http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120505Y.shtml

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Hidden in Plane Sight: US Media Dodging Air War in Iraq

    By Norman Solomon

    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Monday 05 December 2005

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    The US government is waging an air war in Iraq. "In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased," Seymour Hersh reported in the December 5 edition of The New Yorker. "Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border."

    Hersh added: "As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war."

    Here's a big reason why: Major US news outlets are dodging the extent of the Pentagon's bombardment from the air, an avoidance all the more egregious because any drawdown of US troop levels in Iraq is very likely to be accompanied by a step-up of the air war.

    So, according to the LexisNexis media database, how often has the phrase "air war" appeared in The New York Times this year with reference to the current US military effort in Iraq?

    As of early December, the answer is: Zero.

    And how often has the phrase "air war" appeared in The Washington Post in 2005?

    The answer: Zero.

    And how often has "air war" been printed in Time, the nation's largest-circulation news magazine, this year?

    Zero.

    This extreme media avoidance needs to change. Now. Especially because all the recent talk in Washington about withdrawing some US troops from Iraq is setting the stage for the American military to do more of its killing in that country from the air.

    The last few weeks have brought a dramatic shift in the national debate over Iraq war policies. On Capitol Hill and in major news outlets, the option of swiftly withdrawing US troops - previously treated as unthinkable by most partisan leaders and media pundits - became part of serious mainstream media conversation.

    At least implicitly, news coverage has viewed the number of boots on the ground as the measure of the US war effort in Iraq. And as a consequence, public discussion assumes - incorrectly - that a reduction of American troop levels there will mean a drop in the Pentagon's participation in the carnage.

    In fact, beneath the surface of mass-media discourse, there are strong indications that the US military command will intensify its bombardment of Iraq while reducing the presence of American occupying troops before the US congressional elections next fall. With the White House eager to show progress toward US disengagement from Iraq, we should expect enormous media spin to accompany any pullout of troops in 2006.

    "The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant - and underreported - aspect of the fight against the insurgency," Hersh's New Yorker article observed. The magnitude of the US bombing is a mystery in American media coverage relying on what's spoon-fed by the Pentagon. "The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War."

    Surely the media spinners in the White House are keenly aware that the air war in Iraq has been flying largely beneath the US media's radar - inattention that augurs well for a scenario of reducing US troop levels while stepping up the air war. Hersh's reporting suggests that's in the offing: "A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the president's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by US warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units."

    Mainstream news outlets in the United States haven't yet acknowledged a possibility that is both counterintuitive and probable: The US military could end up killing more Iraqi people when there are fewer Americans in Iraq. "Lowering the number of US troops in conjunction with a more violent air war and creation of an Iraqi client military, as some are suggesting, will likely increase the number of Iraqis killed," says Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee. "This would in effect be 'changing the color of the corpses' in order to make the continuing war more palatable to the US public."

    There is a strong precedent for such a politically driven strategy. Midway through 1969, President Richard Nixon announced the start of a "Vietnamization" policy that cut the number of US troops in Vietnam by nearly half a million over a three-year period. But during that time, the tonnage rate of US bombs dropped on Vietnam actually increased.

    A similar sequence of events is apt to get underway next year, before the November elections determine which party will control the House and Senate through 2008. Caught between the desire to prevent a military defeat in Iraq and the need to shore up Republican prospects at home in the face of an unpopular war, President Bush is very likely to keep escalating the US air war in Iraq while reducing US troop levels there. And he has good reason to hope that the American news media will continue to evade the air war's horrendous consequences for Iraqi people.

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    Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to: WarMadeEasy.com.

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We are the OCCUPIERS in Iraq.  The OCCUPIERS have created institutions – an army, police, and paramilitary death squads among them – that are permanently tainted by our connection to them.  When our troops eventually leave, no number of “Marines over the horizon,” or punishing air strikes, or “battle-ready battalions” of Iraqis will keep the OCCUPIER’S institutions in place.  Resistance, some of it undoubtedly violent, will continue until those institutions are either removed or destroyed. - Mike Ferner, Beware Iraqization

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=8212

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December 6, 2005

No-Timetable Policy Rules Out a Deal on Zarqawi

by Gareth Porter

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U.S. President George W. Bush's adamant rejection of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq effectively slams the door on a recent reported offer from Sunni resistance groups to eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist haven in Iraq as part of a negotiated peace agreement.

At the recent Iraqi reconciliation meeting in Cairo, leaders of three Sunni armed organizations – the Islamic Army, the Bloc of Holy Warriors, and the Revolution of 1920 Brigades – told U.S. and Arab officials they were willing to track down terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and turn him over to Iraqi authorities as part of a negotiated settlement with the United States, according to the highly respected London-based Arabic-language al-Hayat newspaper.

Other press reports have confirmed the presence of Sunni resistance leaders on the fringes of the conference, and al-Hayat reporters were on the scene covering the conference.

Bush has effectively ruled out such an agreement with the insurgent groups by rejecting any negotiation on a withdrawal timetable. He again attacked the idea of "setting an artificial deadline" for withdrawal in his speech to naval cadets on Nov. 29.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad declared for the first time in an interview on ABC news last week that he was prepared to open negotiations with leaders of Sunni insurgent groups who are not Saddam loyalists or followers of Zarqawi.

But without any flexibility on the troop withdrawal issue, no real negotiations with the insurgents are possible. The demand for a withdrawal schedule has been the central negotiating demand of Sunni insurgent leaders ever since they began communicating their conditions for ending the armed resistance to U.S. officials early in 2005.

The capture of Zarqawi by Sunni insurgents would not end the terrorist-haven problem by itself, but that offer appears to shorthand for a broader proposal to attack and eliminate the foreign terrorist bases of operation in Iraq. U.S. intelligence has long been aware of a sharp rivalry and even occasional armed clashes between Sunni insurgent organizations and the foreign terrorists under Zarqawi's leadership, despite their military cooperation against the occupation.

In the past, both the Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi's followers have raised the possibility that the Sunni leaders would turn on the foreign jihadists if a peace agreement were reached with the United States. Last August, Saleh al-Mutlaq of the Sunni National Dialogue Council, which is sympathetic to the Sunni armed resistance, declared, "If the Americans reach an agreement with the local resistance, there won't be any room for foreign fighters."

After the reports of contacts between the Sunni insurgents and U.S. officials surfaced last summer, the al-Qaeda organization in Iraq expressed serious concern about just such a possibility. An Internet posting by a follower of Zarqawi warned that if the Sunni insurgents ended their armed resistance, the insurgents would "exploit their knowledge of the mujahideen and their methods and their supply routes and they way they maneuver."

In 2005, the Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi have clashed over both possible peace negotiations and participation in the October referendum on the constitution. Organizations linked with Zarqawi warned as early as last spring against negotiating with the United States, and threatened to kill anyone who worked to turn out voters in the referendum. A coalition of larger insurgent groups called for maximizing the vote against the draft constitution.

The Sunni leaders told their U.S. contacts in Cairo they would not deliver Zarqawi to the U.S. forces, consistent with their demand that the U.S. military presence must be phased under any negotiated settlement, according to al-Hayat. A Pentagon source commented last week that it would "make perfect sense" that the Sunni insurgents don't want to hand over either arms or foreign jihadists to the U.S., as a matter of nationalist pride.

Cooperation with a Shi'ite-dominated government on the foreign terrorist presence in Iraq, however, would require further negotiations between Sunni insurgent leaders and the government on protection of minority rights and other major political issues.

Negotiating with the major Sunni resistance organizations, once regarded as impossible, become a real option after Sunni intermediaries began passing on peace feelers from several of those organizations early in 2005. Guerrilla units once thought to be acting entirely independently of one another and without any program are now credited with the capability for common political action.

In July, Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway told reporters in Washington that the military had identified the top eight to 10 leaders of the insurgency and knew that they had met "occasionally" to "talk organization tactics." Some of those meetings are said to have taken place in Syria and Jordan.

After meetings between the insurgent leaders and U.S. military officers, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, said that the "preliminary talks" could lead to actual negotiations with insurgent groups.

Bush's "declassified" war strategy reflects a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi's organization than is seen in past administration rhetoric.

Whereas Bush administration rhetoric has referred to the enemy only as "terrorists" and "Saddam loyalists" in the past, the document identifies a third group, the "rejectionists," who are said to represent most of those who have taken up arms against the occupation. It acknowledges that the "rejectionists" have goals that are "to some extent incompatible" with those of the terrorists.

The document, titled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," also hints that the Sunnis have legitimate Sunni concerns about the absence of any protection for minority rights in the constitution pushed through by Shi'ite party leaders.

Nevertheless, it suggests that there is no need for any compromise with the insurgency, because the U.S. and its Iraqi allies can play on divisions among the insurgent groups, drawing off some of them and controlling the rest. Bush declared in his speech on Iraq last week that the goal was to "marginalize the Saddamists and rejectionists."

According to source familiar with Defense Department thinking on the issue, a plan was adopted last summer for "negotiations" with insurgent groups that would offer no real compromise with them. Instead, the U.S. officials would offer withdrawal only if and as certain "conditions" were met, such as training and deployment of adequate government units to replace U.S. troops.

The marginalization strategy requires Shi'ite leaders to promise greater protection for Sunni rights through amending the constitution. "I think Khalilzad is gently nudging the government in the direction of negotiating with the Sunnis," said the Pentagon source.

The administration is unlikely to do anything more in contacts with Sunni insurgents until and unless a more accommodating Shi'ite leadership emerges from the Dec. 15 election, according to the source.

Meanwhile, no effort is being made to take advantage of an opportunity to do something concrete about the one issue which is of concern to the U.S. public. As the domestic political struggle over military withdrawal from Iraq heats up, the failure to pursue a timetable could eventually become an explosive issue for the Bush administration.

(Inter Press Service)

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"I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president." - Quote from 'Bush at War' by Bob Woodward

http://lnk.nu/rawstory.com/6qy.html

(Supporting Links at Source URL)

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Closer look at Pentagon logs finds masked political requests from Republican Senate staffers

12/05/2005

Filed by Ron Brynaert

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A closer examination of documents released by the Pentagon which log all requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act shows that various individuals connected to the Republican party -- including at least five former staff members for the National Republican Senatorial Committee -- filed requests on Democratic congressmembers without identifying their employer.

Democrats, on the other hand, were more likely to state their affiliation: the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee made eight requests of the Pentagon by name since 2000 as RAW STORY reported last week.

Those familiar with "disguising" political Freedom of Information Act filings say that campaigns will sometimes have others sign off on the requests. Housemates or friends who are not employed by a political party at the time are sometimes called on to file. Such requestors often go on to become party officials.

The Pentagon logs, obtained by blogger Michael Petrelis and given to RAW STORY, include requests from names who appear on the 2001 Congressional staff directory.

Those names include: Krista Cole, Josh Hartsell, Brent Lancaster, Brian Rogers and Hannah Walker. Cole, Hartsell and Lancaster made requests on the same date: June 28, 2001, as did Edward Newton, who later received payment from the Republican party.

Brent Lancaster, who received RNC reimbursements after making a filing in 2001 and was a press secretary for Rep. John Cooksey (R-LA), sought information on Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI).

Hannah Walker, hired by the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2003 and now a legislative assistant for Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), filed to obtain information on Sens. Levin and Durbin in 2002. Walker also filed request for info on Bob Clement, a Democratic congressman and Tennessee Senate Candidate in 2002.

According to Open Secrets, a website that tracks money in U.S. elections, Cole, Rogers and Newton received payment from the Republican Party during the 2004 election cycle.

In June 2001, Cole sought information on the now-deceased Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), while Hartsell went after Jean Carnahan, who was appointed to the Senate after her husband, Mel , died in a plane crash. Rogers' request for correspondence related to former Senator Robert Torricelli (D-NJ).

Some of the other "masked requests:"

Mark Drake, a then-staff member of the conservative Media Research Center who became the spokeperson for the Minnesota Republican Party, filed a request for the military records of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).

Miriam Moore, legal analyst for the Family Research Council also employed by the Republican National Committee during the Bush/Cheney '04 campaign, requested information on Howard Dean in May of 2003. In 2004, she made inquiries about John Kerry, Governor Bill Richardson, and Democratic Senators Evan Bayh, Bob Graham, and Bill Nelson. Moore also requested correspondence between the Department of Defense and Dewey Square Group -- a massive public affairs firm that according to Roll Call, has "close ties to just about every important Democratic politician in the country."

Moore is linked to the Florida voter "caging" scandal: two e-mails connected to the so-called "caging list," part of an apparent plan to "disrupt voting in [Florida's] African-American voting districts" in the 2004 election, were sent to Moore's RNC headquarters e-mail address.

The following are the requests made by Republican staffers. The first date is the day the request was received by the Pentagon; the second date is when action was taken.

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Josh Hartsell

01-F-1956 / HARTSELL, JOSH /6/28/01
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE OFFICE OF THE SENATOR JEAN CARNAHAN OF MISSOURI AND THE U. S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE FOR THE PERIOD OF JANUARY 1, 2000 TO THE PRESENT

Hannah Walker 02-F-0513 / WALKER, HANNAH / 1/15/02, 10/29/02
ACTION TAKEN: OTHER
REQ CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE SEC DEF AND SENATOR CARL LEVIN OF MICHIGAN FOR THE PERIOD OF 1997

02-F-0559 / WALKER, HANNAH L. /1/23/02 10/28/02
ACTION TAKEN: OTHER
ALL CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE OFFICE OF SENATOR RICHARD DURBIN OF ILLINOIS AND DOD FOR THE PERIOD OF 1997 TO THE PRESENT

02-F-1869 / WALKER, HANNAH / 8/2/02 10/28/02
ACTION TAKEN: OTHER
REQ: 1988-PRESENT ALL CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE OFFICE OF BOB CLEMENT OF TENNESSEE AND THE DOD

Krista Cole

01-F-1923 / COLE, KRISTA L. / 6/28/01 9/24/02
ACTION TAKEN: OTHER
REQ RECORDS FOR THE PERIOD OF 1997 TO THE PRESENT, ALL CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE OFFICE OF SENATOR PAUL WELLSTONE OF MN AND THE DOD.

Brian Rogers

02-F-0985 / ROGERS, BRIAN / 3/25/02 8/7/03
ACTION TAKEN: WITHDRAWN 8/7/03
REQ RECORDS FOR THE PERIOD OF 1983 TO THE PRESENT FOR ALL COORESPONDENCE BETWEEN SENATOR ROBERT TORRICELLI & THE US DEPT OF DEFENSE.

Edward Newton

01-F-1960 / NEWTON, EDWARD S. / 6/28/01 10/19/01
ACTION TAKEN: FEES
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE OFFICE OF SENATOR TOM HARKIN OF IOWA AND THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE FOR THE PERIOD OF 1997 TO THE PRESENT

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RAW STORY will post the full logs later this week -- the posting was delayed Friday because we'd uncovered this new angle.

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"What the Iraq/Bush war shows the world is how a Cabal of Criminality, numbering less than a few hundred individuals, can bamboozle a nation into a war whose ramifications on our future we cannot yet fully comprehend. The Bush war, the single-greatest blunder in America's foreign policy history, was spawned by greed-addicted corporatists and treasonous neoconartists, presstitute lackeys and political hacks, placed in charge of US foreign policy." - Manuel Valenzuela, A Cabal of Criminality

http://lnk.nu/motherjones.com/6qx.html

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MotherJones.com / interview / 2005

War Crimes, USA

Could administration officials be called to account?

Mark Engler

December 05 , 2005

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In normal times, suggesting that the leaders of our country might have committed war crimes would violate a firm taboo in American political discussion. Yet in the post-Abu-Ghraib era—and especially as President Bush has quarreled with Congress over the McCain amendment prohibiting abuse of all detainees in U.S. custody—observers can no longer profess shock at the idea that criminal breaches of humanitarian law have occurred. According to a recent editorial in the Washington Post, the amendment "would mandate an end to the hundreds of cases of torture and inhumane treatment, many of them qualifying as war crimes, that have been documented by the International Red Cross, and the Army itself at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and elsewhere."

With the White House on the defensive about its justifications for the invasion of Iraq, and with European governments in an uproar over whether American abuse of prisoners has taken place in bases on the continent, scrutiny of alleged U.S. war crimes looks sure to intensify. And if debate about this inflammatory topic begins to rage, a new book, edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith, promises to add fuel to the fire. In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond collects damning official documents, leaked e-mails, testimonies, commentaries, and investigative articles. Together, these items make a strong case that Bush administration actions overseas violate international norms and treaties, and that those responsible are subject to legal repercussions.

Are we actually going to see Donald Rumsfeld stand trial? Motherjones.com talked to the editors about why the issue of war crimes may become an ever-sharper thorn in the side of administration officials, about the potential and the limitations of international law, and about the obligation of citizens to prevent further crimes from being committed.

Historian Jeremy Brecher has written and edited over a dozen books, including the labor history classic, Strike! Jill Cutler is an assistant dean at Yale College and editor of Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order. Brendan Smith is a legal scholar and former congressional aide to Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Mother Jones: Does accusing United States of war crimes make you sound out of touch with mainstream American sentiment? Wouldn’t most people think that these accusations are coming out of left field?

Jeremy Brecher: If the United States is involved in committing war crimes, we as Americans have a responsibility to address that. I don’t think hiding from reality is a solution to the fact that no one likes to be told that they’re doing something wrong.

The second point, though, is that Americans actually are very worried that our country may be doing things that are not in accord with our own values. Appealing to that concern isn’t a matter of trashing our country, but of giving Americans a means of confronting what our government has been doing.

Jill Cutler: People who work at the FBI, Senators, and Congressmen are very concerned about our conduct in the war on terror. The FBI was concerned about the torture that was occurring in various places. Military officials are concerned that the Army’s field manual is not being observed.

Brendan Smith: The concept of war crimes is actually bringing together some unlikely allies. Paralleling the peace movement, we’re seeing what we could call a “law and order movement.” Here, you have organizations like Amnesty International and the ACLU that are concerned with civil liberties and human rights. But you also have a dozen retired military officials, led by Marine Corps General David Brahms, who wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee saying that it should not confirm Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General because he promoted violations of the Geneva Conventions.

JB: The public attitude about war crimes has changed a lot since the beginning of the 1990s. We’ve moved away from a situation where war crimes were just epithets that governments used to bash foreign leaders they didn’t like. Now, we’ve seen tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. We have the International Criminal Court, which, even though the United States is not part of it, is designed for the purpose of trying war crimes. The United States itself has brought either formal charges or accusations of war crimes against other countries’ leaders–including, as we speak, against Saddam Hussein. So this is a concept that we are becoming more familiar with, something that is regarded as part of the fabric of law.

Mother Jones: The idea that the U.S. could commit war crimes is taboo, yet on the other hand, it's taken for granted that our country has a special role in the world--that America is an exception. And that exceptionalism gives the U.S. a certain prerogative to act without having to submit to an international litmus test.

JB: This is a claim that’s made by the Bush administration, but when you look at the poll data, it’s quite clear that this belief is not widely shared by the American people. There’s a very interesting set of polls done by an organization called PIPA, the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. They show that most Americans believe that the United States is bound by international law and by the Geneva Conventions. It’s this fundamental belief in law, including both national and international law, that we’re hoping to appeal to.

For me personally, it goes back to the pictures I saw of the Nazi concentration camp victims when they first came out after World War II, and to hearing about the Nuremberg tribunal. I’m too young to remember the tribunal actually happening, but I certainly learned about it at an early age. The idea that top officials could be held responsible for crimes committed by those under their command seemed to me to be an essential part of how to make some decency and peace in the world.

There was an attempt to apply that idea to the Vietnam War, but there was no mechanism for actually enforcing it—even though the Bertrand Russell Commission held a tribunal in what we would now call civil society to investigate alleged U.S. war crimes. But as we moved through 1990s, war crime tribunals became live institutions. And that raised the question of whether this could really be meaningfully applied to every country, including the United States.

BS: Beyond exceptionalism, there is a more grounded principle in American society, which is that even the most powerful among us are accountable to the law. If you juxtapose those two principles, accountablilty and exceptionalism, I think the one that wins out is accountability.

Mother Jones: What specifically are the war crimes that you are identifying?

BS: We are talking about three categories. The first are crimes against peace. After Nuremberg an idea took hold that launching an aggressive war is the supreme international crime. There are only a few specific circumstances where a state can use force against another state. The U.N. charter says either you need a resolution from the Security Council or you need to be acting in self-defense from an imminent and immediate attack. In the current situation, the U.S. launched an aggressive war in Iraq that even Kofi Annan declared illegal.

The second category of crimes concern the conduct of the war and occupation. This would include the administration’s use of illegal weapons, such as napalm, white phosphorus, and cluster bombs. It includes a failure to protect civilians. It includes trying to break the Iraqi insurgency with collective punishment against the civilian population—with acts like cutting off water supplies. This is a practice we saw in Fallujah and elsewhere, and which the U.N. has condemned.

Fallujah actually summarizes several of these crimes. There we had eight weeks of bombing, we destroyed 36,000 houses, 60 schools, and 65 mosques. One of the military’s first acts was to storm the hospital. The U.S. cut off all food supplies, all power to the entire city. The Defense Department said that all the civilians were out at the time of the attack, but reports show that 30,000 to 50,000 civilians remained in the city. The U.S. blocked the Red Crescent from entering. All males between 15 and 55 weren’t allowed to leave. So in Iraq, Falljah has become iconic of American war crimes and brutality.

The third set of war crimes centers on torture. Here, the question is not whether it’s happening, it’s how often and who’s responsible. When we wrote the book there were 32 deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody reported. Now there are over 100. The FBI reports cases of strangulation, burning with cigarettes, routine beatings.

JC: Failure to count civilian deaths is also a war crime, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Mother Jones: Certainly, war is ugly. Terrible things happen in war. But the charge that these types of things are criminal seems to be controversial. The administration would respond, for example, that they are trying their best to prevent civilian deaths.

BS: Our claim is that there is more than enough evidence to bring an initial indictment or to hold an investigation. The finer questions of whether a certain attack—like the attack on the hospital in Fallujah, whether that was a legal attack because the building was overrun by insurgents or whether the facility was a functioning hospital serving the sick and wounded—is a factual question. It should be up to a jury; it should be up to a court of law to decide.

JB: The failure of the U.S. to record and investigate the deaths of civilians really goes to the heart of this. If you do not investigate the killing of civilians by bombs, or at road blocks, or in house-to-house fighting, you have no way to know whether your operations are being conducted in accord with international law or not. That’s why knowledge of the effects of warfare on civilians is the legal responsibility of military commanders. There are open statements—specifically by Mr. Rumsfeld—that these things are not being investigated, that no records of civilian deaths are being kept. That is an inherently criminal act.

Mother Jones: Torture may be the war crime that we hear the most about, and perhaps there's good reason for that. The evidence on torture, particularly the testimony of those who have been tortured in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, and the leaked documents from our government showing official knowledge of this situation, seems exceptionally damning. I wonder if that’s how you would account for the focus on this area.

JC: The evidence of other war crimes is also very strong and quite striking. I think maybe people have a special feeling about torture because they feel a democratic nation doesn’t use it. They don’t care so much that a democratic nation uses the deprivation of water against civilians. We respond more strongly to the idea of torture because we can see it happening to ourselves. Most of us can’t see ourselves in a position where our city is deprived of water.

BS: Like any good prosecutor, you go with your strongest case first. And the strongest case out there, because of the incredible work of Amnesty International, the ACLU and other groups, is torture. We know about these leaked memos because of Freedom of Information Act cases by the ACLU and other groups.

Another thing that really struck a raw nerve right at the beginning was the scapegoating of low-level soldiers like Lynndie England. The administration argued that that this was just a matter a few rotten apples, when actually high-level officials are responsible.

Mother Jones: Recently, one of the daily newspapers in New York had a large picture of President Bush on its cover and a banner headline that was a quote from him, saying: "We are not torturers." The fact that he would have to make this denial seems to me to be extraordinary in the U.S. political context.

JB: We are seeing the fallout from some ideas and practices that probably have never been pushed so openly to the extremes. One is the idea that the President has unlimited power. This argument has been made before, and certainly the executive has had wide latitude in wartime. But people are now being forced to confront the fact that, taken to its logical conclusion, this idea means the President can simply order that people be tortured. The Bush administration has actually said in court that if it decided to summarily execute those it held captive, no court would have the right to intervene. They actually said that in court.

Then there’s the doctrine of preemptive war. The White House has taken this so far as to say that it has the right to do anything it claims is in defense of national security--and that international law has no claim to stop it.

These are such extreme positions that they are beginning to force people to say, “Where are the lines?” There must be some lines we can’t cross. And I think once that question is raised, it is a moment for self-education for all of us--a moment for thinking about where those lines we cannot cross actually lie.

BS: I believe the Bush folks are really in trouble. Sweden, Iceland, Spain, Italy, and the European Union’s human rights commission are all investigating the CIA for torture—they’re looking at charges that the U.S. has reinvented the Gulag inside the gulags of Poland and Romania. Various mainstream groups like the ACLU and Human Rights First are already going after Rumsfeld for his direct role in the torture.

I don’t think the Bush administration knows how to get out of this situation. Its solutions are things like having Vice President Cheney lobby on the Hill to make an exemption in the McCain anti-torture amendment, so that CIA officials can torture as a matter of policy. In response, the Washington Post labeled Cheney the “Vice President for Torture.” The administration must be getting the sense that this has really spun out of control.

Remember, they’ve explicitly expressed worry about charges of war crimes. When Gonzales wrote his torture memo of January 25, 2002, it warned the President about possible prosecution under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, which makes any grave violation of the Geneva Conventions a crime under U.S. federal law. The President’s counsel is actually warning him there that he needs to think through this problem and to plan so that he’s not going to be busted for war crimes.

Mother Jones: You argue that one implication of looking at the Iraq war from a war crimes perspective is that it changes the way we see war resisters.

JC: It doesn’t necessarily change the way we see war resisters, but it certainly leads us to put a higher value on their resistance. What stands out for me is that the people who do resist, especially military resisters, often face horrific consequences. When Greg Ford, a 30-year Coast Guard veteran, went to tell his superior officer that prisoners were being tortured by his unit in Samarra, Iraq, he was told that he had 30 seconds to change his mind about making the report. When he refused, he was airlifted to a psychiatric hospital in Germany. In this context, I think resisting takes a kind of courage that we can hardly imagine.

JB: One of the things that has been striking in profiling some of the resistors is how much resistance is based on a defense of national and international law. In late 2004 a military judge listened to the testimony of Pablo Parades, a sailor who was ordered to get on a ship bound for Iraq, He showed up in a t-shirt that said, “Like a Cabinet member, I resign.” He refused to go on board because he was convinced that the war violated the law. The remarkable thing is that the judge ultimately refused to send Paredes to jail. He said that the government’s case against the sailor was so weak that there was reasonable cause to believe that the war in Iraq was illegal.

I don’t think we’re going to see a large number of judges in the military declaring the war illegal. But this is an extreme reflection of a deep concern about the illegality of the Bush administration’s actions that is widespread among military lawyers.

Mother Jones: In the book you discuss the “evident limitations” international law. You write, “Surely there is little expectation that members of the Bush administration will soon be subject to war crimes prosecution in U.S. courts.” Yet you argue nevertheless that war crimes are an important part of a wider strategy to confront White House lawlessness.

BS: When we wrote the book, I never imagined that we would be where we are today, with so much action in the courts. Still, I think that the general point is valid. I think we should be skeptical of the law as alternative to organizing.

At the same time, the law can be a force that supports social movements. One manner in which movements use the law is called popular constitutionalism--the use of legal concepts to legitimize social goals. We saw this when Martin Luther King argued that the Constitution was a promissory note, that it promised equality to all people, and that the civil rights movement was there to cash in the note. There’s a long history of using legal documents in this way.

Social movements can also capitalize on unintended developments in the law. There are parts of the law that are very progressive but were never intended that way. For example, President Truman insisted, against the wishes of Churchill, that Nazi and Japanese military leaders have a fair trial, with due process. Churchill at the time was arguing for summary execution, that the enemies should be drug out behind the building and shot. But Truman, who was originally a small-town judge, believed in an abstract concept of legal justice. He was only thinking about the Nuremberg trials. But when war crimes trials developed in later decades—against Milosevic, for example—they needed precedents. And they looked to the Nuremberg trials. We want to encourage the on-going development of war crimes law and use unintended developments to advance the goals of social justice.

JB: A key example that I would raise is the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, which ruled that separate was not equal. To the extent that integration occurred in the United States in the decade after the Brown decision, it was not because of the courts. It was primarily because of the actions of the civil rights movement. However, the legal principle gave a basis for action. The civil rights movement ultimately had to use not only political persuasion but also civil disobedience on a massive scale in order to achieve what the court decision had promised. I would not be surprised if the implementation of war crimes law will require that same kind of social action.

Our book ultimately is not a compendium of crimes. It is about giving us, as Americans, the understanding, knowledge, and perspective to deal with a reality that otherwise is quite overwhelming. I think it’s very important that, as a society, we assimilate lessons of what’s happened in Iraq. We didn’t assimilate the lessons of Vietnam very well. We knew that something bad happened. But as a country we never really saw the fundamental mistakes that led us there. That’s one of the reasons we facing the catastrophe in Iraq today.

One purpose of raising the war crimes issue is to point out that we got in to this partly because we didn’t have barriers, principles, and values in our society to say that certain things are unacceptable. If anything constructive is to come out of the horrors of the United States in Iraq, it will be that kind of reflection and the creation of limits that will prevent us from doing it again.

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[Note: This month Brecher, Cutler, and Smith are launching a War Crimes Watch web site to track continued evidence of war crimes and national efforts to stop future crimes from being committed.]

Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, can be reached via the web site www.democracyuprising.com.

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"They have engaged and they are in a conspiracy to wage aggressive war for which people were convicted at [the Nazi war crime tribunals at] Nuremburg." - Daniel Ellsberg

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120505N.shtml

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 America Can't Take It Anymore

    By Mark Follman

    Salon.com

    Monday 05 December 2005

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The Bush administration has embraced torture as a key part of the "war on terror." Finally, members of Congress, the military and the CIA are speaking out against the abuse.

    Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government would begin working "the dark side" to defeat its enemies in a new global war. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion," Cheney declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."

    More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and accountability. Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects - conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House - have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators.

    The grim acts unleashed by those policies are no secret today. Cruel and wanton abuses have been exposed at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and other lesser known U.S. military bases and prisons around the world. In November, the Washington Post uncovered a global network of covert CIA prisons known as "black sites," top-secret interrogation facilities reportedly operating in far-flung locations from Eastern Europe to Thailand. Still, many dark details remain unknown.

    "There is no instance in American history where we've been exposed as being so deeply involved in actually conducting torture on a routine and regular basis," says Thomas Powers, an expert on national security and the author of two books on the CIA.

    In recent months, a fierce backlash against the abuses has not only been rising in Washington, but well beyond. Many Americans on the front lines of national security are demoralized and angered by the fact that only a few foot soldiers have been punished - such as Pvt. Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib infamy - while commanders in the field and policymakers have remained untouched. A growing number of military and CIA personnel, according to officers from both realms, admit that the Bush policies, hatched in the fearful weeks and months after 9/11, have deeply corrupted military and intelligence operations over four years of war.

    In October, the Senate passed the McCain amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. It would impose uniform standards for interrogation on both the military and CIA, adhering to the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture and other "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners. As the amendment makes it way to the House, the Bush administration is fighting it every step of the way. Cheney is wielding his influence on both Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon, seeking to water down language in the McCain amendment and exempt the CIA from new guidelines.

    Following the revelation of the black sites, President Bush stated: "We do not do torture." Much evidence proves otherwise, but what else could the president of the United States say? Torturing prisoners is both illegal and morally reprehensible. Committed by Americans, it has undermined the mission to bring democratic reform to Afghanistan, Iraq and the greater Middle East. It has done profound damage to America's image at home and worldwide. And most intelligence experts, including CIA director Porter Goss, agree that when it comes to gathering useful information, torture simply doesn't work.

    By now, the public may be desensitized to all the personal testimonials of torture brought to light in the media. In some cases, skepticism is warranted: Captured al-Qaida training manuals revealed instructions for prisoners to lie about being tortured to undermine the enemy. Military investigators have said they've found instances of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay making false allegations.

    But evidence of widespread use of torture by the United States under the Bush administration is indisputable, including the policy of rendition, or the handing over of prisoners to foreign allies like Jordan and Egypt who are known to torture. European leaders have been in an uproar as further evidence emerges that the CIA has secretly used European airports to transport prisoners for interrogation.

    The numbers alone tell a chilling story. According to recent reports by the Associated Press, the United States has held more than 83,000 prisoners since the war on terror began, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, more than 14,000 remain in U.S. custody, mostly in Iraq, where U.S. military officials have acknowledged in the past that many prisoners were of little or no intelligence value. Military officials have said the same of the majority of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay; yet from Guantánamo to the war zones, more than 4,000 prisoners have been held for a year or longer, with several hundred held for multiple years.

    As of March this year, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody. Of those, 22 died when insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib prison, while others reportedly died of natural causes. At least 26 deaths have been deemed criminal homicides.

    Particularly troubling, says Powers, is that the Bush White House has taken no responsibility for the long trail of illegal abuses committed in the name of fighting terror: "Has anybody high up been held accountable for those 26 homicides? Not that I know of. And I'd be very surprised if we ever learn the full extent of all this. My guess is that if we could see the whole picture, it'd be extremely dark and unpleasant."

    Army Capt. Ray Kimball is among the growing number who say that interrogation by torture is anti-American, ineffective and categorically wrong. In an interview with Salon, he said it also causes severe harm to U.S. soldiers themselves.

    "Torture not only degrades the victim, it also ultimately degrades the torturer," said Kimball, who served in Iraq and now teaches history at West Point. "We already have enough soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after legitimate combat experiences. But now you're talking about adding the burden of willfully inflicting wanton pain on another human being. You tell a soldier to go out there and 'waterboard' someone" - strap a prisoner to a board, bind his face in cloth, and pour water over his face until he fears death by drowning - "or mock-execute someone, but nobody is thinking about what that's going to do to that soldier months or years later, when it comes to dealing with the rationalizations and internal consequences. We're talking about serious psychic trauma."

    A few courageous soldiers, including Army Capt. Ian Fishback of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, have spoken out against policies they say have cultivated torture on the battlefield. For 17 months, Fishback sought clarification within the military for the proper treatment of prisoners, and could find none. "I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder," Fishback wrote in an open letter to Sen. John McCain in September. "I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq."

    Coercion used on detainees, Fishback wrote, "is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable ... If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession."

    More soldiers are starting to come forward with the support of groups like Human Rights Watch, which conducts leading research on torture in the war on terror. Although unwilling to talk on the record for fear of retribution by the military, a number of active-duty soldiers who've spoken with Human Rights Watch are increasingly angry about the torture scandals, according to researcher John Sifton. While some soldiers are wary that media and human rights groups are out to make the military look bad, Sifton says most of them realize that they are taking the sole blame for the abuses.

    "A number of soldiers we've talked to have told us they were ordered by military intelligence to torture," Sifton told Salon. "And not just at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq." According to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their superiors told them to take a hike.

    One of them was Army Spc. Tony Lagouranis, who worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison and in a special intelligence unit that operated across Iraq in 2004. After multiple attempts to report wrongdoing, he became frustrated by stonewalling inside the military and took his knowledge of abuses to the media.

    "It's all over Iraq," Lagouranis, now retired, told the PBS show "Frontline" in late September. "The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like ... burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs." At the root of the abuses, he said, was a lot of "frustration that we weren't getting good intel," and murky directives regarding the treatment of prisoners. Inevitably, Lagouranis said, those conditions gave rise to instances of "pure sadism," like the ones at Abu Ghraib.

    There are other accounts of stonewalling and coverup by the military: One Army whistleblower who tried to report abuses in Iraq in 2003 was suddenly declared psychologically ill and forcibly shipped out of the country. "They were determined to protect their own asses no matter who they had to take down," said Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, in a Salon report last year.

    In a joint effort with Human Rights First and NYU's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch has been amassing a database of "literally hundreds and hundreds of cases of torture" at the hands of the U.S. military and CIA that have gone uninvestigated or unresolved. "There are only two cases I know of in which an officer or senior NCO has been accused of criminal conduct because of actions of those under their command," Sifton said. While some lower-level troops who committed abuse have been rightfully punished, he said, "it's simply shocking that nobody higher up has been held criminally liable."

    "The message that's going out to guys is, as long as you're a senior military member or administration staffer, you're golden," says one active-duty Army officer, a veteran of combat in Iraq. "Just make sure either you've got a fall guy, or you're high enough up in the hierarchy, and you'll be fine."

    Beginning almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, policies crafted inside the Bush White House set the conditions for rampant abuses by the military and CIA. In the first fearful weeks and months after the attacks, top administration lawyers in the White House and Justice Department drew up a series of secret legal memos that recast the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, those considered terrorist suspects from no easily identifiable army or nation. The memos argued that captured enemy combatants were not entitled to fundamental protections of U.S. or international law, including the obligations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, a treaty the United States ratified in 1994 explicitly outlawing "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners.

    The administration also relied on a classified document known as a "presidential finding," authorizing broad covert action by the CIA to capture, detain or kill members of al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The finding, which administration legal advisors apparently ruled lawful, was signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. A day later, Congress granted the administration additional power by authorizing the use of "all necessary and appropriate" military force at the discretion of the president.

    This November, in response to the torture scandals, the Pentagon issued a new high-level directive requiring that interrogations be conducted using "humane" treatment. That term replaced language in an earlier draft of the directive modeled after the international rules against torture - a change that was made following intense pressure from Cheney's office.

    According to one senior Army officer, a judge advocate general who has been involved in discussions with Pentagon officials on the issue, reaching a consensus on what constitutes "humane" treatment can be exceedingly difficult - and vague language remains precisely the strategy of the Bush administration's legal maneuverings on detention and interrogation. Pentagon officials working to revise the Army field manual have also reportedly faced stiff resistance from Cheney's office. In theory, the senior Army JAG says, the rules outlined in the current version of the manual, including 14 techniques approved for interrogations, were already well-defined enough to avert wrongdoing - at least until the Bush administration began calling for "the gloves to come off" in the war on terror.

    According to the senior Army JAG, who wasn't authorized to speak to the media and was granted anonymity by Salon, many fellow JAGs and military officers feel that the administration has long since veered into dubious territory. "There are plenty of us who think that the legal opinions put forth by the administration, while maybe passable from a technical standpoint, aren't serving our long-term interests. The feeling is that there are steep costs to the administration's views, and that we're just beginning to pay them."

    It is no accident that the McCain amendment seeks to tighten controls over both the military and CIA. The two often work in concert in an ill-defined, shadowy world of prisoner capture, transport and interrogation. While some abuses took place in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay prior to the Iraq war, conventional wisdom holds that torture only ballooned with the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But according to one active-duty Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, U.S. intelligence operatives were working alongside the military in the Middle East well before the war even began.

    "Before the invasion of Iraq, I was on an airfield in a foreign country that had an OGA site operating on it," says the Army officer. (OGA, or "other government agency," is parlance for a nonmilitary agency, typically the CIA.) "The airfield was prepped for any number of missions. It was made abundantly clear to us that those guys were self-sufficient and operated under their own set of rules. And if we didn't like that, that was too damn bad."

    Robert Baer, a veteran CIA officer who operated in Iraq and across the Middle East before retiring in 1997, affirms that the CIA often works with military and private contractors, including on interrogations. He says joint operations are likely all over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at the "black sites," which, according to the Washington Post, were set up beginning nearly four years ago.

    A recent report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker revealed how the joint operations can shield any single agency from responsibility for torture. The killing of a terrorist suspect in U.S hands at Abu Ghraib in 2003 may go unpunished, according to the report, because of murky circumstances over whether the military or CIA had custody of him. The prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, was first captured and roughed up by Navy SEALS before being handed over to a CIA interrogator at the prison. The CIA interrogator reportedly placed a bag over al-Jamadi's head, bound his hands behind his back, and hung him by his hands. Top forensics experts who examined the case said al-Jamadi, who had broken ribs, suffocated to death.

    Several military investigations have fingered the CIA for operations in Iraq that essentially made prisoners like al-Jamadi disappear within the military's detention system with no record of their captivity - a practice known as "ghosting." To date, only one agency employee has been held to account, a CIA contractor - but not an officer - charged for beating a prisoner to death in Afghanistan.

    The CIA has never had a sterling reputation on human rights, says author Thomas Powers, though no one inside the agency would ever admit to using torture. "They've also said they don't commit assassinations," Powers says wryly. "They don't, except when they do."

    Nevertheless, Bush policies appear to have corrupted the CIA to an unprecedented degree. Between the torture scandals and the prewar intelligence meltdown - Powers says analysts were made to "hop on one leg and whistle" while pumping up bogus intelligence on Iraqi WMD - the CIA has become an "operational arm" of the Bush White House.

    The network of secret CIA prisons is particularly disturbing, Powers says, because they make prospects for oversight and accountability even dimmer. As with the military, it's likely that only the rank and file will be held accountable. "Over the last 50 years the agency has been asked many times to do extreme things," Powers says. "But almost always, whenever there's somebody to be blamed for it, nobody in the White House takes a hit."

    Other CIA experts confirm that torture fails to exact useful information from prisoners, especially insurgents. "I've never seen torture solve an insurgency problem. It just makes it worse," Baer says. In addition to decrying its ineffectiveness, some veteran CIA officers, like their counterparts in the military, have begun to speak out against torture on moral grounds.

    "It goes completely against the profile of people the CIA wants to recruit," Baer says, adding that officers are trained to resist interrogation, but generally not to conduct it. "This is a 180-degree turn, and it's wrecking the CIA further."

    The rising backlash against torture today indicates more military and intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush administration is sinking the United States into an unprecedented moral quagmire - one that could lead to an especially dire end. "The problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now," Powers says. "How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual - it's complete madness."

    Last summer, Sen. Richard Durbin, a senior Democrat from Illinois who co-wrote the McCain amendment, was savaged by the White House for pointed criticisms he made comparing torture at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay with Nazism and the Soviet gulags. Looking back, Durbin maintains he could have chosen his words more carefully - but more importantly, he says, Cheney's battle against the McCain amendment represents a betrayal of America's men and women fighting on the front lines, and an "incredible contradiction" from the White House on torture.

    For Durbin, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until last January, the revelation of the CIA "black sites" has raised new, troubling questions. "To my knowledge, it was never discussed - whether they exist, where they exist, who runs them, and what's going on inside," Durbin said, speaking by phone from his office on Capitol Hill. "I think we absolutely need a more thorough investigation. But we'll be hard pressed to see it because it reflects directly on statements made by the president and vice president. And when it gets that delicate politically, the Senate Intelligence Committee has refused to step in."

    That's been the norm under the Bush White House, Durbin adds. Cheney, he says, enjoys powerful sway over the committee. "There is a close relationship between Sen. Pat Roberts [who heads the Intelligence Committee] and the vice president. I can tell you that little or nothing was done while I served on the committee, in terms of a thorough review of our treatment of prisoners."

    While Durbin and fellow lawmakers responsible for oversight were kept in the dark on covert interrogation operations, before he left the committee he and others viewed hundreds of classified photos of torture from Abu Ghraib. According to Durbin, a number of the images they witnessed were even more horrific than the public has seen to date, though he declined to go into detail, because they remain classified. "In all of my years of public service, I'll never forget that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners."

    "I honestly believe that when this war is over, we'll look back on this treatment of prisoners as our own Japanese internment-camp issue," Durbin says. "It's further illustration that when a nation is in fear, as we are of continued attacks of terrorism, a nation will do things that do not stand up well at all by the judgment of history."

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"They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages." - Australian attorney Richard Bourke