May 2004: Week Four: This Far and No Further

Back to May 2004

Entire Iraqi war and occupation proven an Iranian intelligence operation

May 22: The Defense Intelligence Agency reports that a senior aide to Ahmad Chalabi has duped the US for years with disinformation designed to affect US foreign policy and to collect highly sensitive information, and the treachery has been paid for by US taxpayers. The aide, Aras Karim Habib, is an agent of Iranian intelligence, and has apparently passed along the secrets he has collected to Iran for years. Iraqi and coalition police are currently seeking Habib, who is now the subject of a warrant for his arrest. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," says a DIA source. The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing" by passing classified US documents and other sensitive information. The program has received millions of dollars from the US government over several years. An administration official confirms that "highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel." The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 per month to Chalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Patrick Lang, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East branch, says he has been told by colleagues in intelligence that Chalabi's US-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to," he says. He describes it as "one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history," and goes on to say, "I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work."
The DIA source says Karim is primarily responsible for the intelligence breach: Karim's "fingerprints are all over it," he says. "There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the US government, inadvertently," he says. The Iraqi National Congress has received about $40 million in U.S. money over the past four years, including $33 million from the State Department and $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency. In Baghdad after the war, Karim's operation was run out of a floor of a secure intelligence headquarters building while the agency was on the floor above, said an Iraqi source who knows Karim well. The links between the Iraqi National Congress and U.S. intelligence go back to at least 1992, when Karim was picked by Chalabi to run his security and military operations. Indications that Iran, which fought a war against Iraq during the 1980s, was trying to lure the United States into action against Saddam appeared years before the Bush administration decided in 2001 that ousting Saddam was a US priority. In 1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq's nuclear program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bomb program in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave United Nations nuclear inspectors what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program. Hamza, who fled Iraq in 1994, teamed with Chalabi after his escape. It turns out that the documents were sophisticated forgeries made by Iranian intelligence. Other Chalabi aides term the allegations that Habib is working for Iranian intelligence "ridiculous" attempts to undermine Chalabi. (Newsday/Duluth News Tribune, MSNBC)
May 22: A confidential December 24 letter to the International Red Cross disputes the protected status of many of the detainees at Abu Ghraib, and contends that the prisoners do not warrant protection under the Geneva Conventions. The letter, drafted by military lawyers and signed by Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, emphasized the "military necessity" of isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their "significant intelligence value," and said prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals. The military insisted that there were "clear procedures governing interrogation to ensure approaches do not amount to inhumane treatment." In recent public statements, Bush administration officials have said that the Geneva Conventions were "fully applicable" in Iraq. That has put American-run prisons in Iraq in a different category from those in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo Bay, where members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been declared unlawful combatants not eligible for protection. However, the December 24 letter undermines administration assertions of the conventions' broad application in Iraq. Until now, the only known element of the letter had been a provision described by a senior Army officer as having asserted that the Red Cross should not seek in the future to conduct no-notice inspections in the cellblock where the worst abuses took place. The International Committee of the Red Cross had reported in November that its staff, in a series of visits to Abu Ghraib in October, had "documented and witnessed" ill treatment that "included deliberate physical violence" as well as verbal abuse, forced nudity and prolonged handcuffing in uncomfortable positions.
In recent Congressional testimony, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, asserted that the December 24 response demonstrated that the military had fully addressed the Red Cross complaints. Much of the military's reply is devoted to presenting a legal justification for the treatment of a broad category of Iraqi prisoners, including hundreds identified by the United States as "security detainees" in a cellblock at Abu Ghraib and in another facility known as Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport, where the Red Cross had also found abuses. Prisoners of war are given comprehensive protections under the Third Geneva Convention, while civilian prisoners are granted considerable protection under the Fourth Convention. Under the argument advanced by the military, Iraqi prisoners who are deemed security risks can be denied the right to communicate with others, and perhaps other rights and privileges, at least until the overall security situation in Iraq improves. The military's rationale relied on a legal exemption within the Fourth Geneva Convention. "While the armed conflict continues, and where 'absolute military security so requires,' security detainees will not obtain full GC protection as recognized in GCIV/5, although such protection will be afforded as soon as the security situation in Iraq allows it," the letter says, using abbreviations to refer to Article 5 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That brief provision opens what is, in effect, a narrow, three-paragraph loophole in the 1949 convention.
The Red Cross's standing commentary on the provision calls it "an important and regrettable concession to State expediency." It was drafted, during intense debate and in inconsistent French and English versions, to address the treatment of spies and saboteurs. "What is most to be feared is that widespread application of the article may eventually lead to the existence of a category of civilian internees who do not receive the normal treatment laid down by the convention but are detained under conditions which are almost impossible to check," says the Red Cross commentary, which is posted on its Web site. "It must be emphasized most strongly, therefore, that Article 5 can only be applied in individual cases of an exceptional nature." An authority on the laws of war, Scott Silliman of Duke University, says that the assertions in the military's letter were highly questionable and that the military lawyers who drafted it may have misconstrued the law. The category in which prisoners may be excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions that the letter cites, Silliman says, are for people who can be shown to be a continuing threat to the occupying force, not people who might have valuable intelligence. "They may be high value assets but that does not necessarily make them security risks," he says. The provision cited in the letter provides that the protections could be suspended for people suspected of "activities hostile to the security" of a warring state or an occupying power. In testimony last week on Capitol Hill, Colonel Marc Warren, a top American military lawyer in Iraq, defended harsh techniques available to American interrogators there as not being in violation of the Geneva Conventions. He said the conventions should be read in light of "various legal treatises and interpretations of coercion as applied to security internees."
Exactly how the treatment of security prisoners would differ from others under the military's approach was not spelled out in detail, but clearly it would allow their segregation into a separate part of the prison for interrogation, where some of them could be held incommunicado. The military's letter promised to try to improve prisoners' treatment in some respects cited by the Red Cross, promising, for example, to provide shelters against mortar and rocket attacks "in due course" but noting that the shelters are in short supply for American and allied soldiers. It also said "improvement can be made" to provide adequate clothing and water, and promised speedier judgments and discharges of innocent prisoners. The letter is addressed to Eva Svoboda of the Red Cross committee, who is identified as the agency's "protection coordinator." It asserts that the prisoners at Camp Cropper "have been assessed to be of significant ongoing intelligence value to current and future military operations in Iraq. Their detention condition is in the context of ongoing strategic interrogation," it reads, and "under the circumstances, we consider their detention to be humane." The Red Cross report said that at the time of the October visits to Abu Ghraib, "a total of 601 detainees were held as security detainees. Many were unaware of any charges against them or what legal process might be ahead of them," the report reads. Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer who heads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke, says the response of authorities at Abu Ghraib to the Red Cross appears to be part of a larger pattern in which the administration and the military devote great energy to find ways to avoid the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. "If you look at this in connection with other things that are coming out, it doesn't seem like a snap decision but part of an across-the-board pattern of decision-making to create another category outside the conventions." He cites a memorandum written in January 2002 by Albert Gonzales, the White House counsel, recommending that President Bush decree that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners from the war in Afghanistan. In the memorandum, Gonzales said that getting out from under the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions would preserve the government's flexibility in fighting terrorism. (New York Times)
May 22: Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, head of coalition forces in Iraq, issued an order last October giving military intelligence control over almost every aspect of prison conditions at Abu Ghraib with the explicit aim of manipulating the detainees' "emotions and weaknesses," according to an October 12, 2003 memorandum published in the Washington Post. The memo proves that Sanchez, far from being "out of the loop," was provably involved in the abuse of prisoners at the Iraqi prison. The memorandum comes to light as more details emerged of the extent of detainee abuse. Formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator. The October memorandum also contradicts Sanchez's sworn testimony to the US Senate. At a hearing this week of the Senate armed services committee, he was questioned about an order he had given in November placing Abu Ghraib prison under the command of a military intelligence brigade. He insisted the order referred only to the defense of the jail. "All of the other responsibilities for continuing to run the prison for logistics, training, discipline and the conduct of prison operations remained with the 800th [military police] Brigade commander," Sanchez told senators. He specifically rejected the findings of the official report into the Abu Ghraib abuse by Major General Antonio Taguba, who concluded that military intelligence officers had told the guards "to set the conditions" for interrogations. However, according to the memorandum, Sanchez had explicitly given military intelligence interrogators control over the "lighting, heating...food, clothing and shelter" of the detainees being questioned. It also called for military intelligence officials to work more closely with the military police guards at the prison to "manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses." It has also become clear that the military intelligence brigade that took control of the interrogation center was deployed direct from Afghanistan and brought with it harsh procedures it had developed there. The US military deems US military prisons in Afghanistan to be outside the jurisdiction of the Geneva conventions because it defines al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters as "unlawful combatants." (Guardian)
May 22: Several high-ranking US military officials believe that the Pentagon has hired private contractors to interrogate Iraqi prisoners in an attempt to avoid congressional and military oversight. "They believed that there was a conscious effort to create an atmosphere of ambiguity, of having people involved who couldn't be held to account," says a civilian lawyer who has spoken to the officials. Two private companies were involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib. One, CACI International, supplied interrogation specialists, while the other, Titan International, supplied interpreters. Their participation has been highly controversial because of concerns that their confused legal status could preclude them from effective oversight. Private contractors are not subject to the same military legal code as uniformed soldiers. They have also been exempted from local laws in Iraq, under a decree passed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. A Pentagon spokesman denies that contractors were used for reasons of secrecy, and said they were held to the same standard as regular military intelligence: "The regulations -- both Geneva and otherwise -- apply the same exact way to the contractors as they do to uniform personnel," says the spokesman. Critics of such outsourcing arrangements note that while seven US soldiers are already facing court martials for their conduct at Abu Ghraib, no contractors have yet been punished despite being implicated in the abuses in a report filed by army Major General Antonio Taguba in late February. Civilian contractors in Afghanistan have also avoided sanctions even though at least one has come under investigation in connection with the death of a prisoner at an army detention facility there. (Financial Times/CommonDreams
May 22: It is now revealed that two Marines have been court-martialed for torturing an Iraqi prisoner with electricity at the Marine-run Al Mahmudiya prison in Iraq. Privates Andrew Sting and Jeremian Trefney, both 19 years old, pled guilty to charges stemming from their abuse of an inmate with wires attached to a 110-volt cell. Both have been discharged from the military and will serve jail terms. Two other Marines are facing unspecified charges over the incident. (San Diego Union-Tribune
May 22: A newly released AP video of the aftermath of a US attack on a wedding party in western Iraq shows a scene of horrific carnage, depicting the dead bodies of at least ten children, clumps of hair from a woman's head, bloodstains, shattered musical instruments, and more. The attack killed up to 45 civilians, mostly from the Bou Fahad tribe of the village of Mogr el-Deeb, near the Syrian border. US officials have denied that the gathering that was attacked was actually a wedding party, but instead a gathering of terrorists. The video gives those denials the lie. Most of the graves of the Iraqis killed in the attacks contain the bodies of mothers and their children. In Washington, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers has told Congress that "we feel at this point very confident that this was a legitimate target, probably foreign fighters" who may have ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian wanted for allegedly organizing attacks on US troops in Iraq on behalf of al-Qaeda. "The intelligence right now and what we found at the site, which were weapons and the sort of things you might not expect at a wedding party, were not consistent with that. They were consistent with folks trying to come into the country, across the desert, in vehicles, staying for the night, trying to make it into Iraq." Several shotguns, handguns, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns were found at the site, according to US spokesman General Mark Kimmitt.
Bou Fahad tribesmen deny that any foreign fighters were among them. They consider the desolate border area part of their territory and follow their goats, sheep and cattle there to graze. In the springtime they leave spacious homes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and roam the desert. Smuggling livestock into Syria is also part of a herdsman's life, although no one in the tribe acknowledges that. Weddings are often marked in Iraq with celebratory gunfire, but survivors insisted no weapons were fired before the US bombings, despite speculation by Iraqi officials that this drew a mistaken American attack. The first bomb hit the huge goat-hair tent, where male guests were sleeping, at about 2:45 AM May 19. The barrage didn't stop until sunrise, witnesses say. Women and children were in an adjacent one-story house and the men went to their nearby homes. After the first missile, tribesman Hamdan Khalaf ran in panic and hid in a grassy area. "In the morning, we went back to the hill and saw people torn apart, attacked by the plane," Khalaf, who was not wounded, tells APTN. "We pulled them out of here," another man tells APTN, standing on a pile of stones as he picks up a stained green cloth that looks like part of a young man's shirt. A severed arm lays in the rubble. "We took them to hospital -- straight to the fridge," he adds. An angry voice in the background of the tape denounces President Bush. "This is his terrorism," the voice says. The body of what survivors say was the wedding's cameraman was pulled out of the debris on May 20. The footage also shows women in colorful clothes sifting through the wreckage and carrying away blankets and other goods. Pieces of rockets and bullet casings were strewn across the sandy plain, as were pots and pans and a satellite dish. Partly charred pickup trucks and a water tanker stood in the desert.
The attack left few survivors. About a dozen wounded were taken to the town of Qaem, about 140 miles northwest of Ramadi and 130 miles north of Mogr el-Deeb. Witnesses, interviewed on May 20 by the AP in Ramadi, said revelers at the wedding party began worrying when they heard aircraft overhead at about 9 p.m. on May 18. Then came military vehicles, which stopped about two miles away from the village and switched off their headlights. The planes were still overhead at 11 p.m, so the hosts told the band to stop playing and everyone went to bed. About four hours later, airstrikes began and continued until dawn when two helicopters landed and about 40 soldiers searched the house where the women had stayed and a second, vacant house. Soon after, the two houses were blown up. Some witnesses said the houses were attacked by helicopters; others said Americans detonated them with explosives. Kimmitt confirms that the operation was an air and ground assault. "Those people on the ground identified no children as part of that location that were killed," he says, adding that they reported only adult deaths. He also referred to the APTN video, shot May 20 in Mogr el-Deeb, as well as separate APTN footage from Wednesday in Ramadi that showed a headless body of a child and other bodies of children. "What we saw in those APTN videos were substantially inconsistent with the reports we received from the unit that conducted the operation," Kimmitt says. "We're now trying to figure out why there's an inconsistency. We're keeping an open mind as to exactly what happened on the ground. That's why we're continuing to try to gather all the facts; that's why we're not ruling out anything based on information coming forward." (AP/Guardian)

Testimony of rape of Iraqi boys by male interrogators

May 22: An Iraqi detainee has testified that he witnessed the rape of an Iraqi boy by a man in a US army uniform. The report of the detainee's testimony blacks out the name of the rapist, but he has been identified as a translator working for the US Army. "I saw [name blacked out] f*cking a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his d*ck in the little kid's *ss," Kasim Hilas told military investigators. "I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures." It is not clear from the testimony whether the rapist described by Hilas was working for a private contractor or was a US soldier. A private contractor was arrested after the Taguba investigation was completed, but was freed when it was discovered the army had no jurisdiction over him under military or Iraqi law. Another inmate, Thaar Dawod, describes more abuse of teenage Iraqis. "They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer [Corporal Charles Graner, one of the military policemen facing court martial] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners," he said. According to most inmate statements, Graner ran the night shift at Abu Ghraib's interrogation wing, and dealt out the worst of the abuse. Ameen al-Sheikh testified that: "The night guard came over, his name is Graner, open the cell door, came in with a number of soldiers. They forced me to eat pork and put liquor in my mouth. The second night Graner came and hung me on the cell door. I told him I have a broken shoulder. I am afraid it will break again...the doctor told me 'don't put your arms behind your back'. He said : 'I don't care.' Then he hung me to the door far more than eight hours." Al-Sheikh's testimony suggests military intelligence interrogators were also directly involved in the abuse. When he fails to identify a picture of a man suspected of giving him some pistols, he said the interrogators "point a weapon to my head and threaten they will kill me; sometime with dogs and they hang me to the door allowing the dogs to try to bite me." (Guardian)
May 22: Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi walks out of an Arab League summit meeting over his objections to what he says are insufficiently tough criticisms of Israel's handling of the Palestinian crisis. The 22 Arab leaders are united over their outrage at US abuses of Iraqi prisoners and their calls for Iraqi independence. The Arab summit will conclude with a resolution calling for the relaunching of a peace-for-land initiative to end the 56-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict that was endorsed by an Arab summit in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2002. The Bush administration plans to formally unveil its plan for Mideast reform that has been criticized by some as interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries. The plan, known as the Greater Middle East Initiative, will be launched at the G-8 summit of major industrial countries June 8-10 in the United States. (AP/Fox News)
May 22: Truck drivers for Halliburton subsidiary KBR confirm that the firm has sent convoys of empty flatbed trucks through Iraq over 100 times this year alone, putting their drivers and military escorts at severe risk and handing taxpayers the bill with added profit. The drivers were in peril of insurgent attack while taking empty rigs on the 300-mile resupply run from Camp Cedar in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda near Baghdad, say 12 current and former drivers for the company. KBR billed the government for hauling what the drivers derisively call "sailboat fuel." KBR, the US Army, and the truckers give different reasons for why empty trucks were driven through areas that the drivers nicknamed Rockville and Slaughterhouse for the danger they presented. KBR describes the practice of including empty trucks in convoys as normal, given the large number of trucks it has delivering goods throughout Iraq. The Army's contract doesn't dictate how many trucks must be in a convoy or whether they must be full, says Linda Theis, a spokeswoman for the US Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Illinois. "There was one time we ran 28 trucks; one trailer had one pallet, and the rest of them were empty," says David Wilson, who was the convoy commander on more than 100 runs. Four other drivers who were with Wilson confirm his account. "It was supposed to be critical supplies that the troops had to have to operate," says Wilson, who has been fired by KBR. "It was one thing to risk your life to haul things the military needed. It's another to haul empty trailers." KBR denies there was any problem with the truck runs. "It is difficult and dangerous work and requires a lot from our employees," says Cathy Gist, a KBR spokeswoman. KBR truckers say they can earn about $80,000 a year, which is tax free if they remain in Iraq for a year. Trucking experts estimate that each round trip costs taxpayers thousands of dollars. Of 12 current or former KBR drivers iinterviewed, 7 asked not to be identified. Six of the truckers said they were fired by KBR for allegedly running Iraqi drivers off the road when they attempted to break into the convoy; the dismissed drivers dispute that accusation. The 12 drivers, interviewed separately over the course of more than a month, tell similar stories about their trips through hostile territory. (Detroit Free Press)
May 22: After careful review, a number of medical experts have concluded that the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg was staged. "I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic," Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, says from New Zealand. Echoing Dr Simpson's criticism, forensic death expert Jon Nordby, PhD and fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, says, when asked whether he believed the Berg decapitation video had been "staged:" "Yes, I think that's the best explanation of it." Both Simpson and Nordby believe it is highly probable that Berg had died some time prior to his decapitation. A factor in this was an apparent lack of the "massive" arterial bleeding such an act initiates. "I would have thought that all the people in the vicinity would have been covered in blood, in a matter of seconds...if it was genuine," says Simpson. Notably, the act's perpetrators appeared far from so. Nordby observes: "I think that by the time they're...on his head, he's already dead." During the period when Berg's captors filmed the decapitation sequence, circumstances indicate that he had already been dead "a quite uncertain length of time, but more than...however long the beheading took," Simpson says.
Both Simpson and Nordby also note the difficulty in providing analysis based on the video. But both also felt that Berg had seemed drugged. A particularly significant point in the video sequence occurred as Berg's captors attacked him, bringing the supposedly fatal knife to bear. "The way that they pulled him over, they could have used a dummy at that point," says Simpson. Nordby adds that Berg does not "appear to register any sort of surprise or any change in his facial expression when he's grabbed and twisted over, and they start to bring this weapon into use." Subsequently, Nordby says it was likely that the filming sequence was manipulated at the point immediately preceding this, allowing Berg's corpse to be used for the decapitation sequence. Nordby also emphasized that the video "raises more questions than it answers," with the most fundamental questions of "who are you, and how did you die," being impossible to answer from it. But broad speculation exists regarding a number of factors surrounding both Berg's death and the video, and its timing in regard to revelations of US prison atrocities. Because Iraq's radical Islamists speak in a particular manner, and live by a closely proscribed code, apparent contradictions between these ways and the way Berg's captors appeared has generated speculation. Some observers have speculated on the possibility that the individuals weren't native Arabic speakers. Conversely, it is reported that in Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law allows for beheadings in cases of severe crimes, the condemned is heavily drugged with tranquilizers prior to the execution, reportedly leaving them in a state similar to that which Berg appeared in during parts of the video. Nordby emphasizes that the video "raises more questions than it answers." (Asia Times
May 22: A coalition of political scientists, computer experts, voter groups, and state officials are demanding that electronic voting machines to be used in the November elections have a verifiable paper trail, something that manufacturers such as Diebold and ES&S say are both unnecessary and difficult to provide. The voting machines, which will be used in almost a third of polling places around the country, have proven so unreliable, open to manipulation, and vulnerable to hacking, that watchdog groups say that the 2004 election will be even easier to manipulate and fraudulently influence than even the 2000 Florida results. There are no national standards to help resolve the disputes. The federal commission that Congress created after 2000 to guide states is behind schedule, and the research body that was supposed to set standards for November 2004 has not even been appointed. So states, prompted by voter organizations, are taking matters into their own hands. Nevada, which is using touch screens in all its voting precincts this November, has become the first state to require the manufacturer to attach printers in time for Election Day. California is requiring voter-verified paper trails for any electronic machines that counties in the state buy after November; for this November, it has banned touch-screen machines unless counties meet certain security standards. Three counties are suing the state to overturn the ban and a fourth has said it plans to use the touch screens anyway. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley says he is requiring counties to allow voters to vote on paper if they wanted to, even if there were no apparent problems with the touch screens. "It's a voter-confidence issue," he says. "It should be a no-brainer."
More than a dozen other states are considering legislation to require paper backups, and Congress, which had left the matter on the back burner, is considering several similar proposals. "People are demanding this," says Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has introduced a bill to require that by November, all voters be able to cast ballots that they can verify. This would entail either retrofitting touch screens with printers or requiring a county to go back to a paper-based system like optical-scan equipment or even punch cards. Ohio, one of the states considered to be most "in play" during the November elections, has passed a law requiring paper verifications for ballots cast -- by 2006. "Ohio is the big struggle state right now," says Will Doherty, executive director of VerifiedVoting.org, a group advocating for paper trails. Doug Chapin of Electionline.org, a clearinghouse for election information set up by the Pew Charitable Trust, says that Ohio is "rolling the dice" to see whether paper trails were necessary. "You can either build a fence around a cliff or put an ambulance in the valley," he says. "The paper trail is the ambulance in the valley. Certifying the machines and testing them in the first place to make sure they are secure is the fence around the cliff." Right now only a few smaller manufacturers are producing machines with paper verifications, while the larger vendors claim that they can if they want to, but see no need for paper verification. Sequoia Voting System's vice president for sales, Howard Cramer, says that the demand for paper trails is a "fad" that will disappear once voters gain confidence in the electronic machines. (New York Times)

Fahrenheit 9/11 wins acclaim at Cannes

May 22: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 wins the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the top prize offered by the festival's organizers and the first documentary to win the prize since Jacques Cousteau's The Silent World in 1956. Some critics say that, as good as the film is, it doesn't measure up to the quality of his 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, and that the award was given to this film partly for political reasons. Moore's earlier film won a special award at Cannes in 2002. (AP/CommonDreams)

A third of Taguba report "missing" after its release to the Senate

May 23: Around 2,000 pages are missing from the copies of the Army's report on prison abuses in Iraq delivered to the US Senate. The original report, compiled by Major General Antonio Taguba, comprises over 6,000 pages. Pentagon spokesman Larry DeRita says that he knows nothing about the missing pages, but says that if pages are missing, it is an "oversight" due to a technical "glitch." One committee member, Senator Pat Roberts, said Sunday he would talk to the chairman, Senator John Warner, to get the facts. "I don't know" whether pages are missing, Roberts said, "but we'll sure as hell find out." Roberts, a Republican, heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, which also has been handed the report. Democratic Senator Jack Reed, another Armed Service Committee member, said he became aware Friday of the possibility of the missing pages. Reed indicated he would not be surprised if it were true because of the way that he said Defense Department normally treats Congress. "There's a lack of cooperation. There's a lack of candor. And that has hurt not only their perception but also gives rise to feelings or inferences that something is amiss deliberately," said Reed on CBS's Face the Nation. "I hope that's not the case." (AP/San Francisco Chronicle)
May 23: The investigation of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib is spreading to include allegations of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay facility. Following the stories from British detainees who claim that they were abused and videotaped, Navy Vice Admiral Albert Church is calling for an investigation into conditions at Camp Delta, where hundreds of terrorist suspects are being held, many without charges. (AP/KATV)

General Ricardo Sanchez directly linked to Iraqi prisoner abuse

May 23: In statements made during hearings involving Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick's involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, it is revealed that General Ricardo Sanchez, the highest US military officer in Iraq, visited the prison a number of times, and was present for several interrogations and allegations of prisoner abuse. Captain Donald Reese, company commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, is expected to testify to Sanchez's presence at the prison. Reese, who will testify that he was shocked by some of the techniques used by military intelligence officials during interrogations, is expected to testify that none of the abuses were a secret. "All of that was being questioned by the chain of command and denied, general officer level on down," says lawyer Captain Robert Shuck. "Present during some of these happenings, it has come to my knowledge that Lieutenant General Sanchez was even present at the prison during some of these interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse by those duty [non-commissioned officers]." A number of officers, including Reese, may be offered immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony about the knowledge and possible complicity of senior officers regarding the abuses. Sanchez visited the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade's operation, which encompassed Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib, at least three times in October, according to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of US 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. Karpinski says the number of visits by a commanding general struck her as "unusual," especially because Sanchez had not visited several of the 15 other US detention facilities in Iraq. Karpinski has said that she is being used as a scapegoat for the command failures at Abu Ghraib. The general, a reservist from South Carolina, says 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 November 19. "He has divisions all over Iraq, and he has time to visit Abu Ghraib three times in a month?" Karpinski asks. "Why was he going out there so often? Did he know that something was going on?"
Sergeant Samuel Provance, a military intelligence soldier who worked at Abu Ghraib, has said that enormous resources began to pour into the interrogation operation in October and November. Provance said new personnel, including some from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came in suddenly to beef up interrogations. Karpinski says the resources arrived after Major General Geoffrey Miller, then commander of the US military prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, visited Abu Ghraib between August 31 and September 9. She says Miller told her he wanted to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib's operation because the intelligence gathering there was not producing the desired results. Miller has said he never used that phrase. "I think General Miller's visit gave them ideas, inspired them, gave them plans, told them what they were succeeding with in Gitmo," Karpinski says. She added that intelligence officers were "under great pressure to get more actionable intelligence from those interrogations." Karpinski says 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 says 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 says. "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."
On May 19, Pentagon officials testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that a female Army officer identified only as "Captain Woods" drafted a set of interrogation "rules of engagement" used in Iraq. Those rules had been posted at Abu Ghraib by October, and became public during hearings into the abuses at the prison. The list shows two sets of procedures -- those approved for all detainees and those requiring special authorization by Sanchez. Among the items requiring approval from Sanchez were techniques such as "sensory deprivation," "stress positions," "dietary manipulation," forced changes in sleep patterns, isolated confinement and the use of dogs. Senator Richard Durbin said at a May 12 hearing that some of those techniques went "far beyond the Geneva Conventions." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld countered that they all had been approved by Pentagon lawyers. Wood was the head of the military intelligence unit that controlled the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib. On May 21, the New York Times reported that Wood's unit developed aggressive rules and procedures while it was stationed in Afghanistan and imported them to Iraq. During the hearing on May 19. Sanchez noted that the military has initiated seven courts-martial against those involved, and more charges may be brought. "The Army Criminal Investigation Division investigation is not final, and the investigation of military intelligence procedures by Major General [George] Fay is also ongoing," Sanchez testified. Sanchez said he issued policies in September that required soldiers to conduct all interrogations in a "lawful and humane manner with command oversight." In October, he said he distributed a memo titled "Proper Treatment of Iraqi People During Combat Operations." He said he reissued the memo on January 16 after learning about the abuse allegations, and later issued policies emphasizing the need to treat all Iraqis with dignity. (Washington Post)
May 23: Britain's Guardian prints an investigative report illuminating the secretive world of Bush's elite campaign donors: the Pioneers, Rangers, and Super Rangers. Pioneers donate a minimum of $100,000; Rangers, $200,000; and Super Rangers, a quarter of a million or more. Bush has raised nearly $300 million in political donations since 1998, and about half of that total comes from a mere 630 people. (In order to bypass campaign contribution laws that restrict individual donations, the elite donors "bundle" contributions from family, friends, and coworkers.) The Pioneers and Rangers were formed in 1998, while Bush was governor of Texas and first contemplating a presidential run, by four well-heeled Bush family friends. Now it has grown to be the most exclusive, and most powerful, financial political network in America. And they are reaping the rewards. Of the 630 elite donors between 2000 and 2004, nearly a quarter of them received lucrative appointments from the Bush administration, including 24 ambassadorships and two cabinet positions. Over $3.5 billion of federal contracts were doled out to 101 companies that, between them, boast 123 Pioneers or Rangers. And these are only the ones that monitoring groups have been able to trace.
Corporate scandals and criminal activity, too, abounds among the elite. 146 of the 630 donors have either been directly involved in corporate malfeasance or helped run companies that have; the poster child for this particular issue is Enron's Kenneth Lay, but there are many, many others. 78 of the donors are linked to ongoing campaign finance scandals, and others are linked to financial wrongdoing on Wall Street, pollution violations, and even health issues. Four Bush family members are Pioneers, including his sister Dorothy Bush Koch and his uncle H.T. "Bucky" Bush (who will later prove to have profited handsomely from the Iraq occupation). Massachusetts millionaire Richard Egan and his sons Chris and Michael are among the elite. Joining them are three members of the Fox family, who own the Harbour Group finance firm with major investments in China, and the Reynolds family of land developers. Almost 20% of the group are financiers, while 18% are lawyers and lobbyists. The example of West Virginia coal baron and Pioneer James Harless is instructive. After donating at least $200,000 to the Bush campaign in 2000, Harless saw his grandson appointed to the secretive Cheney energy task force delegated to drawing up the US's new energy policies. Afterwards, Bush reversed a campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that plague the coal industry and eased environmental restrictions on opencast mining. "Here is where ordinary Americans are sold down the river," says Andrew Wheat, head of Texans for Public Justice. "When donations affect policy, it is ordinary people who end up biting the bullet."
Critics say the impact of the elite donors is most obvious in legislation governing energy and air pollution. Bush has eased laws governing old, polluting power plants. In many cases lawsuits against the worst offenders were finally dropped. Last week, the Bush campaign contribution cash machine was in full swing. Bush and political guru Karl Rove flew to Atlanta for a four-hour visit to a gated community in the city's poshest neighborhood, hosting a garden reception at the home of Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli. Afterwards, he was guest of honor at an exclusive dinner, where the diners ponied up $25,000 to eat steak with the president. Bush left for the airport with another $3.2 million in his warchest. (Guardian)
May 23: Georgia's Secretary of State Cathy Cox is outed as a crony of Diebold Electronics, the manufacturers of "paperless" voting machines with proven GOP ties. The Diebold website features a glowing quotation from Cox about the wonders of Diebold's machines, even going so far as to include, with Cox's permission, the Great Seal of Georgia on the site to give it an official imprimateur. In line with her support for Diebold, Cox has been instrumental in opposing resolutions in the Georgia State House demanding paper-verified ballots for the 2004 elections. After Governor Sonny Perdue promised to look into allegations of Diebold's machines' unreliability and ease of hacking and manipulations, Georgia scheduled a series of public forums to address the issues. Two such fora were held, with Cox's office refusing to participate; the remainder of the fora were cancelled. In 2002, a folder titled "rob-Georgia" was found on the Diebold FTP site, casting serious doubts on the validity of the 2002 election results. Cox's office has consistently refused to comment on the folder or the possibility of election fraud. except to deny that any of its contents were ever used; when it was proven that the "rob-Georgia" software patches were indeed used in the 2002 elections, Cox's office blocked all investigation of the software, even going so far as to defy the law by refusing to issue a certification of the software. The questions arising from the flawed and possibly fraudulent 2002 elections remain as the 2004 presidential elections loom. (American Politics Journal)
May 23: Former president Bill Clinton breaks a self-imposed silence to criticize the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq occupation, saying that the UN, not the US, should be helping Iraq achieve democracy, and that Bush erred in sending in US troops before the UN weapons inspectors had finished their job. "There are so many people who suspect our motives," he says during an address in Brazil. "I don't think Iraq was about oil and imperialism but it was about unilateralism over co-operation as a way to shape the world in the 21st century." Any military intervention, he says, should have involved a multinational force rather than the present "coalition of the willing." He believes the US should support "the World Criminal Court, the comprehensive test ban treaty, the Kyoto [Protocol] and other international efforts." The US should also promote "health, education and democracy as part of an anti-terrorism strategy," and adds that those international organizations need to be strengthened. "Democracy cannot be imposed -- the Iraqis have to want it," he adds. While he supports the Bush decision to go to war in Afghanistan to "root out" al-Qaeda, he says that "we have to make more partners and fewer terrorists." Cooperation and ensuring democracy benefited the world's poor would help combat terrorism, he says. (Independent/Iraq Occupation Watch
May 23: Army and National Guard recruiters are contacting thousands of inactive reservists throughout the country attempting to persuade them to re-enlist in the active reserves or join their local Guard units. If they don't, many recruiters warn, they could soon be headed to Iraq. The warnings come by telephone, and they have been concentrated in four areas: Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Louisiana. "It then spread through the country, with the exception of New England," says Army Reserve spokesman Steven Stromvall. Stromvall says some National Guard recruiters heard about this and then began using similar tactics. The calls have generated a slew of complaints from veterans and their families. Stromvall acknowledges that there has been a widespread problem with misleading, inaccurate and intimidating retention efforts throughout the nation in the past few weeks but adds that the Army Reserve is moving quickly to fix it. "They went a bridge too far," he said. Stromvall says the problem stemmed from misunderstandings on the part of the reserve's 700 retention sergeants about a new drive to get service personnel in the Individual Ready Reserve, whose members do not have to belong to units or attend drills and meetings, to switch voluntarily to an active reserve branch known as the Selective Reserve. There are now 169,000 reservists and National Guard members of all kinds on active duty, an increase of about 3,000 from last week but down from the more than 200,000 on active duty last year.
The stress of the Iraq occupation and insurgency clearly is causing a crunch. "There is no question the Army is stressed," General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told a congressional committee earlier this year. Adding to the problem is that the Pentagon can't find about 50,000 reservists who moved without notifying the government. The reserve call-ups for tours of active duty in Iraq have largely been by unit. Individual Ready Reserve members have been called up during the war, but in relatively small numbers. Only about 6,500 such individual recalls have been authorized by the Pentagon. Stromvall says the misleading methods included telling Ready Reservists they likely would be called up individually for service in Iraq if they did not join a Selective Reserve unit by a certain date. He says there was one case at Fort Bragg, in which a soldier who was leaving active duty with the regular Army was told by a retention sergeant in the processing line that he would be sent to Iraq automatically if he did not join the Selective Reserve.
One Illinois National Guard veteran who asked not to be identified said the tactics disturbed him. "They did call my wife and threatened that I'd be taken away from her," the Guard veteran says. "Ethics are important to me. This bothers me a great deal. If it's an all-volunteer Army, it's just that," he says. "It's not something you should be tricked into." MariAnn Curta, whose son recently completed a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq, recently received a call warning that her son, Bill, now on the Army's inactive reserve list, could be headed back to Iraq quickly unless he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard. "It's devious, it's deceptive, it's dishonest, it's valueless," Curta says. "I can't believe they'd pull this kind of fast trick on kids who have already served." Those who enlist in the armed forces have a minimum commitment of eight years of service, of which only a portion need be on active duty. The remainder can be spent either in the Selective Reserve, which includes both the active reserve and the National Guard and requires assignment to a unit, or the Individual Ready Reserve, in which the serviceman or woman merely remains on call. Curta says she was contacted last weekend by a recruiter from the Illinois National Guard who said it was "urgent" that her son get in touch with him. "They put the fear in me that he was going back in 48 hours," she says. Kelly Akemann of Elgin, Illinois, says she has received repeated phone calls in recent days from a Chicago-area Guard recruiter warning that her husband, a Guard veteran, could be sent to Iraq if he did not re-enlist quickly. "I told him I thought these were scare tactics and he told me they weren't scare tactics, these are the realities of life," she says. "I told him you don't need to raise the blood pressure of a three-month pregnant woman.... Then I hung up."
Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stone, an Army Reserve spokesman, says the Defense Department has asked Congress for authority to use the Internal Revenue Service to help track down members of the Individual Ready Reserve whose whereabouts are no longer known. "This has been a concern for some time," Stone says. "Two years ago the Defense Department began working with the Treasury on this, and legislation has now been proposed in the Congress." He says the military is not attempting to use the nation's chief tax collector for any Orwellian "Big Brother" purpose. "The only information they would be seeking is an address," he says. Stone says he knows of no mass mobilization of reserves under way or planned and said reserve call-ups thus far have been a simple matter of meeting the needs of commanders in the field. Curta's father, Bill Curta, says his son does not intend to re-enlist. "This is unethical, it's immoral, especially with kids who have already served," Curta says. "It's an ugly story." Stone acknowledges that retention rates for both the National Guard and the reserves have been slipping. But he said the services have been able to maintain their authorized strength, largely by relaxing their "up or out" rules and allowing personnel to stay in the military even though they have not been promoted to their next grade within a prescribed period. He says the Army Reserve has ordered a stop to intimidating retention methods and informed personnel of the proper procedures to follow in dealing with reservists. "It was a mistake," he says. (Chicago Tribune/Duckdaotsu)
May 23: Two reporters, NBC's Tim Russert and Time's Matthew Cooper, have been subpoenaed to testify about information they may have received concerning the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent. Both Time and NBC intend to fight the subpoenas. The subpoenas for Russert and Cooper come from a special grand jury investigating whether the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of Plame after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, publicly challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa. Wilson has charged that officials made the disclosure in an effort to discredit him. Plame was first identified as a CIA specialist on weapons of mass destruction by syndicated columnist and TV commentator Robert Novak last July. Novak said his information came from administration sources, but has declined to name them. Novak's office has repeatedly declined to say whether he has been subpoenaed or cooperated with investigators. NBC News president Neal Shapiro says the Russert subpoena was misdirected because he was "not the recipient of the leak." The subpoena, he said, would have a "potential chilling effect" on the network's ability to report the news. "The American public will be deprived of important information if the government can freely question journalists about their efforts to gather news," says Shapiro. "sources will simply stop speaking to the press if they fear those conversations will become public." Time spokeswoman Robin Bierstedt says, "It is Time Inc.'s policy to protect its confidential sources. While we would like all of our reporting to be on the record, a promise of confidentiality is sometimes necessary to get information that would otherwise be unavailable." Justice Department guidelines for criminal prosecutions state that all avenues should be explored before reporters are subpoenaed or approached in an investigation. The issuing of new subpoenas for reporters may indicate that the investigation is nearing an end.
The Washington Post and the New York newspaper Newsday said last week that their reporters were asked to sit for questions in connection with the investigation but that they had not been formally subpoenaed. Disclosing the identity of an undercover US agent is a felony. The grand jury, which was convened after MSNBC.com and NBC News reported in September 2003 that the CIA had requested a criminal investigation of the leak, has also issued subpoenas for records of telephone calls from Air Force One during the week before Novak published Plame's name. Wilson identified Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "scooter" Libby, and Elliott Abrams, a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, as the possible leakers in a book he published earlier this year. He has also accused Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, of having known about and encouraging the campaign to discredit him. White House press secretary Scott McClellan has said that his conversations with Rove, Libby and Abrams ruled out their involvement. (MSNBC)
May 23: Lucrative and important positions in the US-run CPA in Iraq have gone to young, inexperienced ideologues chosen not for their job experience, but for their political correctness. Six of the 11 profiled in the Washington Post article have been promoted to positions that include managing Iraq's billion-dollar budget, positions that they are completely unprepared for. One, Simone Ledeen, the daughter of ultra-hawk Michael Ledeen, focused on her experience in running a cooking school before she landed her job in the CPA. Another, Todd Baldwin, boasts of his experience as a legislative aide to Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican. Two are English teachers, one a Web site designer, and another is a recent college graduate with no real job experience. All were hired through the Heritage Foundation, where they had posted their resumes. None of the 11 had any experience in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and none had any experience managing money. Yet many of them have risen to key positions managing critical CPA operations and monies. Their qualifications? They are all conservative ideologues. Almost all of them now pull down six-figure salaries, though their inexperience and sometime incompetence have turned the CPA budget office into a "bottleneck," and many of them have finally been replaced by more qualified personnel. (Washington Post)
May 23: The New York Times's Adam Hochschild deconstructs the Bush administration's refusal to accept the word "torture" in its discussions of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisoner abuses. He writes, in part: "As Orwell pointed out most effectively, governments control language as well as people. Since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, our government, from the highest officials in Washington to Army prison guards in Baghdad, have used every euphemism they can think of to avoid the word that clearly characterizes what some of our soldiers and civilian contractors have been doing: torture. 'What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,' said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. 'I'm not going to address the "torture" word.' And nobody else seems to want to address it either. Rather, we are told, military police officers at Abu Ghraib were encouraged to treat the prisoners so as to create 'favorable conditions' for interrogations. What does this mean? Give the prisoners English lessons? New clothes? Come on. In any bureaucracy, orders or clearance to do something beyond the law always comes in code. For those in senior positions, deniability is vital. ...Obviously, no coded orders, suggestions or hints given to the Abu Ghraib prison guards will appear in [Pentagon officials' documentation of the abuses]. ...[N]o, these were not orders for deaths -- but they were for actions similarly beyond the law. What the paper trail will have, however, are the euphemisms for what was actually done:
- 'Sleep management.' This apparently benign term -- doctors use it in discussing insomnia -- disguises a form of torture that has long been popular because it requires no special equipment and leaves no marks on the body. Widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches by inquisitors, it was called the tormentum insomniae. Hundreds of years later, in the interrogation rooms of Stalin's secret police, it was known as the 'conveyor belt,' because relays of interrogators would question a prisoner, day and night, until he or she signed the desired statement and named enough co-conspirators. After being kept awake for a hundred hours or so, almost anybody will confess to almost anything, from flying through the night sky on a broomstick to being a capitalist spy. Soviet prisoners of the 1930's had to sign each page of their interrogation record. In the files that have been released from archives in recent years, you can sometimes see how a prisoner's signature, clear and firm on the first day, gradually turns into an indecipherable scrawl as the sleepless nights roll by.
- 'Water-boarding.' This, as we now know, does not involve water skis, but holding prisoners under water for long enough that they think they are drowning. Again, interrogators favor it because after the prisoner has coughed the water out of his lungs, it leaves no identifiable marks. Reports by human rights groups on countries including Brazil, Ethiopia and El Salvador have noted the prevalence of 'simulated drowning' or 'near drowning.'
- 'Stress positions.' What is a stress position? Mike Xego, a former political prisoner in South Africa, once demonstrated one for me. He bent down and clasped his hands in front of him as if they were handcuffed, and then, using a rolled-up newspaper, showed me how apartheid-era police officers would pin his elbows behind his knees with a stick, forcing him into a permanent crouch. 'You'd be passed from one hand to another. Kicked. Tipped over,' he explained. 'The blood stops moving. You scream and scream and scream until there is no voice.' This begs an obvious question: when the Abu Ghraib detainees were in 'stress positions,' were they then kicked, tipped over, rolled around like soccer balls? We do not yet know, but chances are that if the guards were told to create 'favorable conditions' for interrogation, the prisoners were not lectured politely about the benefits of human rights and the rule of law that the United States is supposedly bringing to Iraq.
Granted, the torture of prisoners under Saddam Hussein was incomparably more widespread and often ended in death. The same is true in dozens of other regimes around the world. But torture is torture. It permanently scars the victim even when there are no visible marks on the body, and it leaves other scars on the lives of those who perform it and on the life of the nation that allowed and encouraged it. Those scars will be with us for a long time." (New York Times/Peace Redding)
May 23: Columnist Maureen Dowd is disgusted with the Bush administration's spin on the Ahmad Chalabi situation. She writes, in part: "[S]o let me get this straight: We ransacked the house of the con man whom we paid millions to feed us fake intelligence on WMD 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 UN 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 naïve neo-cons cast as de Gaulle; the swindler who sold himself to Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as Spartacus. ...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 [Paul] 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 General 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 CIA 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 US 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." (New York Times)
May 23: Frank Rich reviews Michael Moore's new documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. He begins with a telling moment: "In one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush...minutes before he makes [a] prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut. 'In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war, with grave decisions and their consequences at stake,' said Mr. Moore in an interview before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last Monday. 'But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave.'"
Rich continues, "Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources -- foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video -- he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read 'My Pet Goat' to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war. Fahrenheit 9/11 is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it as an expose of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere -- most notably in Craig Unger's best seller, House of Bush, House of Saud -- that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now. Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on Nightline? In Fahrenheit 9/11, we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails.
"...We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. 'I was a Republican for quite a few years,' one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, 'and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way.' Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of 'news,' has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samarra, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before 60 Minutes II? Don Van Natta Jr. of the New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at CIA interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on January 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that 'US soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners.' And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story. Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. 'We've had this footage in our possession for two months,' he says. 'I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic.'
"We already know that politicians in denial will dismiss the abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere partisanship. Someone will surely echo Senator James Inhofe's Abu Ghraib complaint that 'humanitarian do-gooders' looking for human rights violations are maligning "our troops, our heroes" as they continue to fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his colleagues might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who are overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent plan in Iraq. Last weekend the Los Angeles Times reported that for the first time three Army divisions, more than a third of its combat troops, are so depleted of equipment and skills that they are classified 'unfit to fight.' In contrast to Washington's neglect, much of Fahrenheit 9/11 turns out to be a patriotic celebration of the heroic American troops who have been fighting and dying under these and other deplorable conditions since President Bush's declaration of war. In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described 'conservative Democrat' from Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan, whose son, Sergeant. Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account 'always hated' antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending 'the bible and books and candy,' but not before writing of the president: 'He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama.' ...[Moore] can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of Mrs. Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer army, Mr. Moore concludes: 'They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?' Fahrenheit 9/11 doesn't push any Vietnam analogies, but you may find one in a montage at the start, in which a number of administration luminaries (Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in addition to the president are seen being made up for TV appearances. ...No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell." (New York Times/CommonDreams)

Rumsfeld and Ashcroft at top of Iraqi abuse orders

May 24: A Newsweek investigation proves that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to the torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, and other US-operated detention facilities. The system deliberately sidestepped, or ignored, the historical safeguards provided by the Geneva Conventions. The system was adopted over the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers. While the word "torture" was never specifically authorized, the techniques that were authorized entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation; methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture." A new legal framework was concocted by Bush administration lawyers to justify the system of interrogation. Originally the system, and its legal framework, was designed to be used on a specific few prisoners, all suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members, by a small number of trained CIA professionals. Instead, it evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in Iraqi prisons and Cuban detention camps. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against al-Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, authorized a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners' resistance to interrogation. "There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that al-Qaeda could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.
Towards the end of 2001, a small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration staked out a forward-leaning legal position. The attacks by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast, outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and are verified by copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos. The Bush administration's emerging approach was that America's enemies in this war were "unlawful" combatants without rights. One Justice Department memo, written for the CIA late in the fall of 2001, put an extremely narrow interpretation on the international anti-torture convention, allowing the agency to use a whole range of techniques, including sleep deprivation, the use of phobias and the deployment of "stress factors," in interrogating al-Qaeda suspects. The only clear prohibition was "causing severe physical or mental pain" -- a subjective judgment that allowed for "a whole range of things in between," says one former administration official familiar with the opinion. On December 28, 2001, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel weighed in with another opinion, arguing that US courts had no jurisdiction to review the treatment of foreign prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The appeal of Gitmo from the start was that, in the view of administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone, or "the legal equivalent of outer space," as one former administration lawyer described it. And on January 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel coauthored a sweeping 42-page memo concluding that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the conflict in Afghanistan.
Cut out of the process, as usual, was Colin Powell's State Department. So were military lawyers for the uniformed services. When State Department lawyers first saw the Yoo memo, "we were horrified," says one. As State saw it, the Justice position would place the United States outside the orbit of international treaties it had championed for years. Two days after the Yoo memo circulated, the State Department's chief legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV, fired a memo to Yoo calling his analysis "seriously flawed." State's most immediate concern was the unilateral conclusion that all captured Taliban were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. "In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the Conventions," Taft wrote. "I have no doubt we can do so here, where a relative handful of persons is involved." The White House was undeterred. By January 25, 2002, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. In a memo written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of US soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That US officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 US law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions.
As to arguments that US soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers." When Powell read the Gonzales memo, he "hit the roof," says a State source. Desperately seeking to change Bush's mind, Powell fired off his own blistering response the next day, January 26, and sought an immediate meeting with the president. The proposed anti-Geneva Convention declaration, he warned, "will reverse over a century of US policy and practice" and have "a high cost in terms of negative international reaction." Powell won a partial victory: on February 7, 2002, the White House announced that the United States would indeed apply the Geneva Conventions to the Afghan war -- but that Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees would still not be afforded prisoner-of-war status. The White House's halfway retreat was, in the eyes of State Department lawyers, a "hollow" victory for Powell that did not fundamentally change the administration's position. It also set the stage for the new interrogation procedures ungoverned by international law. What Bush seemed to have in mind was applying his broad doctrine of pre-emption to interrogations: to get information that could help stop terrorist acts before they could be carried out. This was justified by what is known in counterterror circles as the "ticking time bomb" theory: the idea that when faced with an imminent threat by a terrorist, almost any method is justified, even torture. With the legal groundwork laid, Bush began to act. First, he signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA. According to knowledgeable sources, the president's directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness. Washington then negotiated novel "status of forces agreements" with foreign governments for the secret sites. These agreements gave immunity not merely to US government personnel but also to private contractors.
The administration also began "rendering" -- or delivering terror suspects to foreign governments for interrogation. Why? At a classified briefing for senators not long after 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was asked whether Washington was going to get governments known for their brutality to turn over al-Qaeda suspects to the United States. Congressional sources say that Tenet suggested it might be better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be able to use more aggressive interrogation methods. By 2004, the United States was running a covert charter airline moving CIA prisoners from one secret facility to another, sources say. The reason? It was judged impolitic (and too traceable) to use the US Air Force. At first, in the autumn of 2001, the Pentagon was less inclined than the CIA to jump into the business of handling terror suspects. Rumsfeld himself was initially opposed to having detainees sent into DOD custody at Guantanamo, according to a DOD source intimately involved in the Gitmo issue. "I don't want to be jailer to the g*ddammed world," said Rumsfeld. But he was finally persuaded. Those sent to Gitmo would be hard-core al-Qaeda or other terrorists who might be liable for war-crimes prosecutions, and who would likely, if freed, "go back and hit us again," as the source put it. In mid-January 2002 the first plane-load of prisoners landed at Gitmo's Camp X-Ray.
Still, not everyone was getting the message that this was a new kind of war. The first commander of the MPs at Gitmo was a one-star from the Rhode Island National Guard, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, who, a Defense source recalled, mainly "wanted to keep the prisoners happy." Baccus began giving copies of the Qur'an to detainees, and he organized a special meal schedule for Ramadan. "He was even handing out printed 'rights cards'," the Defense source recalled. The upshot, according to the Defense source, was that the prisoners were soon telling the interrogators, "Go f*ck yourself, I know my rights." Baccus was relieved in October 2002, and Rumsfeld gave military intelligence control of all aspects of the Gitmo camp, including the MPs. Pentagon officials now insist that they flatly ruled out using some of the harsher interrogation techniques authorized for the CIA. While the CIA could do pretty much what it liked in its own secret centers, the Pentagon was bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military officers were routinely trained to observe the Geneva Conventions. According to one source, both military and civilian officials at the Pentagon ultimately determined that such CIA techniques were "not something we believed the military should be involved in."
But in practical terms those distinctions began to matter less. The Pentagon's resistance to rougher techniques eroded month by month. In part this was because CIA interrogators were increasingly in the same room as their military-intelligence counterparts. But there was also a deliberate effort by top Pentagon officials to loosen the rules binding the military. Toward the end of 2002, orders came down the political chain at DOD that the Geneva Conventions were to be reinterpreted to allow tougher methods of interrogation. "There was almost a revolt" by the service judge advocates general, or JAGs, the top military lawyers who had originally allied with Powell against the new rules, says a knowledgeable source. The JAGs, including the lawyers in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, fought their civilian bosses for months but finally lost. In April 2003, new and tougher interrogation techniques were approved. Covertly, though, the JAGs made a final effort. They went to see Scott Horton, a specialist in international human-rights law and a major player in the New York City Bar Association's human-rights work. The JAGs told Horton they could only talk obliquely about practices that were classified. But they said the U.S. military's 50-year history of observing the demands of the Geneva Conventions was now being overturned. "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" about how the conventions should be interpreted and applied, they told Horton. And the prime movers in this effort, they told him, were DOD Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith and DOD general counsel William Haynes. There was, they warned, "a real risk of a disaster" for US interests. The approach at Gitmo soon reflected these changes. Under the leadership of an aggressive, self-assured major general named Geoffrey Miller, a new set of interrogation rules became doctrine.
Ultimately what was developed at Gitmo was a "72-point matrix for stress and duress," which laid out types of coercion and the escalating levels at which they could be applied. These included the use of harsh heat or cold; withholding food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold, dark cells for more than 30 days, and threatening (but not biting) by dogs. It also permitted limited use of "stress positions" designed to subject detainees to rising levels of pain. While the interrogators at Gitmo were refining their techniques, by the summer of 2003 the "postwar" insurgency in Iraq was raging. And Rumsfeld was getting impatient about the poor quality of the intelligence coming out of there. He wanted to know: Where was Saddam? Where were the WMD? Most immediately: Why weren't U.S. troops catching or forestalling the gangs planting improvised explosive devices by the roads? Rumsfeld pointed out that Gitmo was producing good intel. So he directed Steve Cambone, his under secretary for intelligence, to send Gitmo commandant Miller to Iraq to improve what they were doing out there. Cambone in turn dispatched his deputy, Lieutenant General William Boykin, who was later to gain notoriety for his harsh comments about Islam, down to Gitmo to talk with Miller and organize the trip. In Baghdad in September 2003, Miller delivered a blunt message to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was then in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade running Iraqi detentions. According to Karpinski, Miller told her that the prison would thenceforth be dedicated to gathering intel. (Miller says he simply recommended that detention and intelligence commands be integrated.) On November 19, Abu Ghraib was formally handed over to tactical control of military-intelligence units. By the time Gitmo's techniques were exported to Abu Ghraib, the CIA was already fully involved. On a daily basis at Abu Ghraib, says Paul Wayne Bergrin, a lawyer for MP defendant Sgt. Javal Davis, the CIA and other intel officials "would interrogate, interview prisoners exhaustively, use the approved measures of food and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement with no light coming into cell 24 hours a day. Consequently, they set a poor example for young soldiers but it went even further than that."
Evidence is growing that the Pentagon has lied about exactly when it was first warned of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib. US officials continued to say they didn't know until mid-January. But Red Cross officials had alerted the US military command in Baghdad at the start of November. The Red Cross warned explicitly of MPs' conducting "acts of humiliation such as [detainees'] being made to stand naked... with women's underwear over the head, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position." The Coalition commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and his Iraq command didn't begin an investigation until two months later, when it was clear the pictures were about to leak. Now more charges are coming. Intelligence officials have confirmed that the CIA inspector general is conducting an investigation into the death of at least one person at Abu Ghraib who had been subject to questioning by CIA interrogators. The Justice Department is likely to open full-scale criminal investigations into this CIA-related death and two other CIA interrogation-related fatalities. (MSNBC)
May 24: Many military contractors currently under investigation for their part in crimes perpetrated on Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib and other prisons may escape prosecution because, technically, they do not work for the Department of Defense -- instead, their contracts are through the Department of the Interior. The unexpected role of the Department of the Interior, usually associated not with wartime intelligence-gathering but with national parks, grew out of a government plan to cut costs. But in practice, it may have increased costs and reduced scrutiny, says Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution. "You're placing a military interrogation task under Smokey the Bear," Singer says. "You can't have good oversight." What's more, legal experts say, contractors for nonmilitary agencies such as the Department of the Interior may be able to escape prosecution for crimes they commit overseas because of an apparent loophole in the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The law, passed in 2000, applies only to contractors with the Department of Defense -- a flaw some members of Congress want to remedy. The Iraq war and its aftermath have focused attention on the extraordinary expansion of the work performed by federal contractors, often in sensitive security and intelligence roles. US security contractors in Iraq, who do everything from guarding US administrator Paul Bremer to advising Iraqi police, number more than 20,000, making them the second-largest security force after the US military.
Many military officers and outside experts say that using contractors as interrogators is a bad idea no matter what agency hires them, because they are not subject to military discipline and control. "I would never have tolerated civilian contractors working as interrogators," says Army Colonel Charles Brule, a Rhode Island reservist who worked at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. "Who do they answer to? What's the chain of command?" Congress has also expressed concern about contract interrogators. A defense spending bill passed Thursday by the House would require the Pentagon to disclose in greater detail the work of contractors in Iraq, and Senate Democrats have said they might propose legislation banning contractors from interrogating prisoners. "Daniel Akaka, a Senate Democrat, pressed top Army officials on the issue at a hearing last week. "The contractors seem to be outside of the line of command," he said. "And as a result, some things they do are not known by us." Major General Geoffrey Miller replied that "no civilian contractors had a supervisory position. It's the military...who sets the priorities and ensures that we meet our standards."
But in the case of the contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib, the chain of command is especially blurry, because it ends with an obscure Department of the Interior office 70 miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona. The interrogators work for CACI International, a global government contractor based in Arlington, Virginia, with more than $1 billion a year in revenue. And CACI's contract is with the Interior Department's National Business Center, which for the past four years has run the contracting office at Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Interior Department spokesman Frank Quimby says the arrangement was a result of federal efforts in the 1990s to "streamline and reduce duplication," by having agencies with particular skill at administrative functions such as payroll or contracting handle those jobs for other agencies. Thus, with efficiency in mind, the Fort Huachuca Contract Administration Office was gradually transferred from the Army to the Department of the Interior between 1998 and 2001. "Now the Army comes to that office when it needs services," Quimby says. In 2001, the Interior Department contracting office awarded a "blanket purchase agreement" to a company called Premier Technology Group for services to be provided to the Army. Last year, CACI International acquired Premier Technology. The blanket purchase agreement allows the Department of the Interior to purchase services from CACI International without going through a new round of competitive bidding for each new job.
Since 2001, the department has approved 81 "delivery orders" under the Premier Technology-CACI contract, including 11 for services in Iraq. Most of the services relate to information technology, but at least two involve the provision of interrogators, one for $19.9 million covering "interrogation support" and another for $21.8 million labeled "human intelligence support." Under those contracts, Army officials have said that CACI has provided 27 interrogators to work in detention centers in Iraq. Several work at Abu Ghraib, and one -- a 34-year-old Navy veteran named Steven Stefanowicz -- is sharply criticized in an Army investigative report on the prisoner abuse. Stefanowicz instructed military police officers to "facilitate interrogations" in such a way that "he clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse," says the report by Major General Antonio Taguba. It also declares that Stefanowicz "made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses." Taguba's report recommends that Stefanowicz be fired, reprimanded and stripped of his security clearance. The report does not suggest criminal charges. Technically, Stefanowicz and other CACI workers are not Defense Department contractors, and thus do not appear to be covered by the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. Two congressmen submitted legislation last week designed to plug such loopholes in the law. "Pentagon contractors working in Iraq are operating in a legal fog, where they are not accountable to Iraqi laws, US laws or military laws governing our troops," Democrat David Price said in a statement about the amendment he proposed along with Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican. Their bill would extend the law to contractors with any federal agency, as long as they are "supporting the mission of the Department of Defense."
But even if it passes, the amendment would not apply to crimes committed before it takes effect. Singer says the Interior Department's role began with an attempt to be frugal. But by involving two Cabinet departments and having a contractor provide services for years without new bidding, the government has almost certainly increased costs, he says. "There is no competition and no oversight," Singer says. "The free market can be a wonderful mechanism. But not if you do everything possible to ensure that it won't work." (Baltimore Sun)
May 24: A speech touted by President Bush to address the problems with the Iraq invasion does nothing of the sort; instead, the speech merely repackages the administration's current policies in a "new" five-step plan. Bush fails to address the murder of the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, the torture allegations from Abu Ghraib and other US-run detention facilities, nor does he mention any concerns with the upcoming Iraqi elections or with the mushrooming costs of the US occupation of Iraq. "In effect," writes the Washington Post, "the president said his current plan is good enough to win, and he set out to rally Americans to his cause with rousing language that placed the conflict in Iraq in the context of the larger, more popular battle against terrorism." Bush's endless reiteration of the same points -- it's all about terrorism, Iraq is a rousing success, and so forth -- rankles Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who has been critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. "The more explicit and precise, the better. A lot of rhetoric without altering the substance will not do," he says. "What's involved is basically American credibility." Bush continues to advocate a democratic revolution for the entire Middle East, a goal that most observers believe wildly unrealistic and extremely dangerous. "I'm extremely disappointed, says Senator Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. "He didn't answer any of the important questions. I don't think he leveled with the American people. This may be the last time we have to get it right." (Washington Post)
May 24: A Portland, Oregon judge has thrown out all charges against US lawyer Brandon Mayfield for his supposed involvement in the recent Madrid terrorist bombings. The judge says that the FBI misidentified a fingerprint found at the scene and arrested Mayfield. Mayfield was wrongly accused of being involved in the March 11 terrorist bombings of a Madrid train. The case hinged on fingerprints lifted near the scene of the bombing. The FBI incorrectly identified the prints as Mayfields, and jailed the lawyer for two weeks, in the meantime telling federal prosecutors preparing the case against Mayfield that Spanish officials were "satisfied" with their conclusion. Spanish officials have vehemently denied that they ever made any such claims to the FBI, and say that from the outset they insisted that the fingerprints did not match Mayfield. Spanish officials say that the FBI relentlessly pursued the case against Mayfield anyway, ignoring proof of Mayfield's innocence. "They had a justification for everything," says Pedro Luis Melida Lledo, head of the fingerprint unit for the Spanish National Police, whose team analyzed the prints in question and met with the Americans on April 21. "But I just couldn't see it." The fingerprint actually belongs to an Algerian national, Ouhnane Daoud, who was arrested by Spanish authorities.
Carlos Corrales, a commissioner of the Spanish National Police's science division, says he was struck by the FBI's intense focus on Mayfield. "It seemed as though they had something against him," Corrales says, "and they wanted to involve us." The FBI has finally admitted that they were mistaken in asserting that the fingerprints belonged to Mayfield, though as late as last week they were refusing to admit any such thing, accusing the Spaniards of being responsible for the misidentification. Former assistant FBI director William Baker compares the misidentification to the wrongful arrest of Richard Jewell for the 1996 Olympic bombings. Mayfield, a Muslim convert, was arrested on May 6 on a material witness warrant, a technique that civil liberties advocates maintain is being abused by the Bush administration in its efforts to counter terrorism. Mayfield was never charged with a crime, but was told that he was being investigated for crimes that warranted the death penalty and jailed for 14 days. On May 24, Spanish officials inform the FBI that the print matched that of an Algerian national, and a judge throws the case against Mayfied out. The FBI issues an official apology, and the entire ordeal becomes, in the words of the New York Times, "a stunning embarrassment to the United States government."
Spanish law enforcement officials insist that the entire incident could have been avoided. For one, the FBI sent a fingerprint examiner who spoke no Spanish to confer with Spanish officials on the case. The analysis of Mayfield's fingerprints was "hasty and erroneous," says an FBI official, but the FBI refused to back down, and accused the Spanish of incompetence and obstructing their investigation. The FBI had no other credible evidence against Mayfield. In the May 6 search of Mayfield's home, FBI investigators took what they initially called "miscellaneous Spanish documents" that they asserted may prove a connection between Mayfield and the Spanish terrorists; the "documents" turn out to be Mayfield's children's Spanish homework. A Senate aide who attended a Congressional briefing on the incident says there is great concern about the impact the Mayfield mistake would have. "This is going to kill prosecutors for years every time they introduce a fingerprint ID by the FBI," the aide says. "The defense will be saying, 'is this a 100 percent match like the Mayfield case?'" Mayfield's family was not informed by authorities of the reason for his detention, even after his abrupt release. Some legal experts have said that American officials had been misusing their material-witness authority since September 11 in their zeal to catch terrorists. Mayfield's mother, AvNell Mayfield, says that the government owed her son an apology. "That's what we've been saying all along -- it's not his fingerprint," she says. "He was falsely accused, and they still weren't letting him go." (New York Times , New York Times/Portland Indymedia)

May 25: US intelligence sources fear that Iranian intelligence duped American neoconservatives into attacking Iraq. They believe that Iran schemed to set the US on a course towards invasion by funnelling false intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and into the ears of willing US neoconservatives such as William Luti and Douglas Feith, Chalabi's primary "handlers" in the Bush administration. The purpose appears to be to get the US to get rid of the hostile Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and help replace it with a Shi'a-led, more Iran-friendly government. "It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," says an intelligence source in Washington. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi." Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, says: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy." Chalabi has vehemently rejected the allegations as "a lie, a fib and silly," and accuses CIA director George Tenet of a smear campaign against himself and his top aide Aras Karim Habib. However, the CIA is quite sure of its information, and is sticking to its allegations. "The suggestion that Chalabi is a victim of a smear campaign is outrageous," says a US intelligence official. "It's utter nonsense. He passed very sensitive and classified information to the Iranians. We have rock solid information that he did that." He adds, "As for Aras Karim [Habib] being a paid agent for Iranian intelligence, we have very good reason to believe that is the case." He says it was unclear how long this INC-Iranian collaboration had been going on, but points out that Chalabi has had overt links with Tehran "for a long period of time." Habib, a Shi'a Kurd who is being sought by Iraqi police since a raid on INC headquarters last week, has been Chalabi's righthand man for more than a decade. He ran a Pentagon-funded intelligence collection program in the run-up to the invasion and put US officials in touch with Iraqi defectors who made claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Those claims helped make the case for war but have since proved groundless, and US intelligence agencies are now scrambling to determine whether false information was passed to the US with Iranian connivance. (Guardian

Sanchez replaced as top military commander in Iraq

May 25: Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military commander in Iraq, is being replaced as of July 1. Pentagon and Bush administration officials insist that Sanchez's replacement is not due to his implication of complicity in the Abu Ghraib prison scandals. In a brief press conference, Bush praises Sanchez's service in Iraq and refuses to answer questions. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, says commanders are usually kept in the war zone for about a year, and that Sanchez has been there more than a year. Other commanders will also be rotated out in the coming months, including himself, Kimmitt adds. Kimmitt says military officials in Iraq have always expected Sanchez to depart sometime after the June 30 transfer of power. One Pentagon source says General George Casey, Army vice chief of staff, has emerged as the top candidate to replace Sanchez and assume the new position of unified commander of military forces in Iraq. "There has been no final decision on a replacement, but General Casey is a top candidate," says the official. "This has absolutely nothing to do with Abu Ghraib," adds another official. "The secretary [Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] is very mindful that the perception [of punishment] might arise. But it simply is not the case."
But defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, who has close connections to the Pentagon, says, "You'd have to be pretty naive to think that the problems with abuse of detainees had no impact at all on this decision." Sanchez testified before a Senate committee last week on the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which US forces physically and sexually abused Iraqi detainees. Sanchez took responsibility for the abuse because it happened during his time as commander. But he said he was not aware of the abuse while it was happening and moved quickly to investigate the matter after learning about it. Sanchez was ensnared in the prison abuse scandal after a military lawyer stated at an open hearing April 2 that Captain Donald Reese told him that Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of the abuse at the prison and that Sanchez was present at some of the interrogations. Sanchez is being considered for an appointment to head the US Southern Command in Miami, a job that carries the fourth star of a full general, officials say.
Casey is a full general, and Rumsfeld has for months been considering making a four-star general the overall commander in Iraq, responsible for the broad direction of military operations while a three-star general handles day-to-day military operations. Lieutenant General Thomas Metz serves in that capacity. Sanchez was considered for the new position, but Bush would first have had to nominate him for a fourth star, which is subject to confirmation by the Senate. Pentagon officials say military officials concluded that it would be too complicated to go through that process in the middle of the war in Iraq. Thompson doubted the move was intended to make Sanchez the scapegoat in the Abu Ghraib scandal, but said Pentagon leaders were "recognizing the fact that some atrocious behavior occurred while he was in command, and that has probably shaken their confidence in his suitability for the higher job." Thompson says numerous problems have been associated with Sanchez's tenure as the top commander in Iraq since June 2003, but noted that Sanchez has faced the difficult task of defeating an insurgency. "The fact of the matter is that the United States hasn't decisively won a single major counter-insurgency campaign in modern times," Thompson says. "Look at all the problems Sanchez has faced: a flawed strategy, dreadfully inaccurate intelligence, inadequate forces on the ground, flagging domestic support, and a political leadership that seems to have multiple agendas above and beyond simply defeating the insurgents," Thompson says. "This is not a prescription for success." (MSNBC)
May 25: The Bush administration is refusing to comment on, or release photos and videotapes proving, that many Iraqi female prisoners were raped by their American captors. Such sexual assaults are anathema in Iraqi society, and often result in the shunning or even the murder of the female victims. One photo explicitly shows a US soldier raping an Iraqi woman; a videotape shows US soldiers harnessing a 70-year old woman and riding her around, calling her a donkey. One Iraqi woman has told British reporters that she was raped by several US soldiers, was injured during the assaults, and concludes by begging the reporters, "We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this." Numerous photos of Iraqi prisoners being forced to bare their breasts for the cameras have not been released by the administration. (Village Voice)
May 25: The US Army has kept whistle-blower Lieutenant Julliam Goodrum, a 16-year veteran of the Gulf War and the Iraq occupation, in a locked psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in order to keep him quiet; when they finally released him, they charged him almost $6,000 for the stay. "They are definitely retaliating against me," Goodrum says. Goodrum has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or combat stress, from Iraq. Last summer Goodrum asked for an investigation into the death in Iraq of a 22-year-old soldier in his 212th Transportation Company. He was also quoted in a United Press International article about poor medical care at Fort Knox, Kentucky, that helped spark investigations in Congress. Last fall Goodrum sought mental health care at Fort Knox but was turned away -- just days after complaining in the press about poor medical treatment at Fort Knox. "I said I was having problems. I told them I felt like I was having a breakdown right there," Goodrum says. "They did not care. They said leave." A form from Fort Knox from the day Goodrum says he sought help states that Fort Knox officials in charge of medical care "do not want him" in the medical-hold unit at the base. Goodrum then went to see a private doctor who hospitalized him. That doctor alerted Fort Knox that Goodrum had been hospitalized, according to Goodrum's medical records and documents from that doctor. But Fort Knox cut off his pay, terminated his Army medical insurance and threatened to charge him as absent without leave. Goodrum showed up at Walter Reed in Washington on February 9, where doctors admitted him to Ward 54, the locked psychiatric unit. Though his doctors planned to move him into outpatient therapy on February 19, on the 18th, Reed officials were contacted by officials from Fort Knox who ordered them to keep Goodrum locked away. His records show that Goodrum was held in the locked psychiatric ward for the next 13 days. His health appears to have deteriorated some because of that confinement. "They hurt me, in terms of my recovery. I was doing fine, then 'bam,'" Goodrum says.
On February 21 his record states: "Per chief of psychiatry patient will need to be (in the locked ward) because he has charges pending.... Pt voiced concerns regarding his reduction in status, pt stated that he will continue to be cooperative with staff and follow the current treatment plan but does not understand why he was reduced in status." Some medical staff at Walter Reed expressed concern that Goodrum was being held for non-medical reasons. Walter Reed released Goodrum from the locked ward on March 2, one day after UPI published a story on allegations that Fort Knox refused to treat him. On March 2, an addition to Goodrum's medical records states that Goodrum was "a voluntary patient for the duration of his admission." Goodrum says, "That's not true." Fort Knox officials have not charged Goodrum with any offense, and he says the Army still owes him thousands in back pay -- he did not get a paycheck from early November through April. "I've got a mortgage to pay," he says. UPI published a series of stories last fall about poor medical care for soldiers on "medical hold" at US bases, including many who served in Iraq like Goodrum. In response, the Pentagon announced a series of new polices and has pledged $77 million towards fixing the problem. Goodrum was named the 176th Maintenance Battalion's "soldier of the Year" in 2001. He has received a host of awards, including the combat action ribbon, and positive reviews from superior officers. "Lt. Goodrum is a truly outstanding junior officer," reads one performance evaluation from 2002. "In addition to his technical competence, he demonstrates great leadership potential. ...Promote to captain and select for advance military schooling." (UPI)
May 25: Senator Trent Lott defends the use of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib, saying that the prisoners should be treated "really rough[ly]" and defending the use of dogs to intimidate and attack prisoners. Lott does say he is disturbe

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

May 2004:

Week Four

Entire Iraqi war and occupation proven an Iranian intelligence operation

Testimony of rape of Iraqi boys by male interrogators

Fahrenheit 9/11 wins acclaim at Cannes

A third of Taguba report "missing" after its release to the Senate

General Ricardo Sanchez directly linked to Iraqi prisoner abuse

Rumsfeld and Ashcroft at top of Iraqi abuse orders

Sanchez replaced as top military commander in Iraq