Mea Culpa

The New York Times has finally done it, they've said they're sorry. A number of Op-Ed columnists have begun to express their regret at failing to scrutinize the pre-war intelligence the Bush Administration cited as reason to go to War, and yesterday the New York Times editorial page released this statement:

"...But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one...

...We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight."

I firmly beleive that a share of the blame for the current "quagmire" in Iraq rests upon the shoulders of our inept media, which failed the American people in the lead up to the Iraq War. Washington correspondents and newspapers alike echoed the White House's daily talking points, rather then analyzing their validity and impact. They willfully allowed the Bush Administration to manage the news in a way that no modern president has. Spoon fed pieces of incomplete intelligence were regarded as fact. Only recently have they awakened from their comatose state, and begun to perform the duties of a legitimate press corp. We entrust in the media a special responsibility, one that should not be taken lightly. Although the days of Walter Cronkite have long since passed, Americans still look to the nightly news to find truth, they still scan their morning papers to find fact, and they still depend on the media to hold our elected officials accountable for their actions. So maybe next time the nation is deciding whether to send our young men and women into war, the media will not "tell with such high zest The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori".

I wonder if they'll smear him...

On 60 minutes last night, retired General Anthony Zinni harshly criticized the Bush Administration’s failures in the war on terrorism. A particularly damning critique because as CBS reports,

"Retired General Anthony Zinni is one of the most respected and outspoken military leaders of the past two decades.

From 1997 to 2000, he was commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command, in charge of all American troops in the Middle East...

Following his retirement from the Marine Corps, the Bush administration thought so highly of Zinni that it appointed him to one of its highest diplomatic posts -- special envoy to the Middle East.

...But Zinni broke ranks with the administration over the war in Iraq, and now, in his harshest criticism yet, he says senior officials at the Pentagon are guilty of dereliction of duty -- and that the time has come for heads to roll.

There has been poor strategic thinking in this,” says Zinni. “There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to ‘stay the course,’ 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. Because it's been a failure.”

In the book, Zinni writes: "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."

Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time - with the wrong strategy. And he was saying it before the U.S. invasion. In the months leading up to the war, while still Middle East envoy, Zinni carried the message to Congress: “This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don’t feel it needs to be done now.”

“I can't speak for all generals, certainly. But I know we felt that this situation was contained. Saddam was effectively contained. The no-fly, no-drive zones. The sanctions that were imposed on him,” says Zinni.

“Now, at the same time, we had this war on terrorism. We were fighting al Qaeda. We were engaged in Afghanistan. We were looking at 'cells' in 60 countries. We were looking at threats that we were receiving information on and intelligence on. And I think most of the generals felt, let's deal with this one at a time. Let's deal with this threat from terrorism, from al Qaeda.”

...Last month, Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that he hadn't anticipated the level of violence that would continue in Iraq a year after the war began. Should he have been surprised?

“He should not have been surprised. You know, there were a number of people, before we even engaged in this conflict, that felt strongly we were underestimating the problems and the scope of the problems we would have in there,” says Zinni. “Not just generals, but others -- diplomats, those in the international community that understood the situation. Friends of ours in the region that were cautioning us to be careful out there. I think he should have known that.”

Instead, Zinni says the Pentagon relied on inflated intelligence information about weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi exiles, like Ahmed Chalabi and others, whose credibility was in doubt. Zinni claims there was no viable plan or strategy in place for governing post-Saddam Iraq.

“As best I could see, I saw a pickup team, very small, insufficient in the Pentagon with no detailed plans that walked onto the battlefield after the major fighting stopped and tried to work it out in the huddle -- in effect to create a seat-of-the-pants operation on reconstructing a country,” says Zinni...

Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what happened. “I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility,” he says.

“But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most.”

Adds Zinni: “If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go.”

Who specifically is he talking about?

“Well, it starts with at the top. If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility,” says Zinni. “Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.”

Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as "the neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq.

“I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do,” says Zinni.

“And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested.”

Adds Zinni: “I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don't believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn't know where it came from.”

Zinni said he believed their strategy was to change the Middle East and bring it into the 21st century.

“All sounds very good, all very noble. The trouble is the way they saw to go about this is unilateral aggressive intervention by the United States - the take down of Iraq as a priority,” adds Zinni. “And what we have become now in the United States, how we're viewed in this region is not an entity that's promising positive change. We are now being viewed as the modern crusaders, as the modern colonial power in this part of the world.”

Zinni, who now teaches international relations at the College of William and Mary, says he feels a responsibility to speak out, just as former Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup voiced early concerns about the Vietnam war nearly 40 years ago.

“It is part of your duty. Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that's the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result,” says Zinni.

“I can't think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not speak up. Well, what's the difference between a faulty plan and strategy that's getting just as many troops killed? It’s leading down a path where we're not succeeding and accomplishing the missions we've set out to do.”

I don't know if I have read a more clear and eloquent condemnation of the War in Iraq. Coming from a man of General Zinni's credentials this could prove to be very damaging to Bush's re-election hopes.

WHERE THE HELL IS THE LIBERAL MEDIA ON THIS ONE?? Get on it guys....

John Kerry needs to take talking points from this interview and use them over and over again until Novemeber.

I give it a week till the White House starts floating rumors that General Zinni is a homosexual alcoholic. You heard it here first....

Violating Federal Law....

The Bush administration has yet another colossal blunder to add to their resume.

The New York Times is reporting that:

"The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.

The agency said the videos were a form of "covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure.

The consequences of the ruling were not immediately clear. The accounting office does not have law enforcement powers, but its decisions on federal spending are usually considered authoritative and are taken seriously by officials in the executive branch of the government.

The decision fuels a raging political debate over the new Medicare law. President Bush and many Republicans in Congress say the law will provide immense assistance to millions of elderly and disabled people. But Democrats say the law will do little for the elderly and is so seriously flawed that the government had to resort to an illegal public relations campaign to sell it to voters.

The General Accounting Office said that a specific part of the videos, a made-for-television "story package," violated the prohibition on using taxpayer money for propaganda."

Covert propaganda, The list goes on and on....

Nominations and such...

Various Republican hacks have been attacking Senator Kerry's campaign's tentative plans to not officially accept the Democratic nomination until five weeks after the Democratic convention.

A Fox News analyst claimed over the weekend that "only John Kerry could hold a nominating convention and not nominate anyone."

I got to give it those guys over at FOX, they stay on message.

Republican: Good

Democrat: Bad

New Republic's Noam Schieber gives a bit more of an accurate assessment,

"The indignation at Kerry and the Democrats here strikes me as utterly (and naively) misplaced...The real reason Democrats want more time to raise money is so blindingly obvious it hardly needs pointing out--but apparently not quite that obvious, so here goes: The Republicans are raising well over $200 million for the re-election of George W. Bush. If Kerry doesn't try to establish some rough parity on this front, he's going to get blown out of the water.

To review: Each major party's nominee gets $75 million in public funds to spend as he sees fit the moment he officially accepts the nomination. At that point, he can no longer raise and spend private contributions. Which means that formally accepting the Democratic nomination five weeks before Bush accepts the Republican nomination would force Kerry to spread $75 million in public funds across three months, while Bush would have to make the same amount last for only two months, and would be able to raise and spend private contributions during the five-week period in between the Democratic and Republican conventions. What part of that arrangement strikes Broder as fair? Or, to put it differently, if Kerry accepts the nomination in late July, he will only be able to spend about $25 million per month during each of the last three months of the campaign (despite his demonstrated ability to nearly match Bush on the private fundraising front), whereas Bush could end up spending close to $40 million per month. Does putting it that way make it sound any more fair?"

What is it about leveling the playing field that Republicans hate so much?

It just keeps getting worse...

Reuters is reporting today that:

"U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said Tuesday...

...An Iraqi journalist working for U.S. network NBC, who was arrested with the Reuters staff, also said he had been beaten and mistreated, NBC said Tuesday.

Two of the three Reuters staff said they had been forced to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their mouths, particularly humiliating in Arab culture.

All three said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs. They said they did not want to give details publicly earlier because of the degrading nature of the abuse...

...Ureibi, who understands English better than the other two detainees, said soldiers told him they wanted to have sex with him, and he was afraid he would be raped...

The soldiers told them they would be taken to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, deprived them of sleep, placed bags over their heads, kicked and hit them and forced them to remain in stress positions for long periods...

...The abuse happened at Forward Operating Base Volturno, near Falluja, the Reuters staff said. They were detained on January 2 while covering the aftermath of the shooting down of a U.S. helicopter near Falluja and held for three days, first at Volturno and then at Forward Operating Base St Mere.

The three -- Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja-based freelance television journalist Ahmad Mohammad Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani -- were released without charge on Jan. 5.

The U.S. military, in a report issued before the Abu Ghraib abuse became public, said there was no evidence the Reuters staff had been tortured or abused...

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said in a letter received by Reuters Monday but dated March 5 that he was confident the investigation had been "thorough and objective" and its findings were sound.

A summary of the investigation by the 82nd Airborne Division, dated January 28 and provided to Reuters, said "no specific incidents of abuse were found." It said soldiers responsible for the detainees were interviewed under oath and "none admit or report knowledge of physical abuse or torture."

"The detainees were purposefully and carefully put under stress, to include sleep deprivation, in order to facilitate interrogation; they were not tortured," it said. The version received Monday used the phrase "sleep management" instead.

The U.S. military never interviewed the three (Iraqi men) for its investigation."

Worse then Watergate?

Slate's Fred Kaplan puts the latest revelations from Seymour Hersh and Newsweek in perspective:

The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy. Can he escape the massive tidal waves? Maybe. But at this point, it's not clear how.

If today's investigative shockers—Seymour Hersh's latest article in The New Yorker and a three-part piece in Newsweek—are true, it's hard to avoid concluding that responsibility for the Abu Ghraib atrocities goes straight to the top, both in the Pentagon and the White House, and that varying degrees of blame can be ascribed to officials up and down the chain of command.

The gist is that last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put in place a secret operation that, in Hersh's words, "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."

This operation stemmed from an earlier supersecret program involving interrogation of suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. A memo to President Bush from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales—excerpted in Newsweek—rationalized the program by noting that we need "to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American citizens." This new sort of war, he went on, renders the Geneva Conventions' limitations on interrogating enemy prisoners "obsolete" and "quaint."

This program, Hersh reports, was approved by the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the National Security Council. President Bush was "informed" of it. Hersh also notes that its harsh techniques yielded results; terrorists were rounded up as a result. So, last spring, after Saddam's regime fell in Iraq and Rumsfeld grew frustrated over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or to learn anything about the insurgents who continued to resist the U.S.-led occupation, he put the same program in motion in Iraq.

That's when all hell broke loose, and conventional prisoners of war—whose wardens had up to that point been following Geneva rules—were suddenly treated like terrorists whose deadly secrets must immediately be squeezed out. Hence, the ensuing torture.

Read together, the magazine articles spell out an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal. Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.

That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial...

...What is Bush to do? There's not much he can do. Many, including loyal Republicans worried about the election, are urging him to fire Rumsfeld. But that move probably wouldn't stop the investigations. In fact, the confirmation hearings for Rummy's replacement would serve as yet another forum for all the questions—about Abu Ghraib, the war in Iraq, and military policy generally—that the administration is trying to stave off. More than that, Bush has said repeatedly that he won't get rid of Rumsfeld. If he did, especially if he did so under political pressure, he would undermine his most appealing campaign slogan—that he stays the course, doesn't buckle, says what he means and does what he says.

If lesser officials are sacrificed—Cambone, Feith, and so forth—there is no guarantee that they will go gently, especially if they face possible criminal charges. The same, by the way, is true of Rumsfeld himself, a savvy survivor who can be expected to take some interesting memos with him—for possible widespread circulation—if he were forced to leave the building.

Much is at stake here—budgets, bailiwicks, careers, reputations, re-elections, to say nothing of national security and the future of Iraq. Get ready for a bumpy ride."

Flip Flop

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in a NY times op-ed on 5/14/04:

"At the same time, President Bush recognized that our nation will continue to be a strong supporter of the Geneva treaties. The president also reaffirmed our policy in the United States armed forces to treat Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in keeping with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention."

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in a confidential memorandum to the President on 1/25/02 obtained by newsweek:

"The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians...In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Come again?

Zogby

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE NEW ZOGBY POLL: Bush's job approval is down to 42 percent. His approval on Iraq is down to 36 percent. Kerry is up by five points in the horserace (47-42). Right track/wrong track is at 54/40. The percentage who say it's "time for someone new" is at 53 percent. Kerry favorability is at 55 percent. Bush favorability is at 52 percent. Bush and Kerry are tied in the red states (45-45).

Kerry leads in the Blue states (49-38), the East (53-36), the West (45-44), the central Great Lakes (47-41), and among progressives, (81-12), liberals (79-12), moderates (55-30), Hispanics (59-39), African-Americans (85-6), Democrats (84-9), and Independents (46-37).

Bombshell

In an explosive column by Seymour Hersh the New Yorker revealed today that, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, personally authorized the expansion of a secret program that encouraged both the physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. The program began in Afghanistan and in an effort to gather valuable intel on Osama Bin Laden and the growing insurgency in Iraq, it was broadened to include Abu Ghraib prison.

When the insurgency in Iraq refused to quell, and the administration's initial predictions that those involved where simply a few bathists loyalists fighting on, proved to be inaccurate, the Administration began to search for a solution.

According to Hersh,

"The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents...

A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures..."

He advocated,

"...methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap(the secret program in Afghanistan), bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

...Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’sauspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system.

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

...The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

...In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end...

...The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.” The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”

This article presents a number of complex issues and questions that we as a nation are going to have to digest and come to terms with.

What is clear now, is that a secret operation known as SAP, which utilized sexual humiliation tactics to garner intel from high ranking Al Queda members in Afghanistan, was expanded to Iraq and allowed to operate with minimal oversight and guidelines, against the recommendation of Senior leadership in the CIA. This was directly approved by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld should resign immediately, effective 5/17/04.



Everyone should read the whole article, it's here.

Republican Mud

The Washington Post keeps it real,

The Bush campaign has repeatedly accused the senator of "politicizing" Iraq. Bush-Cheney chairman Marc Racicot told reporters Wednesday that Kerry is relentlessly "playing politics" and exploiting tragedy for political gain. Racicot, for instance, told reporters that Kerry suggested that 150,000 or so U.S. troops are "somehow universally responsible" for the misdeeds of a small number of American soldiers and contractors. Racicot made several variations of this charge. But Kerry never said this, or anything like it.

As evidence, Racicot pointed to the following quote Kerry made at a fundraiser on Tuesday: "What has happened is not just something that a few a privates or corporals or sergeants engaged in. This is something that comes out of an attitude about the rights of prisoners of war, it's an attitude that comes out of America's overall arrogance in its policy that is alienating countries all around the world." What Racicot did not mention was that Kerry preceded this remark by saying, "I know that what happened over there is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops."

by Jim VandeHei

I'm glad that one reporter is finally calling Racicot on this. Unfortunately, the selective use of quotations and ellipses happens on both sides of the political spectrum, but when an individual blatantly uses this technique to misrepresent another's sentiment, it deserves to be scrutinized.

Priceless

"The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the administration’s diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries."

This was a quote from the Republican Party Platform at the 2000 convention referring to President Clinton's foreign policy.

Also of note, for anyone who remembers the fiasco in Texas spearheaded by Tom Delay,

"Gerrymandered congressional districts are an affront to democracy and an insult to the voters. We oppose that and any other attempt to rig the electoral process."

That is just too funny.

Poll Numbers

I never give that much credence to poll numbers, but for what its worth here is the latest:

CBS News Poll. May 11, 2004

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?"

Approve 44%
Disapprove 49%
Don't Know 7%

Gallup Poll and CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll 5/7-9/04

Bush's Approval Rating:

Approve 46%
Dissapprove 51%
Dont Know 3%

NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll May 1-3, 2004

Bush's Approval Rating:

Approve 47%
Dissaprove 46%
Don't Know 7%

Kerry's Voting Record

The Bush administration's constant barrage of half-truths on Senator Kerry's record in the Senate has just taken a turn for the worse. The most recent ad states that,

"John Kerry has repeatedly opposed weapons vital to winning the War on Terror..."

It then lists a number of military vehicles which John Kerry supposedly didn't support, and ends with this nugget, "Kerry even voted against body armor for our troops on the front line of the War on Terror. John Kerry's record on national security: Troubling."

What's much more troubling is the Bush Administrations record on distorting the truth in polical ads.

Lets examine their latest accusation.

"The claims are misleading...The Bush campaign bases its claim on Kerry's votes against overall Pentagon money bills in 1990, 1995 and 1996, but these were not votes against specific weapons. And in fact, Kerry voted for Pentagon authorization bills in 16 of the 19 years he's been in the Senate. So even by the Bush campaign's twisted logic, Kerry should -- on balance -- be called a supporter of the "vital" weapons, more so than an opponent...

It is true that when Kerry first ran for the Senate in 1984 he did call specifically for canceling the AH-64 Apache helicopter, but once elected he opposed mainly such strategic weapons as Trident nuclear missiles and space-based anti-ballistic systems. And Richard Cheney himself, who is now Vice President but who then was Secretary of Defense, also proposed canceling the Apache helicopter program five years after Kerry did. As Cheney told the House Armed Services Committee on Aug. 13, 1989:

Cheney: The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward, AH-64; . . . I forced the Army to make choices. I said, "You can't have all three. We don't have the money for all three." So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out. That would save $1.6 billion in procurement and $200 million in spares over the next five years.

Two years later Cheney's Pentagon budget also proposed elimination of further production of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle as well. It was among 81 Pentagon programs targeted for termination, including the F-14 and F-16 aircraft. "Cheney decided the military already has enough of these weapons," the Boston Globe reported at the time.

Does that make Cheney an opponent of "weapons vital to winning the war on terror?" Of course not. But by the Bush campaign's logic, Cheney himself would be vulnerable to just such a charge, and so would Bush's father, who was president at the time."

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Why can't the Bush administration run on what they've accomplished in the last four years rather then attacking their opponent for things he didn't do.

Because if they run on their record. They'll lose.

Even Republicans

According to the Hill, "Republicans on the Hill are so frustrated with the White House that when Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) criticized the administration at a House GOP meeting last week, the caucus burst into applause. The meeting was only the latest sign in an accumulating body of evidence that lawmakers are unhappy with the way the administration treats them."

Can't this Administration do anything right!

"Humanitarian do-gooders"

Ladies and Gentlemen, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe:

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," the Oklahoma Republican said at a U.S. Senate hearing probing the scandal.

...."I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying," he said.

This has got to be one of the stupidist things i have ever heard a politician mutter.

How this clown was ever elected to public office is beyond me.

Accountability

The Army Times:

Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.

If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush.

He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.

On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

To date, the Army has moved to court-martial the six soldiers suspected of abusing Iraqi detainees and has reprimanded six others.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the MP brigade that ran Abu Ghraib, has received a letter of admonishment and also faces possible disciplinary action.

That’s good, but not good enough.

This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

The New Comments

Just a quick note, the new comments section I have added requires the participant to register on-line. Its quick and easy, and will allow for longer responses. So deal with it.

Management

The Red Cross

From the AP:

GENEVA (AP) - A Red Cross report disclosed Monday said coalition intelligence officers estimated that 70-90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested by mistake and said Red Cross observers witnessed U.S. officers mistreating Abu Ghraib prisoners by keeping them naked in total darkness in empty cells.

The report by the International Committee of the Red Cross supports its allegations that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and "not individual acts" - contrary to President Bush's contention that the mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few."

...he 24-page document, confirmed by the ICRC as authentic after it was published Monday by the Wall Street Journal, said the abuses were primarily during the interrogation stage by military intelligence.

Once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities, the abuses typically stopped, it said.

The report cites abuses - some "tantamount to torture" - including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution."

"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from person who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value.'"

Responsibility

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria is on point:

America is ushering in a new responsibility era," says President Bush as part of his standard stump speech, "where each of us understands we're responsible for the decisions we make in life." When speaking about bad CEOs he's even clearer as to what it entails: "You're beginning to see the consequences of people making irresponsible decisions. They need to pay a price for their irresponsibility."

"I take full responsibility," said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been "responsible" to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words "I take responsibility."...

The events at Abu Ghraib are part of a larger breakdown in American policy over the past two years. And it has been perpetrated by a small number of people at the highest levels of government...

Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president's office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made this country respected around the world. Alliances, international institutions, norms and ethical conventions have all been deemed expensive indulgences at a time of crisis.

Within weeks after September 11, senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House began the drive to maximize American freedom of action. They attacked specifically the Geneva Conventions, which govern behavior during wartime. Donald Rumsfeld explained that the conventions did not apply to today's "set of facts." He and his top aides have tried persistently to keep prisoners out of the reach of either American courts or international law, presumably so that they can be handled without those pettifogging rules as barriers. Rumsfeld initially fought both the uniformed military and Colin Powell, who urged that prisoners in Guantanamo be accorded rights under the conventions. Eventually he gave in on the matter but continued to suggest that the protocols were antiquated. Last week he said again that the Geneva Conventions did not "precisely apply" and were simply basic rules.


The conventions are not exactly optional. They are the law of the land, signed by the president and ratified by Congress. Rumsfeld's concern—that Al Qaeda members do not wear uniforms and are thus "unlawful combatants"—is understandable, but that is a determination that a military court would have to make. In a war that could go on for decades, you cannot simply arrest and detain people indefinitely on the say-so of the secretary of Defense.

On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.

Comments

Space for additional comments.

Swift Boat Veterans for truth???

A newly formed group called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" has called upon John Kerry to release all his Vietnam service records, claiming that Senator Kerry is "unfit to be commander-in-chief."

The National Review states that, "The group's organizers explain that the veterans who have signed to date represent the large majority of those who served with Lt. Kerry in Vietnam. Scores of others are expected to join up in the days ahead."

What the National Review fails to note, is that their use of, "served with John Kerry" doesn't actually mean they served with John Kerry, just that they were in Vietnam around the same time. In fact the vast majority of these "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" have never once met Senator Kerry. This is an important distinction.

Matt Gunn has something to say about all this:

1.Their call for Kerry to release his Naval records is a little odd, because, uh, Kerry's already released all his Naval records. The original documents can be downloaded from his web site.

2.. "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" says "We have every commanding officer he ever had in Vietnam." That's just completely false..."Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" also says, "They all signed a letter saying he is unfit to be commander-in-chief." Hmmm... There are 29 pages of officer evaluation reports on Kerry were filled out by Kerry's commanding officers while he served in the Navy. How in the world could "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" read the following descriptions from Kerry's C.O.'s as "unfit"?


October 19, 1967, evaluation from Captain Allen W. Slifer:
A top notch officer in every measurable trait. Intelligent, mature, and rich in educational background and experience, ENS Kerry is one of the finest young officers I have ever met and without question one of the most promising.

September 3, 1968, evaluation from Captain E.W. Harper, Jr.:
LTJG KERRY is an intelligent and competent young naval officer who has performed his duties in an excellent to outstanding manner.

December 18, 1969, evaluation from LCDR George M. Elliott:
In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action LTJG Kerry was unsurpassed. He constantly reviewed tactics and lessons learned in river operations and applied his experience at every opportunity. On one occasion while in tactical command of a three boat operation his units were taken under fire from ambush. LTJG Kerry rapidly assessed the situation and ordered his units to turn directly into the ambush. This decision resulted in routing the attackers with several enemy KIA. LTJG Kerry emerges as the acknowledged leader in his peer group. His bearing and appearance are above reproach. He has of his own volition learned the Vietnamese language and is instrumental in the successful Vietnamese training program. During the period of this report LTJG Kerry has been awarded the Silver Star medal, the Bronze Star medal, the Purple Heart medal (2nd and 3rd awards).

There aren't any negative descriptions. None.

3. Perhaps more important than Kerry's C.O. evaluations are the evaluations of the men under his command.

A USA Today article states that, "Interviews with 18 officers and enlisted sailors who served with Kerry in Vietnam mostly portray a young leader with an aggressive command style. Many recall a warm, compassionate officer who cared deeply about his working-class crew. They also remember a warrior who ferried pregnant women and hungry villagers down river for medical care and food.

They recall how he initiated water-balloon fights to break the tension. How he asked his crew to call him "John" on the river and "sir" back at base. And how he listened to their problems in a way that foretold a career in politics.

"His concern for us was overwhelming," says Fred Short, a PCF-94 gunner's mate who would get the shakes when the adrenaline of battle wore off. "He would come around then and put his hand on your shoulder and ask if you're all right," says Short, 56, of North Little Rock "I never had another officer do that."

I once again repeat that, exactly one of the officers that belong to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, actually served under John Kerry, the rest of them just served in Vietnam around the same time. How they somehow have this "supposed" knowledge that John Kerry is not fit to be Commander in Chief boggles my mind.

I just dont' get it, when is the right going to understand that the more they talk about John Kerry's service in Vietnam, the more comparison's will be drawn to the service the current Commander and Chief gave. Is that what they really want???

.......................................

From the May 4 Rush Limbaugh Show, titled "It's Not About Us; This Is War!":

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

From the May 3rd show:

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war -- have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

LIMBAUGH: You know, if you look at -- if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks just like anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I'm -- yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City -- the movie. I mean, I don't -- it's just me."

I always see hooded naked men with electrodes attached to their genitals and hands at Britney Spears concerts. Its commonplace.

Furthermore, doesn't every fraternity sodomize their neophytes with broomsticks and lightbulbs......

And seriously, these soldiers are under a lot of stress, who are we to say they can't let off a little steam from time to time.....

Once again.......the absolute idiocy of Rush Limbaugh has rendered me speechless.

Abu Ghraib Prison

The Washington Post Editorial Page is taking Donald Rumsfeld to task:

THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable...

...The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held "ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no copies were posted in the facility...

The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge.

On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman said that the secretary had not read Mr. Taguba's report, which was completed in early March. Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he still hadn't finished reading it, and he repeated his view that the Geneva Conventions "did not precisely apply" but were only "basic rules" for handling prisoners. His message remains the same: that the United States need not be bound by international law and that the crimes Mr. Taguba reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude has undermined the American military's observance of basic human rights and damaged this country's ability to prevail in the war on terrorism."

The Washington Post stops short of calling for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, but if America is to preserve any shred of credibility in the global politic, there may be no other option.

Here's Ny Times columnist Thomas Friedman's take:

"We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today.

This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable..."

All partisanship aside, I am legitimately afraid for the safety of American citizens at home and abroad if George Bush wins another term. He has squandered the outpouring of good will that followed 9-11 and managed to transform it into a growing hatred and resentment for anything American. But we as American's still have a choice, we can regain legitimacy abroad if we show that George W. Bush's unilateralism does not reflect the views of a majority of Americans. The election in '04 is about much more then domestic politics, its about America's future role in this global community. We cannot go it alone.

Vote Kerry in '04

A Tragedy

"Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory -- the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience...

But now we have photos that have gone to the ends of the Earth, and painted brilliantly and indelibly, an image of America that could remain with us for years, perhaps decades...

There are now images of men in the Muslim world looking at these images. On the streets of Cairo, men pore over a newspaper. An icon appears on the front page: a hooded man, in a rug-like poncho, standing with his arms out like Christ, wires attached to the hands. He is faceless. This is now the image of the war...everywhere America is hated (and that's a very large part of this globe), the hooded, wired, faceless man of Abu Ghraib is this war's new mascot...

"And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines. . . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday.

Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us...

But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours."

By Philip Kennicott

Our soldiers in Iraq are the face of America, their actions for better or for worse, shape Arab views of America as a whole.

In George W. Bush terms, we have just lost a major battle in the "war on terror".

A System of Abuse

The Washington post editorial page:

SECRETARY OF Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday described the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison as "an exceptional, isolated" case. At best, that is only partly true. Similar mistreatment of prisoners held by U.S. military or intelligence forces abroad has been reported since the beginning of the war on terrorism. A pattern of arrogant disregard for the protections of the Geneva Conventions or any other legal procedure has been set from the top, by Mr. Rumsfeld and senior U.S. commanders. Well-documented accounts of human rights violations have been ignored or covered up, including some more serious than those reported at Abu Ghraib. In the end, the latest allegations may be distinguished mainly by the fact that they have led to court-martial charges -- and by the leak of shocking photographs that brought home to Americans, and the world, the gravity of the offenses...

The foundation for the crimes at Abu Ghraib was laid more than two years ago, when Mr. Rumsfeld instituted a system of holding detainees from Afghanistan not only incommunicado, without charge, and without legal process, but without any meaningful oversight mechanism at all. Brushing off his violation of the Geneva Conventions, Mr. Rumsfeld maintained that the system was necessary to extract important intelligence. But it was also an invitation to abuses -- and reports of those abuses have been appearing since at least December 2002, when a Post story reported on harsh "stress and duress" interrogation techniques bordering on physical torture. Other reports by journalists and such groups as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented the lawless detention and criminal treatment of detainees, including the deaths of at least two prisoners at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan that were ruled homicides by military investigators. Yesterday the Army revealed that two Iraqi prisoners were killed by U.S. prison guards last year and that 20 other detainee deaths and assaults are still being investigated in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one has been criminally charged in any of these deaths...

We have been saying for some time that Congress has neglected its responsibility to oversee the administration's conduct and provide the missing legal framework for handling foreign detainees. The result of its inaction and of the administration's refusal to respond to previous reports of abuses is the scandal of Abu Ghraib, which has done incalculable damage to the U.S. position in Iraq and around the world. The only way to even partial recovery is a full and independent congressional investigation of the abuses, both in Iraq and elsewhere; prosecution of all those responsible for crimes; and, finally, a resolve to handle prisoners in conformance with American standards of decency."

The post is abosolutely dead on here, and unfortunately these horrifc acts seem to be much more widespread then first reported. These abuses put a stain on the dedicated service so many men and women give to our country.

Can you imagine the outcry if an American was taken prisoner in an arab country and was subjected to a similiar kind of humiliation and torture. I will be posting segements from international news sources all day in an effort to summarize the global reaction to these systemic abuses.

George Will

At least one conservative has his head screwed on straight. George Will claims, "Its time for Bush to see the realities in Iraq".

From the Washington Post:

Appearing Friday in the Rose Garden with Canada's prime minister, President Bush was answering a reporter's question about Canada's role in Iraq when suddenly he swerved into this extraneous thought:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."

What does such careless talk say about the mind of this administration? Note that the clearly implied antecedent of the pronoun "ours" is "Americans." So the president seemed to be saying that white is, and brown is not, the color of Americans' skin. He does not mean that. But that is the sort of swamp one wanders into when trying to deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters.

Scott McClellan, the president's press secretary, later said the president meant only that "there are some in the world that think that some people can't be free" or "can't live in freedom." The president meant that "some Middle Eastern countries -- that the people in those Middle Eastern countries cannot be free."

Perhaps that, which is problematic enough, is what the president meant. But what he suggested was: Some persons -- perhaps many persons; no names being named, the smear remained tantalizingly vague -- doubt his nation-building project because they are racists...

This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts. Thinking is not the reiteration of bromides about how "all people yearn to live in freedom" (McClellan). And about how it is "cultural condescension" to doubt that some cultures have the requisite aptitudes for democracy (Bush). And about how it is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture" because "ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit" (Tony Blair).

Speaking of culture, as neoconservative nation-builders would be well-advised to avoid doing, Pat Moynihan said: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society...." Here we reach the real issue about Iraq, as distinct from unpleasant musings about who believes what about skin color.

The issue is the second half of Moynihan's formulation -- our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq. Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals. Nowadays it separates conservatives from neoconservatives.

Condoleezza Rice, a political scientist, believes there is scholarly evidence that democratic institutions do not merely spring from a hospitable culture, but that they also can help create such a culture. She is correct; they can. They did so in the young American republic. But it would be reassuring to see more evidence that the administration is being empirical, believing that this can happen in some places, as opposed to ideological, believing that it must happen everywhere it is tried.

Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice...."

There are still level headed conservatives out there who don't agree with the Neo-Conservative agenda but they need to speak up.

Your preaching to the choir George...

Good Ol Rush

Media Matters:

Limbaugh wrong on the minimum wage

Ridiculing Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) for advocating that Congress raise the federal minimum wage, Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that minimum-wage earners are overwhelmingly teenagers who don't have to support families. From the April 29 Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: There aren't families living on the minimum wage anyway; it's a teenage entry level job for 75% of the people earning minimum wage.

Several minutes later, Limbaugh said:

LIMBAUGH: The people that get the minimum wage are not the people Democrats portray them as being -- heads of households supporting families of four. It's not the case. Let's get real.

The truth is that only 32 percent of minimum wage earners are teens ages 16 - 19, according to the Economic Policy Institute's analysis of 2000 U.S. Census Bureau data."

Rush getting the facts wrong, NAHHH!!!!

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB

These are the kind of human rights violations the Administration cited as reason to "liberate" Iraq.

"A brutal dictator who tortures his own people..."

Now we are perpetrators of the same vigilante justice.

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH:

"A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski's brigade headquarters.) Taguba's report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence. Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their extremely sensitive nature."

These soldiers and their superiors should be prosocuted to the fullest extent of the law.