link dumpage: the war

[sisyphusshrugged]

Bernard Weiner of Crisis Papers.org asked Paul Lukasiak: [snip] to try to sum up his conclusions [on Our Fearless Leader's military record] in one paragraph, "one that the American citizenry immediately would grasp, and might be useful in considering whether to vote for Mr. Bush in November."

An examination of U.S. Statutory Law, Department of Defense Regulations, and Air Force policies and procedures from the early seventies proves that the George W. Bush and his spokesmen have consistently misrepresented the nature and extent of his obligations as a member of the United States Armed Forces.

When considered within their proper legal and policy context, the Bush records effective rebut the White House claim that Bush "fulfilled his duty." When considered as a whole, these documents reveal that Bush spent the last two years of his six-year Military Service Obligation in an active effort to avoid fulfilling the obligations and commitments he incurred upon entering the Texas Air National Guard.

They also show that while some Texas officials aided and abetted Bush's efforts (and others apparently acquiesced to what was happening), there is no reason to question the character of Alabama officials, or Air Reserve Forces personnel as a whole. Finally, the only conclusion that can be reached from an examination of Bush's records for the period after he quit the Air National Guard is that the Air Force attempted to take punitive measure against Bush, but that political pressure prevented those measures from being carried out.

Capt. Yee was less fortunate

A Muslim chaplain once accused of espionage says he is resigning from the U.S. Army.

Captain James Yee says in a statement that the Army's handling of his case has "irreparably" harmed his reputation and destroyed his prospects for an Army career.

Law Experts Condemn U.S. Memos On Torture (washingtonpost.com)

Nearly 130 lawyers, retired judges and law school professors and a former director of the FBI yesterday condemned a series of U.S. government legal opinions holding that the torture of terrorism suspects might be legally defensible.

The lawyers signed a statement asking the Bush administration and Congress to investigate why the memos were prepared by administration lawyers, and whether there is a connection between the opinions and detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other detainee facilities.

"The position taken by the government lawyers in these legal memoranda amount to counseling a client as to how to get away with violating the law," said John J. Gibbons, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia and the attorney in the U.S. Supreme Court case that granted legal hearings to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Seven past presidents of the American Bar Association also signed the statement, as did William S. Sessions, director of the FBI from 1987 to 1993. The statement says the once-classified memos written by U.S. government lawyers sought to "circumvent long established and universally acknowledged principles of law and common decency."

Journalistic Malpractice

American Journalism Review has a very interesting analysis of the media's coverage of the Abu Ghraib story.

There were stories out there before the pictures, but nobody seemed very interested. The images are what finally woke up the press and even then they were terribly sluggish and slow off the mark. They offer a number of different reasons: intimidation by the administration, lack of resources and access, misplaced post 9/11 "patriotism", physical danger in Iraq, complaints by conservative readers and others.

One of the things it touches upon but doesn't really expound on is the fact that most of the sources for these stories, until Joseph Darby's name became known, were all Iraqis. And, I believe that because of that it was assumed that they were lying. I wrote yesterday about the Center for Constitutional Rights report by the three British prisoners who were released from Guantanamo. I thought for a bit if I should put in some qualifiers about their story because, after all, we only have their word for it. Normally, I would have written something like "even if only half of what they say is true it's..." I didn't do that because after a few moments reflection I realized that there was already so much information out there confirming that the US had legally justified torture, had developed systematic torture schemes and had actually perpetrated torture (we've all seen the pictures) that the burden of proof was now on the US, not these prisoners. I believed them.

Journalism, however, in its fetish to provide "balance" even when common sense tells you there is no balance, will continue to present these stories with a built in skew to the administration's side of the story.

You break it, you bought it is apparently for the little people too

The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today.

The United States currently has more than five divisions in Iraq, troops that fought their way into the country and units that were added in an attempt to stabilize it. But the Bush administration is trying to establish a new military structure in which American troops would continue to secure Baghdad while the majority of the forces in Iraq would be from other nations.

although that's apparently not what we're telling the little people

Bush almost gets weepy later, when he tells a story "that touched my heart," about seven Iraqi men who visited him in the Oval Office. The men's right hands were chopped off by order of Saddam Hussein, and they had X's burned into their foreheads. An American organization provided them with prostheses. "A guy took my Sharpie, wrapped his new fingers and wrote, 'God bless America,' in Arabic," Bush says, his voice choking up. "What a contrast," he says. In America, "We want to heal you, no matter who you are," his voice catching again.

So, are we going to abandon Iraq? Bush asks the crowd. "Are we going to be a country of our word?" he asks. "Or are we going to go timid and weary and afraid of the barbaric behavior of a few?" The crowd shouts back: "No!"

What did we refuse to know and when did we refuse to know it?

By the spring of 2002, major news publications such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsweek and Time were running stories calling the “Prague connection” an “embarrassing” mistake and stating that, according to European officials, the intelligence supporting the claim was “somewhere between ‘slim’ and ‘none’.” The stories also quoted administration officials and CIA and FBI analysts saying that on closer scrutiny, “there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the United State at the time he was supposed to be in Prague.” Even FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, a Bush political appointee, admitted in April 2002, “We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts,” but found nothing.

But that was not good enough for the administration, which instead of letting the story go, began trying to manipulate intelligence to turn fantasy into reality. In August 2002, when FBI case officers told Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that there was no Atta meeting, Newsweek reported Wolfowitz “vigorously challenged them.” Wolfowitz wanted the FBI to endorse claims that Atta and the Iraqi spy had met. FBI counterterrorism chief Pat D’Amuro refused.

In September 2002, the CIA handed Cheney a classified intelligence assessment that cast specific, serious doubt on whether the Atta meeting ever occurred. Yet, that same month, Richard Perle, then chairman of the Bush’s Defense Policy Board, said, “Muhammad Atta met [a secret collaborator of Saddam Hussein] prior to September 11. We have proof of that, and we are sure he wasn’t just there for a holiday.” In the same breath, Perle openly admitted, “The meeting is one of the motives for an American attack on Iraq.”

By the winter of 2002, even America’s allies were telling the administration to relent: In November, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he had seen no evidence of a meeting in Prague between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent.

But it did not stop.

Kos tells us who in Washington served (like he did).

War crimes

It’s been argued at length whether the Iraq war as a whole was morally justified. Given that many thousands of people died in the process of removing Saddam’s regime, I don’t think so. On the other hand, if you suppose that Saddam would otherwise have stayed in power for decades, and make some optimistic assumptions about future prospects, it’s possible to come to the opposite conclusion. But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr?

If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.


These people weren’t Al Qaeda or Baathists, they were (apart from the inevitable innocent bystanders) young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Sadr’s militia is one of a dozen or so similar outfits in Iraq, and there are hundreds more around the world, quite a few of which have received US support despite having a worse record than Sadr’s...

Al Jazeera

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” So said George Orwell, in a quote adopted by British blog Harry’s Place . It is a quote worth recalling in the light of the decision of the Iraqi government to close down Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices for a month.

Iraq issues warrants for Chalabis (keep in mind that Ahmad, who engineered this war with his neoconservative friends in the White House, has been caught in bed with both Iran and local Iraqi favorite al Sadr)

An Iraqi judge said on Sunday he had issued an arrest warrant against leading politician and former Pentagon darling Ahmad Chalabi and his nephew Salem Chalabi, the head of the tribunal trying Saddam Hussein.

Zuhair al-Maliki, chief investigative judge of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, said an arrest warrant had been issued against Ahmad Chalabi in connection with counterfeiting money and against Salem Chalabi on a murder charge.

Ahmad Chalabi, who helped lead the United States to war in Iraq, was once touted as a potential leader of the country after Saddam was ousted, but has since been spurned by Washington and many in Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's interim government.

Allawi, trying to quell a Shi'ite Muslim uprising, traveled to the holy city of Najaf on Sunday and ordered Shi'ite fighters to lay down their weapons. But fighting raged on, with U.S. helicopter gunships pounding guerrilla positions.

Trying this particular nephew could get complicated.

Salem, of course, remains head of the war crimes tribunal charged with trying Saddam Hussein and other leaders of the former regime. But the tribunal covers crimes committed under the former regime, not the present one. So perhaps there's no conflict.

Meanwhile, it's probably just as well we didn't do this for oil, because there may be less of it left than we weren't counting on

Fighting around the southern Iraq oil fields that U.S.-led forces had previously thought were secure has driven out civilian firefighters trying to put out the oil well blazes, the top firefighter said Monday.

"It's not nearly as safe as they said it was," said Brian Krause, vice president and senior blowout specialist for Houston-based Boots and Coots. "We're kind of sitting ducks out there."

The Iraqi resistance in the oil fields challenges U.S. claims that southern Iraq is quickly falling under allied control.