Thank you Mr. Fish for searing images into my brain of a camouflaged genitals and American GI’s traversing a hairy ass.
I’ve always thought war was way more disgusting than romantic, and now… even more so.
From The New York Times:
President Obama is seeking to block the release of photographs depicting American military personnel abusing captives in Iraq and Afghanistan, an administration official said Wednesday.
The president’s decision marks a sharp reversal from a decision made last month by the Pentagon, which reached a deal with the American Civil Liberties Union to release photographs showing incidents at Abu Ghraib and a half-dozen other prisons.
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“The president strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the theaters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces,” the official said, “and making our job more difficult in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said of the nation’s top military generals: “Odierno and McKiernan and Petraeus have all voiced real concern about this. Particularly in Afghanistan, this is the last thing they need.”
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The photographs were set to be released on May 28. But as that date approached, a growing sense of unease among military officials was expressed to the White House.
Many also recalled the Abu Ghraib photographs, showing prisoners naked or in degrading positions, sometimes with Americans posing smugly nearby, caused an uproar in the Arab world and concerns within the military that the actions of a relatively few service members had tainted the entire forces.In this more recent case, the A.C.L.U. argued that disclosing the pictures was “critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse,” said Amrit Singh, who argued the case on behalf of the group before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
The world already has easy access to some very disturbing torture photos. Are the new ones sought by the ACLU really so much worse than these that they would put our soldiers at more risk than they already are?
I agree with the ACLU that the photos should be released. If these photos confirm that torture took place in many places besides Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, they would support the allegations that prisoner abuse and torture was not carried out by just “a relatively few service members,” but that it was directed by high ranking officials in the Bush Administration.
We need to see what, where, and when the abuses occurred so that we can investigate and find out who was ultimately responsible for the violations. They need to be held accountable for their crimes.
Someday we will see the photos, so we might as well see them now. The sooner we get through this nasty episode in our history, the sooner we can atone for it and put it behind us.
Their story of lawlessness, mayhem and murder in Iraq.
U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are planning to descend on Washington from Mar. 13-16 to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in those countries.
“The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it,” said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. “That’s left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like.”
Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicised incidents of U.S. brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples”, as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation”.
“The problem that we face in Iraq is that policymakers in leadership have set a precedent of lawlessness where we don’t abide by the rule of law, we don’t respect international treaties, so when that atmosphere exists it lends itself to criminal activity,” argues former U.S. Army Sergeant Logan Laituri, who served a tour in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 before being discharged as a conscientious objector.
Laituri told IPS that precedent of lawlessness makes itself felt in the rules of engagement handed down by commanders to soldiers on the front lines. When he was stationed in Samarra, for example, he said one of his fellow soldiers shot an unarmed man while he walked down the street.
“The problem is that that soldier was not committing a crime as you might call it because the rules of engagement were very clear that no one was supposed to be walking down the street,” he said. “But I have a problem with that. You can’t tell a family to leave everything they know so you can bomb the shit out of their house or their city. So while he definitely has protection under the law, I don’t think that legitimates that type of violence.”
Read the whole article here.
Last Thursday the Washington Post published a column by Michael Kinsley about The Surge titled “Defining Victory Downward.” Here are a few excerpts:
It was also, implicitly, part of a deal between Bush and the majority of Americans, who want out. The deal was: just let me have a few more soldiers to get Baghdad under control, and then everybody, or almost everybody, can pack up and come home.
In other words: you have to increase the troops in order to reduce them. This is so perverse on its face that it begins to sound zen-like and brilliant, like something out of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” And in General David Petraeus, the administration conjured up its own Sun Tzu, a brilliant military strategist.
… the best that we can hope for, in terms of American troops risking their lives in Iraq, is that there will be just as many in July — and probably in January, when Bush leaves office — as there were a year ago. The surge will have surged in and surged out, leaving us back where we started.
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Imagine that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its “debaathification” campaign so that Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and that “only” 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain this equilibrium.
You might have several words to describe this situation, but “success” would not be one of them.
I had the column fresh in my mind while I watched the Obama/Clinton debate that evening. I thought maybe some of these ideas would make it into their responses to questions about whether or not they thought the surge has been successful. They both danced around the perimeter a bit, but never really challenged the notion that the surge has been a success.
I emailed N.J. Barnes, a contributor to this site, to see what his thoughts were, and he had this to say:
That’s because they’re each afraid of being tagged as a naysayer. But the generals themselves would admit, if pressed, that the Sunni “Awakening” and Sadr’s decision to tell his people to back off have more to do with quelling the violence than the so-called “surge” which started after the Awakening awoke. None of that is to to disparage the American military effort which has been much more effective under Patraeus, no question. Their task has been made infinitely less difficult by the fact that they could afford to concentrate their efforts on al-Qaida-in-Iraq and with the help of local Sunni tribesmen who were previously shooting at us and blowing us up.
But what Bush and Patraeus and Gates really are saying is that there is no end in sight; that if we draw down, the thing will fall apart. So with no real satisfactory end in sight, how is that success?
Best to tell the Iraqis we’ve done our bit and we plan to withdraw one year from the date the new Pres (hopefully not McCain) takes office. The Iraqis in the final analysis must be prepared to take responsibility for their own country. And if it falls apart so be it. A lesson for us, hard learned, for the future.
So this is how we are winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people:
The committee staff report said Blackwater guards had engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, and in the vast majority of cases the guards fired their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded. In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and the company sought to cover up other episodes, the report said.
The staff report said that State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet, and in one case last year, helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.
The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that the company’s guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.
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In the case of the Christmas Eve killing, the report said that an official of the United States Embassy in Iraq suggested paying the slain bodyguard’s family $250,000, but a lower-ranking official said that such a high payment “could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.” Blackwater ultimately paid the dead man’s family $15,000.
In another fatal shooting cited by the committee, an unidentified State Department official in Baghdad urged Blackwater to pay the victim’s family $5,000. The official wrote, “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”
And we thought Abu Ghraib made us look bad. Our government hired mercenaries at Blackwater along with their pals in the State Department are doing their best to make us look even worse.
The price for murdering a guy started at $250,000 (pretty low by U.S. Standards) and quickly dropped to $15,000 so as not to encourage people to commit suicide to enrich their families after they willingly provoke Blackwater security guards to kill them.
That kind of reminds me of some scenes in the Hearts and Minds documentary where they talked about how the government and the media spread propaganda about how the people of Vietnam did not value human life – that their lives were worth nothing. It was bullshit of course, just like this is.
Do they really think that there would be a rash of Iraqis volunteering themselves to get shot for a couple hundred thousand dollars? I don’t think so…
So the price went down to $15,000 and then to $5,000 at the urging of an anonymous State Department official. That’s great. Our military doesn’t count Iraqi fatalities, and our hired guns aren’t accountable to anyone, until now I guess, and when they start shooting, they pretty much unload and leave any wounded innocent bystanders to fend for themselves.
When they are confronted by grieving family members, they hand out $5,000. Not even enough to buy a decent used car.
They don’t seem to be following their own “Core Values.”
P.S. Says here that Erik Prince, Chairman and CEO of Blackwater, is a fundamentalist Christian. Guess that means God gave him a license to kill.
Following a week of testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, Bush appeared on TV last night and said:
In their testimony, these men made clear that our challenge in Iraq is formidable. Yet they concluded that conditions in Iraq are improving, that we are seizing the initiative from the enemy, and that the troop surge is working.
Followed by blah, blah, blah and a lot of misleading statistics about how the level of violence is down in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala. Our mendacious leader failed to mention that the sectarian killings are down because the targets of their violence have fled the neighborhoods.
The Uniter moved on to:
Whatever political party you belong to, whatever your position on Iraq, we should be able to agree that America has a vital interest in preventing chaos and providing hope in the Middle East. We should be able to agree that we must defeat al Qaeda, counter Iran, help the Afghan government, work for peace in the Holy Land, and strengthen our military so we can prevail in the struggle against terrorists and extremists.
Again, he failed to acknowledge that there was no al Qaeda presence in Iraq before we invaded. If his goal really had been to “strengthen our military so we can prevail in the struggle against terrorists and extremists,” he would have continued fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and followed them into Pakistan where they are now—stronger than ever.
But alas… there’s no oil in Afghanistan, and therein lies the real story.
Paul Krugman tells the tale quite well in today’s column:
To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”
Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
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What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
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No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.
Last night Bush made it clear that he has every intention of passing this war on to the next president. That reminds me of a football metaphor that Petraeus used not long ago. He said “[We are] a long way from the goal line but we do have the ball and we are driving down the field.” (Check out Pierre Tristam’s column about what the use of a football metaphor in a soccer country says about the problem with our game plan.)
So to use another football analogy, we may have the ball, but the drive has stalled and we’re facing third and 36 on our own 22 yard line. The next play: Bush drops back to pass, the ball slips out of his hands and all he can do is hope that someone on his team picks up the ball so his team can punt.
Excerpts from Robert Byrd’s Senate floor speech on May 1, 2007:
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” No matter how many times the President wishes it were so, peace in Iraq will not be found at the barrel of an American gun. No matter how hard the President hopes it will happen, sectarian violence will not be quelled with U.S. forces occupying the Iraqi nation. Cross your fingers. Pull out your lucky rabbit’s foot. Even nail a horse shoe over the Oval Office door. But, hoping for luck will never change the deadly dynamic in Iraq.
Peace demands an Iraqi-led political solution to transcend the ethnic and sectarian divisions that are splitting the country apart — a political effort which, to date, the Iraqi government has been unable or unwilling to take on. Our legislation could have spurred that progress, but President Bush has defiantly said no. This White House clings to its “foolish consistency.”
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With the supplemental bill, Congress responded to the calls of the American people. We offered a new beginning in reconstruction and stability for Iraq. Our proposal could have generated political reconciliation and economic security in Iraq. Our bipartisan plan shifted the responsibility for the Iraqi nation’s long-term success to the Iraqi people themselves.
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Once again, I urge the President to think through the consequences of his choices, the consequences of his rejection of this new plan for Iraq, the consequences of clinging to false hopes. For that is what this veto does. This veto endorses the falsehoods that took us to war. It cements failed policies in place. This veto ensures that hundreds, maybe thousands more, will die in Iraq without any true plan for peace. It forces our military to continue to pursue a mission impossible, creating democracy at the point of a gun.
Read the whole speech here.
And now seems like a good time to reread his “Arrogance of Power” speech from March 19, 2003. You can read it on his website, or you can visit this page of Patti Smith’s website and scroll down through “Guernica” until you get to it about three quarters of the way down. Enjoy the ride.
According to this column from The Guardian, it looks as though the right wing has taken their strange brew of fundamentalist Christianity and politics about as far as they can, and now things are starting to move back towards a more tolerant middle:
…a growing number of American Christians are uneasy about allowing religion to become so politicised and so closely associated with one party. Fundamentalist Islam has also made a difference; it has reminded the bulk of Americans of the wisdom of the American constitution – keeping religion and state firmly apart.
For two faiths coexist in the United States: one is devotion to God and the other to the Constitution. The genius of the founding fathers was to make sure that the two did and do not mix. Religion is a private matter, with which the state is barred from interfering – and which is barred from interfering with the state. Fundamentalist Christians have had ambitions to overturn that long-standing convention
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The mood has been reflected by an extraordinary little book, Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. It has become a bestseller. Harris quotes passages from the Bible that I did not know existed, such as one in Exodus discussing the demands you should make when selling your daughter into slavery. One passage from Deuteronomy encourages Christians to stone to death anybody who tries to draw them away from their God. As for governing America according to the 10 Commandments, Harris is withering; four do no more than outlaw other religions and the rest are a routine expression of core moral precepts.
For a book which ridicules religion and ruthlessly exposes the inadequacies of the Bible to become a bestseller is a classic Schlesinger-style signal that times are a-changing. And politicians are feeling the mood swing.
Those are good signs, but then there is this reminder that the pendulum still has quite a ways to fall back from its apex high on the right.
A year ago, he was a Pentecostal Christian minister at Camp Anaconda, the largest U.S. support base in Iraq. He sent home reports on the number of “decisions” — soldiers committing their lives to Christ — that he inspired in the base’s Freedom Chapel.
But inwardly, he says, he was torn between Christianity’s exclusive claims about salvation and a “universalist streak” in his thinking. The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which collapsed the dome of a 1,200-year-old holy site and triggered a widening spiral of revenge attacks between Shiite and Sunni militants, prompted a decision of his own.
“I realized so many innocent people are dying again in the name of God,” Larsen says. “When you think back over the Catholic-Protestant conflict, how the Jews have suffered, how some Christians justified slavery, the Crusades, and now the fighting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, I just decided I’m done. . . . I will not be part of any church that unleashes its clergy to preach that particular individuals or faith groups are damned.”
Larsen’s private crisis of faith might have remained just that, but for one other fateful choice. He decided the religion that best matched his universalist vision was Wicca, a blend of witchcraft, feminism and nature worship that has ancient pagan roots.
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He learned about Wicca, ironically, from the Army, in an overview of various faiths at the Chaplain’s Basic Training Course at Fort Jackson, S.C., in 2005.
Well you probably can guess how his request to switch from a Pentecostal chaplain to a Wiccan chaplain turned out. Request Denied Sir! There will be no Wiccan chaplains in the U.S. ARMY SIR!
It’s a pretty interesting article. Read it all here.
Congressman Charles Wrangell of New York, among others, has raised the spectre of a draft as the way to ensure that a) we never get ourselves into another Iraq and b) that if we do, at least our entire society will bear the burden and the sacrifice.
It’s an attractive idea for many of us who have opposed the Iraq War from the beginning and who have been particularly appalled that so few have been asked to bear the burden – namely the military servicemen and women whose lives are put in jeopardy, and the families who must endure their absence, in some tragic cases, their loss. In the end, however, I cannot escape the conclusion that a draft would be wrong for the country.
There is little doubt that a professional volunteer military is both more efficient and effective than a drafted force. Whilst there are plenty of reasons to excoriate the politicians who ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the military brass who planned (or didn’t plan) it, there can be no question regarding the sterling performance of the troops themselves. At the small unit level, officers and men alike have conducted themselves with professional skill, valour, steadfastness and fortitude in a challenging environment where danger can take many forms and lurk in any direction. Certainly reserve and National Guard troops have performed well too; however, the bulk of the ground force in Iraq has been comprised of career soldiers, whose extensive training, high morale and unit cohesion have proved invaluable. It surely makes a difference that they volunteered for their service, particularly in insurgency-type warfare, such as in Iraq, where it is critical to be disciplined enough not to overreact to stressful situations by employing disproportionate force, thereby alienating the very people we are attempting to help. It’s unlikely that a force comprised primarily of draftees would have been able to maintain the high morale level and military performance that the volunteer professional forces have achieved to date.
Of course the very professionalism of a volunteer military and the fact that relatively few will be called upon to serve, makes it a particularly inviting instrument for use by an administration with its own agenda. Clearly, this was the case with Iraq, as many of us saw at the time – and many more see now. The Iraq mess has prompted Wrangell and others to believe that a draft would ensure that we would never again sleep walk into a war, by allowing ourselves to be sold on an invasion by a president and vice-president who would have made far better used car salesmen than they have national leaders. The inescapable logic is that if the sons or daughters of the population at large were eligible for service in Iraq or somewhere like it, the nation would very likely be less supine in permitting a president to start a war without a balanced and thorough debate, devoid of charges that opponents were unpatriotic.
There are a couple of problems with this rationale. First, it simply makes little sense in this genuinely dangerous world to have a military that is less than the best. And to have the best is to have a professional volunteer force. Second, a key argument in the selling of the Iraq war, subliminally at least, was that it was going to be easy – a “cakewalk” as Kenneth Adelman, former assistant secretary of defence and arms control director in previous GOP administrations, put it in a Washington Post article in 2002. (Mr Adelman, of course, was only talking about the conventional invasion itself – not the unconventional aftermath. It really is irritating when your enemy doesn’t stand there to be blown apart by your laser-guided bombs and artillery/tanks but instead melts away to become the nucleus of a highly effective insurgency that has claimed the lives of over 3000 Americans).
A draft, in other words, might not have saved us from the initial invasion, albeit it would undoubtedly have impacted the war’s continuation now that the country had become deeply disillusioned.
For me this debate misses the point. There’s no purpose in having a draft if it is designed simply as a means to dissuade us from ever using military force for national security or compelling humanitarian reasons. On the other hand, having at our command a well trained and equipped professional military must not become a license for its inevitable use when the stakes are not high enough, or when the extent of the commitment is not commensurate with the benefit or justification.
In the end it comes down to this: if we don’t pay attention and thus fail to make wise choices in the voting booth we will invariably live to regret it. If the Congress and the media fail to act as a check on a brash and bullying president, it is the country that will ultimately suffer. If we have to arm twist and cajole our allies to go along with us on a specific large-scale military enterprise, chances are we should forget it. We have done best as a nation when we have acted in concert with willing allies; we have done worst when we have acted alone or with reluctant friends.
The United States had an independent media and a governmental system of checks that was the envy of the world. Both have been tarnished by the Iraq experience because, for reasons that will be studied for years to come, they failed to prevent a president, who was clearly in over his head, from leading us into the worst foreign policy blunder in living memory.
Analysing and fixing what went wrong should be our priority, not instituting a draft.