posted on this article):
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors." ...

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. ...

"Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly," a former high-level intelligence official told me. "He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go." The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.

The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s ιlite forces—Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: "Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress."

In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantαnamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. ...

By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantαnamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coφperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. "You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away." The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was "Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it." Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: "'We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.' The cover story was that some kids got out of control." ...

This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.

Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”

“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”
The New Yorker
 


12:54 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Abuse Not As Isolated As The Administration Wants Us To Believe (Updated Post)

Those who are disposed to equate, or even to rationally mitigate, the almost unimaginable brutality of cutting off the head of Nicholas Berg with the also almost unimaginable abuse of Iraqi detainees by Americans, are missing the only truly relevant point politically, if not metaphysically. And that is that America, to be America, must always hold America and Americans to an enormously higher standard than all other people or nations.

You might logically ask why? After all, we are as human and fallible as any other people on Earth. We feel anger, hatred, vengefulness, ethnocentricism and indignation when wronged every bit as much as citizens of other countries. But, while as people we are no different from any other humans on Earth, our ideals are vastly greater than and different from any other nation on Earth.

America is more a state of mind, than a state: And that is our greatness. We are made up of people from every nation-state in the world; but the documents of our principles are singularly, utterly unique. Our Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and all of the protections of the ideals of liberty that through judicial interpretation have further enhanced those two masterpieces of governance literature, demand not that we be above the codes and cultures of other peoples and nations, but that when we behave otherwise, we will be held accountable to their sublime standards. I offer that to be as much the price of freedom as all of the loved ones fallen on all of the battlefields where those principles have been defended over two centuries.

To be an American means that we swear an internal oath to live up to the written ideals of our sacred liberty, or surely, deliberately, with all due process of law, suffer the punishment so mandated when we do not.

Such is what these months ahead of us will determine: Are we still capable of being America, or have we with time and the weariness of strife fallen back and joined the pack of all lesser principled nation-states? The choice is ours to make, jointly, and individually. And we make that choice at the voting booth.

The article excerpted below is further evidence of how difficult it will be to stay true to the state of mind that is America, rather than the fallible humans who make up its populace. (NOTE: Two added articles further detail abuse and widens its scope dramatically.)
WASHINGTON, May 14 -- An American-run detention center outside Baghdad known as Camp Cropper was reportedly the site of numerous abuses of Iraqi prisoners several months before the mistreatment of prisoners unfolded last fall at Abu Ghraib prison, according to documents and interviews.

The detention facility, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, appears to have served as an incubator for the acts of humiliation that were inflicted months later on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At both sites, the mistreatment has been linked to interrogations overseen by the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, based in Wiesbaden, Germany.

The alleged abuses at Camp Cropper last May and June were severe enough to have prompted formal complaints to American commanders from visiting officials of the International Committee for the Red Cross. After several visits to Camp Cropper, where they interviewed Iraqi prisoners, officials of the I.C.R.C. in early July 2003 cited at least 50 incidents of abuse reported to have taken place in a part of the prison under the control of military interrogators.

In one example cited to American officers in Baghdad that month by the committee officials, a prisoner said he had been beaten during interrogation, as part of an ordeal in which he was hooded, cuffed, threatened with being tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, "force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days."

A medical examination of the prisoner by the committee's doctors "revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, and a broken rib," said a final report by the Red Cross panel, which was presented to American officials in February 2004.

"Sometimes they treated them good, and sometimes they didn't treat them so good," Staff Sgt. Floyd Boone, a military policeman, said of the military intelligence interrogators from the 205th Brigade at Camp Cropper.

He and other members of the military police were not permitted to watch the interrogations, he says, but he remembers "all the noise, yelling and screaming" from trailers where interrogators from the 205th Brigade took Iraqi prisoners for questioning before returning them to the custody of the military police.

After the I.C.R.C. complaints, the military interrogation site at Camp Cropper where the abuses took place was closed down, senior military officials said, though they declined to discuss the committee's report or to say whether it had prompted that move. "A decision was made to close the camp and consolidate at Abu Ghraib," a senior military officer said. ...

The brigade commander, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who took command at the end of June 2003, was later put in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib and was implicated by the Army's investigation of abuses as being "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the actions of those who mistreated and humiliated Iraqi prisoners there. ...

The 205th Military Intelligence Brigade is now the principal focus of an internal Army inquiry that is expected to shed new light on the abuses, according to senior military officers.

In November, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, elevated the brigade to an even more prominent role, assigning it to overall responsibility for Abu Ghraib, over the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army Reserve unit headed Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski.

At Camp Cropper, as at most American-run prisons in Iraq, the military intelligence brigade, which was responsible for interrogations, operated in a structure parallel to the military police, who were in charge of the prison and its prisoners. ...

[B]y July 2003, alleged abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Camp Cropper were among problems that had prompted loud and repeated warnings, not just from the I.C.R.C. officials, but from others focused on human rights, including Amnesty International, and a top deputy to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

In May of 2003, according to the I.C.R.C. report, officials from that organization hand-delivered to officers of the United States Central Command in Doha, Qatar, a memorandum "based on over 200 allegations of ill-treatment of prisoners of war during capture and interrogation" during the period of major combat that followed the American invasion in March.

But it remains unclear how seriously those complaints were taken by American officials, and to what extent they were even addressed by American commanders in Iraq, by the American civilian authorities there, or by their superiors at the Central Command, the Pentagon and the State Department.
There is more in The New York Times

More details of abuse come to light through statements released by a lawyer defending one of the accused:
The Whistle-Blower: Accused Soldier Paints Scene of Eager Mayhem at Iraqi Prison

When a fresh crop of detainees arrived at Abu Ghraib prison one night in late October, their jailers set upon them.

The soldiers pulled seven Iraqi detainees from their cells, "tossed them in the middle of the floor" and then one soldier ran across the room and lunged into the pile of detainees, according to sworn statements given to investigators by one of the soldiers now charged with abuse. He did it again, jumping into the group like it was a pile of autumn leaves, and another soldier called for others to join in. The detainees were ordered to strip and masturbate, their heads covered with plastic sandbags. One soldier stomped on their fingers and toes.

"Graner put the detainee's head into a cradle position with Graner's arm, and Graner punched the detainee with a lot of force, in the temple," Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits said in his statements to investigators, referring to another soldier charged, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. "Graner punched the detainee with a closed fist so hard in the temple that it knocked the detainee unconscious."

"He was joking, laughing," Specialist Sivits said. "Like he was enjoying it."

"He went over to the pile of detainees that were still clothed and he put his knees on them and had his picture taken," Specialist Sivits said. "I took this photo." ...

Specialist Graner, meanwhile, was having the other detainees make a tower, all of them in a kneeling position like a formation of cheerleaders.

"Frederick and Graner then tried to get several of the inmates to masturbate themselves," Specialist Sivits recounted.

"Staff Sergeant Frederick would take the hand of the detainee and put it on the detainee's penis, and make the detainee's hand go back and forth, as if masturbating. He did this to about three of the detainees before one of them did it right."

After five minutes, they told him to stop. Specialist Graner then had them pose against the wall, and made one kneel in front of the other, Specialist Sivits said, "So that from behind the detainee that was kneeling, it would look like the detainee kneeling had the penis of the detainee standing in his mouth, but he did not.
The New York Times

Further allegations of abuse feature the C.I.A. and high-profile Al Qaeda captives, which somwhat complicates the issue emotionally if not legally and morally considering American ideals.
Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations

WASHINGTON, May 12 -- The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States.

The methods employed by the C.I.A. are so severe that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have directed its agents to stay out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees, counterterrorism officials said. The F.B.I. officials have advised the bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could compromise their agents in future criminal cases, the counterterrorism officials said. ...

The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders is the most secretive component of an extensive regime of detention and interrogation put into place by the United States government after the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan that includes the detention facilities run by the military in Iraq and Guantαnamo Bay, Cuba.

There is now concern at the agency that the Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to examinations of the C.I.A's handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison abuses.

So far, the agency has refused to grant any independent observer or human rights group access to the high-level detainees, who have been held in strict secrecy. Their whereabouts are such closely guarded secrets that one official said he had been told that Mr. Bush had informed the C.I.A. that he did not want to know where they were.

The authorized tactics are primarily those methods used in the training of American Special Operations soldiers to prepare them for the possibility of being captured and taken prisoners of war. The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury.

Counterrorism officials say detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications.

Many authorities contend that torture and coercive treatment is as likely to provide information that is unreliable as information that is helpful.

Concerns are mounting among C.I.A. officers about the potential consequences of their actions. "Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable," one intelligence source said. "Now that's happening faster than anybody expected."

In the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed, C.I.A. officials became convinced that he was not being fully cooperative about his knowledge of the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Mohammed was carrying a letter written by Mr. bin Laden to a family member when he was captured in Pakistan early in 2003. The C.I.A. officials then authorized even harsher techniques, according to officials familiar with the interrogation.

The C.I.A. has been operating its Qaeda detention system under a series of secret legal opinions by the agency's and Justice Department lawyers. Those rules have provided a legal basis for the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including the water-boarding tactic used against Mr. Mohammed.

One set of legal memorandums, the officials said, advises government officials that if they are contemplating procedures that may put them in violation of American statutes that prohibit torture, degrading treatment or the Geneva Conventions, they will not be responsible if it can be argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit "violence to life and person, in particular . . . cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

Regarding American anti-torture laws, one administration figure involved in discussions about the memorandums said: "The criminal statutes only apply to American officials. The question is how involved are the American officials."

The official said the legal opinions say restrictions on procedures would not apply if the detainee could be deemed to be in the custody of a different country, even though American officials were getting the benefit of the interrogation. "It would be the responsibility of the other country," the official said. "It depends on the level of involvement."

Like the more numerous detainees at Guantαnamo Bay, the high-level Qaeda prisoners have also been defined as unlawful combatants, not as prisoners of war. Those prisoners have no standing in American civilian or military courts.

The Bush administration began the program when intelligence agencies realized that a few detainees captured in Afghanistan had such a high intelligence value that they should be separated from the lower-level figures who had been sent to a military installation at Guantαnamo Bay, which officials felt was not suitable.

There was little long-term planning. The agency initially had few interrogators and no facilities to house the top detainees. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency began to search for remote sites in friendly countries around the world where Qaeda operatives could be kept quietly and securely.

"There was a debate after 9/11 about how to make people disappear," a former intelligence official said.

The result was a series of secret agreements allowing the C.I.A. to use sites overseas without outside scrutiny.

So far, the Bush administration has not said what it intends to do over the long term with any of the high-level detainees, leaving them subject to being imprisoned indefinitely without any access to lawyers, courts or any form of due process.

Some officials have suggested that some of the high-level detainees may be tried in military tribunals or officially turned over to other countries, but counterterrorism officials have complained about the Bush administration's failure to have an "endgame" for these detainees. One official said they could also be imprisoned indefinitely at a new long-term prison being built at Guantαnamo.
The New York Times
 


3:58 AM / Editor / permalink    1 comments




Talk About Shutting The Barn Door After The "Animals" Are Charged...

Better late than never is a cliche that does not do justice to this announcement, as the title of this post also does not. A year or two late and 200 Billion Dollars short, a modified cliche, however, fits nicely, even if it is far too flippant:
WASHINGTON, May 14 -- Under a barrage of international and domestic criticism, the top American commander in Iraq has barred virtually all coercive interrogation practices, like forcing prisoners to crouch for long periods or depriving them of sleep, the Pentagon said Friday.

The commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, will still consider requests to hold prisoners in isolation for more than 30 days, according to a senior Central Command official who briefed reporters on Friday. The general has approved 25 such requests since October, the official said. But the official said that General Sanchez would deny requests to use other harsh methods.

"Simply, we will not even entertain a request, so don't even send it up for a review," the Central Command official said.

Previously, certain interrogation techniques, including sensory deprivation were supposed to be used only with the general's explicit approval. General Sanchez issued the new guidelines on Thursday, the same day that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a surprise visit to Baghdad and to Abu Ghraib prison, where the worst abuses occurred, in an effort to quiet the furor over the abuse scandal.

Mr. Rumsfeld has said that the American military in Iraq was abiding by the Geneva Conventions, and that the mistreatment was the work of a terrible few. But at a Senate hearing on Thursday, Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, acknowledged that hooding prisoners or forcing them to crouch naked for 45 minutes — tactics available to interrogators with General Sanchez's approval under the old policy — was inhumane. The International Red Cross had warned American officials for months that Iraqi prisoners were being abused in American-run prisons.

The senior Central Command official said the coercive practices were dropped because General Sanchez was not receiving requests to use most of them. But the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, acknowledged that it was "likely that the heightened scrutiny of the last couple weeks" had prompted General Sanchez to revise the interrogation rules. He said Mr. Rumsfeld did not order General Sanchez to change the policy.

The changes appear to affect only operations in Iraq, and would not change interrogation methods at the American base at Guantαnamo Bay, Cuba, or in Afghanistan. The rules also apply to any civilian contractors.

The Army's top intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, had presented to senators this week a list of techniques, some of which were approved for use on all prisoners and others that required General Sanchez's approval. The chart also listed safeguards, including a warning that "approaches must always be humane and lawful." Senators said at the hearing on Tuesday that General Alexander had characterized the one-page chart as a product of the American military high command in Baghdad. But the Central Command official disclosed Friday that the document was actually produced sometime in October by the Army's 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib. The Central Command official also said that until last fall, commanders did not have an interrogation policy specific to Iraq.

That changed, however, after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the head of detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, visited Iraqi prisons last September and recommended several changes, including the creation of a specific interrogation policy for prisons in Iraq. ...

On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats who had accused the Pentagon this week of employing practices that violated the Conventions applauded the policy changes. "Pressure works," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who clashed with Mr. Wolfowitz at Thursday's hearing, said in a telephone interview, "I'm glad they're changing them, but it's like closing the barn door after the herd is out. Why were these regulations promulgated in the first place?"
The New York Times
 


3:55 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Biggest Story of the Month--and Year--Was Not Prisoner Abuse Or the Murder of Nick Berg

I have been patiently waiting for a big headline announcing the biggest story since the invasion of Iraq. Apparently, I should not hold my breath. I know it has been a a news cycle of almost unprecedented horror stories for weeks now, replete with photos and videos, making such news all the more compelling to editors. But still I thought some sharp young editor, or even more likely, a sharp senior editor closer to 50 than 30, would look at the words that General Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Capitol Hill this past Thursday, jerk his head in amazement and order up a front page, above the fold Screamer: "General Myers Said We Can't Win In Iraq."

Of course, it did not happen. Oh, he said it, and it was reported. According to Google, America's highest ranking military officer's startling admission was reported in a total of 10 English language news outlets, and 7 of those were syndications of Maureen Dowd's column "Clash of Civilizations" in last Wednesday's The New York Times, which also appears in these pages. Other than Ms. Dowd's excellent column, the item was independently published in The Straits Times as one short paragraph in a lengthy analysis piece on the war in Iraq:
As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, put it with despairing frankness in his testimony to Congress yesterday: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq. There is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."
It also appeared on Yahoo News in an overview Op/Ed column by Richard Reeves:
Or maybe it is Vietnam on amphetamines. There was an astounding flashback, last Wednesday, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, told a Senate hearing: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq. There is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."

Been there, heard that. We did not lose militarily in Vietnam. We lost politically and morally. And by that I do not mean that we were less moral than the communists or the North Vietnamese. I mean we were less moral than we claimed to be.
It also appeared as a small part of another analysis overview in the Sydney Morning Herald:
But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, was also wringing his hands before the same committee, telling senators: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq ... [but] ... there is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."
And that is all. Frankly, I'm astonished by the lack of attention to what General Myers told a Senate panel. After all of the swagger and macho gung ho'ism of "Shock and Awe," "Mission Accomplished," and the expenditure of almost 200 Billion dollars and almost 800 American soldiers' lives, and all of the patriotic bluster and name-calling when the "Q word" or the "V word" (quagmire and Vietnam) was even mentioned, the admission that we are as stalemated in a quagmire in Iraq as we were in Vietnam, one would think that the administration would have been excoriated by journalists far and wide. But, no.

Such is the power of a scandal that includes sexual perversity, and the power of a ghoulish video-taped human butchering. As a media professional I understand it. As a social historian and lifelong student of all things political, I am absolutely flabbergasted that it didn't even merit a headline anywhere, much less the front page.

One of the articles briefly quoted above, from the Sydney Morning Herald, deserves a fuller offering, and so it follows below:
The roots of revenge
May 15, 2004

The US now confronts a possible civil war of its own making

The speed is breakneck. Cycles of violence in Palestine and Northern Ireland loop from one to the next at a pace that reflects decades or centuries of occupation, but in Iraq they unfold with the power and speed of a jack-hammer on concrete.

This week's grotesque beheading of a Jewish-American in Iraq came after the appalling scandal of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their US captors, which followed the debacle of the American attack on Falluja, which was retribution for the butchery of four American security contractors in the same city, which Arab observers claim bore the hallmarks of a revenge attack for an unspecified American act at some point in the past 13 months.

It's hardly surprising, then, that since the fall of Baghdad there's been virtually no oxygen for the serious business of crafting the uncertain future of Iraq.

The Americans would have us believe that they want to be out of there by June 30, when they say they will return control of the country to Iraqis. But the reality is that the occupation will continue, and so will the war.

The US is hard at work building the camps that it wants to become permanent American bases and this week the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, flagged to the US Senate that next year the occupation will soak up billions more dollars than presently acknowledged and possibly even greater troop numbers than the current 138,000.

But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, was also wringing his hands before the same committee, telling senators: "There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq ... [but] ... there is also no way to militarily win in Iraq."

Catch-22 - the Americans came to Iraq as the answer, but now they are the problem.

Myers very sensibly hit upon the need to "internationalise" the crisis, embracing a solution spurned so often by Washington: "The United Nations has to play the governance role. That's how we're, in my view, eventually going to win."

The UN has made a tentative return to Iraq. It is assessing the possibility of holding elections before the end of January which it says could happen if there is a significant improvement in security. And with only six weeks to the June 30 handover, the UN special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is trying to do what Washington could not do - cobble together an interim government.

But such is the mess that the US has made of an occupation it insisted would bring democracy to the Middle East, that the chances of a full UN return to Iraq are slim. NATO says it wants nothing to do with it; France and Germany have reaffirmed they'll not send troops; and an attempt by the chief of the US Central Command, General John Abizaid, to publicly browbeat Pakistan, Morocco and Tunisia into providing troops to give the occupation a Muslim face was met with stony silence.

All of which leaves the US President, George Bush, in about the same state as a seasoned US security contractor who, when asked how he was faring at the height of the April hostage crisis in Baghdad, snapped, "Up to my ass in alligators."

The fear now is that the real American success in Iraq has been the creation of the perfect environment for a protracted guerilla war which, at any time, could become a civil war. Resistance is so entrenched that stage-managed events like this week's distribution of sweets to village children near Falluja will have little impact.

Events in recent days have graphically demonstrated the increasingly asymmetric nature of the conflict - a high-tech, digital, self-inflicted wound by the US in the prisoner abuse scandal has overarched a brutal decapitation rooted in the ancient Arab culture of revenge but transmitted globally on the internet. Both sides are reeling without having directly engaged each other.

Some Iraqis will be offended by the manner of the death of Nick Berg, but few will speak against his beheading. Arab conspiracy theorists will be well pleased with the unfolding abuse scandal - their media space is filled with allegations of American wrongdoing and all of it is helped along by the strengths of Western democracy. As a Baghdad cafe-goer told CNN in a prisoner-abuse vox pop this week: "Arabs do it, too, but we're not allowed to talk about it." However, we slice and dice the story in the West: we test it against history, we psychoanalyse it, we leave the accused defend themselves.

It fills our media space and pours selectively into the Arab media in a way that sustains the worst elements of the original allegations which, in many Arab minds, are not against individual soldiers but against the US and the Bush Administration.

It's easy for Washington's defenders and apologists to dismiss the abuse as aberrant behaviour or even as the means to justify an end. But it all looks very different to Arabs who wonder about the democracy roadshow the US is running in the Middle East.

Should they believe in the due process promised in the aftermath of the prisoner abuse - or in the allegation by the International Committee of the Red Cross that as many as 90 per cent of the Iraqis in US detention have committed no wrongdoing? Should they put aside all the lies and half-truths on the way to war: the WMD that didn't exist, the terror links that weren't there, the war to reduce terrorism that brought terrorism to their doorstep?

Those who manipulate the mythic Arab Street don't give lectures on the wonders of the Westminster system or the rich philosophical underpinning of democracy in the US. They are too busy repackaging the latest news in much the same way that Bush and Blair and Howard packaged the worst of the case - true and untrue - against Saddam Hussein before last year's war.

If Americans want a glimpse of the future of their occupation of Iraq, they should look to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the same way that Israeli settlers on Arab land have been targets, so too will US troops be in Iraq. And if they want a sense of what "June 30 return of sovereignty" means, they should look at US plans for an embassy in "independent" Iraq - there will be no fewer than three ambassadors, two of whom are military men. The existing US occupation staff and the presidential bunker they commandeered last year as an American HQ in Baghdad will simply become the embassy and they'll be able to tic-tac with the Iraqi proxies they have already locked into key positions across the bureaucracy ahead of the formation of an Iraqi government.

Presiding over it all will be Ambassador John Negroponte, whose 1980s ambassadorship in Honduras has been much questioned because of allegations of US complicity in the disappearance of people who disagreed with the regime.
Sydney Morning Herald
 


12:25 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, May 15, 2004

My Kerry - McCain Fantasy Ticket Isn't The Pipe Dream It Seems

The "Kerry - McCain Train" I called for earlier this week is indeed building up some locomotive steam, as reported in today's The New York Times. So many of my impossible "dreams" in life have come true, I am not as disposed as others to disbelieve the "impossible" dream. It is surely the best fix for our nation, democracy and the world, therefore it must be given every chance to happen.
WASHINGTON, May 14 -- Despite weeks of steadfast rejections from Senator John McCain, some prominent Democrats are angling for him to run for vice president alongside Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, creating a bipartisan ticket that they say would instantly transform the presidential race.

The enthusiasm of Democrats for Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, is so high that even some who have been mentioned as possible Kerry running mates — including Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator — are spinning scenarios about a "unity government," effectively giving Mr. Kerry a green light to reach across the political aisle and extend an offer.

"Senator McCain would not have to leave his party," Mr. Kerrey said. "He could remain a Republican, would be given some authority over selection of cabinet people. The only thing he would have to do is say, `I'm not going to appoint any judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade,' " the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, which Mr. McCain has said he opposes.

Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Mr. Kerry, said such a ticket "would be the political equivalent of the Yankees signing A-Rod," referring to Alex Rodriguez, the team's star third baseman.

Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, "continues to be interested in" Mr. McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran whom Kerry aides describe as the candidate's best friend in the Senate, as a running mate, said one longtime Democratic official who works for the Kerry campaign.

But the official said the plan was unrealistic, because Mr. McCain "won't do it." In an interview on Friday, Mr. McCain said, "I have totally ruled it out."

Even so, Democrats say a bipartisan Kerry-McCain ticket, featuring two decorated Vietnam War veterans from different parties and regions of the country, would give them a powerful edge in the debate over who can best lead the nation in the war on terror. "It would be a dream team," Mr. Lehane said.

This kind of open speculation suggests that Democrats are so eager to regain the White House in November that they are willing to overlook members of their own party, and to accept a candidate who disagrees with one of the core tenets of their platform, the right to an abortion. At the same time, the Kerry-McCain talk is testimony to the close friendship between the two, and the cool relationship between Mr. McCain and President Bush. The senator from Arizona is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign there, but it is no secret in Washington that Mr. McCain has not quite forgiven Mr. Bush for the attacks on him during the 2000 Republican presidential primaries.

Mr. Kerry defended Mr. McCain then, and the Arizona senator returned the favor in March, dismissing suggestions by the Bush camp that Mr. Kerry is weak on defense. "If you don't stand by your friends if they are unfairly attacked," Mr. McCain said Friday, "then you've lost your bearings."

The two men talk on the phone periodically, most recently a few days ago. On the campaign trail, Mr. Kerry drops Mr. McCain's name almost daily. On Friday, he invoked Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, at a news conference when asked whether he thought pictures of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison should be released to the public.

"I think John McCain really had the right formula, personally," he said, referring to the Arizona senator's suggestion that the pictures would eventually find their way into public view, and should be put out in an organized fashion.

And it was not surprising that the words "our good friend John McCain" were the first thing out of Mr. Kerry's mouth earlier this week, when he was asked to name possible replacements for Donald H. Rumsfeld, President Bush's embattled secretary of defense.

Despite Mr. McCain's protestations that he would not be Mr. Kerry's No. 2, Senator Nelson, of Florida, said he had spoken to both Mr. McCain and Kerry campaign officials about it.

"There's a collective sigh that says, `This feels right,' " Mr. Nelson said Friday, adding, "I think it's very plausible that, with Iraq still in chaos, that if offered to him, he would say it's time for me to go serve my country again in another capacity, where I can do some good."

Such an offer would undoubtedly be controversial among Democrats. Some say Mr. McCain would upstage Mr. Kerry; others regard him as too conservative. Among the latter is Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's campaign in 2000. "McCain has not been pro-choice; he's not been out front on affirmative action," Ms. Brazile said. "He's not been out front on core issues that have defined the Democratic Party."
There is a whole lot more at The New York Times
 


2:41 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The LongBow Papers Fix...

Dear readers, posting in these pages has been infrequent and spotty of late. There were two reasons:

1) I have had an extremely overloaded academic schedule this past week. So that Chinese universities can have a full seven-day May Day Holiday, two days of classes are made-up by working the Saturday and Sunday preceding the holiday. In my case, that meant seven straight days of classes and lectures at 3 different universities. The marathon finally ended for me yesterday evening with four hours of lectures on the techniques of TV Hosting and Anchoring at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. That was after my day had begun here at the China Foreign Affairs University with my usual 8:00 AM Friday post-Graduate lecture on "Shakespeare Today."

2) The "New Blogger" Dashboard, with all of its neat bells and whistles, was a bit of a nightmare to integrate with my custom-designed template hosted on my own domain site and private server. Ellen, my lovely and so very talented wife, had to almost rebuild the site from scratch to make it all work. She toiled several dozen hours on this task. It appears that her efforts have been quite successful. I now have a "Comments" feature, and the inner benefits of the new "Dashboard" tools for posting.

I look forward to what the "Comments" feature might bring--but not without some measure of anxiety, as discussed in this recent post.

Thank you all for your support and patience during this past "glitchy," over-worked week.
 


1:46 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Nicholas Berg Had No Ties To Terrorists

The rumor running through cyberspace that Nicholas Berg had a "connection" with the 9/11 terrorists has been shot down and explained. However, the explanation has a lot to do with the Cyber World, and my guess is that it won't stop the conspiracy theory buffs. Just how statistically coincidental is it that two people, worlds and cultures apart, would have identical pass words?

That is what happened in this instance, as reported in today's The New York Times:
WASHINGTON, May 14 - Federal officials said Friday that they were satisfied that Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old American decapitated in Iraq, had had no terrorist links even though his computer password had apparently been used by a terror suspect.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation first interviewed Mr. Berg in 2002 after his e-mail password appeared to have been used by that suspect, but the connection "was just a coincidence," a senior official of the bureau said.

Attorney General John Ashcroft echoed that assessment, rejecting any suggestion that Mr. Berg "was in some way involved in terrorist activity."

"It is not uncommon" for college students like Mr. Berg, who was attending the University of Oklahoma at the time, to have their computer passwords shared and distributed, Mr. Ashcroft said, adding, "We do not believe that that reflects any association with terrorist objectives or activities" by Mr. Berg.

That Mr. Berg's password may have been used by the terror suspect, who remains unidentified, has been a subject of news accounts since Thursday. But there are conflicting reports as to whether the password was discovered by the authorities in the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is in custody awaiting trial in an American court on charges related to the Sept. 11 attacks. And law enforcement officials were unwilling Friday to clear up those conflicts, citing a judge's order barring the parties from discussing the Moussaoui case.

The F.B.I. is investigating Mr. Berg's beheading, by militants in Iraq, which was captured on a grisly video posted on an Islamic Web site. Mr. Ashcroft pledged Friday to seek criminal charges in the United States against those responsible.
The New York Times
 


1:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, May 14, 2004

The Mystery of the Emmett Till Murder...

As my readers know, I have a strong passion for and identification with the brutal, cowardly torture, murder and mutilation of young Emmitt Till in 1955 in the Delta country of Northwest Mississippi. I very recently posted a small essay of both joy and pain regarding the murder of the African-American teenager from Chicago who had the spunk to whistle at a pretty white lady during a visit with relatives in Mississippi. The joy was for the news that authorities were reopening the investigation of the almost 50-year-old murder case; the pain was from the memory of those days of shame for all white Mississippians.

Today, I received an e-mail from an eminent historian from the University of Alabama, David T. Beito, who knows the case intimately. He brought my attention to an article he co-wrote, which is excerpted below. However, his e-mail gives me the opportunity to not only point readers and bloggers to a fascinating look at the case as a mystery, but to The History News Network, a valuable source for historians, writers and researchers--in other words, a lot of bloggers. It is also a source of new Blogs for us all. Check out the side bar.
Why It's Unlikely the Emmett Till Murder Mystery Will Ever Be Solved
By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito

Like countless black males before him, Till had received the ultimate punishment for threatening Mississippi’s rigid code of racial etiquette. In the past, the press would have ignored such a killing. But this time it was different. The Till case was a media sensation as journalists from all over the world flocked to the small town of Sumner for the trial. When a Mississippi jury acquitted Milam and Bryant in September, protests erupted in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and many other cities. Some historians contend that the fall-out from these events sparked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Only three months after the trial, in December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was underway because Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man.

Today the Till case is once again in the news. Although Milam and Bryant are long dead, some have argued that the murder was part of a broader conspiracy. The recent trials of Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry have fueled the calls from the New York Times and others to reopen the case and to prosecute possible accomplices. These calls are understandable but our investigation (which includes conversations with key witnesses) has led us to be skeptical that the mystery behind the murder can ever be solved.

Until recently, few of those familiar with the case considered it worthwhile to even ask how many people killed Emmett Till. For decades, most took their cues from journalist William Bradford Huie, who revealed in an article for Look in 1956 how Milam and Bryant, safely acquitted after their trial in September, had proudly confessed to the murder. Huie strongly implied that they were the only perpetrators. The effect of the article, appropriately titled, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” was so profound that it pushed aside any serious discussion of accomplices for decades to come.

It had not always been so. During the last months of 1955, many journalists, civil rights activists, and law enforcement officials seriously pondered whether Milam and Bryant had help. Even the prosecutors belonged to the ranks of the conspiracy theorists. They had based much of their case on the testimony of Willie Reed, an eighteen-year old high school student. Reed described how he had observed Till, along with three whites (including Milam) and two blacks, in a pickup truck shortly after the kidnapping. The truck pulled into an equipment shed near Drew, Mississippi and he heard “licks and hollers” that sounded like a beating. The prosecutors never asked Reed to identify the other men in the truck. The press, law enforcement, and civil rights leaders, however, focused on three black employees of Milam: Levi “Too Tight” Collins, Henry Lee Loggins, and Willie Hubbard. Black journalist James Hicks alleged that the sheriff had locked up Collins and Loggins in jail during the trial under false names as part of a cover up. In November 1955, Hicks wrote an open letter to Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., which urged the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate. The FBI briefly considered the matter but decided not to enter the case stating that it did not have jurisdiction because state lines had not been crossed.
There is a whole lot more at The History News Network
 


10:59 PM / Editor / permalink    1 comments




To Fox News Personnel: Don't Read This!

"It's not exactly every day that the Pentagon warns military personnel to
stay away from Fox News." No, indeed not,
one would think. But, according to Vivienne Walt with Time Magazine, that's what happened. I subscribe to Declan McCullagh's Politech newsletter--which might be a good idea for you if you're interested in the confluence of politics and technology, here's the link. In one of today's items from Politech was the first couple of graph's and a link to a hoot of an article in Time. I think you will get a kick--a frightening one, actually--out of it.
Military Personnel: Don't Read This!
How a Pentagon email sought to contain the prison abuse scandal
By VIVIENNE WALT / BAGHDAD

Saturday, May. 08, 2004
It's not exactly every day that the Pentagon warns military personnel to
stay away from Fox News. But that's exactly what some hopeful soul at
the Department of Defense instructed, in a memo intended to forbid
Pentagon staff reading a copy of the Taguba report detailing abuse of
detainees at prisons in Iraq that had been posted at the Fox News web site.

An email to Pentagon staff marked "URGENT IT (Information Technology)
BULLETIN: Taguba Report" orders employees not to read or download the
Taguba report at Fox News, on the grounds that the document is
classified. It also orders them not to discuss the matter with friends
or family members. The emailed memo was leaked to TIME by a senior U.S.
civilian official in Baghdad, who did not hide his disdain for the
"factotums" in the Pentagon. "I do wonder how incredibly stupid some
people in the Pentagon are," he emailed TIME. "Not only are they drawing
everyone's attention to the report -- and where it can be seen -- but
attempting to muzzle people never works."

The email message:

The Time Magazine article

Declan McCullagh's Politech

 


10:47 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A World Gone Mad...

"We're living in a world gone mad." It's not terribly original, but that's how I began a somewhat emotional verbal riff earlier today at the newly renovated CCTV International studios here in Beijing. I was there to do some commentary about the peculiarly perverse and horrific confluence of the Abu Ghraib Prison abuse scandal and the "beheading" of the 26 year-old American civilian, Nick Berg, for tonight's "DIALOGUE" on CCTV International Channel 9.

I must have gone a bit over the top because the beautiful, so very intelligent young Chinese lady I've come to know well and admire greatly, who was producing that segment, had tears in her eyes by the end. I had to wrap up the sound bite myself, as she was quite distracted and had momentarily forgotten we were doing TV. In truth, so had I; I was finally letting go with the jumbled up emotions of these past days and weeks of shocking news and images.

I went on to say that I have spent most of my adult life studying and writing about violence, crime, justice, injustice, punishment, revenge, retribution--but that I did not understand what we are facing now. This is new and different, terribly different; but also it is very old and not at all different, we just have to skip back in the clock of our souls by centuries, millenniums, actually, for its equivalent.

Soon there will be a full essay under this title and with this theme. But tonight, I want only to illustrate the point with the images; if you are not too squeamish, study them and look for the common denominator between them all. Then we can discuss it with some degree of objectivity, and maybe some very sad understanding.

I will actually only provide the links, you will have to choose to look at them:
The Abu Ghraib Prison Photos, HERE


The Nick Berg Beheading Video, HERE
 


12:28 AM / Editor / permalink    1 comments



Thursday, May 13, 2004

From Dubya's Mouth...

It's been a very long and strange day. It started with four straight hours of lecturing 3rd year law students at the China Foreign Affairs University on the Abu Ghraib Prison abuse scandal and the Nick Berg "beheading" for my "Media & Foreign Policy" class. Uh, yeah, tough sledding. Then I had to hustle over to the CCTV Studios to do some commentary on those same two subjects for tonight's "DIALOGUE" on CCTV International Channel 9. Uh, yeah...very tough sledding. More on both later.

At the moment I crave a diversion. So I'll go to one of my favorite leisure-time activities: Bushisms, as collected by Jacob Weisberg:

"I do think we need for a troop to be able to house his family. That's an important part of building morale in the military." --Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida; March 12, 2001

"I confirmed to the prime minister that we appreciate our friendship." --After meeting with Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada; February 5, 2001

"I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun." --St. Louis; October 18, 2000
 


7:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Wall Street Journal Editorial Blames Jimmy Carter For Our Tough Slug In Iraq

The Right Wingers reach new lows in illogical thinking daily; but the Wall Street Journal editorial excerpted below is surely a nadir of note. I would not normally sully these pages with such convoluted thinking for fear that it might be contagious, but this has to be read--only partly, though, my fear of contamination is irrational, I know, but I can't help it. I will give you the first two graphs and let you decide if you are up to clicking through for more:
Imagine a different Nov. 4, 1979, in Tehran. Shortly after Iranian terrorists storm the American Embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Tehran's leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.

When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran's assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the U.N., Mr. Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini might well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there might well have been the sort of chaos in Tehran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979--and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.
There is a whole lot more, if you can stomach it, at OpinionJournall
 


11:21 PM / Editor / permalink    1 comments




Get On "The McCain For Vice President On Democratic Ticket" Train...

This will not be a surprise to my regular readers, but I want to make it clear and official: Republican Senator John McCain should be John Kerry's Vice Presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket. John McCain crossing the aisle has been a "pipedream" of mine for some time. Well, why should it only be a fantasy? I am certainly not alone on this. Below is what Richard, the author of The Peking Duck, has to say on the matter.
In normal times the idea of a split ticket would be absurd. But these aren't normal times, and some real out-of-the-box thinking is called for. It still sounds like a fantasy, with a hundred reason why it's not practical. But stranger things have happened. It would almost certainly spell a Kerry victory and ensure the end of the Bush dynasty. It's a truly thrilling notion.
But there are some real heavyweights in political Blogland who also don't see this as such a crazy idea, Kevin Drum is one, and Andrew Sullivan is also tooting the horn, and Thomas Friedman recently wrote: "Most of all, I want to wake up and read that John Kerry just asked John McCain to be his vice president."

These are folks with a lot of readers between them. So why don't we all get serious and start an active movement in the Blogosphere and get this train up and chugging for real?

Help Save Our Democracy: McCain For Vice President on the Democratic Ticket!

 


7:32 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




When Words Fail...

Meaningful words fail me at this moment. I can only say that the psychopaths that cut off the head of Nick Berg did in a moment what I thought would take years: Over come our shame of Abu Ghraib, and harden and unify us to the only real task at hand--defeating these monsters and eradicating their presence from this Earth.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 11 -- An Islamist Web site posted a videotape on Tuesday showing the decapitation of an American in Iraq, in what the killers called revenge for the American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

The Web site said the man who had carried out the beheading was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant linked to Al Qaeda who the Americans believe was behind some of the deadliest terrorist attacks here.

"Sheik Abu Musab Zarqawi slaughters an American infidel with his hands and promises Bush more," read the title of the video. The Web site is operated by a group named Muntada al-Ansar, and often carries statements by Islamic militants.

The video shows a thin, bearded man, who identified himself as Nicholas Berg of West Chester, Pa., seated before a row of five masked men. Mr. Berg appeared to be wearing an orange jump suit similar to those issued to Iraqis in American-run prisoners here.

After the militants read a statement, the tape showed the men pushing Mr. Berg to the floor. As he screamed, one of the men put a knife to Mr. Berg's neck and the men yelled "God is Great!"

The head was held up to the camera.

The State Department confirmed that Mr. Berg's body was found Saturday near an overpass in Baghdad. An American intelligence official said the body was found without a head.

Mr. Berg's family in Pennsylvania said a State Department official had notified them on Monday of their son's death. They said Mr. Berg, 26, had gone to Iraq twice since December as an independent businessman looking for work fixing communication antennas.

"I knew he was decapitated before," Michael Berg, the father, told The Associated Press on Tuesday after the videotape was shown. "That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public." ...

Before Mr. Berg was killed, one of the masked men on the videotape said in Arabic: "For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we asked the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib, and they refused."

"So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls," the man said. "You will receive nothing from us but coffin after coffin slaughtered in this way."
The New York Times
 


12:40 PM / Editor / permalink    1 comments




Bush Views American Soldiers Having Sex With Each Other

What's a born-again Christian president to do? This one secretly didn't have much of a problem with the degradation perpetrated on the "evil-doers" by his "Mission Accomplished" boys and girls waging the Last Great Crusade. But having sex with each other? For his sake, let's hope it is the boys and girls thing. Can you imagine if he had to view the boys and boys thing?

This is getting too weird, too sick, too disgusting, too unbelievable not to believe all of it and probably much worse. And there is still a war going on. Folks are dying!

Puritanical America just reels from one sex-paralyzed administration to another. Of course, Ms. Monica and her knee pads with matching thongs was Ozzie & Harriet compared to Abu Ghraib's digital slide-show.
WASHINGTON, May 10 -- President Bush made a robust show of support on Monday for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, as the White House, the Pentagon and Congress grappled with whether and how to release more pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers. ...

Mr. Bush later went to Mr. Rumsfeld's office, where he was shown more than a dozen images of the abuse, most of which have not been publicized, White House and Pentagon officials said. Mr. Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, characterized the president's reaction as "one of deep disgust and disbelief that anyone who wears our uniform would engage in such shameful and appalling acts."

Administration officials debated whether to release publicly all the pictures in the government's possession, with many of the president's political and communications advisers advocating moving quickly to get the images out and avoid the prospect of weeks or months in which they leak out piecemeal.

But no decision was made, officials said, adding that they continued to weigh issues including the effect of any release on pending criminal inquiries and the privacy of people shown in the images, some of which, government officials said, show American soldiers having sex with one another.

Separately, the Pentagon and Congressional leaders continued to negotiate ways to allow lawmakers to view the images in the absence of a public release.

The images include both photographs and videotapes. White House officials said Mr. Bush had been shown still images taken from videotapes as well as photographs.

The New York Times

 


3:43 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Would You Buy A Used Car From The White House Or The Red Cross?

Who to believe? It is such an old quandary. He said, she said. They said, we said. You say, I say. The Devil is in the details? God is in the details? Would George W. Bush lie to us? Would Donald Rumsfeld lie to himself? Does Cheney lie to every one. Does Condi Rice know the difference between the truth and a lie? Is Colin Powell even capable of telling a lie? General Myers? General Pace? How about General Sanchez? General Abizaid or General Smith? Surely not General Miller!

Okay, but what about the Red Cross? Would they lie? What would be their motive to lie? Do you get to have the access and implied integrity of the Red Cross by lying? What would they have to gain by lying?

Personally, I think the question is a no-brainer--my money is on the Red Cross:
WASHINGTON, May 10 -- In a visit to the Abu Ghraib prison last October, Red Cross inspectors were so unsettled by what they found that they broke off their visit and demanded an immediate explanation from the military prison authorities.

As recounted in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, prisoners were being held "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," apparently for several days.

The inspectors were also able to document the exact sort of behavior that has produced a firestorm over the last two weeks: "acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women's underwear over the heads for prolonged periods Β? while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position."

The report also said military intelligence officers had confirmed the inspectors' impression that those "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information."

The 24-page report, completed in February, appears to contradict several statements by senior Pentagon officials in recent days concerning how and when the military learned of potential abuses in Iraq, how they reacted to reports of abuses and how widespread the practices might have been.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said Monday that the organization's president, Jakob Kellenberger, complained about the prison abuses directly to top Bush administration officials during a two-day visit to Washington in mid-January when he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.

Antonella Notari, the chief spokeswoman for the international committee in Geneva, suggested that Mr. Kellenberger had raised the issue with senior administration officials because the situation had not improved sufficiently after the prison authorities in Baghdad had been informed of the criticisms.

"If it's a serious problem and it persists, we would make use of our contacts with higher-ranking people," she said.

Ms. Notari said the February report had been based on private interviews with prisoners of war and civilian internees during the 29 visits the committee's staff had conducted in 14 places of detention across Iraq between March 31 and Oct. 24, 2003. ...

Mr. Powell's spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said Monday that "when such information came to us, as it did over the course of time, late last year and early this year, we certainly took note of the information."

A spokesman for Ms. Rice said Monday that Mr. Kellenberger did not raise the issue of Iraq prison abuse with her at their meeting on Jan. 15. Sean McCormack, the spokesman, said staff members who had attended said their notes showed that "this issue was not discussed in this meeting." He said the entire session had been about the detention center at GuantΓ‘namo Bay, Cuba.

An aide to Mr. Wolfowitz said Mr. Kellenberger had briefly mentioned a coming report about problems at the Iraqi prisons. Charley Cooper, special adviser to Mr. Wolfowitz, said, "No mention was made of any specific allegations of abuse or mistreatment of prisoners at any of the facilities housing detainees inside Iraq."

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview on Monday that the "timeline is not yet clear in my mind, but it is critical."

"If, in fact, Pentagon and other administration officials were alerted by the International Red Cross to the abuse in the prisons," she said, "it's very troubling to me that those allegations were not followed up and pursued." The Red Cross, she said, has enormous credibility and its observations should be taken very seriously. The International Committee of the Red Cross is typically given access to detention sites like Abu Ghraib to monitor human rights under an agreement in which it does not publicize its concerns but tries to work to resolve problems through the host government.

The February report seems at odds with some of the testimony given before Congress last week by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith and other top officials.
The New York Times
 


3:00 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Of Tourists and Torturers...

It took a novelist to get it right, and I mean in an op-ed piece in today's The New York Times, Luc Sante nailed the Abu Ghraib issue to the wall--an apt metaphor, as you will see when you read it. And read it you must. I have been staring at the horrible pictures for days, thinking about them, writing about them, asking every metaphysically relevant question I can trying to figure out the "why" and the "what" and most importantly the "how" of this peculiar perversity now gripping the collective guilt of most civilized Americans, but I was getting nowhere.

Then I read Mr. Sante's brilliant piece and I gasped, "yes!" He wrote what I have been feeling and seeing in those photos but, in this instance at least, wasn't wordsmith enough to find the words and the analogies necessary to capture it. Please read the essay below. I believe that you will have the same reaction I did. Because, of course, in the end, as it so often and sadly is in our world today, it is about race:
Leaving aside the question of how anyone could have perpetrated the horrors depicted in those pictures, you can't help but wonder why American soldiers would incriminate themselves by posing next to their handiwork. Americans don't seem to have a long tradition of that sort of thing. I can't offhand recall having seen comparable images from any recent wars, although before the digital era amateur photographs were harder to spread. There have been many atrocity photographs over the years, of course — the worst I've ever seen were taken in Algeria in 1961, and once when I was a child another kid found and showed off his father's cache of pictures from the Pacific Theater in World War II, which shook me so badly that I can't remember with any certainty what they depicted. I'm pretty sure, though, that they did not show anyone grinning and making self-congratulatory gestures.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American soldiers included in them look exactly as if they were standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot marlin. That incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the pictures. The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I registered what I was seeing, I was reminded of something. There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance, that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of lynchings.

In photographs that were taken and often printed as postcards in the American heartland in the first four decades of the 20th century, black men are shown hanging from trees or light fixtures or maybe being burned alive, while below them white people are laughing and pointing for the benefit of the camera. There are some pictures of whites being lynched, too, but these tend not to feature the holiday crowd. Often the spectators at lynchings of African-Americans are so effusive in their mugging that they all seem to be vying for credit. Before seeing such pictures you might expect the faces in them to express some kind of collective rage; instead the mood is giddy, often verging on hysterical, with a distinct sexual undercurrent.

Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some people otherwise known for their gentleness and sympathy — but isn't the abandonment of such scruples possible only if the victims are considered less than human? After all, it is one thing for a boxer to lift his hands over his head in triumph beside the fallen body of his rival, quite another to strike a comparable pose next to the bodies of strangers you have arranged in quasi-pornographic tableaus. The Americans in the photographs are not enacting hatred; hatred can coexist with respect, however strained. What they display, instead, is contempt: their victims are merely objects.

It is conceivable that such events might have occurred in a war in which the enemy looked like us —certainly, there are Americans to whom all foreigners are irredeemably Other. Still, it is striking how, in wartime, a fundamental lack of respect for the enemy's body becomes an issue only when the enemy is perceived as being of another race. You might have heard about the strings of human ears collected by some soldiers in Vietnam, or read the story, reported in Life during World War II, about the G.I. who blithely mailed his girlfriend in Brooklyn a Japanese skull as a Christmas present. And the concept of the human trophy is not restricted to warfare, but permeates the history of colonialism, from the Congo to Australia, Mexico to India. Treating those we deem our equals as game animals, however, has been out of fashion for quite a few centuries.

Of course the violence at Abu Ghraib was primarily psychological — hey, only a few people were killed — and the trophies were pictorial, like the results of a photo safari. Some commentators have made a point of noting this very relative nonviolence, contrasting it with the lynching of the four American military contractors in Falluja last month. This line of argument is notable for what it leaves out: there is a difference between the rage of a people who feel themselves invaded and the contempt of a victorious nation for a civilian population whom it has ostensibly liberated.

That prison guards would pose captives — primarily noncombatants, low-level riffraff — in re-enactments of cable TV smut for the benefit of their friends back home emerges from the mode of thinking that has prevented an accounting of civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war. If civilian deaths are not recorded, let alone published, it must be because they do not matter, and if they do not matter it must be because the Iraqis are beneath notice. And that must mean that anything done to them is permissible, as long as it does not create publicity that would embarrass the Bush administration. The possible consequences of the Abu Ghraib archive are numerous, many of them horrifying. Perhaps, though, the digital camera will haunt the future career of George W. Bush the way the tape recorder sealed the fate of Richard Nixon.

Luc Sante, who teaches creative writing and the history of photography at Bard College, is the author of "Low Life," "Evidence" and "The Factory of Facts."
The New York Times
 


8:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Links From Abu Ghraib Directly Into The Pentagon?

Is this the beginning of the trail that might lead through General "Gitmoize" Miller, to Cambone and then to Rumsfeld himself? Where will the buck stop?
WASHINGTON, May 10 -- The Pentagon's top intelligence official urged last summer that an Army general be sent to Iraq to review how American military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

But the official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, said he had never advocated a policy of having military guards at the prison soften up prisoners for the interrogators.

Mr. Cambone's role in sending Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller and a team of experts to Abu Ghraib last August and September, and in pushing from the highest levels of the Pentagon for more and better intelligence to help fight insurgents in Iraq, will be a focus of hearings the Senate Armed Services Committee is to hold on Tuesday.

General Miller, the chief of interrogations and detentions in Iraq, has defended his recommendations from that visit to have prison guards prepare detainees for interrogations. He has said those recommendations played no role in the later abuse and humiliation of prisoners by some guards. ...

In an unfolding scandal in which most of the focus has been on soldiers or military commanders, the role of Mr. Cambone, as well as of other senior Pentagon officials, in pushing for improved intelligence in Iraq directly links the Defense Department to policies that may have influenced how prison guards and military interrogators carried out their jobs.
There is more in The New York Times
 


8:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




DO NOT READ THIS REPORT!

Shrub & Twigs can't even get their cover-up act in order. And make no mistake about it, there has been a cover-up of the abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly no surprise there, it is the reflexive action of almost all governments to try the cover-up route at first. This is true no matter how many examples of history--from very recent to very ancient--are cautionary tales from which we learn that it almost never works and that it almost always makes matters worse.

The almost funny example of the moment, brought to us by the good folks at The Center For American Progress and Time Magazine, not only proves the point above, but adds evidence suggesting why things have gone so badly in our Iraqi adventure into infamy: wishful, blinders-on thinking and ineptness of the first order:
DON'T READ THIS REPORT: The instinct to hush things up was still in effect after the story and gruesome pictures broke. According to Time magazine, the administration sent an email to Pentagon staff with the subject line "URGENT IT (Information Technology) BULLETIN: Taguba Report." The email orders "employees not to read or download the Taguba report...on the grounds that the document is classified. It also orders them not to discuss the matter with friends or family members."
The Center for American Progress
 


7:10 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Glory Be, It's About Time...

Good news for a change, even though it's about one of the most horrid and infamous murders in modern American history. It is even more so, if you grew up in Mississippi during the early civil rights movement as I did. I was only seven when Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, murdered, mutilated and then dumped into the Tallahatchie River in rural Northwest Mississippi--the Delta--for whistling at a white woman, but I remember its impact as if it was yesterday.

Of course, Emmett wasn't that much older than I was. Oh, at the time I suppose he was; when you are a child, the difference between being seven and fourteen is large. If he had lived, however, we would be in the same age-group, close contemporaries; there is precious little difference between 55 and 62. We would be just a couple of middle-aged dudes with a lot of the same memories if we were to meet today. But Emmett didn't get to be middle-aged; he barely got into his teens. And, finally, perhaps somebody is going to pay for the crime that did much to spur a great movement and begin a very slow, but epochal change in my beloved Mississippi, the state that many of us used to be ashamed to say was our home.

But not any longer, Mississippi and the rest of the old south has changed greatly over the years. Many horrible crimes that went unpunished because of all-white juries in the bad old days, have one-by-one been reopened in the past decade or so and justice finally done. Not all is well, certainly; racism still exists in Mississippi and throughout the south, as you will read in the bad news part of the article below. But so does it exist in Clinton, Iowa, and Santa Barbara, California; I know, because I have spent enough time in both places, long enough to have written about Northern bigots and New Age bigots I found in both of those very different places. In other words, the old south and Mississippi are no longer unique in that regard.

Although that isn't exactly true, either; you see, Mississippi ranks number one in something that doesn't get mentioned enough: There are more African-Americans in elected office in Mississippi than any other state in the union. You can look it up. After you read the story of Emmett Till, that is:
WASHINGTON, May 10 -- Nearly a half-century after the brutal killing of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, in Mississippi provided a flashpoint in the civil rights movement, the Justice Department said Monday that it was opening a criminal investigation into the case in light of new evidence.
In a surprise announcement, prosecutors said information uncovered in the filming of two documentaries on the 1955 killing suggested that people besides the two original suspects may have been involved.

"We owe it to Emmett Till, we owe it to his mother and to his family, and we owe it to ourselves to see if, after all these years, any additional measure of justice is still possible," said R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.

Black leaders consider the killing one of the last resolved murders of the early civil rights era, and a campaign has been building for months to push federal officials to re-examine the case. The new information gathered by the filmmakers suggests that as many as 10 other people took part in or observed the killing.

The re-examination of the case is a bittersweet victory for civil rights advocates.

"I am glad the case is being reopened, but it is sad that it has taken so long," said Kweisi Mfume, president and chief executive officer of the N.A.A.C.P.

Emmett Till, a Chicagoan who was visiting relatives in Money, Miss., that August, was dragged from his bed, beaten, shot and dropped in the Tallahatchie River after he had been accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's store. The image of Emmett's battered body in an open coffin at his funeral in Chicago became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement, particularly for many Northerners removed from the brutalities of the Jim Crow era.

Testimony from witnesses linked two white men -- Carolyn Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam -- to the crime. But an all-white jury acquitted them after the defense appealed to the jurors' white heritage. The defendants later gloated about the killing and provided gruesome details about the torture and murder in a Look magazine article. Both are now dead.

Mr. Acosta of the Justice Department called the acquittals a "gross miscarriage of justice" that moved the country to begin to confront the racism and segregation of the South.

The federal government did not investigate the case at the time, despite numerous pleas, and the five-year statute of limitations then in place for federal civil rights crimes has long expired.

But if others are now implicated, they could still be prosecuted by the State of Mississippi on charges of murder or perhaps other crimes, officials said. Mr. Acosta said that officials had already conducted a preliminary review into the new information and that federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents would work with the local authorities in Mississippi.

"At the end of the day, there may not be a prosecutable crime, but it's a case of such importance that it's worth taking a chance to see what's there," said a senior Justice Department official speaking on condition of anonymity.

Simeon Wright, a cousin of Emmett who shared a bed with him the night he was abducted, said he had been waiting for justice in the case most of his life.

"I'm elated by this," said Mr. Wright, a retired pipe fitter who lives in Chicago. "It's a great decision. Something had to be done."

Mr. Wright said the killing fractured what had what had once been a close-knit family, and relatives fled Mississippi for Chicago soon after the defendants were acquitted. His father, a cotton farmer who stood up in court to point out the accused men, had to leave most of the family's possessions behind, Mr. Wright said.

"Our world was never the same after that," he said.

The re-examination of the case was prompted in part by Keith Beauchamp, 32, a filmmaker from New York City who spent the last nine years making a documentary about the killing. Mr. Beauchamp said that based on his research, he believed five people were still alive who were involved in or had knowledge of the killing. Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, who died last year, was involved in the making of the film.

In recent years, Mr. Beauchamp has toured the country showing a partly completed version of his film, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," to drum up public support for a re-examination of the case. He has met with the federal authorities to plead his case and has also enlisted the help of members of Congress like Senator Charles E. Schumer and Representative Charles B. Rangel, both Democrats of New York.

Mr. Schumer said in an interview that he was "pleasantly surprised" by the Justice Department decision, but that investigators should now move quickly.

"Time is of the essence because so many of the witnesses and even the possible conspirators are older," he said. "In a case like this, justice delayed should not be justice denied."

A second filmmaker, Stanley Nelson of Manhattan, produced and directed a 2003 documentary titled "The Murder of Emmett Till" that has been broadcast on PBS and is scheduled to receive a Peabody Award next week. That documentary has also been reviewed by the Justice Department, officials said.

Mr. Nelson said he was hopeful the investigation would lead to charges against others.

"There were a number of people who had evidence about the murder who did not testify at the time because they were scared," he said. "We were able to go to Mississippi and find people in a week or two who had evidence to give. So if you have trained investigators with subpoena powers, who knows what will come of this?"

As part of his documentary, Mr. Nelson said, he interviewed a Mississippi man, Oudie Brown, who remembered seeing another man cleaning up blood shortly after the killing. "That's Emmett Till's blood," Mr. Brown said the other man had told him.

The Till murder is one of several civil rights cases that have been reopened long after most people thought they had been consigned to the history books. In 1994 in Jackson, Miss., a jury of eight blacks and four whites took six hours to convict Byron De La Beckwith, then 73, in the 1963 slaying of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Mr. Beckwith, a white segregationist, had been tried twice in 1964; both times the all-white juries had deadlocked.

Last year the Justice Department helped convict a 72-year-old former Klansman, Ernest Avants, in the 1966 slaying of a black sharecropper, Ben Chester White. The slaying was part of a plot, prosecutors said, to kill the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In trials in 2002 and 2001, two former Klansmen were convicted in the 1963 church bombing that killed four girls in Birmingham, Ala.

The re-examination of the Emmett Till killing came a week after the Justice Department announced an agreement forcing Cracker Barrel restaurants to ban discrimination against black diners.

Civil rights advocates were divided over whether the developments in the Till and Cracker Barrel cases represented a more aggressive posture under Mr. Acosta's leadership or politically motivated moves in an election year.

"We're happy to see the Justice Department stepping up to the plate, whatever the motivation," said Dennis Hayes, general counsel for the N.A.A.C.P. "Time will tell what it means. But two civil rights cases do not a trend make."
The New York Times

The paragraph's below were filed earlier in the day by the Associated Press in Chicago shortly after the announcement that the case was being reopened.
CHICAGO (AP) -- Though Mamie Till Mobley didn't live to see it, the pressure she exerted over four decades to have her son's 1955 murder reopened has finally borne fruit: The Justice Department is now looking into the case. ...

"I can see her sitting in the chair with a tissue, and her cheeks rosy red and her eyes full of tears. It would be a happy, relief, burden-lifted type of cry,'' said Airickca Gordon, 34, a cousin whom Mobley helped raise. [Mamie Till Mobley died in Chicago last year at age 81]

Two people charged in the case -- Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman Till purportedly whistled at, and J.W. Milam, Bryant's half brother -- were acquitted by a jury that deliberated for 67 minutes.

The two later admitted to the killing in a 1956 Look magazine interview, but couldn't be prosecuted again because the legal bar against double jeopardy. The Justice Department never investigated the case despite appeals from Till's mother and others. Both Bryant and Milam have since died. ...

A few days after allegedly whistling at Carolyn Bryant at her family's store, Till was abducted from his uncle's home in the small town of Money, Miss., on Aug. 28, 1955.

"There are lots of loose things out there that have never been answered," said Wheeler Parker, 65, a cousin who was in the house with Till the night he was abducted.

Another cousin who was there, Simeon Wright, said he recognized Bryant when he came into the bedroom that night.

"I guess I was hoping against hope that what they said was going to happen wasn't," Wright said Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America." "They said they were just going to whip him. Initially, they said they were looking for the boy from Chicago that did the talking in the store." ...

In the 1956 Look article, Milam recounted Till's murder.

"'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of them sending your kind down here to stir up trouble,'" Milam was quoted as saying. "I'm going to make an example of you, just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand."

Milam said he beat Till and shot him in the head, then used barbed wire to tie a heavy metal fan around Till's neck and dumped the body in the river. Other than Bryant, no other accomplices were mentioned. ...

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who was a young child when Till was slain, said he doesn't think Justice Department officials would reopen the case "unless they thought it would be good and useful to do that."

"It reopens some old wounds, but that's not always counterproductive to reconciliation," Barbour, a Republican, said Monday.

After her son's death, Mobley became a teacher and civil rights activist, always eager to speak about her son at schools, conferences and to strangers who recognized her.

"I wish Mamie could have been here," another of her cousins, Abriel Thomas, said Monday. "It was the only thing she ever wanted out of life -- a little bit of justice."
Associated Press
 


6:23 PM / Editor / permalink    3 comments




Seymour Hersh Continues To Deliver The Bad News We Must Have...

Seymour Hersh isn't considered the best wordsmith amongst his colleagues, and not all of us would feel safe enough to have a few scotches with him whilst we talked shop, particularly gabbing much about whatever story we were working on. Perhaps I should just say that...ahem, Seymour is, well, "competitive." Indeed, I wouldn't suggest bringing up Seymour's Pulitzer for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in the company of other journalists working that beat in those days. And certainly not to any journalist who knew and admired Ron Ridenhour, who passed away broke and mostly forgotten in New Orleans a few years ago--even though there almost certainly wouldn't have been a My Lai story anywhere in the press without the dogged determination of Ron. He could also write clean, gripping prose.

But all of that is "insider journalism" and not important to the matters at hand. Beyond question, Seymour Hersh delivers the goods, and he has been doing so for a very long time. If he reports it, you can take it to the bank that it's true. In that regard, there has never been any doubt. Which is exactly why his work on the Abu Ghraib disaster has the effect it does on the powers that be.

So, when he mentioned in passing on several talk shows last week that he had more coming on the story, it was reason for concern to anyone who would rather prosecute the photos than the sickos who staged and took them. In this week's New Yorker Magazine, Seymour makes good on his word, and then some. As always, his reportage is thorough. I am going to excerpt only some of it below. You should click through and read all of it. (A tip of the keyboard to Conrad, at The Gweilo Diaries, who linked to Seymour's story earlier today.)
In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he "knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI" -- military intelligence -- personnel at Abu Ghraib." Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used "military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee." ...

Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.

One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the cameraΒ?s view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate's leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.

...Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, "the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people." (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then "turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten." ...

When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the ArmyΒ?s military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. "Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I've never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated," Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, "I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I'd have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army." ...

In one case, disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined "at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank," the newspaper said.

Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The Army's senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem--a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort. ...

On January 16th, three days after the Army received the pictures, Central Command issued a blandly worded, five-sentence press release about an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was then that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January 19th, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the officer in charge of American forces in Iraq, ordered a secret investigation into Abu Ghraib. Two weeks later, General Taguba was ordered to conduct his inquiry. He submitted his report on February 26th. By then, according to testimony before the Senate last week by General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people "inside our building" had discussed the photographs. Myers, by his own account, had still not read the Taguba report or seen the photographs, yet he knew enough about the abuses to persuade "60 Minutes II" to delay its story.

At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and Marine General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain of command. If the Army had been slow, it was because of built-in safeguards. ...

In interviews, however, retired and active-duty officers and Pentagon officials said that the system had not worked. Knowledge of the nature of the abuses--and especially the politically toxic photographs--had been severely, and unusually, restricted. "Everybody I've talked to said, 'We just didn't know'--not even in the J.C.S.," one well-informed former intelligence official told me, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom such allegations would normally be shared. "I haven't talked to anybody on the inside who knew--nowhere. It's got them scratching their heads." A senior Pentagon official said that many of the senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib allegations.

"This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of command attention," a retired major general told me, speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. "Where were the flag officers? And I'm not just talking about a one-star," he added, referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. "This was a huge leadership failure."

The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld's office, General Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. "You've got to match action, or nonaction, with interests," the Pentagon official said. "What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems."

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. "They always want to delay the release of bad news--in the hope that something good will break," he said. ...

In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. "Oh, I'm not one for instant history," he responded. By Friday, however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and Senate committees and apologized for what he said was "fundamentally un-American" wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come. Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts, and hadn't reviewed the Army's copies until the day before. When he did, they were "hard to believe," he said. "There are other photos that depict . . . acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman." Later, he said, "It's going to get still more terrible, I'm afraid." Rumsfeld added, "I failed to recognize how important it was."

NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers Β?severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and 'acting inappropriately with a dead body.' The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys."

No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. ...

The Pentagon's impatience with military protocol extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America's treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation." ...

In a statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector General had an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner. A source familiar with one of the investigations told me that the victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has been assigned to the case. The source also told me that an Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate general were seeking, through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for testimony. ...

Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantanamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. "Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence," Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority.

General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, "effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties."

Taguba also criticized Miller's report, noting that "the intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guantanamo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda." Taguba noted that Miller's recommendations "appear to be in conflict" with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller's recommendations and Sanchez's change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action.

In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known, Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guantanamo and named head of prison operations in Iraq. "We have changed this--trust us," Miller told reporters in early May. "There were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again." ...

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused. ...

"He's not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon," a retired Army major general said of Taguba. "He's the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public."
There is a great deal more in this excellent piece of reporting at The New Yorker

 


12:16 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, May 10, 2004

Blogger's New "Dashboard" Has A Few Bugs, For The LongBow Papers, At Least

I was quite excited when I woke up to an all new Blogger this morning--well, a lecture on "Media & Foreign Policy" to my senior law students here at the China Foreign Affairs University came first. Ouch!

I have been waiting a long time for some of the new features, particularly the built-in "comments" addition. I have wanted to have a comments feature from the giddy-up, but I had not yet found one that was sure to be the right fit with Blogger. Using Blogger software on my own domain name and server, along with a template designed by my lovely wife, Ellen, the author and proprietor of The Crackpot Chronicles, rather than one of theirs, meant that Blogger and The LongBow Papers didn't always talk the same language. Unfortunately, this is still true with the shiny new Blogger.

I am most certainly not complaining; the new "Dashboard" with all of its bells and whistles is going to be a winner, no doubt--one-click "blockquotes" instead of typing the html code every time alone is worth whatever hassles are ahead of me. With a bit of luck, and some adroit code snipping and pasting--which is far easier written than done for this computer dunce--The LongBow Papers will have the comments feature by tomorrow. That very well might not be such a pleasant thing for the author of these pages, of course. My often unpopular view of things is sure to cause me much personal umbrage taken at those who will none too politely tell me exactly how wrong and stupid I really am about almost everything.

That can also be a very good thing, I suppose. Almost everyone I know or have known throughout my life has thought that any degree of anger-management and tolerating fools at least somewhat gladly would not be bad things for me know something about. Of course, I have always thought, and therefore often swore to, that I was a paragon of tolerance and civility. We will soon find out just how right or wrong they or I was on the matter. That is if I can get the goddamn, son-of-a-bitching thing to work!
 


8:52 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Road Map To Infamy...

When and how did it all go so wrong? There are those who will say that the war itself, the invasion of Iraq, March 20, 2003, is when the inevitable was set in motion. There are those who will say the international diplomacy by ultimatum and intimidation, the very notion or threat of defiant unilateral military force, is when the road to Abu Ghraib and its now indelible stamp of infamy began.

There will be many, many answers to that very large question for many, many years; there is still so much history to be studied, learned and written. Understand, I am not implying that the two premature answers above are even remotely correct. No yet. Yes, I have opinions, but there is also still too much yet to happen for me to offer even that at this moment.

We can, however, look at the smaller picture now, the one that will play the loudest in the weeks and months to come with their pending court martials and newer, even more disgusting revelations. Today's Washington Post lays out a pretty good snapshot of the events in Iraq that led to Abu Ghraib's ugly legacy. Excerpts of it are below.
Less than two weeks after 1,000 pounds of explosives demolished U.N. headquarters here on Aug. 19, driving the organization from Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was warden of the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists. Miller's mission in Iraq signaled new zeal to organize an intelligence network that could hit back at the insurgents, but through unorthodox means.

"He came up there and told me he was going to 'Gitmoize' the detention operation," turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the military prison system in Iraq. "But the difference is, in Guantanamo Bay there isn't a war going on outside the wall."

The worsening war outside the walls of the U.S. prison system in Iraq had a direct bearing on the abuses that occurred inside the facilities, according to Iraqi and American sources. Through the summer and fall of 2003, when detainees at Abu Ghraib prison suffered mistreatment now notorious throughout the world, the security situation in Iraq and the treatment of Iraqi prisoners ran parallel courses, both downward. ...

Last fall, U.S. military leaders cast about for ways to generate more information on the insurgency after focusing their early intelligence efforts on the hunt for Saddam Hussein, his top lieutenants and the weapons of mass destruction that were the Bush administration's rationale for going to war.

The urgency of the problem prompted U.S. officials to accept a new intelligence service they once opposed because of its similarity to Hussein's. It also led to more widespread detentions of Iraqis. The strategy was reflected in the rising number of Iraqis arrested for questioning across the country in the late fall. At Abu Ghraib alone, the number of prisoners rose from 5,800 in September to 8,000 five months later, when Karpinski received an official admonishment.

The harsh treatment of prisoners was seen by some of the perpetrators as consistent with Miller's recommendation for "setting conditions" for interrogations by military intelligence officers. Although abuses of prisoners have been denounced as aberrations, former detainees describe humiliation, pain and discomfort as commonplace. ...

The continuing strife had an impact on troops deployed in Iraq and looking forward to a prompt return home. In early June, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which would play a central role in the future U.S. intelligence strategy, received disheartening news. Instead of returning to the United States, the soldiers would be staying on in Iraq. ...

The 320th MP Battalion was assigned to Abu Ghraib, a prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad synonymous with Hussein's oppression. The unit was severely understaffed, with 450 soldiers responsible for as many as 7,000 prisoners at a time, according to the Taguba report. The jail was built to hold 4,800 prisoners.

"Morale suffered," Taguba wrote, "and over the next few months there did not appear to be any attempt to mitigate this morale problem." ...

Miller, a former paratrooper with a mild Texas drawl, arrived in Baghdad from Cuba on Aug. 31 at the head of a team "experienced in strategic interrogation," according to the Taguba report. Their aim was "to review current Iraqi theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence," Taguba wrote. ...

The Taguba report cites one of those recommendations as saying that the detention centers had to act as "an enabler for interrogation." Miller recommended giving military intelligence officers a greater role in how prisoners were detained, not only how they were questioned. He also recommended training a guard force that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation on internees/detainees."

These new procedures came into force as increasing numbers of Iraqis were being detained and interrogated. According to interviews with former prisoners, many arrests were made in predawn raids on houses. Others were swept up if weapons -- even licensed ones -- or suspicious items were found during roadside vehicle searches.

Ahmad Naje Dulaimi, a waiter at a restaurant in Baghdad's Adhamiya neighborhood, was arrested in the middle of the night of July 18. He had once worked for the Iraqi Olympic Committee, which was run by Hussein's son, Uday, and used as a cover for political persecution.

Dulaima was a long-distance freestyle swimmer on the Iraqi national team. A neighbor had informed U.S. soldiers of his affiliation, he said, and suggested to U.S. troops that he was a member of Hussein's militia, Saddam's Fedayeen.

"I had an Olympic Committee card in my wallet, but I told them I was a swimmer," said Dulaimi, a lanky 23-year old with floppy hair and acne. "I guess the Americans believed their spy."

Within days, the informant, a well-known religious figure in the neighborhood, was killed for working with U.S. troops, Dulaimi said.

Dualimi's 11-month imprisonment began in the interrogation rooms of the Adhamiya Palace, a former Hussein villa now being used by U.S. troops. He spent the first night in the T-shirt and shorts he was sleeping in at the time of his arrest, but he was also hooded, with his hands and feet bound by plastic cuffs.

For two days, he consumed only a cracker and several sips of water, he said. On the third night, he was interrogated by two U.S. soldiers, a man and a woman, who were assisted by a Kuwaiti interpreter. The male soldier strode into the interrogation room, Dulaimi said, and immediately urinated on his head.

"They asked me about Baathists in the neighborhood, if there were officers, who sold weapons, and who were Fedayeen. I told them I knew nothing," said Dulaimi, who also spent time in Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib before he was freed on Thursday, according to his release papers and prison identification bracelet. "They said, 'We know you are innocent, but we want information from you. You know these people.' " ...

In a news conference here Saturday, Miller said, "There was no recommendation ever by this team -- the team that I had here in August and September -- that recommended that the MPs become actively involved in interrogation, in the interrogation booth."

The prison system's new "Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," issued Oct. 12, came in the wake of Miller's recommendations. According to the Taguba report, the "numerous photos and videos portraying detainee abuse by Military Police personnel" were dated soon after the policy was adopted, sometime between October and December. ...

Last week, denunciations and threats rang out from mosques across Iraq during Friday prayers. Powerful clerics ridiculed the U.S. occupation authority's central justification for the war -- that it would bring justice to a country suffering under dictatorship -- and warned or reprisals if those who carried out the torture were not tried by an independent court.

"Saddam didn't claim that he was for freedom and equality," Moqtada Sadr, the rebellious Shiite cleric now commanding a thousands-strong anti-U.S. militia, told hundreds of worshippers in the southern city of Kufa. "I call for humanitarian organizations to change this prison into a humanitarian establishment, and to try the criminals in honest courts as soon as possible. Otherwise, we'll do the necessary actions in ways that you don't expect."
There is a whole lot more in The Washington Post
 


6:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Whores of Babylon...and Their Pimps

How can it be that the worst national moral scandal in our nation's history happened under the administration of the most fundamentalist Christian president in its history? Perhaps I should qualify the two elements of the question.

The worst moral scandal? No, Abu Ghraib is not My Lai. Rape, sexual degradation, depraved humiliation, emotional extortion, cultural demonizing, physical abuse, a fair amount of fairly routine physical torture, and two or three murders do not equal the massacre of scores of Vietnamese women and children. Abu Ghraib is not equal to the Black Holocaust, with its shameful enslaving, flogging, raping, lynching and tormenting of millions of African-Americans over three centuries. Abu Ghraib is also not equivalent to the systematic annihilation of unknown millions of Native Americans over some four centuries.

But then none of those atrocities can be classified as "immoral" in the Anglo-Saxon, Judaic-Christian view of sexuality, wherein typically lies most American-Puritanical taboos. We do not have to search the two centuries of America’s existence as a nation to find Abu Ghraib’s equivalent. There is none, certainly not at the institutional level of Abu Ghraib and certainly not under the Color of Authority of the armed services of the United States of America.

The most fundamentalist Christian president? There's not even a list with which to compare George W. Bush. William Jennings Bryant would have been a match but he lost every presidential race he entered. Jimmy Carter? President Carter wasn't a born-again Christian. He lived his faith every day of his life beginning with his natural birth, evangelizing only by example, never by goody-two-shoe platitudes and never with the arrogance of a zealous "true believer."

As to the "moral" scandal, I will put it this way so as to cut to the chase: George W. Bush's majority wing of the Republican Party believes that homosexuality is a crime against nature, that it is a sickness of the soul, not a life-choice. Many still believe that it should be an actual crime, a felony that should be punished by incarceration. I could go into any number of other fundamentalist “family value" issues concerning sexuality that are pillars of the faith-based, natural-law and Bible-as-absolute-word-of-God branch of unforgiving moralists that are well known to be the overwhelming majority of the Bush electorate. But just this one issue will do.

It will suffice because, based on the photographs so far disclosed, the Abu Ghraib atrocity of conscience was thematically based upon forced and or simulated homosexual acts or poses and homoerotic naked male contact for the purpose of photographing, apparently for three uses: Intimidation to “soften up” detainees for interrogation; enhanced control over the detainees while incarcerated and afterwards, knowing they would never willingly disclose to family and friends what they had been forced to do; and as a form of voyeuristic pleasure, since we now understand that the digital photos were passed widely around for viewing by any number of American troops in Baghdad.

I can only pose the question. I do not know why a sickening level of sexual immorality happened uniquely, peculiarly during an administration that, based upon its words and record, one would think a deviant culture so at odds with the prevailing national will would not dare to flourish openly but rather seek only dark, hidden places to perpetrate such activity. But the ugliness at Abu Ghraib was just the opposite, choosing instead to be conducted not only openly, not only flagrantly, not only routinely, but it was happily, freely documented ad nauseam by digital cameras with all of the frequency of tourists at the Great Wall.

I am asking you. I am asking everyone. We need to find the answer. I believe therein might lie at least part of the solution to its eradication from the present and a preventative for its return in the future.

We can at least for the moment study the evidence, and those people who have already admitted to participation in the atrocities—how could they not when they are pictured in full digital color wherever we look these days:
There were no rules, by her account, and there was little training. But the mission was clear. Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, a military police officer who has been charged with abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation.

"They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," Harman said by e-mail this week from Baghdad. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk."

Harman, one of seven military police reservists charged in the abuse of detainees at the prison, is the second of those soldiers to speak publicly about her time at Abu Ghraib, and her comments echo findings of the Army's investigation into prisoner abuse there. She did not discuss abusive treatment of prisoners or clarify who specifically ordered such treatment, and she referred questions about the charges against her to her attorney, who declined to comment.

Her face is now famous as belonging to one of two soldiers posing in the widely published photograph of naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid. The picture is one of several that have inflamed the Arab world and brought condemnation from President Bush and other U.S. political and military leaders.

Harman is accused by the Army of taking photographs of that pyramid and photographing and videotaping detainees who were ordered to strip and masturbate in front of other prisoners and soldiers, according to a charge sheet obtained by The Washington Post. She is also charged with photographing a corpse and then posing for a picture with it; with striking several prisoners by jumping on them as they lay in a pile; with writing "rapeist" on a prisoner's leg; and with attaching wires to a prisoner's hands while he stood on a box with his head covered. She told him he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box, the documents said.

In her e-mails, Harman said detainees would be handed over to her military police unit by Army intelligence officers, by CIA operatives or by the contractors. The Army probe into Abu Ghraib said the U.S. government used employees of private companies as interrogators and interpreters along with intelligence officers. Two of the civilian contractors are under investigation in connection with the abuses.

Prisoners were stripped, searched and then "made to stand or kneel for hours," Harman said. Sometimes they were forced to stand on boxes or hold boxes or to exercise to tire them out, she said.

"The person who brought them in would set the standards on whether or not to 'be nice,' " she said. "If the prisoner was cooperating, then the prisoner was able to keep his jumpsuit, mattress, and was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner didn't give what they wanted, it was all taken away until [military intelligence] decided. Sleep, food, clothes, mattresses, cigarettes were all privileges and were granted with information received."

She said the prison had no standard operating procedures and on Tier 1A, where suspected insurgents were held, Army and other intelligence officers "made the rules as they went." ...
Harman, an assistant manager at a Papa John's Pizza in Fairfax County before being sent to Iraq, said the company received additional training at Fort Lee, but it was for "combat support, not I/R," the military term for internment and resettlement. She said she was never schooled in the Geneva Conventions' rules on prisoner treatment.

"The Geneva Convention was never posted, and none of us remember taking a class to review it," Harman said. "The first time reading it was two months after being charged. I read the entire thing highlighting everything the prison is in violation of. There's a lot."

Harman is charged with conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, making a false statement, and assault. She faces an Article 32 hearing tentatively set in June, the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing to determine whether there is enough evidence to convene a court-martial.

Harman's mother, Robin Harman, said her daughter would never hurt anyone.

"She has this . . . attitude that she is going to save the world," said Robin Harman, who lives in Northern Virginia. "She got over there and got an eye-opener. You don't put unqualified kids in that situation."

Yesterday, as Robin Harman watched Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testify, she called her daughter a "scapegoat." "They're passing the buck, putting it all on the little kids," she said. "That's what makes me so mad."

Harman took many photographs while in Iraq, her family said.

Among hundreds of digital pictures passed around her MP unit -- and obtained by The Post -- is one taken before the soldiers got to Abu Ghraib in October. In it, Harman is smiling, crouching slightly, a thumb up, and leaning toward a blackened, decaying corpse with long fingers and a gaping mouth.

The photo was taken at a makeshift combat morgue in Al Hillah, her family said, citing letters that Harman sent with the picture.
The Washington Post

And then we have another lovely young lady who frolicked in the ancient kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. She has been exposed the most. The lady with the Iraqi on her leash. The cigarette smoking, masturbation demonstrator. What is her story? Is there anything to be learned here?
RALEIGH, N.C. - Although relatives insist she was following orders, the military charged an Army reservist with assaulting detainees after photographs surfaced of her smiling and pointing at naked Iraqi prisoners.

Pfc. Lynndie England on Friday became the seventh member of an Army Reserve military police unit to be charged in a scandal that has drawn outrage around the world and damaged the reputation of the United States as it tries to stabilize Iraq.

England 21, faces four allegations, according to a statement from the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg.

She is accused of assaulting Iraqi detainees on multiple occasions; conspiring with another soldier, Spc. Charles Graner, to mistreat the prisoners; committing an indecent act; and committing acts "that were prejudicial to good order and discipline and were of nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces through her mistreatment of Iraqi detainees." ...

In photographs that have been shown repeatedly in news reports, England is seen smiling, cigarette in her mouth, as she leans forward and points at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi.

Another photo shows her holding a leash that encircles the neck of a naked Iraqi man lying on his side on a cellblock floor, his face contorted. ...

Both England and Graner were members of the Army Reserve's 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cumberland, Md. Graner's attorney has said he faces a possible court-martial on criminal charges of maltreatment and indecent acts.

England's family said she is pregnant with Graner's child.
The Washington Post

And here is the story of the soldier who with the help of his father pimped his way onto "60 Minutes II" with the picture proof that rocked the world and shocked a nation. It is also the story of a soldier with a "good" side and a "bad" side:
CUMBERLAND, Md., May 7 -- Ivan Frederick was distraught. His son, an Army reservist turned prison guard in Iraq, was under investigation earlier this year for mistreating prisoners, and photographs of the abuse were beginning to circulate among soldiers and military investigators.

So the father went to his brother-in-law, William Lawson, who was afraid that reservists like his nephew would end up taking the fall for what he considered command lapses, Mr. Lawson recounted in an interview on Friday. He knew whom to turn to: David Hackworth, a retired colonel and a muckraker who was always willing to take on the military establishment. Mr. Lawson sent an e-mail message in March to Mr. Hackworth's Web site and got a call back from an associate there in minutes, he said.

That e-mail message would put Mr. Lawson in touch with the CBS News program "60 Minutes II" and help set in motion events that led to the public disclosure of the graphic photographs and an international crisis for the Bush administration. ...

The irony, Mr. Lawson said, is that the public spectacle might have been avoided if the military and the federal government had been responsive to his claims that his nephew was simply following orders. Mr. Lawson said he sent letters to 17 members of Congress about the case earlier this year, with virtually no response, and that he ultimately contacted Mr. Hackworth's Web site out of frustration, leading him to cooperate with a consultant for "60 Minutes II."

"The Army had the opportunity for this not to come out, not to be on 60 Minutes," he said. "But the Army decided to prosecute those six G.I.'s because they thought me and my family were a bunch of poor, dirt people who could not do anything about it. But unfortunately, that was not the case." ...

But there are still numerous unresolved questions about the photographs. One is why they were taken. Some officials suggest that soldiers wanted the photographs as souvenirs, but some relatives said they believed that the photographs were going to be shown to other prisoners to pressure their cooperation.
Then there is the question of how the photographs became public.

Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of forces in the region, testifying Friday before Congress, said he was still unclear how that happened. "It was a surprise that it got out," General Smith said.

Military officials were aware of two disks with photographs on them that were part of continuing investigations, one in Iraq and another in Washington, he said.

"That was the limit of the pictures, and we thought we had them all," General Smith said.

Producers at "60 Minutes II" are not saying exactly how they got the photographs. But Jeff Fager, the executive producer, said, "We heard about someone who was outraged about it and thought that the public should know about it." ...

Officials said that the photographs showing psychological or physical abuse numbered in the hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000, with Mr. Rumsfeld hinting Friday that more may come out.

Among some prison personnel in Iraq, the photographs were apparently an open secret. "Some soldiers in Iraq had them — I'm hearing that soldiers were showing them to everybody," Mr. Lawson said. He said he did not have the original photos and did not turn them over to anyone.

The photographs have now turned soldiers like Mr. Lawson's nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, and Pfc. Lynndie R. England into graphic symbols of military abuse. But for Mr. Lawson, they are evidence of a complete breakdown in training and authority in the Iraqi prison system.

He shared his frustration in his March 23 e-mail message to Mr. Hackworth's Web site, writing: "We have contacted the Red Cross, Congress both parties, Bill O'Reilly and many others. Nobody wants to touch this."

Less than five weeks later, images of his nephew — interviewed on "60 Minutes II" with Mr. Lawson's help — would be shown around the world. Far from untouchable, the story would become unavoidable.
The New York Times

 


11:14 AM / Editor / permalink   



Saturday, May 08, 2004

A Shooter Explains...

I know I have spent too much time in maximum security prisons in the States as a journalist and investigator over the past couple of decades. Why? Because when I read an article like the one below, which is an interview with a National Guardsman who shot to death two inmates in Abu Ghraib, and seriously wounded others, I actually understand his point of view. I don't like it. I know I don't like him. I've known too many correctional officers with his attitude, and in truth I loathe each and every one of them. BUT, I understand him, and them. There are many more correctional officers that I know quite well and like a whole lot. While none of them can be accused of "coddling" convicted violent felons, they have compassion and basic human respect for the inmates whose complete lives they are responsible for, down to the smallest detail.

Therefore, my perspective on this particular aspect of the Abu Ghraib scandal is admittedly suspect. On the other hand, the sexual degradation and base perversity aspects has me outraged--and seriously puzzled--because I do NOT understand it and never will. It has exposed a nauseous vein in the American psyche I did not know existed outside of the sick but relatively rare world of sexual predators and monsters, a few of whom I have had the distinct displeasure of spending time with in an attempt to capture their thoughts for posterity.

You should read Sgt. Terry Stowe's story and judge him for yourself:
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (Reuters) - A U.S. soldier who shot dead two Iraqis during a riot at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and fired rubber bullets at inmates said on Friday some force was needed to run a wartime prison.

"A few people would probably say that I jumped at the opportunity on taking a life," said Sgt. Terry Stowe, 44, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company. ...

"I tried my darndest not to pull the trigger the whole damn time I was there, but when I see my fellow soldiers and my comrades in mortal danger, I'm going to do what I can to save their lives."

Stowe, in an interview with Reuters, justified his actions on the grounds that he was acting to prevent greater violence. A March internal military report prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba has criticized the military's lack of training and other conditions that led to the three deaths in the Nov. 24 riot.

The former security company official, who served at Abu Ghraib from July 2003 to March 2004, said some fellow MPs, as well as officials in Washington, failed to understand the harsh realities of running a prison where a few hundred U.S. guards control thousands of Iraqi prisoners.

"There were many small aspects of violence that were needed when one or two people get too unruly or won't do as they're told," said Stowe, who served in the first Gulf War before joining the National Guard. "Just to keep the peace we use non-lethal (force) or just tell them: 'Hey, you need to quit.' Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."

He said the U.S. government had exacerbated difficulties in Abu Ghraib by jailing many Iraqis who did not deserve to be there. He cited one man arrested for stealing a toothbrush and given what he said was a long sentence.

Stowe also blamed the military and politicians in Washington for turning a blind eye to realities in Iraq. "The military chain of command is so uptight with politics, they don't want to know the real deal. Our people are put under so much stress ... they don't know where to turn."

Speaking in Redwood City south of San Francisco where he lives, Stowe cited several times when he used rubber bullets. Once he fired on a crowd of 15 or 20 engaged in a fight that broke out during a soccer game. He said no one was killed, although some prisoners developed welts. One time, he said he fired a rubber bullet at a prisoner who refused to sit down.

"Bang, nonlethal, just give him a little nudge or rubber bullet in the chest saying 'you will do as you're told,"' he said of the incident. "He was not posing a danger but if you let him get away with it he will constantly do it. It's almost like a stepping stone on how far they can push a soldier." ...

The Nov, 24 riot still haunts Stowe in his dreams as he replays his shooting of three from a guard tower above the prison yard about 150 feet away. He said other MPs tried rubber bullets and other means without success.

"There were two MPs on the ground in between two compounds where they were getting pummeled by large rocks and bricks and whatever they were throwing," he said. "That's when I wounded the first one to get them to stop, to give them their warning that deadly force is authorized."

"Then the prisoners concentrated on the tower in between the two compounds -- there were two more MPs in that tower," he said. "They were getting pummeled also, and that's when I had to take two more shots." The second two shots were fatal. The prisoner hit by the first bullet survived.
Reuters
 


2:44 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, May 07, 2004

Human Rights Record Costs China EU Deal

As a diversion from my gloom over the Abu Ghraib nightmare, I went to a baseball game this afternoon. Beijing was shutout 4-zip by Tianjin in the Chinese Baseball League, the Middle Kingdom's attempt to solidify professional baseball for the years to come. The level of play is about that of a last place team in a Single A short-season rookie minor league in the states--with some individual exceptions. Beijing has a little second baseman that could probably play at the Double A level with another season under him. But it's baseball, it's fun, and some day there will be real talent coming out of China headed for the MLB. Anyway, a ballyard, any ballyard is special to me, a place of safe harbor where the cares of the world evaporate for a few hours. Baseball has been a very large part of my life, throughout my life. I am just happy to have it here on the other side of the world, where I now make my home

I am now awaiting Donald Rumsfeld's appointment with a congressional grilling live on CNN. But in a brief bit of surfing after a fine meal at a Muslim Chinese restaurant here in Beijing, I came across the story below in The Guardian. Interesting, give the whole piece a good read:
The European Union yesterday refused to lift its ban on arms sales to China amid ongoing concerns about human rights abuses and a crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong.

But the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, and the president of the European commission, Romano Prodi, did sign new agreements to boost expanding trade ties and pledged to deepen relations.

Mr Wen, who went to Brussels with a 100-strong delegation, tried but failed to secure an end to the arms embargo imposed after the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.

"We have expressed the hope that the EU will lift its arms embargo and give us the status of a market economy," he said, adding that trade and human rights issues should not be linked.

Mr Prodi said any lifting would have to be agreed to by all 25 EU member states. France and Germany are both keen to sell sophisticated weapons to China, and argue that the issue is now of purely symbolic significance.

EU trade is handled by the commission, but foreign policy proper remains in the hands of national governments - one of the union's peculiarities that its partners find puzzling and frustrating.

Britain, concerned about limits on democracy in Hong Kong, is against ending the embargo. So is the US, which accuses Beijing of backsliding on human rights and says sales could upset the strategic balance in east Asia.

Mr Wen, who is a modernising reformer, has already visited Germany and heads for Italy, Britain and Ireland before returning home next week. China sees a strong EU as a useful political and economic counter-balance to the US.
The Guardian

 


11:04 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Detainees Were Shot And Killed From Watchtowers At Abu Ghraib

It just keeps getting worse. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Red Cross delivered a devastating report of routine atrocities at Abu Ghraib to the administration in February. The report included summary executions that sound a great deal like the "sport-killing" by correctional officers at California's Corcoran State prison that shocked America a couple of years ago. The report below is from Reuters quoting the Wall Street Journal since the paper has a subscription only online edition. (You most certainly can go there with the link if you don't mind paying.) The fact that WSJ is releasing this scoop is significant in itself; after all, it is the most conservative of America's major dailies and has a lot riding on Bush's reelection.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Red Cross report delivered to the United States in February suggested abuse of Iraqi prisoners was widespread and may have been tolerated by the U.S.-led coalition, the Wall Street Journal said on Friday.

The confidential report concluded that mistreatment in some cases was "tantamount to torture," the newspaper said. The findings were based on inspections and interviews in Iraq by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The February report shows the treatment of prisoners in Iraq differed with statements made by officials in the administration of President Bush that military higher-ups had not condoned the abuse, the newspaper said.

It quoted the report as saying information gathered by the Red Cross "suggested the use of ill-treatment against persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.

In the report, the Red Cross said prisoners were held in empty cells naked at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and beaten by soldiers. Three former military policemen at the prison told Reuters on Thursday that abuse was commonplace.

The aid group also said coalition forces fired on unarmed prisoners from watchtowers and killed some of them, as well as committing "serious violations" of the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of war prisoners, the Journal said.
Reuters.com
 


8:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




My Turn...

As surely you have noticed over the past few days, my mind, heart and soul has been strangely gripped by the abuse under the Color of Authority perpetrated by American soldiers at the infamous prison named Abu Ghraib. The question is why? But then just me asking that question is strange, and arrogant. Millions of people around the world have been gripped in the worst ways by the Abu Ghraib atrocities. Why are mine any different?

Mostly I think it is because it’s my business, it is my territory, if you will. No, not Iraq; prisons, prisoners, jailers, crime and punishment, man’s inhumanity to man is my business. I should say “was,” because a couple of years ago I quit that business. I had lost a large part of my time and my life by spending too much time getting into the heads of murderers and violent criminals for almost two decades. It cost me a family; it cost me friends; it cost me financially when my findings were too true for too many who wish not to know truth other than that which they already believe.

It’s a young man’s business anyway, and I had a very good run for a very long time. I am not bitter or unhappy about going back to the things I loved most when I first started writing: fiction, political commentary and teaching.

Yet I again feel that passion of old tugging at me hard over the ugly, perverse revelations of our turn at running the most infamous prison of contemporary times. And the perverse part is what is gnawing at me. That is the conundrum here. That is the thing that everyone is not talking about. Even though the words and pictures the commentators and journalists are using are of course sexually perverse, everyone is missing the point and it is as big as the elephant in the living room. Perhaps that is why. The perversity cannot be seen through the pervasive perversity of the pictures.

Folks, torture and abuse under the Color of Authority I know well. When the state prisons in California were murder pits only a couple of years ago—you remember Corcoran State Prison—I was there, I was involved. I was also at California state prisons that did not make the news because they were stuck so far out in the desert most of my colleagues in the media didn’t even know how to find them, and the sport killings and arranged death-fights flourished under the scorching sun but not the light of exposure, although I tried. Mostly though I was trying to keep an inmate or two that I was close to alive, so that other crimes could be solved and injustices exposed.

I know and understand unwarranted violence in all of its manifestations; I hate it, I do not excuse or condone it, but I understand where it comes from. I have spent a lifetime studying it; and there were times in my life when violence was an occasional reality in my life because of the bigotry and baseness that lurks deep in the belly of most humans. And there lies the terrible quandary of Abu Ghraib. Since the seeds of unwarranted violence upon living flesh lies in the center of us all, waiting to come out under all of the wrong conditions, I no longer puzzle over its sudden appearance in otherwise mundane lives. And I certainly do not puzzle over it when it comes out of the state of institutionalized violence such as war, or even civilian riots.

What I am utterly amazed over, what I have never seen, what I have never even heard of, is the systemic use of deviant sexual behavior as a device of prisoner control or manipulation. Yes, prisons in America are rampant with sexual abuse—inmate rape upon inmate is a routine part of prison life. Occasionally sex will occur between correctional officers and individual prisoners.

And, yes, dehumanization is systemic in American prisons. It starts from the very beginning, and it does usually start with nakedness and body searches and communal showers under the glare of guards who soon direct you to a laundry stack and a prison “uniform” becomes your attire for years. All of this is done with the purpose of breaking your will to resist. You are meant to feel powerless, vulnerable, under dominion.

But where did this insanity at Abu Ghraib come from? The whole thing was about sexual perversion. It was calculated. American soldiers, from a country and an Army that is still embroiled in its acceptance of homosexuality, force detainees to commit or simulate homosexual behavior for the purpose of being filmed? Where did the idea even come from?

When I say it is unprecedented, folks, I mean it. Yes, there were certainly instances of sexual depravity, even at times on a relatively large scale, in the Nazi death camps. But it was for sexual gratification of sadists and sexual predators. It was not part of the “Final Solution.” Extermination was.

From everything we have seen, homosexual contact, or the appearance of it, was THE plan at Abu Ghraib. Emotional extortion apparently was part of the plan also. Knowing there were photographs of them in poses of naked humiliation was obviously thought to be a mechanism of both intimidation and control over the detainees. Intimidation to make them talk in the off-chance they knew something about the insurgency; and control over what they would say when they were eventually freed, as almost all of these detainees would be, since they were not hardened insurgents or they would have been handled entirely differently.

There can be no doubt then that these soldiers were instructed to do what they did by intelligence operatives who knew the stigma attached to such behavior in the Muslim world. Okay, so now we understand that there was a “military plan” behind the nightmare.

But that nightmare is beyond our ability to endure as a leader of civilized nations. With all of this not just an aberration by a few “sick” reservists, it must be pinned to where it belongs: Upon us as a nation. A hard cure with bitter medicine? Absolutely. But the sooner we accept it, take the medicine, clean up the vomit of our sickness, the sooner we can go about making the enormous amends we owe to the world.

No, you nor I nor your neighbors had anything to do with it. But men and women we sent over to Iraq in our name did. And we also sent over in our name the men and women who gave the instructions. And we also empowered the leaders of our nation who set a tone of cultural bigotry that ensured such ugliness would be used against the “enemies” of a “Christian” nation.

Most of the talk has been about what heightened retribution will be taken upon our troops in the months ahead because of what happened at Abu Ghraib. And I am sure there is reason for this concern. American soldiers may very well die in greater numbers because of Abu Ghraib. This pains me greatly.

I am, however, much more troubled by what this will mean to the death of the American ideal—for those who still look to us for moral leadership in this terribly unsettled world, but just as much for what the death of the American ideal will mean to you and me and those who will follow us.
 


4:34 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Has The Real Christopher Hitchens Been Spurred To Reappear By The Shame Of Abu Ghraib?

There was a time when almost all professional wordsmiths admired Christopher Hitchens. He was prolific, which is always to be admired in the business. He wrote beautifully, with a style that was only his; he was derivative of no one, and at the same time everyone who ever wrote well. That is not a contradiction; it is one of the finest compliments one can pay a writer. After all, everyone who writes steals something from every writer he's read. And it doesn't really matter since all of us steal almost everything from William Shakespeare; and we also know that all of us are only fighting for second place no matter how talented we are, Mr. Shakespeare is that far out in front of the pack.

But I am writing about Mr. Hitchens; I lecture on Shakespeare every Friday morning at 8:00 AM, if you are in Beijing, drop in if you wish. Do not bring Christopher Hitchens with you, however, unless you want to witness an ugly scene. You see, most writers I know believe that Hitchens has become a sad, embittered caricature of himself. It didn't happen overnight, of course, it just seemed that way. Mostly it was all that time spent on the inside of the beltway that got to him. His success had been writing from the outside looking in, and doing so brilliantly. A funny thing happened besides his loss of perspective, though, and it didn't come from success I don't believe. He just turned mean. Very mean.

He had always wielded a sharp knife, but he began to actually hate some of the people he covered. He also shamefully betrayed friends, fellow colleagues. So much so that in his hatred for Bill Clinton he violated not only a journalist's most sacred rule, the absolute protection of a source's identity, he betrayed a friend, one of his closest friends, a man who in fact had helped Hitchens in his networking inside Washington. He volunteered to go before the house impeachment panel and publicly identify and testify to what this very close friend had told him privately, off the record, about a matter he had knowledge of through his position as a senior member of President Clinton's staff. I do not need to name him here for the informed, and wish not to for those not informed. It was all very public; there was even a book which featured this episode. I choose not to sully his name in these pages.

But all of the above is reason only to disrespect the man, not the writer. The writing also changed, however. Sometimes cynicism and bitterness can wear well on a writer late into his career. It was true of Mark Twain, for example; his dark cynicism and bitterness in his last years produced memorable work. Not all literary scholars will agree with me on that, but most will. Also most contemporary critics will agree with me about Hitchens' work over the past seven or eight years. Editors? Mostly, no. Hitchens is still prolific to the max. Editors like copy even more than they do style and certainly more than they do integrity and emotional honesty in their contributors.

Why am I writing so much about Christopher Hitchens on a day dedicated to the Abu Ghraib scandal? Because the pathos of it has somehow, perhaps only momentarily, brought back the old Hitchens, the real Christopher Hitchens. And I want you to read him. He is still writing mean; and the cynicism is still all too apparent, but the emotional honesty is there, in spades:
The images from Abu Ghraib prison do not test one's convictions about the wrongness of torture. They test one's opinions about the wrongness of capital punishment. Just consider for a moment what this bunch of giggling sadists has done, with its happy snaps and recreational cruelties:

* It has defiled one of the memorials of regime change. I was a visitor to Abu Ghraib last summer, and the stench of misery and evil was still palpable in those pits and cellars. It is as if British or American soldiers had not only executed German prisoners of war, but had force-marched them to Dachau in order to commit the atrocity.

* It has been like a shot in the back to the many soldiers (active front-line duty, not safe-job prison guards) who were willing to take casualties rather than inflict them and who fought selectively and carefully. What are the chances of the next such soldier who is captured by some gang of Saddamists or Wahabbists or Khomeinists?

* It seems, at least on its face, to have profaned the idea of women in the military. One does not have to concede anything to Islamist sexism in order to know what the impact of obscene female torturers will have in the wider society.

This is only the rehearsal for one's revulsion. One of two things must necessarily be true. Either these goons were acting on someone's authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.

Probably everyone has wondered what they might do—or might allow to be done—in the case of the "ticking bomb" and the stubborn terrorist detainee. At least when I saw the movie, Sean Connery in The Untouchables got a rousing cheer when he shot a corpse in the head, in the thick of combat, to convince a mobster that he was deadly serious. But no such excuse will conceivably do in this case. Junk videos made by mediocre pick-nose pornographers are evidence of a complete indifference to intelligence. Who is going to dare claim that a car bomb outside a school was thwarted by such tactics? One has to remember the crucial objection to torture in the first place. Moral considerations apply, as they must. But the vice of the torturer is that he or she produces confessions by definition. And soon, the whole business of confession has become polluted with falsity and madness. Even the medieval church was smart enough to work this out and to drop the practice.

Another objection is that the torturers very swiftly become a law unto themselves, a ghoulish class with a private system. It takes no time at all for them to spread their poison and to implicate others in what they have done, if only by coverup. And the next thing you know is that torture victims have to be secretly murdered so that the news doesn't leak. One might also mention that what has been done is not forgiven, or forgotten, for generations.

If anyone wanted to argue that torture is a matter of routine in many of the countries whose official media now express such shock, they would have to argue by way of double standards. This case would collapse at once and of its own weight if the standard was to become a single one, or if one torturer became an excuse for another. This point doesn't completely apply to the media themselves, who have yet to show the video execution of an Italian civilian kidnapped by Iraqi jihadists, or indeed many other lurid atrocities. But there's no hypocrisy in holding self-proclaimed liberators to a higher standard.
Slate
 


1:49 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Be Careful What You Say, You May Have To Taste Those Words All The Way Back Down Your Gullet

There is a very interesting timeline of spoken words over at Slate. I am only going to supply a sampling, and then I'm sure you will click on over:
Rape Rooms: A Chronology

What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded.

By William Saletan
Updated Wednesday, May 5, 2004, at 7:54 PM PT


"The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don't have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over."—Paul Bremer, Administrator, [Iraq] Coalition Provisional Authority, Sept. 2, 2003

"Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers."—President Bush, remarks to 2003 Republican National Committee Presidential Gala, Oct. 8, 2003 ...

"Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape rooms no longer exist, mass graves are no longer a possibility in Iraq." —Bush, remarks at "Ask President Bush" event, Michigan, May 3, 2004

"I'm not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. … I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word." —Rumsfeld, Defense Department Operational Update Briefing, May 4, 2004

"It's very important for people, your listeners, to understand in our country that when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act—and we act in a way where leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our Congress asks pointed questions to the leadership. … Iraq was a unique situation because Saddam Hussein had constantly defied the world and had threatened his neighbors, had used weapons of mass destruction, had terrorist ties, had torture chambers …" —Bush, interview with Al Arabiya Television, May 5, 2004
The above were from just the beginning and end. There are about 25 more of them at Slate
 


12:32 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




There Are Some Words A Bush Just Cannot Say

Perhaps it is genetic. Perhaps it's by family tradition and training. Perhaps it's his own unique combination of arrogance and deeply inward sense of insecurity: the wastrel son of a dynastic family? This is one thing we cannot blame on his 12-step born-again-Christianity. AA demands that you make amends and apologies to all whom you have wronged during your bingeing days. I know--I've had to sit and listen to a couple of those maudlin, embarrassing, face-to-face sessions of self-serving catharsis from friends and relatives. But the man just will not say it. Strange. And very troublesome for our foreign service personnel. Working for the State Department anywhere but in Washington now could qualify for hazardous duty stipulations.
Why Bush Didn't Apologize?

In his Arab TV interviews, the president refused to say the words Iraqis needed to hear: I'm sorry.

By Fred Kaplan
Updated Wednesday, May 5, 2004, at 3:09 PM PT

It would be a surprise if President Bush's Arab TV interviews today went over well with Iraqi viewers. It would also be a surprise if he much cared.

His remarks seemed geared, for the most part, to American voters, who he knew would watch replays and excerpts a few hours later. For this audience, he pushed all the right buttons. For the other, Arab audience, he pushed a few of the right buttons, brushed up against some of the wrong ones, and deliberately avoided the crucial ones.

He scheduled the interviews—with Al Arabiya, a popular and independent Arabic network, and Al Hurra, a much-derided station owned by the U.S. government (but, pointedly, not with Al Jazeera)—to defuse the uproar over news of American soldiers torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. As everyone acknowledges, these revelations could irreversibly harm America's already-tarnished reputation in the Middle East.

Before Bush went on the air, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, profusely apologized on Arabic television, as did Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander in charge of detainee operations.

But one of several things that Bush did not do, when his turn came, was to apologize. He used the words "abhorrent," "appalled," "horrible," and said, "What took place does not represent the America that I know"—all good words, as far as they go. But he did not say, "I'm sorry."

It seems the president is allergic not just to the words but to the concept of responsibility that underlies them. To apologize would be to admit he'd made a mistake. And mistakes are forbidden in the Bush White House. ...

Some of the president's comments were oddly dissonant. When the Al Hurra correspondent asked him if anyone would resign because of the prison horrors and if he still had confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush replied, "Of course, I've got confidence in the secretary of defense and in the commanders on the ground because they're doing great work on behalf of the Iraqi people."

Avoiding the question of whether anyone would lose their job was standard Bush practice—he never answers questions he can sidestep. But the reply he did give was strangely arrogant. It is not Bush's place, especially when speaking humbly on Iraqi television, to claim that American soldiers are doing "great work on behalf of the Iraqi people." That's for Iraqis to decide.

Similarly, this was not the forum for him to say, "America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect." That's for Americans in Iraq to demonstrate, not for the president to assert.

Too often, the president began a sentence with the words, "People in Iraq must understand ..." or "The Iraqi people must understand …" or "People in the Middle East must understand … ." He probably didn't mean it but, to an Iraqi audience, these phrases may seem insistent, overbearing, even autocratic, coming from the man who is currently occupying their country.

Finally, some of his statements were false—appallingly so—and one can only hope not too many Iraqis noticed. For instance, he told Al Arabiya that the official investigation into the prison tortures would be "full" and "transparent." To Al Hurra, he added that even conducting an investigation "stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were not brought to justice under his regime."

And yet there was nothing "transparent" about this probe until the photographs and Gen. Taguba's report were leaked to CBS and The New Yorker. The report, though available on the Internet, is still classified Secret, even though, as Steven Aftergood reveals in today's edition of his Secrecy News newsletter, it is a violation of federal law to classify official probes of illegal conduct. There are many legitimate ways Bush might have contrasted America's open government with Saddam's dictatorship—but, alas, this was not one of them.
Slate
 


12:16 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, May 06, 2004

The Red Cross Aware Of Conditions, But Were Stonewalled

This is horribly surreal. The Red Cross being concerned for "detainees" in foreign jails used to always be about some despotic country most Americans couldn't find on a map or know how its name was spelled. Or during the old days when the "Iron Curtain" separated much of the world into spheres of influence. Good versus Evil. Which was which depended either on the view from your side or whether you were part of the privileged class and then it didn't matter. But the United States saying shove it to the Red Cross? This is what George W. Bush has brought down upon the greatest, freest, richest nation on Earth.
GENEVA (Reuters) - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Thursday it had repeatedly urged the United States to take "corrective action" at a Baghdad jail at the center of a scandal over abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

The Geneva-based humanitarian agency, mandated under international treaties to visit detainees, has had regular access to Abu Ghraib prison since U.S.-led forces began using it last year, according to chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari.

"The ICRC, aware of the situation, and based on its findings, has repeatedly asked the U.S. authorities to take corrective action," she told Reuters.

Notari declined to give details of what the ICRC had seen during the visits, which take place every five to six weeks, or about its reports to the U.S. authorities.

The United Nations said separately that it had written to U.S. authorities, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Governor of Iraq Paul Bremer, seeking information on human rights in Iraq over the past year, including treatment of detainees. ...

The ICRC, which has been operating since the late 19th century, keeps a public silence about what it hears from detainees as the price for gaining access to jails in trouble spots around the world from Chechnya to West Africa.
Reuters.com
 


11:44 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Right Wing Apologists For Perversity Ask: "Where Is The Torture?"

It is here. It is in just a small excerpt from Major General Antonio M. Taguba's report presented below. Read just this quick summary of some of the abuse he uncovered and ask yourself if this is how detainees who have yet to be charged with a crime should be treated? Anywhere. Forget the presumption of innocence. One can only wish. Our laws do not apply. These are men who have been "detained" in their own country, a country we took it upon ourselves to teach the superiority of our rule of law and way of life.

These are the very young men that we sent the best and brightest of our own young men and women--under the risk of death and maiming--to liberate from the rule of just such arbitrary and summary "justice and punishment." These are the young men who will be citizens of the "new" Iraq after June 30. Citizens we want as allies, not dedicated avengers.

These detainees were never intended to stand trial. These detainees were never intended to face any due process of law, criminal or otherwise. These detainees were caught up in routine sweeps and then held for questioning in the long chance that they might have information helpful in putting down the insurgency. If they were suspected of being dangerous guerilla fighters, they would not have been in this facility in this manner. If they were, they would have been held in isolation; they most certainly would not be herded all together where they could conspire to escape or indeed bring the insurgency inside the prison. This is basic "Jailer 101."

The prevailing question is: If we want to win the peace and have our young men and women home sooner as opposed to later, why are we all but assuring that every Iraqi citizen rousted for questioning leaves our "accommodations" a committed insurgent who will fight with enraged might against those who treated him as less than human in his own hometown? Knowing he does so leaving behind pictures of him doing things that are more shameful than anything he could have imagined. Read the way the soldier-jailers at Abu Ghraib went about winning the hearts and minds of their detainees:
[B]etween October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force; The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements (ANNEX 26) and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence; I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:

a. Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;

b. Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;

c. Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;

d. Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;

e. Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;

f. Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;

g. Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;

h. Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;

j. Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture;

k. A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;

l. Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;

These findings are amply supported by written confessions provided by several of the suspects, written statements provided by detainees, and witness statements;

In addition, several detainees also described the following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances, I find credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses (ANNEX 26):

a. Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;

b. Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;

c. Pouring cold water on naked detainees;

d. Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;

e. Threatening male detainees with rape;

g. Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.

Executive summary of Taguba report, finalized Feb. 29, 2004, briefed to superiors on March 3, 2004, and submitted in final form on March 9, 2004.
MSNBC
 


8:54 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Will Rummy Have To Leave The Pentagon Running?

In the long battle for supremacy in the administration between Powell and Rumsfeld, the "smart money" has been on Rumsfeld to be the last man standing. I would say the odds have shifted greatly. Make no mistake about it, this reporter believes and is predicting that before it is over somebody will go down.

This scandal has powerful "legs"--no pun intended. There will have to be a sacrificial offering to appease the demons the administration unleashed upon itself. It did so by setting the tone of the war on terror--that morphed into the war on Iraq--as a "crusade" full of biblical intonations and evocations to rival any of the Medieval Crusades to retake the Holy Lands led by the great princes and kings of European lore.

And, really, isn't that how Dubya sees himself. It is in his walk and talk. Give him an armored steed, a sword and visored helmet and the photo-op would be perfect. But than that photo-op has already happened. It was a year ago. The steed was a jet fighter, and the helmet was certainly there. The sword? The Secret Service--and we can be sure he had a bible close at hand.

So, who is going to fall on another metaphorical sword? A lot of folks say it is going to be Rummy:
President Bush privately admonished Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday, a senior White House official said, as other U.S. officials blamed the Pentagon for failing to act on repeated recommendations to improve conditions for thousands of Iraqi detainees and release those not charged with crimes.

Bush is "not satisfied" and "not happy" with the way Rumsfeld informed him about the investigation into abuses by U.S. soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison or the quantity of information Rumsfeld provided, the senior White House official said.

The president was particularly disturbed at having had to learn from news reports this week about the scope of misconduct documented in an Army investigative report completed in March, according to the official, who refused to be named so he could speak more candidly.

Other U.S. officials said Rumsfeld and the Pentagon resisted appeals in recent months from the State Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority to deal with problems relating to detainees. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell urged action in several White House meetings that included Rumsfeld, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

"It's something Powell has raised repeatedly -- to release as many detainees as possible -- and, second, to ensure that those in custody are properly cared for and treated," said a senior State Department official familiar with the discussions.

But the Pentagon repeatedly failed to act on both requests, said U.S. officials, who are privately furious over a human rights disaster that they believe might have been averted if military officials had acted on their requests. ...

Rumsfeld also came in for fresh criticism yesterday on Capitol Hill, where Republicans joined Democrats in expressing anger about not having been informed about the details of the prison investigation. Rumsfeld is to appear at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing tomorrow, and some White House officials fear that a Republican lawmaker will ask him whether he is considering resigning. Some Republican aides on Capitol Hill said he might not survive until Election Day. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Rumsfeld should resign if investigators conclude the chain of responsibility reaches his office. ...

State Department officials, however, have been particularly concerned about what they said was the Pentagon's reluctance to heed urgings earlier from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to improve conditions at Iraqi prisons. ...

Bush aides conceded that Rumsfeld had earlier given Bush a general sense of the investigation of Abu Ghraib during a meeting that included Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. But White House press secretary Scott McClellan said officials have not been able to pin down the exact date, except that it was after Jan. 16, when the Pentagon issued a release announcing the probe.

Much of the debate within the administration over what to do about Iraqi prisoners has roots in a long-running struggle among the departments of State, Defense and Justice to sort through prisoners at the detention facility at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, officials said. The scandal involving Abu Ghraib prison has cast a fresh spotlight on the administration's general approach to the handling of war prisoners and terrorist suspects since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Concerns about prison conditions in Iraq were brought up in internal administration deliberations at the beginning of the year by Powell and Bremer, who warned of the potential political fallout, U.S. officials said.

"We've been pressing for more flexibility and openness to the ICRC's needs and suggestions about the detainees," said a U.S. official familiar with the legal issues involved in detentions.

"The level of disarticulation between the military and civilian components of our occupation is extraordinary," said Larry Diamond, fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute who served for several months as an adviser to L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, and is now a critic of the U.S. occupation. "We're either serious about human rights and the Geneva Convention or we're not."
There is much more at The Washington Post
 


7:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Rumsfeld Is The Target of Choice For The Major Editorials

Below is an excerpt of today's editorial from The Washington Post; above it is a picture that illustrated one of its several stories covering the Abu Ghraib prison scandal:
Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility



Thursday, May 6, 2004

THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable.

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said, would be treated "for the most part" in "a manner that is reasonably consistent" with the conventions -- which, the secretary breezily suggested, was outdated. ...

The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held "ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no copies were posted in the facility.

The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge.

On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman said that the secretary had not read Mr. Taguba's report, which was completed in early March. Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he still hadn't finished reading it, and he repeated his view that the Geneva Conventions "did not precisely apply" but were only "basic rules" for handling prisoners. His message remains the same: that the United States need not be bound by international law and that the crimes Mr. Taguba reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude has undermined the American military's observance of basic human rights and damaged this country's ability to prevail in the war on terrorism.
There is more in The Washington Post
 


7:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Picture Proof Gets Worse...

In many ways, it feels as if I have come out of retirement as an investigative journalist specializing in crimes of violence. Although I am in China, thousands of miles from the crime scenes--Iraq and Washington, D.C.--with the Internet, and my knowledge of forensics, the penal system, the military, and various and sundry tools of the criminal justice trade, I offer that I can indeed at least approach the level of work I was able to do when everything was "in hand" before me.

In this post we are going to add more "evidence," photographs, in what must be remembered is NOT a trial, it is still an investigation--although some military justice has already been meted out in several instances. We can perhaps look at this stage of the process as we would a grand jury in America, where only the prosecutor, sans defense counsel--in almost all cases--provides inculpatory evidence against those he believes he can indict.

It is important that we also remember that there are several classes of people who may in the end be "indicted," so to speak: Those who committed the alleged acts; those who supervised them and instructed them; and the "executive" class who set the tone of permissiveness that allowed the crimes to happen, indeed perhaps even encouraged the law-breaking to occur. The reporting and picture below is from The Washington Post. Below the article is a link to a photo gallery of new picture "proof" with the appropriate warning of caution for the squeamish:
The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor.

Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them. There is another photograph of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched. A pair of women's underwear covers his head and face. ...

The impact is heightened by religion and culture. Arabs "are even more offended when the issue has to do with nudity and sexuality," he said. "The bottom line here is these are pictures of utter humiliation."

It is unclear who took the photographs, or why.

Lawyers representing two of the accused soldiers, and some soldiers' relatives, have said the pictures were ordered up by military intelligence officials who were trying to humiliate the detainees and coerce other prisoners into cooperating.

"It is clear that the intelligence community dictated that these photographs be taken," said Guy L. Womack, a Houston lawyer representing Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., 35, one of the soldiers charged.

The father of another soldier facing charges, Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., also said his son was following orders. "He was asked to take pictures, and he did what he was told," Daniel Sivits said in a telephone interview last week. ...

Yesterday, in Fort Ashby, W.Va., two siblings and a friend identified Pfc. Lynndie England, 21, as the soldier appearing in a picture holding a leash tied to the neck of a man on the floor. England, a member of the 372nd, has also been identified in published reports as one of the soldiers in the earlier set of pictures that were made public, which her relatives also confirmed yesterday. England has been reassigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., her family said. Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful. The military has not charged her in the case.

England's friends and relatives said the photographs must have been staged. "It just makes me laugh, because that's not Lynn," said Destiny Goin, 21, a friend. "She wouldn't pull a dog by its neck, let alone drag a human across a floor."

England worked as a clerk in the unit, processing prisoners before they were put in cells, taking their names, fingerprinting them and giving them identification numbers, her family said. Other soldiers would ask her to pose for photographs, said her father, Kenneth England. "That's how it happened," he said.

Soon after CBS aired its photographs, Terrie England said she received a call from her daughter.

" 'Mom,' she told me, 'I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,' " Terrie England said.

The pictures obtained by The Post include shots of soldiers simulating sexually explicit acts with one another and shots of a cow being skinned and gutted and soldiers posing with its severed head. There are also dozens of pictures of a cat's severed head.

Other photographs show wounded men and corpses. In one, a dead man is lying in the back of a truck, his shirt, face and left arm covered in blood. His right arm is missing. Another photograph shows a body, gray and decomposing. A young soldier is leaning over the corpse, smiling broadly and giving the "thumbs-up" sign.

And in another picture a young woman lifts her shirt, exposing her breasts. She is wearing a white band with numbers on her wrist, but it is unclear whether she is a prisoner.
Iraqi Prisoners Controversy
Editor's Note: Some images in this gallery may be disturbing because of their violent or graphic nature.


[Picture in story above] A naked detainee at the Abu Ghraib prison is tethered by a leash to prison guard Army Pvt Lynndie England in these undated photos. Relatives positively identified England from this photo. These photos were cropped from the waist down for publication purposes. Enter Gallery
Washington Post
 


6:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Full Text of: HEARING ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE

Dear readers, today's pages will be dedicated to reportage and commentary on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal alone. Why? Not only because it is the biggest story in the Solar System this day, week and month. It is mostly because it is the worst scandal of the abuse of authority that this old crime journalist, author and media professor has observed in 55 years of life on this spinning rock we all share called Earth. Hyperbole, you say? No. And in subsequent posts I will address exactly why I believe it to be so. I will also explain how vastly different--to my knowledge unprecedented--it is from any other atrocity or abuse under the Color of Authority in America's history.

In this post, however, I want to provide you with a transcript of the state of the evidence to date so that it can be referred to at your leisure as we work through the "news" of this day. Below is a link to the full 53-page Hearing Article 15-6 Investigation report compiled by Major General Antonio M. Taguba as provided by Global Security.Org. It can be downloaded as a text file in only seconds. Just click on the Title Page.

HEARING ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION
OF THE
800th MILITARY POLICE
BRIGADE
Global Security.Org
 


4:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Dubya, Ye Reap What Ye Sow...

George W. Bush chose to wield his presidential bully pulpit with the arrogance of the true-believer. He believed only in action, not ideas, and then only in action that fit his biblical world view. In speech and in swagger, he set the tone of the American agenda, leaving no room for any others to sit at his exalted table. Is it then any wonder that the impressionable true-believers who served in our name but under his god's-way-or-the-highway-to-hell doctrine lived down to his level and forever shamed the proudest tradition of freedom this Earth has ever known? I think not. Now a terrible price will be paid, and it will not be paid by him.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - President Bush took personal command Wednesday of efforts to counter a backlash in the Arab world to U.S. forces murdering and abusing Iraqis in what was once Saddam Hussein's most notorious jail.

After the U.S. army revealed Americans killed at least two Iraqi prisoners, Bush was to give interviews on Arab television to condemn "shameful and unacceptable" behavior. A top ally said the scandal could undermine Bush's entire project in Iraq.

A further 10 deaths were being investigated, the army said, a week after the publication of photographs showing laughing soldiers abusing naked detainees. The pictures sparked worldwide outrage and a hasty damage-limitation exercise in Washington, where official inquiries into the allegations began in January.

"It is a complete breakdown in discipline," Army Vice Chief of Staff General George Casey said after briefing senators. ...

APOLOGY

Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice apologized.

"We are deeply sorry for what has happened to these people, and what the families must be feeling. It's just not right," she told Al-Arabiya television, the same Arab satellite channel on which Bush will speak to the region later.
The general brought in from Guantanamo Bay to run the jails in the wake of the report vowed there would no repeat of abuse and said beatings, hooding and other interrogation techniques were banned. Thousands more of about 10,000 Iraqis still held would be freed, Major General Geoffrey Miller said.

But U.S. efforts to isolate the case captured on camera to a few bad apples -- six soldiers face court-martial and seven have been disciplined -- ring hollow to many Iraqis, for whom tales of beatings and humiliation behind the razor wire have been commonplace since the U.S. invasion toppled Saddam a year ago.

"The prisoner abuse is so disgusting, so degrading that I think humanity has been hurt broadly. And that will be interpreted around the world I think as almost undercutting our efforts," said Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
Finally, at least someone from the administration was ordered to say I'm sorry. It does not play well on Ms. Rice's lips or style, however. Reuters.com
 


11:04 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Pentagon: It Is Murder, Not Only "Abuse"

There is no rational, objective comment that I am capable of at this moment to introduce this breaking report from Reuters; I won't even try:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two Iraqi prisoners were murdered by Americans and 23 other deaths are being investigated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States revealed on Tuesday as the Bush administration tried to contain growing outrage over the abuse of Iraqi detainees. ...

"The actions of the soldiers in those photographs are totally unacceptable and un-American," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. "Any who engaged in such action let down their comrades who serve honorably each day and they let down their country."

Army officials said the military had investigated the deaths of 25 prisoners held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and determined that an Army soldier and a CIA contractor each murdered a prisoner. Most of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

An Army official said a soldier was convicted in the U.S. military justice system of homicide for shooting a prisoner to death in September 2003 at a detention center in Iraq.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a private contractor who worked for the CIA was found to have committed the other homicide against a prisoner. ...

Concerned about the fallout, President Bush will appear on U.S.-funded Arabic television channel Alhurra and the pan-Arabic television station Al-Arabiya to address the issue.

McClellan said Bush first learned of allegations of abuse sometime after the charges were elevated to top military officials in January. Pressed by reporters, McClellan said he could not narrow down the time frame any further. ...

The new U.S. commander overseeing military-run prisons in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, said there are an estimated 8,000 detainees, about half of them at Abu Ghraib. The two other main prisons are at the southern port city of Umm Qasr and at the Baghdad International Airport, The Washington Post reported on its Web site.

Miller said the U.S. military runs 11 other detention facilities in Iraq where prisoners can be held for up to 14 days before a decision is made to release them or transfer them to one of the three main prisons, the newspaper said.

The images of abuse have dented the U.S. argument that it invaded Iraq to bring democracy and human rights to a nation brutalized by a vicious dictator, former President Saddam Hussein.

Shocking excerpts from a report on the abuse completed on March 3 by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba were likely to further stoke fury at home and abroad.

"Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees," the report said.

"This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF)."

Taguba said several detainees had credibly described acts of abuse, including:

* Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees

* Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair

* Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick

* Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them

* Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time
* Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped

ANGRY LAWMAKERS

On Capitol Hill, angry Republicans and Democrats denounced the abuses. The Senate Intelligence Committee scheduled a closed hearing for Wednesday.

"The prisoner abuse is so disgusting, so degrading, that I think humanity has been hurt broadly," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican. He said it could undercut U.S. efforts to bring democracy to Iraq.

Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican and committee member who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, joined many lawmakers in complaining that Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials failed to inform Congress of the situation.
Reuters.com
 


3:53 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Please Read This Post...

Based upon short-lived recent measures taken against these pages, and an experiment which, although not scientifically conclusive, gave me every reason to take the word "alleged" out of my vocabulary when discussing said measures, I am asking you to read an article from The Guardian--which Fons Tuinstra, of the China Herald, mentioned in a post earlier today--reproduced in full below, without much verbiage in this introduction as to why.
Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Tuesday May 4, 2004

The Guardian

A professor at one of China's foremost universities has launched ferocious attack on the state propaganda department saying it uses Nazi tactics and has been covering up famines, corruption and disease for more than 50 years.

In what may be a sign of a power struggle within the Communist party, the author, Beijing University journalism professor Jiao Guobiao, said he was "encouraged by elders" to launch the tirade.

Its target is an organisation that is controlled by allies of the former president Jiang Zemin, who is said to have used his position as head of the military to block moves towards more democracy and media freedom.

The essay has predictably been banned in the mainstream media, but it can be seen on the internet, where it has become a focus of the disappointment felt by many who had hoped the new leadership of President Hu Jintao and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, would loosen the gag on free speech.

Mr Jiao, a former journalist, called for the abolition of the state's propaganda machinery, which he said was guilty of shielding corrupt officials and whitewashing the darkest moments in the country's history.

"The character of its work is the complete opposite of that of a modern civilisation," he wrote. "Where else can you find propaganda departments? Not in the US, the UK or Europe. But you did find them in Nazi Germany, where Goebbels said 'a lie that is repeated 1,000 times becomes the truth'."

Ignoring the caution that usually typifies public criticism of state institutions in China, Mr Jiao dished out the sort of vitriol that the propaganda department was once famous for.

"Their censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilisation, and as counter to scientific common sense as witches and wizardry," he wrote. "They take money from the parties referred to in reports. They distort the media's sense of right and wrong and justice. They are killing the constitution."

He accused the department of covering up the starvation of millions in the famines of 1962 and more recently of hiding the Sars epidemic. In one case, he said, it took money to fix a programme that was due to appear on television about Ningbo City.

In the past, outspoken critics have been arrested and jailed. But Mr Jiao said he could no longer remain silent about the "No orders" issued by the propaganda department.

"The worst thing that could happen to me is death," he wrote. "But I cannot stand see ing the Communist party develop in this way. We must take responsibility for China."

Chinese journalists say the propaganda department issue a list of stories that must not be reported. According to the Secret China website, the lat est list includes prohibitions on stories on the revaluation of the currency, university graduates' poor job prospects, the business activities of government officials in Anhui province and sales of state-owned assets. Similar blocks have been placed on book publications, including anything to do with one-night stands and extra-marital affairs.

A year ago, hopes were high that the new government would relax media controls. Journalists had been allowed unprecedented freedom to expose the Sars cover-up and a policy paper was circulating in the high ranks of the Communist party that would have forced officials to be more responsive to media requests for information and interviews.

But in recent months, the journalists who pioneered stories on Sars have been imprisoned, and the transparency proposals have been shelved. The Guardian was told that the former president Jiang Zemin was behind the tightening of controls. The head of the propaganda department is the vice president, Zeng Qinghong, a close ally of Mr Jiang.
The Guardian
 


12:35 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




When We're the Evildoers in Iraq

I have just finished watching Donald Rumsfeld do his patented "Rummy Soft Shoe" tip-toe through the garbage that he has been famous for most of his adult life. Remember, this is the man who, smiling like the hypocritical jack-ass he is, was pictured glad-handing Saddam Hussein during the mid-80's on one of his trips to Iraq to assure that our "ally" not only had enough supplies of chemicals to gas his neighbors and citizens but that he had Reagan's explicit okay to do so.

At the just completed press conference, when he was politely given the chance to offer a generic, not personally responsible, apology to the victims of American military abuse at Abu Ghraib, from America, for Americans, he resolutely refused to do so. Of course, he also parsed the words "torture" and "abuse" more slickly than Bill Clinton ever did with the word "if"--he actually took umbrage that a reporter would use the word torture.

When did the words "I'm sorry" fall into such disrepute? It is not a legal admission of guilt for a leader to offer an apology for the behavior of his subordinates. For most of civilized history it has just been a simple matter of good manners. But not for this bunch of ideologues. I don't know about you, but my life experiences have taught me the healing powers of the words "I'm sorry" when they are said sincerely.

Isn't he and Bush and Cheney and Sanchez and Myers and Abizaid sorry that soldiers under their command did what they did or are they not? Perhaps they are sorry only that someone took pictures. Being sorry is the first step towards making amends. Apparently this country, under these men, and women, is above making amends, even when we are caught red-handed being the evil-doers.

The soldiers in those pictures were wearing the uniform of the United States Army, they represented you and me. I for one wish to say loud and clear: I AM SORRY. Please, hear me, citizens of Iraq, Joseph Bosco, a citizen of the United States of America, is terribly sorry for the shame and humiliation and indignity and pain inflicted upon you by American soldiers. While I know it will not be easy, please find it in your hearts to forgive me and all Americans for what was done to you in our name.

Now, please read a powerful column by an old friend of mine, Robert Scheer, in what used to be my hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times.
President Bush is again refusing to take responsibility for any of the horrors happening on his watch. This time it is the abuse of Iraqi prisoners carried out by low-ranking military police working under the direct guidance of military intelligence officers and shadowy civilian mercenaries. Our president launched this war with the promise to the Iraqi people of "no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone." What went wrong? "

The president has called the now-exposed pattern of violence an isolated crime performed by "a few people." Yet the Pentagon's own investigation of the incident shows that not only was the entire Abu Ghraib prison out of control, it was the MPs' immediate military superiors who "directly or indirectly" authorized "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of the prisoners as a way to break them in advance of formal interrogations.

"Military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. government agency interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses," says the report. The report, completed in March and kept secret until it was revealed on the New Yorker website Friday, also stated that a civilian contractor employed by a Virginia company called CACI "clearly knew his instructions" to the MPs called for physical abuse.

Furthermore, in a statement released Friday, Amnesty International reported that in its extensive investigations into human rights in post-invasion Iraq, it "has received frequent reports of torture or other ill treatment by coalition forces during the past year," including during interrogations, and that "virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities."

Recall that a key excuse for the U.S. invasion was to ensure the safety of Iraqi scientists and others in the know so that they might feel free to reveal the location of weapons of mass destruction or evidence of Saddam Hussein's potential ties to Al Qaeda. Shockingly, some of those scientists are now in coalition prisons, even though the weapons clearly don't exist.

In this context, of course, it makes sense that U.S. interrogators would feel enormous pressure to use any means necessary to verify the absurd claims made so aggressively by the president and his Cabinet before the war. Far from the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system, they apparently felt quite free to approve techniques clearly banned by war crimes statutes.

Yet, astonishingly, weeks after the Pentagon's own damning internal report on the torture at Abu Ghraib, and several days after CBS' "60 Minutes II" broke open the story worldwide by showing those horrific photos, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld still had not been briefed on the report, a spokesman said Sunday. Similarly, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, admitted Sunday that he hadn't yet bothered to read the 53-page report filed by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, even though he had successfully requested that CBS delay its "inflammatory" broadcast. This shows far more concern for public relations than for finding out the truth.

How could it be that the top officials responsible for the military were not themselves interested in keeping abreast of the investigation — even after the story had exploded into a global scandal?

After all, an ambitious promise to bring democracy and the rule of law to Iraq became the ex post facto rationale for the invasion, once it became clear that the earlier claims of weapons of mass destruction and Hussein ties to Al Qaeda were a fraud.

So it should have been a clear and high priority to make certain that Iraqi prisoners incarcerated in Hussein's most infamous prison did not receive the same brand of "justice" the dictator had been doling out for decades. That they did is now a deep and dirty stain on the reputation of this nation.

Yes, it's great that we are still worlds away from being Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Hussein's Iraq.

We are a free society in which, it is hoped, truth eventually comes out, and thanks to what seems to be one brave whistle-blowing soldier and a responsible officer to whom he reported the torture, these crimes have come to light. Those are the acts of true heroes, and we should be proud of them.

Yet, before we go overboard in celebrating our virtues, let's admit that Americans too can be "evildoers," especially when we embrace, as the president consistently has done, the terribly dangerous idea that the ends justify the means.

The ultimate cost of a foreign policy based on blatant lies, and that equates military might with what is right, is that the brute in all of us will not inevitably lie dormant.
The Los Angeles Times
 


3:18 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, May 04, 2004

It Just Keeps Getting Worse...

To quote the immortal Casey Stengel on managing the expansion Mets: "You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, 'Can't anybody here play this game?'" Why do I quote Casey? And why do I quote Casey being funny at a time of great futility over losing baseball games with a team that was expected to lose a lot of games?

I do this because it's better than crying, or shouting at the TV and computer screen--all of which I have done just today--over the debacle that "post-war" Iraq continues to be. With the latest developments, it has reached nightmarish proportions greater than all of the earlier nightmares when I thought--whistling past the graveyard--that it just couldn't get any worse.

Sometime later tonight, I hope, I will have much more to say on these matters; at the moment I am behind deadline on a book chapter that my publisher is screaming for. I do offer a few gems from journalistic colleagues of mine. Below is a roundup of events of the past few days in Iraq that is a must read if you want to see the big picture of things even though we are still in the micro stage of these particular developments. It is from the fine folks at The Center for American Progress:
REPORT COMPLETED IN FEBRUARY: The 53-page report outlining the abuse, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. This weekend, however, Myers acknowledged he had not read the internal report, saying, "It's working its way to me." In the months since the completion of the report, it appears military leaders haven't done anything in response.

IRAQI GENERAL REPLACED IN FALLUJAH: In a move indicative of the general confusion and lack of planning the United States has shown in conducting military operations in Iraq, the U.S. has backed away from turning the security of the embattled city of Fallujah over to former Iraqi General Jassim Mohammed Saleh. Marines had named Saleh, a former member of the Saddam's Republican Guard, to lead the new Fallujah Brigade. However, while U.S. commanders "said that Saleh had agreed to go after the purported foreign fighters in Fallujah, Saleh announced that none are there." According to one perplexed military official, "We've just told him he can form a brigade and take over the city. Now we're telling him that he has to step aside?" Appointed in Saleh's place was Muhammad Latif, a former intelligence officer in the Iraqi army who studied at the British Staff College for military officers. Saleh will now "help lead only one of the three battalions that will form the brigade."

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...: Newsweek reports that Ahmad Chalabi, "the longtime Pentagon favorite to become leader of a free Iraq, has never made a secret of his close ties to Iran." Those ties may have deadly repercussions for U.S. troops, however; "top Bush administration officials have been briefed on intelligence indicating that Chalabi and some of his top aides have supplied Iran with 'sensitive' information on the American occupation in Iraq." According to officials, "electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq. There are also indications that Chalabi has provided details of U.S. security operations. According to one U.S. government source, some of the information Chalabi turned over to Iran could 'get people killed.'" The Iraqi exile, who has close ties to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, has his own agenda and "may be working both sides in an effort to solidify his own power and block the advancement of rival Iraqis."

ANTIWAR EQUALS RACIST?: In one of the weirder claims to be put forth by the White House, President Bush tied anti-war sentiment to racism. Friday the president announced: "There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern...I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily—are a different color than white can self-govern." Neither President Bush nor Press Secretary Scott McClellan commented on exactly who the people are who supposedly think that. The phrase "ours" to mean "white" is also offensive, given that the Census reports a quarter of people in the United States are other than white.
The Center for American Progress
 


6:27 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Mother Jones On Abu Ghraib...

Mother Jones Magazine's blog, MoJo, has an analysis on the Abu Ghraib scandal to date that is important reading:
Even the war party pundits are recognizing the despicable nature of what American military police and intelligence officers did at Abu Ghraib prison last year. The routine humiliation and mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, Jed Babbin of National Review concedes righteously, was "in violation of the Geneva Conventions and common decency." But Babbin -- like so many other fervent supporters of the Bush Administration's war -- seems exclusively worried about the admittedly massive damage done to the shaky credibility of that war. Babbin's recommendation: Throw the accused in Leavenworth and move on.
We have to handle this right. The courts martial should be open to any media that want to attend — even al-Jazeera -- and the perpetrators' names dragged through the mud. Those who are guilty should be imprisoned for as long as the law allows. No plea bargains, no deals -- just the max. As a result of their actions, these few have dishonored their country and every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine who now serve. And they have created a firestorm of anger at the American presence in Iraq that reaches all through that country and the whole region. The damage they have done will reverberate throughout the process of forming the new Iraqi government. By trying the perps publicly and quickly, and imposing the harshest sentences possible, we can begin to repair the damage.
Absent from Babbin's bubble of concern, naturally, are the prisoners themselves. And, predictably, Babbin argues that the crimes were "the acts of a few, and have no relationship to the conduct of the tens of thousands of Americans who have fought in this war." He even manages to take a swipe at John Kerry in the process.

Babbin is right in concluding that the Abu Ghraib torturers have done great damage to Washington's attempts to portray its occupation of Iraq as a momentary police action following the nation's 'liberation.' But he seems singularly unwilling to recognize the damage done to the self-inflating rhetoric he and other war party pundits have peddled since Baghdad fell -- the rhetoric which snidely assumes that all opponents of the war (cue swipe at Kerry) are unpatriotic appeasers or naive tools of terror. And Babbin's final assertion simply won't fly. As Seymour Hersh writes in his excellent New Yorker piece, the fifty-three-page investigative report written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba "amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels."
The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

...

As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States' reputation in the world.
Andy McNab, writing in the British Telegraph, worries about a far more immediate and deadly form of fallout. McNab, who was actually imprisoned at Abu Ghraib during the first Gulf War, writes:
[T]he photographs of the Americans taunting and insulting their Iraqi prisoners, stripping them naked and forcing them to undergo mock-executions and to simulate sex with each other, will have convinced thousands of Iraqis that the Americans are just as bad as Saddam's torturers. If there were any Iraqis who believed the coalition's claim that they were benign liberators, there won't be many now.

The soldiers responsible for the abuse have guaranteed thousands of new recruits to the organisations such as al-Qaeda which want to kill as many coalition troops in Iraq as possible. The images of torture they have created will have stiffened the resolve of the Iraqi militants and encouraged those Iraqis who were wavering to join the resistance against the coalition. So more young American soldiers will be blown apart by booby-trapped cars and shot by snipers. Their unnecessary deaths will have been caused by the stupidity of their own comrades.
MoJo Blog
 


4:36 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Miracle of Nature in Qinghai

With all the ugliness that photographs have filled me with of late, I was quite taken by the three lovely photographs below from a photo essay in today's China Daily. I reproduce them here for the sheer pleasure of seeing them on these pages as A meteorological miracle:

Gone are sandstorms blurring eyes in the past months, northwestern China's Qinghai Province is now blanketed by a 12-mm snow on May 2, a meteorological miracle blessing the May 1-7 holiday-goers to the hinterland region. More than 400,000 people are expected to visit Xining, capital city of Qinghai during the travel peak season.


China Daily
 


12:19 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, May 03, 2004

How China Daily Reports The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal

As an American professor of "Media & Foreign Policy" at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, it is interesting and useful that I compare how the same international events are portrayed in the western press and the Chinese state-owned press. Consequently, since I have posted stories on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal from the viewpoint of The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, I want to post, without comment, pertinent excerpts from an article on the scandal in today's China Daily.
Dhia al-Shweiri spent several stints in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, twice under Saddam Hussein's rule and once under American. He prefers Saddam's torture to the humiliation of being stripped naked by his American guards, he said Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press.

America's top general, Gen. Richard Myers, said Sunday there was no evidence of "systematic abuse" and the actions of "just a handful" have unfairly tainted all American forces.

However, Amnesty International said it has uncovered a "pattern of torture" of Iraqi prisoners by coalition troops, and called for an independent investigation into the claims of abuse.

The 30-year-old al-Shweiri, who used to work in a fabric shop, is a die-hard fighter in the al-Mahdi Army, the fanatic militia of a Shiite Muslim cleric who has vowed to take on the Americans.

Al-Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam's regime, he was electrocuted, beaten and hung from the ceiling with his hands tied behind his back.

"But that's better than the humiliation of being stripped naked," he said. "Shoot me here," he added, pointing between his eyes, "but don't do this to us."

For months, human rights groups and former prisoners had complained of mistreatment at detention centers but their protests were widely dismissed as politically motivated until the U.S. command started an investigation in January. Six American soldiers are now facing courts-martial. ...

Al-Shweiri said he was not surprised to see TV images of smiling U.S. soldiers posing by naked, hooded inmates who, in one photograph, were piled in a human pyramid.

Al-Shweiri, who was arrested by the Americans in October, said he was asked to take off his clothes only once and for about 15 minutes.

"I thought they wanted me to change into the red prison uniform, so I took off my clothes, down to my underwear. Then he asked me to take off my underwear. I started arguing with him but in the end he made me take off my underwear," said al-Shweiri, who was too embarrassed to go into too much detail.

He said he and six other prisoners — all hooded — had to face the wall and bend over a little as they put their hands on the wall.

"They made us stand in a way that I am ashamed to describe. They came to look at us as we stood there. They knew this would humiliate us," he said, adding that he was not sodomized.

"They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. We are men. It's OK if they beat me. Beatings don't hurt us, it's just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered," he said.

"They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman," al-Shweiri said.

Al-Shweiri's account could not be independently verified.

He said the Americans arrested him along with his father and brother in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City in Baghdad, accusing him of belonging to the al-Mahdi Army because he had an automatic weapon in his house and some headbands with Islamic sayings on them. His father and brother were released shortly after the arrest.

Al-Shweiri insisted he wasn't involved in any religious or political group at the time. He worked in a fabric shop in Sadr City, attending Friday prayer sermons at his neighborhood mosque.

He said he felt gratitude to the Americans for toppling Saddam, who had barred many Shiite public gatherings and whose regime arrested al-Shweiri twice.

The first time came 12 years ago, when he was held for 19 months. He was arrested again in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison, charged with belonging to the then-banned Islamic al-Dawa Party, he said. He was freed when Saddam pardoned prisoners at the end of the same year.

"I hated Saddam so much that when the Americans came, I viewed them as liberators. I was happy and supported them. But soon it became clear that they are no liberators but occupiers," he said. "I had seen how oppressed people were under Saddam and I refused to give in to oppression and injustice. We must fight oppression."

When al-Shweiri left American detention, he said his hatred for Saddam was replaced with one for America and two months ago he joined the al-Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Now with the future of the al-Mahdi Army uncertain, many militiamen are worried. The Americans have demanded the militia be disbanded and that al-Sadr, who is accused of involvement in the death of a rival cleric, turn himself in.

"If Seyed Muqtada orders us to disband, we will. If he orders us to die, we will die. And if he tells us to live, we will live. We have nothing to do with the Americans and what they demand from us," al-Shweiri said.
China Daily
 


11:54 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




How High Up The Ladder Of Command Will The Iraq Prison Abuse Investigation Go?

The abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Baghdad is the kind of story that in journalistic terms has "legs"--in other words, it will not go away and has every element necessary for a story--and the obligatory investigations--that will overshadow other related events for an extended period of time. The New York Times is taking the lead in the hunt after Seymour Hersh did the excellent spade-work--the kind for which he is justifiably famous--for The New Yorker magazine.
An internal Army investigation found a virtual collapse of the command structure in a prison outside Baghdad where American enlisted personnel are accused of committing acts of abuse and humiliation against Iraqi detainees.

A report on the investigation said midlevel military intelligence officers were allowed to skirt the normal chain of command to issue questionable orders to enlisted personnel from the reserve military police unit handling guard duty there.

The Army has already begun one investigation into the abuse allegations. Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, the incoming deputy commander of Army intelligence, is examining the interrogation practices of military intelligence officers at all American-run prisons in Iraq and not just the Abu Ghraib prison.

A second review was ordered Saturday by Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, to assess the training of all reservists, especially military police and intelligence officers, the soldiers most likely to handle prisoners. Six members of an Army Reserve military police unit assigned to Abu Ghraib face charges of assault, cruelty, indecent acts and maltreatment of detainees.

Gary Myers, a lawyer for Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, one of the enlisted men charged in the case, requested this weekend that the Army open a court of inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, a move that would broaden the investigation beyond the six enlisted personnel to look at the broader command failures.

The widening prison-abuse scandal in Iraq, which has stirred anger in the Arab world just as the Marines have tried to defuse a bloody confrontation in Falluja, holds the potential to damage efforts by American officials to meet a June 30 deadline to transfer limited self-rule to the Iraqi people. The scandal appeared to have caught senior Pentagon officials and some top officers off guard on Sunday, despite President Bush's condemnation of the abuses on Friday. Appearing on three Sunday talk shows, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave conflicting answers when asked if the problems at Abu Ghraib were systemic throughout detention centers in Iraq.

At first, General Myers insisted that the instances of mistreatment was not widespread and were the actions of "just a handful" of soldiers who had unfairly tainted all American forces in Iraq. But when pressed, he acknowledged that he had not yet read a classified, 53-page Army report completed in February by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, first reported in the May 10 edition of the New Yorker, that chronicled the worst of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Myers left open the possibility the abuses could be broader, saying "We don't know that yet."

A spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that the secretary had not been briefed on General Taguba's report either, but had been kept abreast of the investigative process.

General Myers also acknowledged that he had asked the CBS News program "60 Minutes II" to delay broadcasting photographs of the abuses taken by guards inside the prison to avoid worsening tensions in Iraq at a time when attacks against American forces are on the rise and one soldier is being held hostage by insurgents. "I thought it would be particularly inflammatory at that time," General Myers said on the ABC News program "This Week." ...

Documents from an April 2 military court hearing in Iraq for Sergeant Frederick provide new details about the abuse. The documents show that Specialist Matthew Carl Wisdom, of the 372nd Military Police Company at Abu Ghraib, appeared in the hearing and described some of the acts of abuse he saw.

"I went down to Tier 1 (the cellblock where much of the abuse is said to have occurred) and when I looked down the corridor, I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open," he is quoted as saying. "I thought I should just get out of there. I didn't think it was right, as it seemed like the wrong thing to do. I saw Staff Sergeant Frederick walking towards me, and he said, `Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.' "
There is much more at The New York Times
 


12:52 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Joseph Kahn Has A Must Read Article On Censorship In China

The article excerpted below needs no introduction, and neither does its author, Joseph Kahn, of The New York Times. I will restate that it is must reading if you have any interest in China and its chances of ever attaining a free press.
Freedom Ring? Not So Fast. China's Still China.

BEIJING, May 2 - During the Cultural Revolution, China's propaganda department often made hyperbolic charges against intellectuals - capitalist roaders, enemies of the people - accused of betraying Mao Zedong.

So when Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Beijing University, was searching for words to describe China's still all-powerful censors and standard-setters more than 30 years later, he borrowed from its lexicon of vitriol.

The department is spiteful like the Nazis, he wrote in a recent essay. It thinks itself infallible like the pope. In the 1950's it covered up the starvation of millions of people. Today, he charged, it lies about SARS.

"Their censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilization, and as counter to scientific common sense as witches and wizardry," he wrote in the article - which has been widely circulated by Internet in Beijing despite, not unpredictably, being banned by the Communist Party's propaganda department.

Such explicit outbursts of dissent are still rare in China. But Mr. Jiao is not alone in expressing frustration that, even after a long-awaited transition to a new generation of leaders some 18 months ago, China's political scene remains stultifying. Intellectuals, Mr. Jiao said, are "supposed to act like children who never talk back to their parents."

The leadership team headed by the president and party chief Hu Jintao that many hoped would tolerate more open debate has instead slapped new restrictions on free speech and the press that some say remind them of the repressive years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

State security agents have been scouring the Internet and pressing charges against people who use it to distribute information or express opinions deemed unfavorable. The authorities harassed scholars who took part in a debate about constitutional changes, disappointing some who believed that Mr. Hu had once invited discussion about how to strengthen the rule of law.

The political environment may reflect a seasonal shift to tight controls during the spring Communist Party meetings and a state of high alert ahead of the 15th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown.

But some see worrying signs that the leadership remains instinctively hostile to political discussion and more independent news media. Scholars say they now suspect that Mr. Hu is not as forward-looking as they had once hoped, and at any rate he must still defer to Jiang Zemin, the military chief, who handed the formal reins of power to Mr. Hu in late 2002 but by many accounts remains a domineering influence.

"I don't think we had a real transfer of power or a turning point in leadership," said He Weifang, a law professor at Beijing University. "There was a moment after Mr. Hu took control when people were optimistic, but now things are even tighter than before."
There is much more by Mr. Kahn, a really fine reporter and wordsmith who we are fortunate to have covering China for The New York Times at this critical juncture for the future of the legendary Middle Kingdom.

The New York Times
 


12:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, May 02, 2004

Upon Fighting Monsters...

"He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), German philosopher, classical scholar, critic of culture.
In a recent post, I took Ms. Karen Hughes to the journalistic woodshed for her shrill and mendacious assertions against John F. Kerry for his 1971 testimony before congress concerning atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam. Ms. Hughes went on to shout out that American soldiers, almost by definition, do not do such things. She used her father who, according to her, had fought in three American wars, including Vietnam, as an example, assuring us that he "was not guilty of any atrocities, and I really find that that's an irresponsible kind of charge to make."

I have no idea what her father did or did not do while in the armed services of the United States during what we can only assume were World War II and the Korean War in addition to Vietnam. But I pointed out in that post the irrefutable fact that "atrocities" were indeed committed in combat in Vietnam by both sides of the conflict. I told a painful personal anecdote as a point of reference. I could have also enumerated any number of "atrocities" American and Allied forces and U.N.-mandated troops committed in World War II and the Korean War respectively, but it would have been redundant and overkill to have done so.

It is an axiom of war: Atrocities happen. They aren't supposed to, but they do because war is an inherently uncivilized activity. War invariably brings out the beast in man. Why? In no small measure it is due to it suddenly becoming institutionally legal and laudable to kill, maim or torture other human beings because they are the enemy and they are trying to do the same to you! Body counts and prisoners taken, along with territory conquered and weapons destroyed, are how armies and nation-states keep score in war.

Now, quite sadly, current events have risen their so often ugly heads and presented all Americans with one of the most shameful lessons regarding the truth of what I have written and what so many military officers, historians and scholars have always known. I am writing of the truly heartbreaking proof of what American troops have done to Iraqi "detainees" in the Abu Ghraib prison just west of Baghdad. I am writing of something so ugly and so calculated and so systemic that I offer that it may be decades--if ever--before the Republic I love beyond measure can ever again have the moral authority to speak of human rights, human abuse or war crimes to even the most repressive regimes.

America, my country, in the name of freedom, liberation and democracy has treated detainees--within their own country, within the same prison where so many of them had been tortured and murdered by the regime we took it upon ourselves to overthrow largely because of its brutality to its citizens--with a sickening level of beastly violence upon their bodies and souls that is almost without precedence in American military history. There can be understanding, even sympathy, albeit grudgingly, when in the heated blood of combat and comrades lost that "enemies" are spontaneously lined up against a wall and machine-gunned. But deliberate torture? Much of it acts of sexual perversion and depravity to make even this old crime reporter reel and gag from the utter baseness of it?

I shed very real tears this day as I looked at the pictures and read the articles excerpted below. I did so for two reasons: One, just basic human compassion for any man--and the victims were all men--forced to undergo such soul-crushing indignities as seen in the pictures; two, because I know that we Americans may never be able to live this down, that perhaps never again can I lecture in my classes abroad about the basic goodness of the American process.

We took on the monster, and became one; we looked into the abyss and saw ourselves. Goddamn us all. And I do mean all of us. Those weren't criminals we sent to serve in our name in Iraq. They were us. They were our sons and neighbors, fathers and brothers, and shockingly enough, our sisters and mothers and wives. Goddamn us all; and then let us begin perhaps the impossible: Begin the process of ripping this monster out of our collective body politic, and then try to replace it with something better--but with that comes the harder task, we have to prove to the world that we will never do such things again.

Below, you will find excerpts from two articles. The first is a breaking news story about the investigation from The New York Times. After that is the article that The Times is reporting on: A stunning piece of investigative journalism by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. While I have a small personal journalistic problem with Seymour that dates back over 30 years, it does not keep me from knowing that his work is almost always about as good as it gets, and the piece below is no exception. You will also find a link to all of the pictures that have so far come to light in the investigation, which has been ongoing for quite some months. It turns out that for some people this is already old news.

A note about the link you will find below to the disturbing pictures with the caveat that they are not pleasant and that you may not wish to view them: It has occurred to me that some of you, perhaps the braver ones, might want to view them as you read, therefore I am also placing the link HERE for that purpose.
From The New York Times:

Officer Suggests Iraq Jail Abuse Was Encouraged

WASHINGTON, May 1 -- An Army Reserve general whose soldiers were photographed as they abused Iraqi prisoners said Saturday that she knew nothing about the abuse until weeks after it occurred and that she was "sickened" by the pictures. She said the prison cellblock where the abuse occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged the abuse.

The suggestion by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski that the reservists acted at the behest of military intelligence officers appears largely supported in a still-classified Army report on prison conditions in Iraq that documented many of the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, including the sexual humiliation of prisoners.

The New Yorker magazine said in its new edition that the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and C.I.A. agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses." ...

While reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers have come to light in the last several days, the report cited by The New Yorker indicates a far more wide-ranging and systematic pattern of cruelties than previously reported.

General Karpinski was formally admonished in January and "quietly suspended" from commanding the 800th Military Police Brigade, the New Yorker article reports, while under investigation.

In a phone interview from her home in South Carolina in which she offered her first public comments about the growing international furor over the abuse of the Iraq detainees, General Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.

She said that while the reservists involved in the abuses were "bad people" who deserved punishment, she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that C.I.A. employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison, although she said she did not know if they had unrestricted access to the cellblock.

According to the New Yorker article, by the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, one of the soldiers under investigation, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, an Army reservist who is a prison guard in civilian life, may have reinforced General Karpinski's contention in e-mails to family and friends while serving at the prison. ...

General Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq.

"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away." ...

General Karpinski said in the interview that the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen cellblocks in the large prison complex and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations, including virtually all of the military police under her command at Abu Ghraib.

She said repeatedly in the interview that she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command. She said that when she was first presented with the photographs of the abuse in January, they "sickened me."

"I put my head down because I really thought I was going to throw up," she said. "It was awful. My immediate reaction was: these are bad people, because their faces revealed how much pleasure they felt at this." ...

"The suggestion that this was done with my knowledge and continued with my knowledge is so far from the truth," she said of the abuse." I wasn't aware of any of this. I'm horrified by this."

She said she was also alarmed that little attention has been paid to the Army military intelligence unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where her soldiers guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations.

She estimated that the floor space of the two-story cellblock was only about 60 feet by 20 feet, and that military intelligence officers were in and out of the cellblock "24 hours a day," often to escort prisoners to and from an interrogation center away from the prison cells.

"They were in there at 2 in the morning, they were there at 4 in the afternoon," said General Karpinski, who arrived in Iraq last June and was the only woman to hold a command in the war zone. "This was no 9-to-5 job."

She said that C.I.A. employees often participated in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, one of Iraq's most notorious prisons during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

General Karpinski noted that one of the photographs of abused prisoners also showed the legs of 16 American soldiers -- the photograph was cropped so that their upper bodies could not be seen -- "and that tells you that clearly other people were participating, because I didn't have 16 people assigned to that cellblock." ...

"I can speak some Arabic," said General Karpinski, a New Jersey native who spent almost a decade as an active duty soldier before joining the Army Reserve in 1987. "I'm not fluent, but when I went to any of my prison facilities, I would make it a point to try to talk to the detainees."

But she said she did not visit Cellblock 1A, in keeping with the wishes of military intelligence officers who, she said, worried that unnecessary visits might interfere with their interrogations of Iraqis.

She acknowledged that she "probably should have been more aggressive" about visiting the interrogation cellblock, especially after military intelligence officers at the prison went "to great lengths to try to exclude the I.C.R.C. from access to that interrogation wing."

She was referring to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been given access over time to Iraqi detainees at the prison.
The New York Times

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world?s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women--no accurate count is possible--were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.

In the looting that followed the regime's collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however--by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers--were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of "crimes against the coalition"; and a small number of suspected "high-value" leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.
Abu Ghraib was an American prison now; what happened next, however, is something no American should want to claim as "ours."
A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski's brigade headquarters.) Taguba's report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added--"detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence." Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their "extremely sensitive nature."

The photographs--several of which were broadcast on CBS's "60 Minutes 2" last week--show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses. ...
The pictures are supplied by The New Yorker at a sidebar link. If you have the heart or stomach for it, they can be viewed by clicking HERE. If you do not, Seymour Hersh gives a vivid and ugly description; he has lost none of his skills of narrative reportage since he won a Pulitzer Prize (disputed, but that's an insider-journalist story best told in another setting) for his revelations of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam:
The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.

Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. "Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other--it's all a form of torture," Haykel said.
Sadly, torture and psychological humiliation beyond the pale, wasn't the nadir of the abuse: murder was.
Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.

The 372nd's abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine--a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called "hard site" at Abu Ghraib--seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:

SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.

When he returned later, Wisdom testified:

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn't think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, "Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds." I heard PFC England shout out, "He's getting hard."

Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed that "the issue was taken care of." He said, "I just didn't want to be part of anything that looked criminal."

The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, "The investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees." Bobeck said that Darby had "initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong."
What we learn next, while somewhat self-serving because it will be part of the defense of the accused soldiers, is that all of the abuse, and particularly the nature and theme of it all came at the request of American Intelligence services in Iraq, C.I.A. C.I.D and "contractors" who wanted the detainees "broken" a bit before interrogations.
At the Article 32 hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys, Captain Robert Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of Frederick's co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from the courtroom. "The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us to engage witnesses and discover facts," Gary Myers told me. "We ended up with a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine." After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick.

Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client's defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, "Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?"

In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:

I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell?and the answer I got was, "This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done." . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.

The military-intelligence officers have "encouraged and told us, 'Great job,' they were now getting positive results and information," Frederick wrote. "CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI's request." At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. "His reply was 'Don?t worry about it.'"

In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called "O.G.A.," or other government agencies--that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees--was brought to his unit for questioning. "They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away." The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison?s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, "and therefore never had a number."

Frederick's defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the complaints in his letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two internal Army reports--Taguba's and one by the Army's chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general.

Last fall, General Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq and recommend ways to improve it. Ryder's report, filed on November 5th, concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. ...

There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to "set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews"--a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners. ...

Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found "no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices." His investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.

Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. "Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder's] assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation," he wrote. "In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment." The report continued, "Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder's report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to 'set the conditions' for MI interrogations." Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents, and private contractors "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."

Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, "MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick's job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk."

Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators, "I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . . being made to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were told that they had different rules." Taguba wrote, "Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said he stated: 'Loosen this guy up for us.''Make sure he has a bad night.' 'Make sure he gets the treatment.'" Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis said. "The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner compliments . . . statements like, 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They're giving out good information.'"

When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, Sergeant Davis answered, "Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing"--where the abuse took place--"belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse." ...

General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen "who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by 'setting conditions' which were neither authorized" nor in accordance with Army regulations. "He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse," Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had "received no formal communication" from the Army about the matter.)

"I suspect," Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib," and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.

The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski's seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates....
As bad as all of this is, the worst is that it was done in large part to innocent Iraqis.
A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained--indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. ...

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba's report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority. ...

As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States' reputation in the world.

Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick's military attorney, closed his defense at the Article 32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was "attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins." Similarly, Gary Myers, Frederick's civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client. "I'm going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor I can find into court," he said."?Do you really believe the Army relieved a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance."
The New Yorker
 


8:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The LongBow Papers Suffer Strange Internet Woes

Folks, for the past three days or so here in the Bosco domain, all things Internet and bloggy went weirdly kaphooey! I could not access my site, nor could I access my Blogger app to fix broken and strangely splintered posts that I knew were up but could do nothing to correct. Ellen, my lovely wife and author of the Crackpot Chronicles--which was not experiencing the same maladies although we are on the same service--thought that perhaps my problems were "political" and suggested that the deletion of a tongue-in-cheek post concerning an event which occurred 15 years ago this month and next might appease the "monitoring gods" and thereby end my troubles. This has been done. If it works, then we are much the wiser about the workings of such things. For the moment, at least, it appears that it has; I am posting this, maybe. We shall see. I apologize to all you loyal readers of these pages.
 


1:44 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




McCain Blasts Ultra-Right Wing Media Conglomerate

Senator John McCain, one of the very few American political leaders with a barrel full of personal and political integrity, once again demonstrates the proof of it and also once again reminds me of one of my most cherished pipe-dreams: That the Republican Senator of Arizona will cross the aisle and join the party which has more often championed the causes he stands for than his current one.

McCain Calls Nightline Nix 'Deeply Offensive'

By CARL HULSE

The decision by Sinclair Broadcast Group to pre-empt tonight's Nightline show featuring a reading of the names of those killed so far In Iraq drew a new detractor today — Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

In a letter to the president of the group, Mr. McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and is a leading congressional voice on military issues, called the decision to block the broadcast on the company's ABC affiliates "deeply offensive."

"There is no valid reason for Sinclair to shirk its responsibility in what I assume is a very misguided attempt to prevent your viewers from completely appreciating the extraordinary sacrifices made on their behalf by Americans serving in Iraq," Mr. McCain wrote. "War is an awful, but sometimes necessary business. Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war's terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves."

Officials of the group, one of the largest owners of television stations in the nation, have objected to the Nightline program, saying it was a veiled political effort to undermine the war. Mark Hyman, the vice president of corporate relations for Sinclair and a conservative commentator, told the New York Times' Bill Carter on Thursday that the Nightline broadcast represents biased journalism. "Mr. Koppel's reading of the fallen will have no proportionality," he said. The company intends to broadcast its own special on Iraq.

"I supported the president's decision to go to war in Iraq, and remain a strong supporter of that decision," Mr. McCain's letter said. "But every American has a responsibility to understand fully the terrible costs of war and the extraordinary sacrifices it requires of those brave men and women who volunteer to defend the rest of us."

In a response to Mr. McCain, David D. Smith, president of the company, told the senator that "in no way was our decision intended to show any disrespect to the brave members of our military, particularly those who have sacrificed their lives in service of our country. To the contrary, our decision was based on a desire to stop the misuse of their sacrifice to support an anti-war position with which most, if not all, of these soldiers would not have agreed."

Mr. Smith also extended an invitation for Mr. McCain to appear on Sinclair's Iraq special.
The New York Times - Campaign 2004 - Times on the Trail
 


12:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, May 01, 2004

Florida State University Graduates Tell Cheney Where To Stick His Slimy Rhetoric

Archduke Cheney the Non-Great is severely dissed by graduates of one of the flagship universities of the state where the unholy oligarchy, of which he is second in line of succession, launched its historic Coup d'etat. Appropriately, Florida State University is in Tallahassee, the capital of Florida. It was there that the House of Bush pulled off the first dynastic restoration in the Republic's history, placing his Lowness Bush the Second extralegally upon the throne which his autocratic father, Bush the First, had so ignominiously lost to a populist groundswell of an informed citizenry.

Let us diligently rededicate ourselves to the humanistically sacred task of which these valiant young men and women remind us: Returning Democracy to the United States of America
F.S.U. Students to Cheney: Just Stick to the 'You are the Future' Stuff

By CARL HULSE

Vice President Dick Cheney is making another university speech this weekend, and a group of students at Florida State University wants to make sure that Mr. Cheney's commencement speech there is not a replay of his attack earlier this week on John Kerry.

In an e-mail appeal to the university's president, T.K. Wetherell, more than 200 students asked that he urge the vice president to lay off the campaign talk during Saturday's graduation sendoff.

"We strongly urge you to seek assurances that his speech will not be another political diatribe aimed only at scoring points in the presidential campaign," said the letter. "The graduation ceremony should be the culmination of students' time at the university and a chance to celebrate accomplishments with friends and family. It would be unfortunate if that day were besmirched by personal attacks either direct or indirect against candidates for public office."

Tom Barcus, a senior from Vero Beach and a member of the student Democratic organization, said the letter was prompted by Mr. Cheney's appearance on Monday at Westminster College when he attacked Mr. Kerry's national security credentials. The content of the speech was so tough that the president of that school circulated his own e-mail message saying he was disappointed in the tone of the speech and that it was not what had been billed by the vice president's office. He then extended an equal-time invitation to Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Barcus said he spoke with Mr. Wetherell, a former speaker of the Florida House, this afternoon and the president said he had no intention of contacting the vice president's office. Mr. Barcus said the university president told him that Mr. Cheney will understand the nature of a commencement ceremony.

Mr. Barcus said he sure hopes so. "We just wanted to make sure our commencement ceremony for the graduates was done properly and was not a campaign event,'' he said.
The New York Times -- Campaign 2004 -- Times on the Trail

I hope you are already a regular reader of the above political blog published by the still greatest newspaper in the world, The New York Times--which has done more for the blogosphere than any of the right-wing nut-case bloggers which constantly disparage it out of pure jealousy and impotent frustration. If you are not, I am happy to have had the opportunity to introduce you to it.
 


4:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



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