Iraq Roundup
It has been claimed at one time or another that some of the worst images of abuse were staged in order to pressure new inmates into talking. But apparently that‘s not true:
[Darby] said that he asked Graner, a Pennsylvania prison guard in civilian life, about the photographs. Graner replied: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.' "
In one of the most striking images to surface, a detainee jokingly referred to as "Gilligan" by the MPs was forced to stand on a box of food, with wires connected to his fingers, toes and penis. Harman said she attached the wires to "Gilligan" and told him he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box. "Why did you do this to the detainee 'Gilligan'?" a military investigator asked. "Just playing with him," Harman said.
Respectful of Otters comments:
Permissiveness led to lawlessness. Given the green light to abuse some prisoners for some purposes, given a prison atmosphere in which the rights of prisoners were completely suspended, given a complete failure of accountability and supervision with respect to prisoner treatment - some of the MPs report following orders of MI personnel whose identities they didn't know - some people started freelancing. They gave way to their ugliest impulses. They had no higher motives.
This is, of course, one of the reasons why torture shouldn’t be permitted in the first place. People given absolute power over other human beings aren’t very good at stopping before they go over the brink. Where were the commanders? Watching and approving, it seems:
The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. ... "Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor. "That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."
This puts a very negative spin on the fact that the American military wants, and is being given, immunity to prosecution after the hand-over of power on June 30:
Despite widespread ill-feeling about the abuse of prisoners by American forces and allegations of mistreatment by British troops, coalition forces will be protected from any legal action. They will only be subject to the domestic law of their home countries. Military sources have told The Observer that the question of immunity was central to obtaining military agreement on a new United Nations resolution on Iraq to be published by the middle of next month.
Are soldiers being given immunity or are they being given a green-light to act with impunity? Muchof the problem lies with the character and experience of those in charge. People with high character and a lot of experience can do a good job leading others and encouraging their best impulses. Those with less character or simply little experience can’t be relied upon to lead as well. So who has been in charge in Iraq? People with a lot of enthusiasm and surely high character, but not much experience:
When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop.
In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis. Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars. ... The CPA was designed to be a grand experiment in nation-building, a body of experts who would be Iraq's guide for transforming itself into a model for democracy in the Middle East. Unlike previous reconstruction efforts, it was to be manned by civilians -- advisers on politics, law, medicine, transportation, agronomy and other key areas. They were supposed to be experts, but many of the younger hires who filled the CPA's hallways were longer on enthusiasm than on expertise.
For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank. ... For others, they represented everything that was wrong with the CPA: They were young, inexperienced, and regarded as ideologues. Several had impressive paper credentials, but in the wrong fields. Greco was fluent in English, Italian and Spanish; Burns had been a policy analyst focused on family and health care; and Ledeen had co-founded a cooking school. But none had ever worked in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and few could tell a balance sheet from an accounts receivable statement.
They were originally picked for low-level jobs that would have been within their expertise - in the end, though, they ended up with positions of a great deal of responsibility. Their qualifications? Political connections, if you could call it that. They had strong Republican credentials and not much more, as far as rebuilding Iraq was concerned, but that didn’t stop anyone from making sure they were in charge.
It's really absurd to think that people are being put in positions of great power and responsibility not because of their technical qualifications, but because of their political reliability. One has to wonder if America has failed in Iraq:
Michael A. Ledeen, author of "The War against the Terror Masters" and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argued at a forum on Iraq earlier the week: "I think the level of casualties is secondary. I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say, but all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . . . What we hate is not casualties but losing. And if the war goes well and if the American public has the conviction that we're being well-led and that our people are fighting well and that we're winning, I don't think casualties are going to be the issue."
Yesterday, Ledeen said his main critique of the war so far is not on military matters. Instead, he said, the administration should have treated the conflict as "90 percent political" and 10 percent military, and on that basis, helped create an Iraqi government in exile before the war began to present as a democratic alternative to Saddam Hussein. The war is a crucial part of the larger fight against terrorism because, Ledeen said, the war on terrorism "is a war of freedom against tyranny, so we have to fight tyranny." On that ground, he argued, "if there is not a democratic government in Iraq in a year of so, we will have failed."
That was from March, 2003.
In other news, there is still a lot of confusion about what is going on with Ahmed Chalabi. Not long ago he was the darling of the Republican Party; now, he is persona non grata. What happened?
[N]ow 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 U.N. officials we've crawled back to for help, anger that may lead to civil war. ... 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.
In addition to funneling secret information to Iran, he may have been funneling disinformation from Iran back to the United States:
Senior U.S. officials have told 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl that they have evidence Chalabi has been passing highly classified U.S. intelligence to Iran. The evidence shows that Chalabi personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, "get Americans killed." The evidence is said to be "rock solid."
On Friday, Stahl reported that senior intelligence officials stress the information Ahmad Chalibi is alleged to have passed on to Iran is of such a seriously sensitive nature, the result of full disclosure could be highly damaging to U.S. security. The information involves secrets that were held by only a handful of very senior U.S. officials, says Stahl.
Meanwhile, Stahl reports that "grave concerns" about the true nature of Chalabi's relationship with Iran started after the U.S. obtained "undeniable intelligence" that Chalabi met with a senior Iranian intelligence, a "nefarious figure from the dark side of the regime - an individual with a direct hand in covert operations directed against the United States."
How much of America’s case for the war against Iraq was based upon “intelligence” that came from Chalabi and his cronies? How much of that “intelligence” actually originated in Iran? We are faced with the prospect that Iran could of have pulled off the biggest, most elaborate, and most clever intelligence coup in history: by running an Iraqi exile as their own agent, they convinced the world’s only remaining superpower to invade a third-rate nation with a fourth-rate military on the pretext that this nation posed a credible threat to everyone else in the world.
More on the Chalabi-as-spy thesis from the Los Angeles Times:
U.S. investigators are seeking to determine whether the effort — which one U.S. official likened to an attempt to "game the system" — was secretly supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush administration to oust the regime in Baghdad, Tehran's longtime enemy. ... The U.S. investigation into the suspected spy operation was a key reason behind Thursday's raids on Chalabi's Baghdad house and the offices of his Iraqi National Congress. Several INC members were accused of kidnapping, robbery and corruption.
It is not clear whether Iran had any role in the alleged use of the INC to provide disinformation to the West. U.S. officials say the INC may have been acting on its own when it sent out a steady stream of defectors from 1998 to 2003 with apparently coordinated claims about Baghdad's purported weapons of mass destruction. ... "We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."
If true, the implications are absolutely staggering.
Update: people who suggest that everything has gone wrong and that we shouldn’t “stay the course” are often treated very derisively by the Republican Party - but will they be willing to do the same with General Anthony Zinni?
"The course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course," he tells CBS News Correspondent Steve Kroft in an interview to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, May 23, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. ... "There has been poor strategic thinking in this...poor operational planning and execution on the ground," says Zinni, who served as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000.
Zinni blames the poor planning on the civilian policymakers in the administration, known as neo-conservatives, who saw the invasion as a way to stabilize the region and support Israel. He believes these people, who include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, have hijacked U.S. foreign policy. "They promoted it and pushed [the war]... even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs. Then they should bear the responsibility," Zinni tells Kroft.
"In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption," he writes. ... The fact that no one in the administration has paid for the blunder irks Zinni. "But regardless of whose responsibility [it is]...it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up, and whose heads are rolling on this?"
Zinni served commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000 and President Bush named Zinni special envoy to the Middle East at one point. I don’t think that he’ll be getting any jobs from the Bush administration any time soon, but perhaps that is actually part of the problem: an unwillingness to seriously listen to those whose opinions don’t conform to administration ideology.
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