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May 2004 |
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Somewhere a mother is sitting in sorrow, Somewhere a bugle is sounding tomorrow, Another Gold Star brings the count to nine hundred, May 30, 2004 - In the wake of the exposure of American mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib we have been treated to an ongoing discourse on whether or not those prisoners or prisoners held by the United States in Afghanistan or Cuba are protected by the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. Lawyers and politicians are skilled in drawing distinctions and explaining why what seems obvious does not apply. A treaty is an agreement between sovereign nations. The Geneva Convention is a multi-lateral treaty. Al Qaeda is not a sovereign nation so the constraints of the treaty do not apply. For that reason the persons captured in Afghanistan are not entitled to its protection. That argument is internally consistent; logically consistent; and makes a fine legal distinction that Ted Olson would be proud to present to the Supreme Court if it came to that. That legalistic argument depends, of course, on our being able to distinguish Afghanistan away from the community of sovereign nations. That was accomplished by declaring that the Taliban, who we had treated with as the legitimate government of Afghanistan right up to the time that the first of the bombs dropped, was not a legitimate government. That sophistry ignores the award of U.S. anti-drug grants to the same illegitimate government barely six months before we attacked it. Nevertheless it formed the core of the argument that the administration seized upon to declare the prisoners seized in that invasion were not EPW but rather were dumped into a new and previously unknown classification not entitled to Geneva Convention treatment...click here for entire article May 29, 2004 - Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. The Army announced that he was killed leading his section bravely against the enemy, suppressing their fire and taking the high ground. The Army awarded him the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. It came at the right time. With the body counts rising in Iraq and in the Afghan War that America forgot we had need of a hero and Pat Tillman was a real hero. He was a hero long before he got to Afghanistan. When America was attacked he sacrificed an assure future of wealth and comfort to become an American soldier. He was a Patriot with a capitol P. He did not find “other priorities” to avoid service when his country was under attack. He did not discover an “anal cyst” to keep him out of service nor a sudden interest in graduate studies. Neither did he join the National Guard, the ROTC or seek sanctuary in Canada. He did not find a sudden religious conversion to qualify him as a conscientious objector. He gave up his future and volunteered. That, and not the manner of his death, made Pat Tillman a hero, the kind of hero it is important that we remember on Memorial Day. Today Pat Tillman became something else as well. The news broke that he was not killed by the enemy lurking in the Afghani hills. Instead we killed him ourselves. He was a victim of friendly fire. His platoon had been divided into two sections in what is known as a “ground assault convoy”. Tillman was in the lead group. The trailing section had lagged behind opening the interval between the two sections. There was an explosion and one section opened fire. Tillman led his section on the supposed enemy and was killed in the confusion. Two Afghani soldiers were wounded. There was no enemy and no enemy fire. The cause of the explosion that set the firing off has not been determined. It may have been a land mine or a remotely triggered explosive device, or even one of the thousands of cluster bombs that we dropped while we blasted that Stone Age country back to the Stone Age....click here for entire article May 28, 2004 - As we wake up this morning Fallujah, the scene of a stalemated siege just a month ago, is quiet. Uniformed soldiers now quietly patrol its streets. They are not US Marines. America’s shock troops don’t enter the city. The uniforms are those of a US financed Iraqi Security Force and the commander used to work for Saddam Hussein. A month ago Fallujah was a battleground where Secretary of Defense threatened to annihilate an unholy alliance of Saddamist “bitter enders” and “foreign fighters”. Today those same fighters wear uniforms, brag about having defeated the Americans and, commanded by a Ba`athist General, impose a version of Islamic Law that more resembles Taliban Afghanistan than a New Free Iraq. What happened? What changed? As we wake up this morning American forces are preparing to withdraw from Najaf. A week ago al Sadr and his Mehdi militia were bottled up in the Shiite holy city. General Sanchez vowed to capture or kill al Sadr and destroy his Mehdi Army. For a month we have been hearing the body counts from the continuing engagement with the rag-tag militia. The Mehdi losses we claimed to have inflicted Today our army is pulling back, al Sadr is neither dead nor in captivity and the Mehdi militia is still defiant, and our soldiers are still being ambushed. What happened? What changed?....click here for entire article May 27, 2004 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President when I was born. The Great Depression was beginning to ease but the dark clouds carried on the winds of war were beginning to gather. The confidence and optimism in the face of adversity exemplified in his declaration that, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” was to sustain the nation as it emerged from economic depression only to be asked to unite in sacrifice to persevere in a world at war. I was three when the tropical skies rained death at Pearl Harbor. That President, defiant in his disability, with a jaunty air and jutting chin gave the nation that image of resolve and strength and the leadership to vanquish our fears and march in step toward the confident future he would not live to realize. I was just turned seven when his successor made the awful decision to employ mankind’s most fearful weapon against the Japanese industrial centers at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Harry Truman knew what responsibility was and did not shrink from it. He was the last President to be able to walk the streets of Washington while his bodyguard from the Secret Service scrambled to keep up. They were two men, one a patrician with a silver spoon birthright, the other a plebeian whose cradle rocked on a Missouri front porch, but they were one in the capacity to press forward with fearless confidence and resolve and America was the better for having known them ....click here for entire article May 26, 2004 - With crude oil fetching record prices and every gallon of gas slipping $2.15 out of your pocket you would think that the oil companies are netting big profits and you would be right. But that tank of gas that cost you 50 smackers on Tuesday in not the only way you are contributing to the oil executive bonus package. Your tax dollars are going into their pockets as well. Chevron-Texaco reported $ 4.7 Billion in profits last year. That is right, it was $ 4.7 Billion after expenses. Chevron was not exactly a company with a Poverty Row address. In spite of that Chevron received a $ 7.3 Million dollar federal grant. $ 7.3 Million out of the Homeland Security Budget to pay for its plant guards and electronic devices to detect intruders. You may remember that at the same time Tom Ridge was handing that gift to the Chevron executives his Department was laying off airport security agents because there wasn’t enough left to pay them. The good folks at Chevron thank you. And it wasn’t just Chevron slurping at the Homeland Security trough. ConocoPhillips smiled all the way to the bank with their profits of $ 4.7 Billion, Not quite up to Chevron’s performance but still quite respectful. Their little Homeland Security grant of $ 10.8 Million really helped in that effort and the Conoco executives thank you for their bonuses. Even Citgo, whose paltry $ 439 Million profit pales in comparison, got you to pay for the lion’s share of its plant security operation to the tune of $ 19.4 Million....click here for entire article May 25, 2004 - The audience was carefully chosen, the officers attending the Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is one of those battleground states as we will be reminded interminably between now and November. The President could expect the audience to react to the applause lines on cue and they did. So what did the President say and how should the wider audience to whom he was speaking react to what he said? Curiously, the White House did not request the on-air networks for time to air the speech live in prime time. It was billed as an important event, one that would set the tone for the President’s troubled re-election campaign. Despite its touted importance it was not important enough seek the widest possible American audience. Viewers were left to either seek out the important speech on Cable news outlets or choose entertainment over enlightenment. The voting audience was left, in the main, to rely on the predictable clips of the scheduled applause lines in a speech before a live and disciplined audience guaranteed to react favorably....click here for entire article May 24, 2004 - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that America would never again be embarrassed as it has been by the photos from the Abu Ghraib affair. He took a giant step yesterday toward achieving his goal. U.S. Military personnel serving in Free Iraq will no longer be permitted to possess mobile telephones with picture taking capabilities, digital cameras, camcorders or any other equipment that be used by the troops to violate the Geneva Conventions by taking incriminating photographs or videos. With one stroke of the secretarial pen Rumsfeld made his new found dedication to the Geneva Convention a part of military policy in Iraq. Pentagon sources told the press that the policy would be extended next week to apply to all US forces everywhere according to a piece in this morning’s Washington Times. No longer will people detained in US custody have to fear having their pictures taken while they are being tortured, sexually abused, or otherwise humiliated. No longer will the American people have to fear that they will see pictures of American service personnel torturing prisoners spread on the pages of the morning newspapers or shown on TV. No longer will American service personnel have to worry that there may be photographic evidence that may come back to haunt them at a Court Martial. It is a giant leap forward and an example of what the Bush team calls “leadership”....click here for entire article May 23, 2004 - In 1960, the year I was eligible to cast my first vote for President, the issue that got the most attention after the usual minor questions of war and peace; poverty or prosperity; and recession or recovery was the issue raised by the Democratic candidate’s Roman Catholicism. If elected President would the Senator from Massachusetts be bound to follow the dictates of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in matters of public policy? The Republicans used it as a wedge issue across the Bible Belt arguing that the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy would seat the Pope in the White House. The Republicans are raising the “Religious Issue” again 44 years later, but with a different twist. They argue that electing John Forbes Kerry, the Senator from Massachusetts, will drive religion out of the political arena because he will not allow the same hierarchy to direct his positions on public issues. The antagonists of 1960, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics, are now allies. The religious issue is not framed as whether the Catholic candidate will be in thrall to the Papal See as it was in 1960. Rather the question is asked whether the Catholic candidate’s refusal to impose Church dogma on the majority of Americans by incorporating it into the nation’s body of law should disqualify him from access to his Church’s most solemn rituals and, by extension, bar him from holding office for his failure to submit wholly to his Church hierarchy’s feudal discipline....click here for entire article May 22, 2004 - This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. Art. VI, clause 2. US Constitution The United States is a party to the treaties popularly known as the Geneva Conventions. Those treaties are made part of the supreme Law of the Land by that quaint document by which we guide our system of government – The Constitution of the United States. The War Crimes Act of 1996 is also part of the supreme Law of the Land. It provides: “Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b) [the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States], shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.” The War Crimes Act goes on to define the offense as any conduct defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party; prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907;or which constitutes a violation of common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva, 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party and which deals with non-international armed conflict. TITLE 18, PART I, CHAPTER 118, Sec. 2441.USCA ....click here for entire article May 21, 2004 - On June 30 th L. Paul Bremer and his Defense Department bosses will hand off Iraqi sovereignty to John Negroponte and his State Department bosses. One thing is sure. Ahmed Chalabi won’t be Negroponte’s Iraqi figurehead if the raid on his home and headquarters is any indicator. We don’t yet know who the figurehead will be. We are waiting for the UN’s representative to tell us the names of the Iraqis who will fill the offices of the interim government. Negroponte will preside over largest US embassy staff since Henry Cabot Lodge reigned in Saigon. Ambassador to the UN since September 2001 Negroponte comes to his new post highly qualified by his experience in Honduras in the 1980s. His biography in Wikipedia tells the story: “His appointment to the UN post was a controversial one because of his involvement in covert funding of the Contras and his covering up of human rights abuses in Honduras in the 1980s. He is accused of sponsoring terrorism for supporting the Contra insurgency against the left wing Sandinistas the first ever democratically elected government of Nicaragua. He is also accused of inciting Contra attacks on civilians.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte ....click here for entire article May 20, 2004 - He was sixteen and frail. He had the misfortune to be the son of a “high level individual” imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. Sergeant Samuel Provance was a military intelligence analyst at Abu Ghraib. He told General Taguba the story. The slightly built teenager was picked up, stripped naked, and thrown in the back of an open truck one night late last December or early in January. He was delivered, naked and mud spattered to a Tier One cell in Abu Ghraib. His father, who had thus far furnished no information to his interrogators, was shown his son. The father commenced to weep and told the interrogators that he would tell them anything they wanted to here. At that point Sgt. Provance was told to take the naked boy to the Abu Ghraib general population area. He protested the order but was told to do it anyway. He told his story to General Taguba in January, to General Kay this month, and repeated it this week in a telephone interview with the Chicago Tribune from his present station in Germany. Kay warned the sergeant not to talk about the incident. Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia did not return to Iraq after a 14 day leave last October. He turned himself in last January and petitioned to be accorded conscientious objector status. As part of his application filed last January – before the Taguba Report was finished and the abuses at Abu Ghraib were known – included an account of the abuse of prisoners at Al Asaad detention facility next to Baghdad Airport. He told of three interrogators called “Scooter”, “Rabbit” and “Arty” who instructed the members of Sgt. Mejia’s unit to “soften up” specific detainees by keeping them awake, staging mock executions, forcing them into “stress positions” - all interrogation techniques that were followed at Abu Ghraib. Sgt. Mejia’s lawyer refers to the mysterious agent as Blackwater-like” contractors...click here for entire article May 19, 2004 - On June 30, 2004 the Iraqi people will regain their sovereignty. President George W. Bush made that promise and, despite every setback on the ground in Iraq, he has said that his deadline is inviolate. It seemed to be a simple promise when he made it. On June 30th the Iraqi people got their country back. The problem came with when we tried to figure out just what “sovereignty” meant in the New American Century. Going to the dictionary did not help for in this new age the meaning of words requires a new dictionary, one written by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in which words mean only that which the speaker wants them to mean Shortly after the words were spoken by the President the Administration started redefining “sovereignty”. What the Iraqi people were going to receive was something called “limited sovereignty.” Now the minions of the Bush Administration are attempting to define that phrase as used in the New Dictionary for the New American Century that they are writing....click here for entire article May 18, 2004 - “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," The passage is from a memorandum written by the man who many think will be the President’s choice to fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. That attitude toward the treaty obligations under the Geneva Convention goes a long way toward explaining how the Picnic on Copper Green became policy in this White House. When the President’s senior legal advisor refers a portion of a treaty as “obsolete” and “quaint” implicitly inviting him to ignore its obligations it is but a short step to advising him to ignore the quaint, obsolete document that declared it to be the law of the land – The Constitution of the United States. It gives one pause until – that is – one considers that the prevailing legal opinion of this Administration, having come to office on the strength of a Supreme Court decision interpreting it, seems to be that the Constitution is not to be complied with but rather an impediment to be circumvented by waiving the 3000 bloody shirts of 9-11...click here for entire article May 17, 2004 - “America is ushering in a New Responsibility Era where each of us understands we’re responsible for the decisions we make in life. You’re beginning to see the consequences of people making irresponsible decisions. They need to pay the price for their irresponsibility.” The President was talking about the likes of Martha Stewart when he said it. Martha made plenty of decisions that the President considers irresponsible. She has been no Pioneer. It is pretty clear that he wasn’t talking about anybody above the rank of Staff Sergeant. When it comes to Iraq there have been plenty of the President’s “irresponsible decisions” made at lots of levels. You could start with the decision to declare the war virtually over on May 1, 2003. There was the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and send them home. There was the decision to ignore the advice of career army officers and not make the commitment of forces necessary to police an occupied country. There was the decision to authorize the SAP program in Iraq – Copper Green. There was the decision to blur the nation’s commitment to the rule of law and declare that some prisoners are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. There was the decision to put ill-trained and ill-supervised reservists in charge at Abu Ghraib’s “hard site”. There have been plenty of “irresponsible decisions” in the course of this splendid little war that is no longer little and is certainly not splendid. Who is paying the price for those?. ..click here for entire article May 16, 2004 - She called them “disappearing ghosts” – the mysterious civilians who floated in and out of the “hard site” at Abu Ghraib prison supposedly under her command. General Karpinski did not know who they were or what they were doing. She wasn’t supposed to. Then there were what the MP’s from Cresaptown, Maryland called “ghost prisoners” – the detainees without records or prisoners delivered to Tier 1 by General Karpinski’s disappearing ghosts. According to an article in the current New Yorker by Seymour Hersh both the mysterious OGA ectoplasmic personnel and their equally evanescent charges were part of the super secret Special Access Program [SAP] designed by Under Secretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone with the specific approval of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Knowledge of the SAP was closely held but, according to Hersh, those who were briefed included General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice; and the President himself. The SAP designed by Dr. Cambone went by several code names, according to Hersh, including Copper Green. The inspiration for Copper Green apparently came from a study of Arab sociology and culture by the late Rafael Patai published in 1973 as “The Arab Mind.” The book was adopted by the neo-conservatives of the Project for a New American Century as the definitive description of Arabic cultures strengths and weaknesses. The Arab, they believed, understood only force and was especially vulnerable to blackmail about sexual matters and most vulnerable to threats of exposure as a homosexual. That was the rationale behind Cambone’s design of Copper Green. Its interrogation techniques were intended to break the so-called “high value targets” or to create an army of informants to be inserted back in to the population to operate under a constant threat of exposure as sexual deviants...click here for entire article May 15, 2004 - The photographs of which we have become all too familiar depict the activities of a few rouge evildoers unknowingly imbedded in the midst of our army of good honest and honorable American soldiers. They were acting alone, on their own initiative and certainly not with the knowledge of or on orders from their commanders. Well, at least not with the knowledge of or on orders from the higher levels of the chain of command. May 13, 2004 - We live in an open society – at least we claim we do. We conduct our government in the public view – at least we claim we do. We have a free and uncensored press – at least we claim that we do. With all of that we permit the government to prevent the press from photographing the stream of anonymous casualties arriving at Dover Air Force Base. We let the government get away with the claim that their policy is intended to protect the privacy of the families of the unidentifiable dead. Ask Nicholas Berg’s father about the invasion of a family’s privacy as the image of his son’s death is shown and re- shown. The Secretary of Defense argued today from Baghdad against letting the public see photographic evidence of American violations of international law and common decency, American law and the Geneva Convention by saying that displaying the photographs is a violation of the Geneva Convention. In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee he was more disturbed by the publication of the evidence than he was with that which the evidence showed saying that the “real question” was how the photographs and the Taguba Report got out. He suggested then and repeats today that showing the American people that evidence endangers the men and women whose lives he has gambled in Iraq. It is as though he believes that the Iraqi detainees will forget their treatment unless reminded by the photographs. It is as though he believes that the Iraqi people have not heard the survivors of post-Saddam Abu Ghraib describe the treatment they endured...click here for entire article May 12, 2004 - His name is Nicholas Berg. His home was in West Chester Pennsylvania. On March 31 he was in custody in an Iraqi jail in Baghdad. The reason for his incarceration is unclear. The FBI says that he was not in US custody but he was in “local” custody. The FBI also says that “he was in Iraq on business and that’s that.” His family last heard from him on April 9th when he phoned to tell them that he was leaving Iraq through Jordan, Syria or Kuwait. May 10, 2004 - Last week a released Iraqi prisoner gave an interview to the western press in which he described the treatment he endured as an internee at Abu Ghraib. He claimed, he had been shown pictures similar to those shown on Sixty Minutes II as part of his interrogation and told that if he failed to cooperate the same fate would befall him. Speaking this morning in an interview with CNN Lynndie England’s civilian lawyers said that their client had been asked to pose for the photographs the President has called “disgusting” by the interrogators at Abu Ghraib and the photographs had been taken for just that purpose that the released prisoner described. May 9, 2004 - With her public support for Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld yesterday National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice reminded us that last October she, and not Rumsfeld, took primary responsibility for the occupation of Iraq in her role as head of the Administration’s Iraq Stabilization Group. Her statements to the press yesterday are part of the President’s PR offensive launched Saturday to counter the growing calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Rice was designated to lead the post war effort in Iraq last October in a move that some pundits speculated was designed to dim the public spotlight on the Department of Defense. It was in the period immediately after the transfer of primary responsibility to Rice that the outrages at Abu Ghraib took place. In her Rumsfeld Apologia Ms. Rice said that the responsibility for the occupation “lay not just with the Pentagon and Mr. Rumsfeld, but with the president's entire national security team.” ...click here for entire article May 8, 2004 - 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. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08IMAG.html General Smith inadvertently let the cat slip out of the bag during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on Friday. The Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon thought that they had the story contained. They knew that the photos existed. They thought that they had possession of them. They had stamped General Taguba’s candid and revealing report as secret. Only the six military policemen who were clearly identified in the photographs were being prosecuted. Quietly, and with out public announcements, the officers of the local command at Abu Ghraib had been reprimanded and transferred out. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had brought the “stress and duress” techniques to Iraq last August and December, was given the command....click here for entire article May 7, 2004 - From the day that the President hit the Trifecta Donald Rumsfeld has been at war. Some of his wars have been conducted in the open – the war in Afghanistan; the war in Iraq – so that the American people could be witnesses to the successes and to the failures that both of these star-crossed conflicts have exhibited. But there have been other Rumsfeld wars. There is his war with Colin Powell’s State Department for control of American foreign policy. There is his war with George Tenet’s CIA for control of the shape of the information upon which the President will decide to support the policies of the Defense Department and its Office of Special Plans. There is his war with the Constitution being fought over two – and perhaps more – Americans being held in military prisons without charges or process – due or otherwise – at the pleasure of the Secretary expressed by his nominal superior, the President of the United States. And, there is his war with human dignity being fought in dank prisons and sun-baked dog pens in Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq. For almost three years now we have fought the first of Mr. Rumsfeld’s public wars – a war in which the primary objective announced to the American people was to capture Osama Bin Laden and dismantle his Al Qaeda terrorist network. Three years of campaigning by a skeleton army and we have yet to get a glimpse of even Bin Laden’s heels. We are no closer to bringing him to justice than we were in October of 2001. That war has been a failure as each spring Rumsfeld’s Pentagon announces a new spring offensive designed to capture the Islamic Scarlet Pimpernel while the quarry announces a price on American heads....click here for entire article May 6, 2004 - It happened on Donald Rumsfeld’s watch as a result of the course that he charted. All the sugar coated excuses of ignorance of the fact, failures of discipline, and the molasses pace of information up the chain of command don’t furnish an excuse to avoid responsibility. The Abu Ghraib outrages are just the latest and most egregious example of the results of a policy, determined by the Secretary himself, to remove any enforceable rights from military prisoners and civilian detainees alike. What the world has seen in indictment after indictment of the detention system put in place by Secretary Rumsfeld, administered by Secretary Rumsfeld, and now defended by Secretary Rumsfeld. It has been a disservice to his President and a disservice to the nation. Nothing less than the international reputation of America as a bulwark against tyranny and a beacon of freedom have been left in tatters by Donald Rumsfeld’s stewardship. That is what the President must now defend and restore. That the crisis reached a boiling point in the midst of a contentious political campaign can also be laid to the Secretary’s door. It is unfortunate that because of that timing considerations of partisanship may intrude upon the requirements of statesmanship. Partisan considerations aside, it is time for the President to act, to exercise leadership and act in the interest of the nation. Donald Rumsfeld must be discharged and discharged now....click here for entire article May 6, 2004 - “According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often "softened up" by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner's resistance.” The Washington Post article echoes what Chip Frederick wrote home to his family when he knew that the secret of Abu Ghraib was leaking out. The words he wrote were self serving justifications for the abuse of prisoners that we are shown on television and the internet. Except that the article was not written in the last week and the subject was not the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The article by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman was published December 26, 2002 and described conditions at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan....click here for entire article May 5, 2004 - The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told The Associated Press today that Mr. Bush first became aware of the accusations of abuse some time after the Pentagon began looking into them, but that he did not see the photographs of sexual humiliation until they were made public and did not learn of the classified Pentagon report about the episode until news organizations reported its existence. New York Times May 4, 2004. The public learned of the Army’s investigation into the abuse of prisoners on January 16th when Central Command announced it. Apparently the President missed that announcement. He did not learn of an investigation when the rest of us did but, to be fair, the announcement suggested that the incidents under investigation were minor incidents in which four soldiers, two men and two women, were being charged with having pushed Iraqi prisoners around. The announcement was carefully worded to avoid setting off alarm bells. According to the White House the President did not know about even the accusations until “some time after” the investigations began....click here for entire article May 3, 2004 - You have seen her picture or at least you have seen it described in print. She poses with a big grin on her face giving a thumbs-up gesture to the camera with one hand while with the other she points to the obscured genital area of an apparently nude Iraqi prisoner. The text tells us that the nude Iraqi is masturbating. She looks like the girl next door and the juxtaposition of her smiling face and the scene that the President has described as “disgusting” is incongruous. Who is she? She is Specialist Lynndie R. England, 21, who, according to the Baltimore Sun, “grew up in a trailer down a dirt road behind a saloon and a sheep farm” in Fort Ashby a tiny town in Mineral County, West Virginia. Her father worked on the railroad and Lynndie made the honor roll in high school. She used to hang out at the Dairy Dip in Fort Ashby with the other local girls eyeballing the local boys in their cars as they cruised by eyeballing the girls. She enlisted in the 372nd Military Police Battalion to get away from her small town and earn money for college. When her Reserve unit, based in nearby Cumberland Maryland, was activated last year and sent to Iraq her picture was hung with pride at the local Walmart and under a banner saying “We’re Hometown Proud” at the Mineral County Court House in Keyser. She sent another picture home to her mother showing her riding a camel somewhere in the Middle East. Her prewar story is remarkably similar to that of another hometown West Virginia girl that we read about just a year ago. She was the “girl next door”....click here for entire article May 3, 2004" - Richard B. Myers wears the stars. He is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of America’s armed forces. Colin Powell held the job during the first Iraqi War under Old 41, President George H. W. Bush. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is supposed to know. That is why he was hired. Yesterday he was asked to assure the public that the abuses of prisoners revealed by CBS news were not indicative of a wider pattern of prisoner abuse. “We don’t know that yet, “Myers answered. Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba caught the job of investigating the claims of a couple US soldiers who spoke out about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison between October and December of last year and supported their accounts with copies of photographs. He completed his report last February. In it he pinned the blame for the abuses on two military intelligence officers and two employees of CACI International. Yesterday Gen. Myers admitted that he had not yet read Taguba’s 53 page classified report. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld hadn’t read it either. Readers of The New Yorker got a glimpse of what is in the report yesterday when Seymour Hersh’s article hit the magazine’s website. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact ....click here for entire article May 2, 2004 - "We have had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They usually end up breaking within hours." That was what the highest ranking reservist soldier to be criminally charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison wrote to his uncle last December 18th. So far six members of the 372 Military Police Company based in Cumberland. Maryland have been charged in connection with abuses documented by CBS News on last Wednesday’s 60 Minutes broadcast. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, Spec. Megan M. Ambuhl, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., Spec. Sabrina D. Harman and Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits all face Courts Martial. The specific charges are secret but the photographs tell the story. According to Brigadier General Janis L. Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade of which the 372nd was a part the abuse occurred in Cellblock 1A. That cell block, and her soldiers assigned to guard, it was not controlled by her command but by the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Ominously the pattern of abuse began after a visit to the prison by a team Military Intelligence officers from Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Delta. "Their main and specific mission was to get the interrogators, to give them new techniques to get more information from detainees," Gen. Karpinski said. Karpinski, the only woman to have ever held a command in an Iraqi combat zone was quietly sent home in January as the story of the abuses began to break. Karpinski was replaced by the man in charge of interrogations at Camp Delta. No one from the Military Intelligence unit faces charges or possible discipline....click here for entire article May 1, 2004 - "A year ago I did give the speech from the carrier saying we had achieved an important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq. As a result, a friend of terror has been removed and now sits in a jail," Sometimes it seems that President Bush is just not paying attention. Either that or once Karen Hughes has taught him a canned response it just has to come out of his mouth without regard to the circumstances. Pronouncing himself “disgusted” at the treatment of Iraqi prisoners revealed in the shots seen round the world he promised to see that the perpetrators of those acts were properly punished. That was in the same breath that he defended his premature “mission accomplished” speech claiming that torture, rape and mass deaths had ended a year ago in Iraq....click here for entire article |
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