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Category: Violence, War 25 comments 20 May 2004 @ 10:26 by jstarrs : Amen......to that, Jazz. 20 May 2004 @ 11:45 by istvan : Did you know? Some eastern masters teach that death should be celebrated. This soldier is doing just that according to the teachings of her own guru. Published on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 by the Inter Press Service Pentagon's Feith Again at Center of Disaster by Jim Lobe WASHINGTON - Although it will take weeks, if not months, to sort out precisely who was responsible for what increasingly appears to have been the systemic abuse by U.S. soldiers of Iraqi detainees, it should be no surprise if Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith is found to have played an important role. Feith, who, according to Bob Woodward's new book, 'Plan of Attack', was described by the military commander who led last year's invasion, Gen Tommie Franks, as ''the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth'', has been at the center of virtually everything else that has gone wrong in Iraq, so there is no reason to think he was very far from this one. It was his office, for example, that created shortly after 9/11 the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans (OSP) which re-assessed 12 years of raw intelligence and the Arab press, to find evidence of ties between the regime of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group. The OSP then ''stovepiped'' that information, unvetted by professional intelligence analysts, straight to Vice President Dick Cheney's office for use by the White House. Similarly, it was Feith's office, along with the Defense Policy Group (DPG) whose members Feith appointed, that served as the point of entry and influence for Iraqi National Congress (INC) chief Ahmed Chalabi and his ''defectors'' who provided phony intelligence about Hussein's vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It was Feith's office that was charged with planning the post-war occupation and reconstruction process, and, in so doing, effectively excluded input from Iraqi experts from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and even from the Iraqi-American community, who had participated in a mammoth project that anticipated most of the problems occupation authorities have since encountered. And it was Feith's office that also housed the future undersecretary for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, who facilitated the transfer of Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that houses suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, to Abu Ghraib prison in the interests of extracting more intelligence from detainees there about the fast-growing insurgency in Iraq. Both Cambone and Miller, who brought high-pressure interrogation tactics barred by the Geneva Conventions with him from Guantanamo, are considered prime targets of ongoing congressional investigations into the prisoner abuse scandal. But the announcement Tuesday by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner that he is seeking testimony in the coming weeks from Feith may have unwittingly cast new light on the reasons why Secretary of State Colin Powell is alleged by Woodward to have referred to Feith's operation as the ''Gestapo Office''. Evidence of Feith's involvement in the prisoner abuse scandal rests primarily on reports that have appeared in 'Newsweek', the 'New York Times', and the 'Los Angeles Times'. They have reported that, even before the Iraq War, top officials in the Pentagon, acting on the advice of civilian lawyers, authorized a reinterpretation of the Geneva Conventions to permit tougher methods of interrogation of prisoners of war (POWs). This effort was strongly resisted by Powell, a retired army general, when it came to his attention, and by the Judge Advocates Generals (JAG) Corps, the formal name given to the military's lawyers. They argued, among other things, that the introduction of ''stress and duress'' techniques, sleep deprivation and other methods that violate the Conventions would not only result in dubious intelligence, but could also be cited as a precedent for use against U.S. soldiers who fell into enemy hands. Dissenters, however, were essentially excluded from the discussion, and, according to 'Newsweek', new techniques were formally approved during the Iraq invasion in April 2003, although Feith's immediate superior, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testified last week he was unaware of such a decision. At the same time, senior Pentagon officials also authorized the exclusion of JAG officers from observing interrogations to ensure they complied with the Conventions. That was a major departure from the practice in the 1991 Gulf War, when JAG officers were present in all interrogation facilities and could intercede if they witnessed violations of the Conventions. Even after the new orders came down, senior JAG officers did not give up. According to a number of accounts, a delegation of officers contacted Scott Horton, a former high-ranking JAG officer and chairman of the Committee on International Human Rights of the New York City Bar Association, to see if he and like-minded attorneys would intervene. ''They were extremely upset'', Horton told the 'Los Angeles Times'. ''They said they were being shut out of the process, and that the civilian political lawyers, not the military lawyers, were writing these new rules of engagement.'' According to Horton, the JAG officers identified the main forces behind loosening the rules as Feith and the Pentagon's general counsel, William Haynes, another political appointee. ''If we -- 'we' being the uniformed lawyers -- had been listened to, and what we said put into practice, then these abuses would not have occurred'', Rear Adm Don Guter, the Navy JAG from 2000 to 2002, told ABCNews. Feith, who was also interviewed by ABC, denied there was any disagreement from JAG officers concerning rules and practices authorized by his office, but the issue is unlikely to rest with his word alone. Indeed, the accounts given by JAG officers are fully consistent with what is already known about Feith's policy-making practices. As with the pre-war intelligence and pre-war planning for the occupation, the experts and professionals were either circumvented or systematically excluded from participating in the policy process, so that civilian ideologues with ideas about how to extract information from uncooperative Arabs, for example, would not have to address informed criticism before plunging ahead. Like his mentor, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, Feith has long been a hardliner on foreign policy, arms control issues and Israel. As a youth, his father, Dalck Feith, was active in pre-World War II Poland in Betar, a militantly Zionist movement and forerunner of Israel's Likud Party. His parents perished in the Nazi Holocaust, according to the neo-conservative 'Wall Street Journal', which last week demanded a public apology from Powell for his reference to Feith's operation as the ''Gestapo Office''. Feith worked for Perle in the Pentagon under Ronald Reagan, and the two teamed up in the late 1980s to lobby on behalf of the Turkish government and build military ties between Turkey and Israel. In 1996 he participated in a private study by a right-wing Israeli think tank that called for ousting Saddam Hussein as a means to transform the balance of power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could ignore pressure to trade ''land for peace'' with the Palestinians or Syria. In 1997, Feith argued in 'Commentary' magazine for Israel to re-occupy the Occupied Territories and repudiate the Oslo accords, and the following year he signed an open letter to then-President Bill Clinton calling for Washington work with Chalabi's INC to oust Hussein. © Copyright 2004 IPS - Inter Press Service ### 21 May 2004 @ 09:10 by Quinty @68.9.129.35 : More on the madness in Iraq Remember Nicholas von Hoffman? He's back (if he was ever gone?) with an essay which brilliantly illuminates the madness we, as a nation, society, the world, are currently passing through. For a long time many of us have said the emperor is wearing no clothes. Here's another cry...... http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1450 if you are curous...... 21 May 2004 @ 10:12 by Quinty @68.9.129.35 : The white man's burden Have you ever thought that at times it's impossible to tell the difference between stupidity and madness? Yet here in the USA we still have people who chortle that Saddam was a menace who had to be done away with at all costs: and Americans, because they are Americans, believe that whatever those means are they're necessary and for the better good. Are we the only people in the world which doesn't realize that we have neighbors, whose humanity is as important as ours? Are we so isolated that we blithely believe that whatever we do is good simply because it is American and we do it? All the nations and empires in history, you may agree, that fell into ruin believed they were somehow special, better than everyone else: "barbarians," "uncivilized savages," "the white man's burden." We couldn't be taking a topple for more absurd reasons now. But if that is what is required to stop us, then let it happen. American imperial power, as I see it, has become a mindless juggernaut, led on by fanatics with a fanciful world-view. At what a cost, what a cost. 22 May 2004 @ 15:01 by jazzolog : What Is A War Crime? New York Times editorial this morning~~~ May 22, 2004 An Abu Ghraib Investigation It has been gratifying to see Senator John Warner, the Republican who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, lead a bipartisan effort to look into the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The hearings have already done far more than the Pentagon ever intended to do in providing a public airing of the Abu Ghraib disaster. But with each day's horrible revelations, it seems evident that the hearings will not be enough. It is also hard to believe that the military's own investigations will yield much, given the shifting of blame offered up by top Pentagon leaders, who continue to insist that the nightmare at Abu Ghraib was an isolated case of unsanctioned behavior by a few sick soldiers. That defense, never particularly credible, has been undercut by the Red Cross, by the emerging testimony of detainees and now by the Pentagon's own records. The Denver Post reported this week that military records documented the deaths of at last five Iraqi prisoners during brutal interrogations, only one of them at Abu Ghraib. In one especially chilling case, the former head of Iraq's air force turned himself in and was held at a "high value" prison, where interrogators appear to have killed him by stuffing him headfirst into a sleeping bag, sitting on his chest and covering his mouth. The Pentagon papered this over with a press release saying the prisoner "said he didn't feel well and subsequently lost consciousness." Despite the efforts of some of the senators notably two Republicans, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and three Democrats, Carl Levin, Jack Reed and Hillary Clinton each new panel of witnesses simply adds to the fog of misunderstanding. This week, for example, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the troops in Iraq, said he had never seen a protocol permitting the harsh treatment of prisoners until it surfaced at a hearing a week earlier. The Army's subsequent claim that the orders were the work of a single captain seemed even more implausible. The theory that a midranking intelligence officer carried out such a drastic shift in the military's normal rules did fit right in with the overriding theme of testimony thus far: senior officers blaming those far below them for everything. General Sanchez said Red Cross reports on prisoner abuse had gone to low-level officers who had never passed them on. Other accounts contradict that. But in any case, that's not a defense it's an indictment of his command. Among the big questions that need to be answered is how the government and the military handled the repeated complaints from the Red Cross. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his closest aides said they had been kept in the dark even longer than General Sanchez. But Red Cross officials met more than once in the past year with top American officials in Iraq and in Washington. Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt reported in The Times this week that the American military's first response had been to curtail Red Cross inspections. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the Red Cross had been so outraged by the soldiers' treatment of prisoners that it considered changing its policy and making its reports public. The military has repeatedly assured us that it will get to the bottom of this mess, but it has not provided any evidence that it's really capable of doing so. Senator Warner, meanwhile, has a long list of witnesses to call. He also wants the Pentagon to deliver a pile of documents, including all reviews by Defense Department lawyers of interrogation rules at Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Rumsfeld should fully and immediately comply. But given the quality of the testimony so far, it is not likely that the Senate hearings will produce the answers the public deserves. While this may not be the ideal time for an independent investigation, it is getting hard to see another option. Neither the Defense Department's inspector general nor Mr. Rumsfeld's office seems capable of mounting a reliable investigation so close to home. The best bet is for Congress to form a special committee with subpoena powers and an investigative staff. That would require, however, that other Republican leaders in Congress show the same honorable determination that Mr. Warner has demonstrated. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/opinion/22SAT1.html?th |
20 May 2004 @ 09:33, by Richard Carlson