http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20...POE=click-refer

Bush calls alleged rape-murder 'despicable'

President Bush, right, speaks to talk show host Larry King, left, as first lady Laura Bush listens in during an interview at the White House Thursday in Washington.


WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush, calling the alleged rape of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her family by a U.S. soldier "a despicable crime, if true," said Thursday that Iraqis will learn about the openness of American justice.
Steven D. Green, a former Army private with the 101st Airborne Division, pleaded not guilty to charges Thursday. Green and other soldiers were accused of targeting the girl after seeing her near the Iraqi town of Mahmoudiya earlier this year.

"These are very serious charges and what the Iraqis must understand is that we will deal with these in a very transparent, upfront way," Bush said during an interview broadcast on CNN's "Larry King Live."

"People will be held to account if these charges are true," Bush said. He later added: "People will be brought to justice. There will be absolute justice if this person is guilty."

The president said he was concerned about how the allegations might color perceptions of American troops.

"What concerns me is not only the action and, you know, if this is true, the despicable crime, if true. But what I don't want to have happen is for people to then say, well, the U.S. military is full of these kind of people. That is not the case. Our military is fabulous."

Bush said the Iraq government has the right to be concerned about how the case is handled. "But they've got to be comforted in knowing ... that we will deal with this in a way that is going to be transparent, above-board and open," he said.

Earlier Thursday, Bush questioned whether some of Iraq's neighbors were working against the fledging Iraqi government.

"We, of course, are concerned that some in the neighborhood may want to derail the progress of a free Iraq," he said. "And that is troubling and something that we'll work on."

The president spoke after meeting in the Oval Office with Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who gave him an update on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's first trip in office to visit his Persian Gulf neighbors.

The United States pushed hard for al-Maliki's trip to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. While al-Maliki received red-carpet welcomes, the leaders privately made clear they will help the Iraqi government only if he does more to reach out to Iraqi Sunnis. The Gulf nations are dominated by Sunni governments leery of Shiite and Kurdish dominance of Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Bush also expressed concern about foreign intervention in Iraq, an apparent reference to Iran and Syria. U.S. officials accuse the two nations of turning a blind eye to the influx of violent militants. Both Syria and Iran have denied the claims, saying it is difficult to fully patrol their porous borders with Iraq.

"Zal is concerned about foreign influences in the country, as am I," Bush said.

Bush said Khalilzad gave him a "realistic" briefing on the situation in Iraq.

"On the one hand, he said they've got a good government — goal-oriented people who are working to achieve certain objectives," Bush said. "And I know that you've been impressed by Prime Minister Maliki's determination to succeed and his willingness to lay out a commonsense agenda and then hold people to account.

"Zal also said it's still a dangerous place because there are people there that will do anything to stop the progress of this new government."

Khalilzad, who went on the trip with al-Maliki, called Iraq the defining challenge of the time. "What happens in Iraq will shape the future of the Middle East, and the future of the Middle East will shape the future of the world," Khalilzad said.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posted 7/7/2006 12:03 AM ET

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-0...POE=click-refer

Relatives defend soldiers in rape case
Posted 7/11/2006 4:40 AM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this
U.S. officials pledge open investigation of alleged rape-murder

HUFFMAN, Texas (AP) — Relatives came to the defense Monday of three U.S. soldiers named in the suspected rape-murder of a young Iraqi woman and the killing of three members of her family.
The father of Pfc. Bryan L. Howard of Huffman said that he supports his son but that he had few details about the case against him.

"I'm proud of my son," Lynn Howard, 50, said as he stood outside the home where he and his wife, Kathy, live. "My heart's broken."

Howard declined to comment further, saying he was waiting to speak with his son's attorney.

Neighbors described Brian Howard as a quiet young man who never got in trouble with authorities.

"He was a real nice guy," said Duane Reigard, describing the family as tightknit. "If he did this, he's got to suffer the consequences, but at this point I can't say anything bad about him at all."

Another soldier charged in the case, Spc. James Paul Barker, always respected women, said Marisol Sanchez, 40, of Fresno, who identified herself as Barker's aunt.

"He has very good morality," Sanchez said, adding that he was raised a Jehovah's Witness. "I know he's not the kind of person who's going to do something like this, especially to disrespect a woman. I don't think so. I don't see him that way."

Barker was born and raised in Fresno and was on his second tour of duty in Iraq, Sanchez said. He has a newborn and a girlfriend at home and two young children with a wife he is divorcing.

Reached by phone in Fresno, a woman who identified herself as James Barker's mother said she had not been contacted by the military.

"I really don't have any comment," she said. "I really don't know if it's him or not."

The mother of a third soldier charged, Pfc. Jesse Spielman of Chambersburg, Pa., said she was shocked and hoped to speak soon with her son.

"I don't believe the charges, and I'm still proud of him," WGAL-TV of Lancaster quoted Nancy Hess as saying.

A man who answered the phone at Hess' home referred questions about Spielman to the military. He declined to give his name. Military officials in Iraq and Fort Campbell, Ky., where Spielman is based, declined to release any other information about him.

On the networking website MySpace.com, a man identifying himself as Spielman writes that he joined the Army in March 2005 and is in Iraq for a year.

Spielman's interests, according to the MySpace page, include "Shooting stuff, meeting people, My car and workin on it." It lists his heroes as "the men and women that serve our country" and especially "the Army and Marines, furthermore the grunts."

The U.S. military on Monday disclosed the names of Barker, Spielman, Howard and Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, who were charged with rape and murder in a March attack in which four members of a family were killed. Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe is charged with failing to report the attack.

They are charged with conspiring with former soldier Steven D. Green, who was arrested last month in North Carolina. Green has pleaded not guilty to one count of rape and four counts of murder.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/


An Illegal War Degenerates
Iraq: Raped
By RAED JARRAR

A few months ago, Abir Al-Janabi was just another 14-year-old Iraqi girl in a small town called Al-Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad. Both of her parents are from the Al-Janabi tribe, one of the biggest tribes with Sunni and Shia branches.

Omar Al-Janabi, a neighbor and relative, was informed by Abir's mother that the young girl was being harassed by U.S. soldiers stationed in a nearby checkpoint. That is why Abir was sent to spend the night in her neighbor's home. The next day, Omar Al-Janabi was among the first people who found Abir, with her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah, her 45-year-old father Qasim, and her 7-year-old sister Hadil, murdered in their home. Abir was raped, killed by a bullet in her head, and then burned on March 12, five months before her fifteenth birthday.

Muhammad Al-Janabi, Abir's uncle, reached the house shortly after the attack as well. Iraqi police and army officers informed him and other angry relatives that an "armed terrorist group" was responsible for the horrifying attack. This is exactly what the angry relatives of the 24 Iraqi civilians killed in Haditha four months before this incident had been told as well. In that case, U.S. officials initially claimed that a roadside bomb planted by terrorists had killed the 24 Iraqi civilians and one U.S. soldier in Haditha, but the Iraqi people knew that it was the Americans.

Unlike the case of Haditha, where Iraqi public opinion was furious about the massacre months before it reached to the U.S. mainstream media, the Iraqi press had not even heard of Abir until the U.S. army accidentally found out information about her while investigating another incident. This raises questions about the number of other similar cases that were never investigated and were blamed on non-occupation parties instead.

According to Iraq Body Count, a credible project documenting Iraq's civilian casualties, the occupation armies are directly responsible for killing more than one fourth of civilians in Iraq since the beginning of the war. This makes the assumption that Abir's case is just one of many even more plausible.

The "Hadji Girl" song is yet another indicator that what happened to Abir is most like not an anomalous case. "Hadji Girl" is a videotaped song about killing Iraqis written and performed by U.S. Marine Corporal Joshua Belile while he was at the Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq. The song became controversial a few weeks ago when the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) discovered it on the internet and objected to its lyrics.

The lyrics, accompanied by loud laughter and applause, include lines as such as "So I grabbed her little sister and pulled her in front of me. As the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally. Then I hid behind the TV, and I locked and loaded my M-16, and I blew those little "expletive deleted"ers to eternity. And I said Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad, Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah, they should have known they were "expletive deleted"ing with a Marine". A two-week investigation held by the U.S. army ended with no punishment for Corporal Belile. Furthermore, according to the spokesperson for the Mike Church Show, Mike Church is planning to record and release "Hadji Girl" and give royalties to Belile. The right-wing presenter will sing and release the song on air this week.

But even if you believe that the case of Abir is a rare exception, it is still a major scandal in Iraq. Issues relating to honor are even more sensitive for the Iraqi public and government than the ongoing daily civilian murders. The first Iraqi governmental reaction came when an Iraqi female member of Parliament asked for an urgent session for which Prime Minister Al-Maliki was called back home to attend. The Iraqi Parliament described the rape as a crime against "the honor of all Iraqis". As a result, Al-Maliki asked for a review of the laws put in place by U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer, giving foreign troops immunity from prosecution in Iraq. This seems to be an Iraqi public demand. Iraqi tribal leaders had a number of meetings across the country last week on the anniversary of "Thawrat Al-Eshrin", the 1920 revolution against the British occupation. The largest meeting was that of the mostly Shia Middle Euphrates Tribes. During this meeting, they threatened to initiate a full-scale revolution against the occupation, similar to what had happened in 1920, unless the U.S. army hands over to them all soldiers accused of raping the "Al-Mahmudiyah Virgin," as she is now known.

The uproar created in the wake of the death of Abir is but the culmination of over three years of pent-up frustration and rage the Iraqi people feel. It will only end with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. What is happening in Iraq is a rape of a nation, not just a rape of a 14-year-old girl, and it has to be stopped as soon as possible.

Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi living in the United States, is the director of the Iraq Project at Global Exchange. Jarrar can be reached at: jarrar.raed@gmail.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/tristam07082006.html

Missile Envy
Is North Korea Bush's Most Reliable Ally?
By PIERRE TRISTAM

There is of course no danger of a Kim Jong Il-starred missile ever grazing so much as a Pentagon radar's anxieties: North Korea is a nation where even ants starve and technology runs on the digestive clockwork of oxen. Its ability to fire off an ICBM that could do more than kill a few hapless fish in the Sea of Japan is somewhere between one-in-a-million and the Hubble Deep Field (though its ability to turn patches of South Korea into a deep field of its own is less in doubt). But if Bush could turn al-Qaeda's posse of spectacular fanatics and conventional imbeciles into a threat on par with Nazi Germany, and if his administration could turn Saddam into the greatest evil since Stalin, then surely his Cheney-trained handmaids can spin a tale of North Korean missiles threatening everything from the Golden Gate to Aunt Bethel's collection of souvenir spoons in Miami Beach. And if they can do that, as they have, then North Korea can be a running advocacy campaign for Bush's version of Star Wars--his "missile defense" initiative currently devouring $10 billion a year to go with the $150 billion spent on the blanched elephant since Ronald Reagan concocted it in March 1983. Sure enough, on Friday Bush was all engorged for his missiles: "It's been three days since North Korea fired those missiles," a reporter asked him in Chicago. "Yesterday you said you did not know the trajectory of the long-range missile. Can you now tell us where was it was headed? And if it were headed? And if it were headed--if it had been headed at the United States, how would our national ballistic missile system have taken it down?"

Bush's response was at first jocular, because he's a great kidder, because ICBMs are a hoot, and because, gosh darn it, people like him that way: "I still can't give you any better answer than yesterday. I can embellish yesterday's answer. It may sound better. No, really, I haven't talked to the Secretary of Defense about that." Then he got somewhat serious, and as always when he does, his answer took on the meandering surface-to-crash trajectory of a North Korean missile (with a golf metaphor as subtitles): "Our missile systems are modest, our anti-ballistic missile systems are modest. They're new. It's new research. We've gotten--testing them. And so I can't--it's hard for me to give you a probability of success. But, nevertheless, the fact that a nontransparent society would be willing to tee up a rocket and fire it without identifying where it's going or what was on it means we need a ballistic missile system. So that's about all I can tell y! ou on t hat. Obviously , it wasn't a satisfactory answer."

Obviously. But he was asked about an intercept. Bush, knowing a headline when he sees one, teed off with his own Kim Jong Il moment: "Yes, I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting it down. At least that's what the military commanders told me."

Bush and his commanders are using the same logic of "reasonable chances" that they do when they turn miserable missile-test failures into successes. This from a New York times account on December 18, 2002: "A week ago over the Pacific, in the latest $100 million test of the nation's prototype antimissile system, an interceptor warhead failed to separate from its booster rocket. It missed its intended target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the atmosphere, while the mock enemy warhead it was meant to destroy zoomed along unscathed. A resounding failure? Not according to the Pentagon. In its new assessment process, the tests that really count are those in which the warhead makes it past the booster-rocket stage to what Pentagon experts call "the endgame": trying to find, home in ! on, and hit a mock warhead. The new logic ignores tests that fail in the earlier, less challenging stages--like the one on Dec. 11, t he third in eight tests of the long-range system since 1999, according to the Pentagon. Private experts say the new logic helped clear the way for President Bush's announcement yesterday that the missile interceptors would be deployed in Alaska and California. But critics say that not taking account of early-stage test failures is like wiping the slate clean of laggards in footraces or political contests. By the new logic, the races acknowledge only winners and runners-up."

But they've had a few more years to work on the elephant, you say? This from a Washington Post story in December 2004: "The Bush administration's effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic missile attack suffered an embarrassing setback yesterday when an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight test of the system in two years." Here's one from the Washington Post story last year: "For the second time in as many months, the Bush administration's new missile defense system failed to complete a key test yesterday, automa! tically shutting down a few seconds before an interceptor missile was to launch toward a mock enemy warhead." March 2005: "The general in c harge of the Pentagon's faltering effort t o develop a system for defending the United States against ballistic missile attack said yesterday that he has ordered a thorough review of all ground equipment used in testing and appointed a senior Navy officer to oversee future test preparations." And here's what these missile-interceptors do shoot down (this from the Post, December 2004): "A military investigation has concluded that a friendly fire' incident in which! a Navy pilot was shot down and killed by U.S. forces during the spring 2003 invasion of Iraq occurred because operators at two Patriot missile batteries and a command center all mistakenly took his F/A-18 Hornet for an incoming Iraqi missile, the U.S. Central Command said last night."

Of course Bush is rejecting talks with North Korea. Why bother? To the delight of military contractors, he's playing Kim Jung Il perfectly. Another source of endless fear to stoke, another conveniently unprovable stash of supposedly deadly evidence, another vindication for seeing the world as an evil ax to grind. We had it coming. The war in Iraq is lost. Afghanistan is being lost. We needed a new front, cost-free (Bush wouldn't dream of tempting Kim to fire off a missile or two south of the 38 th parallel, so it's purely a war of words and images, not costly comb! at). Ri ng up those contractors. They have one hell of a Christmas bonus coming their way.

Pierre Tristam is a columnist and editorial writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and editor of Candide's Notebooks, a Web site. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071106A.shtml


Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Soldiers
By Cindy Sheehan
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 11 July 2006

As of today, the War Department lists 2544 as the number of unjustly murdered troops in Iraq. Dozens of innocent Iraqis are being killed due to the war crime every day. Over 80 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad alone on July 9th: dozens of people just in one city on one day who would be alive if not for BushCo.

I don't know what number Casey was. Nor do I care. I have seen people say 614, I have seen people say 714. It doesn't matter, because Casey and the other 2543 were not numbers. They were living, breathing, loving, worthwhile and contributing members of society. They could pass drug tests (unlike their "commander in chief" at their ages) and they honorably volunteered to serve their country to defend America and our freedoms. What George Bush and the rest of the careless war profiteers have committed in Iraq is abuse and misuse and had nothing to do with defending America or protecting our freedoms. The lies are well documented and proven. The lies are written on my heart forever.

Between WWI and WWII, a highly decorated Marine, Major General Smedley Butler, wrote a short dissertation called War is a Racket. I wish to God I had read this before Casey enlisted, because I believe that he would be alive today if only I had. The first two paragraphs succinctly define the entire booklet and the reason not to allow your child to fall into the hands of the military-industrial war complex:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In his treatise the General goes on to define the "damned" war profiteers of his day: the DuPont family, the steel companies, the leather companies, the t-shirt manufacturers, etc. The profits for these companies increased at a minimum tenfold in the WWI years and in retrospect even seem like healthy profits in 2006 dollars. He also complains about the 6000 buckboards for the colonels, thousands of saddles for the Cavalry, and hundreds of airplane engines that were never used in the war. The waste of money and the waste of life in war are horrendous and inherently immoral - always!

The criminal tradition of the enormous profiteering that went on in WWI and all the other wars is going on today in the war crime of Iraq. The Halliburtons, Bechtels, Blackwater Securities, KBRs, Standard Oils are raking in the billions at a clip that would make Barbary Coast pirate ship captains' heads spin. The no-bid profiteers are cronies and/or former companies of the vice president and most of the Bush regime. I don't know how the blood-monied devils can look at their own children or grandchildren and not be ashamed and appalled that their insatiable greed killed someone else's flesh and blood!

Napoleon once said: "All men are enamored of decorations ... they are positively enamored of them."

Casey was in the paramilitary Boy Scouts founded by Lord Baden-Powell, who was a militarist. I am not knocking the Boy Scouts, because Casey was an Eagle Scout and he gained a lot of positive skills in the Scouts. But he was also taught how to be a good soldier: To pledge to do his duty to God and Country. Does that include marching reluctantly off to a war which one knows is wrong? Does that include putting "the mission" first, above even one's own family and life, no matter how disordered and corrupt the mission is? Boy Scouts earn decorations for their paramilitary uniforms and I know I sewed dozens on Casey's sash (I always complained that sewing should be their first mandatory badge earned so the Scout could do it himself). Then Casey "graduated" to soldier and started earning his "Man Scout" badges. I was handed his Bronze Star and Purple Heart at his funeral like I should be a proud mom being pinned with his Eagle Scout badge. The Man Scout Badges, General Butler explains, were instituted so the military wouldn't have to pay the soldiers more money. How many Man Scout badges can make up for the needless, senseless and avoidable murder of your oldest child? There are not enough in the entire world.

In war correspondent Christopher Hedges' book, War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning, he writes:

The disillusionment comes later. Each generation again responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment - often at a terrible price.
The terrible price is that, once again, we forget that the war machine loves to greedily consume our children for the terrible profits that they so willingly and cheerfully reap. Hence the phrase: "Laughing all the way to the bank." How does it feel that the vultures are laughing at how gullible we are to so naively cough up our young? Previous generations of mothers have watched presidents and other cheerleaders for war and mayhem drag us into war after war and we mothers are unwilling and unknowing accomplices in our children's murders. War will finally have to stop when we mothers (and fathers and spouses, etc.) stop allowing our leaders to march our children off to wars that are to feed the ravenous war monster: This hideous war monster counts on us families forgetting that the last war for revenue was fought against phantom enemies that can't be confined within borders. Whether the wars are covert or overt they are always being waged with our babies' blood.

Tragically, I don't know anyone, war supporter or not, who raised his or her children to be a war criminal. I would hope that there are few people in our country who have hoped against hope that one day that their son would grow up to rape Iraqi girls and kill innocent Iraqis in cold blood. The Mahmoudiya and Haditha incidents are horrible atrocities but, unfortunately, are not isolated incidents in the Iraq war crime. War breeds atrocities. I wish to God, and everything that anybody holds holy, that Mahmoudiya and Haditha were isolated incidents, but we know that they are not. When the neo-cons despicably spit out the blather that we need to "stay the course," I wonder what that means? Rape and murder? That is a horrible course. I think we should change it now.

To be honest with ourselves and our children, instead of the flags and Man Scout badges that our soldiers decorate their uniforms with, they should have their suits covered with corporate logos like NASCAR drivers. A Halliburton patch here and an Exxon patch there. I also believe, like General Butler said: during times of war, CEOs of war profiteers should only be allowed to earn as much as a common soldier.

Sounds fair to me, and I believe war would end if the war profiteers, politicians and generals were required to send their own children to fight for their ill-gotten gains before they sent ours.

Our nation forgot the lessons of Vietnam, where not one person over the rank of Lieutenant was even tried for war crimes. It is incumbent upon this generation of war victims to make sure that this unspeakable episode does not repeat itself. The people responsible for sending our children to this war crime should not get off scot-free. BushCo should be the ones sent to federal prison for crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.

Holding our leaders accountable for unnecessary war and killing innocent people? It's a new concept, but I think one that just might work. Let's try it this time.

But more important, don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers.

--------

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan, KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is also the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and author of two books, Not One More Mother's Child and Dear President Bush. Cindy is currently on the 8th day of the Troops Home Fast and writing from Italy, where she will be awarded the highest honor that the government of Tuscany can award a civilian, the Gold Pegasus, for her international work for peace.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071106R.shtml

US Army to Call Reporters in Officer's Case
Reuters
Tuesday 11 July 2006

Seattle - The US Army plans to call two journalists as witnesses to support charges filed against an officer who refused to fight in Iraq because of his objections to the war, the lieutenant's lawyer said on Monday.

First Lt. Ehren Watada is facing charges over his refusal to deploy to Iraq with his unit on June 22 and choosing to remain at the Fort Lewis base in Washington state.

Last week, the Army charged Watada with missing his deployment, conduct unbecoming an officer and contempt toward officials. If found guilty on all charges, he faces up to seven years of confinement, dismissal and forfeiture of pay.

To prove that he made "contemptuous" comments about President George W. Bush and therefore engaged in conduct unbecoming an officer, the Army plans to call two journalists to attest to comments Watada made during interviews, the officer's lawyer, Eric Seitz, told reporters.

In the charge sheet, the Army also said Watada made "disgraceful" statements about the president.

Watada, who supporters say is the first commissioned US officer to publicly refuse to serve in Iraq, has called the war and US occupation of Iraq "illegal" and said his participation would make him party to war crimes.

Seitz said the Army listed Sarah Olson, an independent journalist, and Gregg Kakesako, a reporter for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, as witnesses.

Olson and Kakesako, who have published interviews with Watada, were not immediately available for comment.

The charge sheet quotes Watada as saying in one interview: "As I read about the level of deception the Bush administration used to initiate and process this war, I was shocked. I became ashamed of wearing the uniform."

Seitz argues that such comments are within Watada's First Amendment rights to make, because he is stating a political position without inciting other people to acts of protest.

"The comments have been basically directed toward the way in which we went to war," said Seitz. "He's not out to call the president names or be disrespectful to his superiors."

http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=35885

Resistance Arises to Bush's Plan For Trying the Qaeda Prisoners
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
July 12, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/35885

A Bush administration campaign to win blanket congressional approval for the military commission system set up to try Al Qaeda members for war crimes is encountering stiff resistance on Capitol Hill.

Administration officials testifying before Congress for the first time since the Supreme Court struck down President Bush's military commission order urged lawmakers to give their imprimatur to the same plan the court rejected as at odds with existing law and America's obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

"The most expeditious way to do it would be to essentially ratify the process that's already in place for military commissions," the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, Daniel Dell'Orto, told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Supreme Court's June 29 ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld suggested adopting the rules for courts-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, although the court did not foreclose other possibilities.

"I guess the lesson learned from this court case is that collaboration is always better than unilateral action," Senator Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, said.

However, Mr. Dell'Orto and the acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, told the committee that the military code was not a feasible basis for war-crimes tribunals.

"The court-martial procedures are wholly inappropriate for the current circumstances," Mr. Bradbury said. "We don't think it's appropriate to start with the UCMJ and talk about specific procedures that should be stripped out."

In several tense exchanges, Mr. Graham told the administration officials that any military commissions had to be based primarily on the court-martial procedures. "If you fight that approach, it's going to be a long hot summer," the senator said."I think you would be well served to forget about Military Commission Order No. 1," he said, referring to rules the Pentagon issued in 2002 setting out procedures for the tribunals.

Mr. Graham's blunt criticism of the administration's approach was striking because he is a former military lawyer and led an effort last year to limit the rights of detainees to file habeas corpus petitions in civilian courts. About 450 war-on-terror prisoners are being kept at Guantanamo Bay, while hundreds more are in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

The chairman of the committee, Senator Specter, also clashed with the administration officials. When Mr. Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania, asked for advice on legislation establishing a congressionally-authorized procedure for determining which detainees should be kept and which should be released, the administration lawyers demurred.

"That is a question we believe should be left up to the Department of Defense," Mr. Bradbury said.

"I doubt very much that Congress is going to be disposed to leave these issues to the Department of Defense," Mr. Specter said heatedly. "The Congress is going to establish the policy. That's our job. ... We're not going to leave it to the Department of Defense or give the Department of Defense a blank check."

While the administration pressed for a quick legislative response to the court's decision, the top Democrat on the committee, Senator Leahy of Vermont, said the delays and legal setbacks could have been avoided if the executive branch had supported bipartisan legislation put forward on the detainee issue in 2002.

"Basically, you told us to take off," Mr. Leahy said. "Four-and-a-half years later, nobody's been brought to justice."

"This president and this administration acts as if they are the whole government," Senator Schumer, a Democrat of New York, complained. "Time and time again, the president acts like a bull in a China shop and sets back the war on terror."

Mr. Bradbury acknowledged being "quite surprised and disappointed" by the Supreme Court's ruling, but said the military commission order was not designed to expand presidential power.

"It was not crafted to push the envelope," Mr. Bradbury said. "The procedures were crafted consistent with historical practice."

On Friday, the Defense Department formally notified its personnel of the Supreme Court's decision, including a holding that all detainees are protected by Geneva Convention provisions barring "humiliating and degrading treatment." The Pentagon directive was first reported by the Financial Times.

Mr. Bradbury said the phrase was "susceptible of uncertain and unpredictable application."

Mr. Graham said he would press for legislation to "rein in" the impact of the court's ruling on that point.

The administration lawyers said according Al Qaeda operatives the rights applicable to American soldiers and sailors accused of crimes would make it all but impossible to proceed with war crimes trials. The attorneys said the proceedings could not comply with rules about hearsay, evidence handling, and mandatory warnings against self-incrimination. "It is simply not feasible in time of war to gather evidence that meets strict criminal procedural requirements," Mr. Dell'Orto said. "It would be ludicrous in my estimation to accord those sorts of rights at that that level to that degree to the sorts of people we have here."

Senator Sessions, a Republican of Alabama, said giving so-called Miranda rights to Al Qaeda prisoners made little sense. "We don't need to be providing that kind of privileges to people captured on the battlefield," he said.

Senator Biden, a Democrat of Delaware, said the Guantanamo prison camp and bold administration claims of authority to use practices some consider torture were undermining American national security.

"You may get one detainee through actions that the rest of the world views as totally illegitimate and inconsistent with who we are — although arguably constitutional, and as a consequence of that produce four more suicide bombers," he said. "I'm telling you things ain't good in Happy Valley."

"The world we live in is a dangerous place. It's not Happy Valley," Mr. Bradbury replied.

Senator Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois,said the Geneva Convention limits would have no impact on one of the most successful interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, offering McDonald's food to prisoners.

"They hand them Chicken McNuggets. They love it, and they start to talk," Mr. Durbin said.

July 12, 2006 Edition

http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printve...am/document.cfm


UN Small Arms Conference Collapses; U.S. Key Resister to Compromise

For Immediate Release: July 10, 2006

Contact: Rachel Stohl, rstohl@cdi.org, 202.797.5283
or, Whitney Parker, wparker@cdi.org, 202.797.5287

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The two-week UN Review Conference on Small Arms concluded Friday with no agreement. Participants in the Small Arms Working Group (SAWG) expressed disappointment at the Conference’s failure to reach a conclusion. SAWG was dismayed by the actions and attitude of the United States. “The failure of the conference to agree on any document squandered an opportunity to establish critical agreements to combat small arms trafficking,” said Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information who chairs the Small Arms Working Group. “U.S. intransigence significantly contributed to the collapse of this conference” she added.

The meeting was intended to review progress on the agreed 2001 Programme of Action and strengthen efforts for continued UN work on small arms. From the outset, the United States made clear its redlines – those issues on which they would not compromise in a final document – including references to development, inclusion of ammunition, a ban on sales of weapons to non-state actors, references to civilian possession, and mandatory follow-up. These U.S. positions were in stark contrast with the views of the majority of states. The U.S. refused to negotiate, and throughout the two weeks the United States thwarted efforts to strengthen national regulations to control small arms, to allow references on the impact of small arms on development, and refused to agree to convene future UN meetings on small arms. U.S. obstinacy during the two weeks also harmed U.S. efforts to gain its own conference priorities, as other countries were unwilling in many cases to support U.S. concerns.

“It is deeply disconcerting that the United States would not work with the international community and compromise,” said Sarah Margon, a policy advisor at Oxfam America. “The unequivocal opposition of the United States to so many issues that had near universal agreement had serious implications for U.S. credibility,” Margon added. Adding insult to injury, the United States held up its own practices as a model for other countries to follow at the end of the conference, after resisting all attempts for compromise and ways forward.

Although the conference failed, efforts to control the proliferation and misuse will continue. “One thousand people die every day from small arms and the international community faces an urgent need to develop a global strategy. Unfortunately, political posturing trumped concrete measures,” said Scott Stedjan, the legislative representative for the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The next opportunity for the international community to act on small arms will take place at the General Assembly in October.

Editor’s Note: SAWG is an alliance of U.S.-based non-governmental organizations and individuals that are working together to promote awareness of the small arms issue and changes in U.S. policies.

PENTAGON NEWS -- IS IT PROPAGANDA? JAMES W. CRAWLEY (WASHINGTON DATE LINE, DC, JULY 11): A globe-spanning Pentagon news operation, the American Forces Information Service, sends news about the Defense Department to troops, dependents and, increasingly, to the general public; some critics say the Pentagon is spreading propaganda, not news, with the taxpayer-paid service.
http://washdateline.mgnetwork.com/index.cf...615&GroupID=181

U.S. WILL GIVE DETAINEES GENEVA RIGHTS - ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY, ASSOCIATED PRESS (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 11): The Bush administration said Tuesday that all detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in U.S. military custody everywhere are entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1100094_pf.html

THE GITMO DECISION - DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND LEE A. CASEY (WASHINGTON TIMES, JULY 11): A genuine policy debate about why retaining the distinctions between lawful and unlawful combatants is much needed.
http://www.washtimes.com/functions/print.p...10-082101-3448r

IRAQ WILL ASK UN TO REVOKE US TROOPS' IMMUNITY: ALLEGATIONS OF CRIMINAL ACTS PROMPT THE CONSIDERED ACTION IN THE SECURITY COUNCIL - TOM REGAN (CSMONITOR.COM, JULY 11)
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0711/dailyUpdate.html

LETTING GO: AT THE END OF THE WAR, THE ARMY DIGS IN - LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN (NEW REPUBLIC, JULY 11): As its sense of ownership grows deeper with each year it spends here, the Army has created its own universe in Iraq -- an ecosystem with its own values, requirements, and purposes.
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060710&s=kaplan071006

SEND IN THE ADVISERS - ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH (NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 11): Success or failure in this war lies in the hands of some 4,000 soldiers -- the American officers and sergeants embedded as combat advisers in the new Iraqi security forces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/opinion/...agewanted=print

Kindness of Taz:

Bush finally explains why he won't attend U.S. soldiers' funerals

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/det.../&entry_id=6914

AP

Families of killed U.S. soldiers receive a flag as a souvenir of their dead loved ones' service in the war
Has the real significance, as measured in blood and death, of George W. Bush's boondoggle in Iraq penetrated the security bubble - secure from external, critical voices; sealed-off from disagreeable reality; safe from inconvenient truth - in which the American leader putters along from day to day?

As of last night, "at least 2546 members of the U.S. military [had] died since the beginning of the Iraq war..., according to an Associated Press count." That figure includes seven military civilians and is six deaths higher than the Defense Department's own count.


Paul Morse/White House

Bush spoke with a Stars & Stripes reporter on board the presidential plane last week
What does Bush really think about the deaths his war-making has caused? Mainstream news media in the U.S. don't really offer much about the president's most profound pensées on this subject. However, last week, in a rare, unscripted-by-his-handlers moment aboard Air Force One, Bush granted an interview to a reporter from the Defense Department's Stars & Stripes newspaper, that strange news organ that is government-owned but ostensibly, editorially independent. (It has certainly published news reports about troop morale in Iraq that have made the Pentagon's brass fume.) Aimed primarily at American military personnel overseas, the Stars & Stripes doesn't really reach a large audience of non-military-related readers back in the U.S.


Jason Reed/Reuters

Military personnel at Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, cheer the self-styled "war president" who has sent 2546 of their friends and colleagues to their deaths
Thus, many probably missed Bush's responses to questions from actual soldiers in the field that the Stars & Stripes reporter passed along to the Commander in Chief. Bush was asked, for example, "if a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be acceptable in return for a cease-fire by [so-called Iraqi] insurgents." In response, Bush "called the question hypothetical and deferred comment to Gen. George Casey," the head of the U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq. When reminded by the Stars & Stripes' reporter, however, that "[m]edia outlets have reported that Sunni insurgents have offered such a trade-off," Bush, who once famously declared that he does not read newspapers, replied: "I'm not sure they have or haven't....I will tell you that whatever decisions I make will be made upon the recommendations of commanders and with one thing in my mind: Can we win?" (The Commander in Chief did not specify what, exactly, was to be "won.")


Paul Morse/White House

In an unscripted remark that really took the cake, Bush told a reporter: "Can we win?"
Perhaps most revealing in the remarks Bush offered the Stars & Stripes was his answer when he was asked why, to date, he has not attended the funeral of a single U.S. soldier who has been killed in his war. Bush, who famously dodged the regular-forces draft during the Vietnam War era, then went AWOL from his National Guard duty post in Texas, said: "Because which funeral do you go to? In my judgment, I think if I go to one I should go to all. How do you honor one person but not another?"

Answer (memo to the Commander in Chief's handlers): By attending one single fallen soldier's funeral, Bush could honor them all.

* * * * * * * * * *

(Personal, marginal note: This little blog post is offered in honor of a two-time veteran (World War II, Vietnam) whom I know, a career Marine, now retired, who, as a skinny teenager from Houston fought and won the Purple Heart for valor in the Battle of Okinawa, the longest, bloodiest battle at the end of the war in the Pacific, and now, as he turns 80 this week, is wobbling due to an old war wound but is still going strong. The veteran is my father. Semper fidelis!)

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/1...ary_justice.php

Defending Military Justice


This week sees a convergence of events in the attempts of our system of law and order to survive an assault on its very foundations launched by Bush & Co.

The Supreme Court has definitively ruled that not only does the rule of law apply to Bush's "war on terror" but that international law is part of that law. Thus, early yesterday The Financial Times broke the story that Rumsfeld's Defense Department has issued a memorandum requiring now, five years after 9/11, that basic Geneva conventions concerning humane treatment of detainees be applied to all those in U.S. custody.

Of course, the administration tried to deny that this was a big deal. The Financial Times shows the absurdity of that claim:

The White House insisted that the move did not represent a change in policy. But the July 7 Pentagon memo stood in stark contrast to a February 2002 memo in which President George W. Bush said: “Common article III of Geneva does not apply to either al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees.”

What do Geneva rights mean to detainees? Yesterday the Center for Constitutional Rights released a detailed report based on newly-declassified information that gives newly detailed narratives of what has gone on in Cuba: "systematic" abuse. From a Canadian press account of one Canadian citizen, Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was picked up by U.S. forces in Afghanistan :

The 51-page report is based on declassified accounts from some of the 450 prisoners and their American lawyers.

It says Khadr, who was 15 and seriously wounded when he was picked up by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, was often interrogated with a bag over his head and barking dogs in the room.

When he was able to walk, interrogators made him pick up trash, then emptied the bag and made him do it again. He wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom for long periods.

Khadr claims that an interrogator told him on one occasion in March 2003 that one of his older brothers was at Guantanamo and that he should get ready for a "miserable life."

The interrogator became enraged when Khadr said he would answer questions if he could see his brother, the report said.

Khadr was cuffed to the floor for a long period and then dragged back and forth in a mixture of his urine and pine oil. He wasn't given a change of clothes for two days.

Other examples of abuse at Guantanamo detailed in the report:

-Solitary confinement for periods exceeding a year.

-Sleep deprivation for days, weeks and, in at least one case, months.

-Threats of transfer to a foreign country for torture.

-Deprivation of medical treatment for serious conditions.

Several prisoners reported assailants stomped on their backs or shoved their heads into hard surfaces while they were incapacitated. Others said objects were inserted into their anuses during strip searches.

But this has implications beyond Guantanamo: The court's decision, and the Pentagon's acknowledgment, affects also the unknown number of "ghost detainees" whose very existence is denied by the administration but whose presence in CIA-run cells in the dark corners of the Earth, as The Financial Times points out:

The move could increase pressure on the administration to rule that detainees being held by the CIA in secret prisoners – such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 2001 attacks – should receive Geneva protections.

Steven Bradbury, acting assistant attorney-general, on Tuesday told a Congressional committee that the Supreme Court had ruled that Common article III applied to the conflict with al-Qaeda, suggesting that it was not limited to military operations. The CIA declined to comment.


“Incommunicado detention clearly violates this standard,” said Jennifer Daskal, advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “At a minimum, the administration can no longer justify its continuing denial of ICRC’s repeated request for access.”

Meanwhile, perhaps hoping to slip it past us while we are being distracted by these important developments, Bush continues to push one of key architechts of his policies on detention and torture that the Supreme Court has just found illegal into a federal judgeship.

Todd Haynes, general counsel to the Department of Defense, advised that detainees at Guantanamo could be subjected to abusive interrogation techniques, including stripping them naked, depriving them of light, forcing them into stress positions, forcibly shaving them, and using dogs to intimidate them. He also advised that using wet towels and dripping water to make the detainees believe they are suffocating (waterboarding) and threatening them and their families with death might be “legally available” options.

As Human Rights First reports, more than twenty "retired generals, admirals and other U.S. military leaders" have signed a letter of concern to the heads of the Senate Judiciary Committee expressing concern. From their letter:

Had Mr. Haynes been ignorant of the likely consequences of these policies, the profound errors he made could perhaps be understood. But the uniformed JAGs [(judge advocate generals, the heads of the military justice system)] of each of the services clearly and repeatedly expressed their concerns about the impact these policies would have both on the reputation of the United States and on the integrity and safety of military personnel. The Army Judge Advocate General, Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, warned that this disdainful approach toward the Geneva Conventions and binding international law “will open us to international criticism that the ‘U.S. is a law unto itself,’” and that the adoption of questionable techniques will lower international standards, “putting our service personnel at far greater risk and vitiating many of the POW/detainee safeguards the U.S. has worked hard to establish over the past five decades.” These prescient warnings were echoed by the flag officer Judge Advocates General of the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. But Mr. Haynes failed to heed them.

Today, it is clear that these policies, which rejected long-standing military law grounded in decades of operational expertise, have fostered animosity toward the United States, undermined rather than enhanced our intelligence gathering efforts, and added significantly to the risks facing our troops serving around the world.

Meanwhile, "the military's four most senior uniformed lawyers" will be calling on the Judiciary Committee this week to urge the application of international and military law in dealing with detainees:

“We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops,” Admiral [John] Hutson [, the Navy's top lawyer until 2000] said. “They can’t try to write us out of this, because that means every two-bit dictator could do the same.”

He said it was “unbecoming for America to have people say, ‘We’re going to try to work our way around this because we find it to be inconvenient.’ ”

“If you don’t apply it when it’s inconvenient,” he said, “it’s not a rule of law.”

Brig. Gen. David M. Brahms, a retired officer who was the chief uniformed lawyer for the Marine Corps, said he expected experienced military lawyers to try to persuade Congress that the law should not be changed to allow the military commissions to go forward with the procedures that the court found unlawful.

“Our central theme in all this has always been our great concern about reciprocity,” General Brahms said in an interview. “We don’t want someone saying they’ve got our folks as captives and we’re going to do to them exactly what you’ve done because we no longer hold any moral high ground.”

Look, this doesn't strike me as being a very difficult decision here. We are going to get a very clear chance to see soon who in Congress really is concerned about supporting our troops, listening to their opinions and doing their utmost to protect them. We will see who is concerned about "law and order" and enhancing our security. We will see who is a "strict constructionist" of the law and who favors radical revisions of legality. Ultimately, we will see which legislators have "moral values" in this fight.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/...2p-365753c.html
Crackdown in Baghdad ineffective, gen. admits

BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - The nearly month-old push by more than 70,000 Iraqi and U.S. troops to bring order to Baghdad has failed to curb the explosion of revenge killings across the capital, a U.S. general said yesterday.
"I think everybody had thought that perhaps it might be improving more than it is at this point," said Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell.

"We have to bring the level of violence down, there's no question," said Caldwell, chief spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition. "It's not at all where we want it to be yet."

The latest Baghdad peacekeeping effort began with fanfare June 14, a day after a surprise visit by President Bush.

New Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Operation Forward Together, involving more than 65,000 Iraqi forces backed by 8,000 U.S. troops, was meant to take control of the capital with a series of roving checkpoints and sweeps.

But sectarian violence has escalated as rival Shiite and Sunni militias have turned entire neighborhoods into no-go zones.

Car bombs killed eight people in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad yesterday, and a few hours later gunmen ambushed a bus in a Sunni area, killing seven.

The incidents followed a vicious weekend in which Sunnis were dragged from their cars and homes and shot dead in the street, and several Shiite mosques were bombed.

Al-Maliki appealed for unity, saying, "Our destiny is to work together to defeat terrorism."

In Washington, administration officials said the new government needed time to gain support.

"No one could have expected that just within weeks of coming to power that the Iraqi government would have been able to stop the violence and to completely address a difficult security situation," said Secretary of State Rice.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/12/...main/index.html

Twenty bodies found in Iraq after abductions
In surprise visit, Rumsfeld tells troops they're 'making progress'

Wednesday, July 12, 2006; Posted: 11:55 a.m. EDT (15:55 GMT)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Twenty people were found dead Wednesday northeast of Baghdad after gunmen kidnapped 24 civilians, an Iraqi official said.

The abductions occurred Wednesday morning at a bus station in Muqtadya, a city northeast of the Diyala provincial capital of Baquba.

The victims were civilians and bus drivers, said the official from the Diyala Joint Coordination Center.

In other violence Wednesday, nine Iraqis died in the capital: Seven were killed and 20 wounded in a suicide bombing at a southern Baghdad restaurant, and two civilians were killed and two others wounded when a car bomb struck in central Baghdad, police said.

More than 100 people have died in violence since the weekend despite a highly touted security crackdown in the capital.

The killings and abductions came as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made an unannounced visit to Iraq to meet with U.S. troops and confer with Iraqi leaders on how to stanch the violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

Rumsfeld spoke with 700 U.S. troops at a military base in Balad, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north of Baghdad, before moving on to the capital to see Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

"Each time I come to Iraq, I see progress," Rumsfeld told the soldiers. "You're making progress. ... You're making history."

Taking questions from the troops, Rumsfeld emphasized that the solution to violence in Iraq isn't a military one.

Instead, he cited the national reconciliation plan -- the grass-roots diplomatic and political initiative that involves reaching out to the Sunni community, predominant in the insurgency after losing power in Saddam Hussein's ouster in 2003.

Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. military official in Iraq, briefed Rumsfeld about the security situation and the status of security forces.

"I think you all know the security in Baghdad is difficult, and we are working very hard with the new government" to subdue terrorists and death squads undermining stability, Casey said.

Casey attributes part of the violence to al Qaeda in Iraq and other militants in the aftermath of last month's death of leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. airstrike. Terror groups in Iraq and the Iraqi insurgency are largely Sunni.

"What we are seeing now as a counter to that is death squads primarily from Shia extremists" that are retaliating against civilians," Casey said.

Questions for prime minister
The Iraqi prime minister also faced tough questions Wednesday from Iraqi parliamentarians over the volatile environment in Baghdad.

Al-Maliki condemned the wave of violence and said an important component in the fight is developing proper intelligence to counter the attackers. He also praised the work and bravery of security forces.

Al-Maliki denied rumors that parts of Baghdad were about to fall and asserted that security forces are in control.

He stressed the need to clamp down on sectarianism. Militias remain one of the government's main concerns.

One Sunni parliamentarian -- Adnan al-Dulaimi -- said militias appear to be behind the sectarian tensions in Baghdad's Hay al-Jihad, where more than 40 Sunnis were killed Sunday.

Al-Maliki said the National Reconciliation Higher Commission has been set up and he hopes it will meet soon.

"We are determined to make the national reconciliation plan succeed," al-Maliki told lawmakers, "because it is the last resort."

He said intermediaries have approached the government on behalf of insurgent groups that are considering joining the political process.

Problem of sectarianism
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq said this week that "violent sectarianism is the now the main challenge" for the country since the February 22 bombing of Al-Askariya Mosque, the Shiite shrine in Samarra.

The security crackdown hasn't done the job so far and needs to be improved, said Zalmay Khalilzad, speaking Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"This sectarianism is the source of frequent tragedies on the streets of Baghdad," Khalilzad said. "It's imperative for the new Iraqi government to make major progress in dealing with this challenge in the next six months."

Despite the significant strife, Khalilzad said other factors lead him to conclude that the country has not descended into civil war.

"State institutions are holding," and leaders of different communities want to remain in the government, he said.

Other developments

Public defenders for a former U.S. soldier charged in the alleged rape of a young Iraqi female and the killings of her and her family in March requested a gag order in the case. Former Pfc. Steven D. Green and four other soldiers are charged with murder and rape. Another soldier has been charged with failing to report the matter but was not accused of participating. All five are charged with conspiring with Green. (Full story)


Attackers killed between five and 16 people Tuesday in a blast near Baghdad's Green Zone, authorities said. The account of violence varies depending on the source. The U.S.-led coalition said that "15 local nationals and an Iraqi policeman" died when three bombs detonated outside the Green Zone -- the heavily fortified district that's headquarters for U.S. and Iraqi officials. Police, however, said that five people were killed. Gunmen in Baghdad also stormed a bus heading to the southern city of Najaf carrying a coffin and killed all 10 people on board. (Full story)

CNN's Arwa Damon, Jomana Karadsheh and Nic Robertson contributed to this

The overall "conspiracy" thesis of this article is, I believe crackpot, but portions of the analysis contain pure gold. The description of the results of the policy for global energy markets and prices are both well-stated and indisputable. And an interesting case is made that the U.S. military is being turned into a global energy protection service.


July 17, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

American Petrocracy

Among the shifting rationales for the war in Iraq, the most plausible motive may be the least discussed: access to oil.


by Kevin Phillips


Few lies have wound up injuring Americans more—in everything from automobile gas tanks and winter heating bills to diminished U.S. global standing—than a rarely revisited three-year-old fib-fest involving George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair. Since World War I, history is clear: the British and Americans have been pre-occupied with only one thing in Iraq—oil. Yet in 2003, as their troops again disembarked, the pretense was all about good and evil, democracy and freedom. The disastrous outcome of the unacknowledged Middle Eastern mission, the struggle for petroleum, has rarely been discussed.

In part, that's because a credulous press has swallowed an extraordinary fraud. Speaking on behalf of George W. Bush, then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer insisted in February 2003, "If this had anything to do with oil, the position of the United States would be to lift the sanctions so the oil could flow. This is not about that. This is about saving lives by protecting the American people." In November 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had likewise declared, "it has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." On the other side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament in early 2003, "Let me deal with the conspiracy theory that this has something to do with oil. There is no way whatever that if oil were the issue, it wouldn't be simpler to cut a deal with Saddam Hussein."

Horse manure. In the run-up to war, from Alberta to Texas, oilmen gossiped about the centrality of oil. Meetings of petroleum geologists buzzed about the so-called "peak oil" forecast that a dangerous top in global production was only a decade or two away. Specialized publications guesstimated how much taking over Iraqi oil could mean for profits and Exxon and Chevron. Polls of ordinary citizens from Europe to Latin America and the Mideast produced similar findings: people thought the invasion was about oil.

The Gulf War in 1991 certainly had been. When the first President Bush went into the Persian Gulf in force that year, it was indeed about petroleum. He openly stated, "our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world's great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein." The idea that Saddam Hussein was a second Hitler was a rhetorical embellishment. Back during the Cold War, even when Washington worried about the Soviet Union rolling into Iran and reaching the Persian Gulf, American concern arose out of the geopolitics of oil, not some abstract commitment to representative government and democracy.

The British had indulged their own motivational buncombe in the aftermath of the First World War when the Marquess of Curzon, Britain's foreign secretary, said that the influence of oil in the new boundaries drawn for Iraq was "nil." "Oil," he said, "had not the remotest connection with my attitude, or with that of His Majesty's Government, over Mosul." By 1924, as the British agreed to cut American oil companies in for a share of Iraq's oil production, the centrality of oil was obvious. Curzon's claim that London sought to bring freedom and self-government to the Arabs was mocked in Parliament and on Fleet Street.

But that was 80 years ago, and today's opinion-molding elites—in the United States, at least—are far more gullible. Too many are still psychologically embedded in the hard-charging pretense that surrounded the 2003 U.S. military incursion. The revelation that Saddam's much trumpeted weapons of mass destruction seem not to have existed has yet to lead to the next logical re-evaluation: just how much more credibility should be given to the three sweeping "it wasn't about oil" assurances quoted earlier? After all, if oil was involved, then the U.S. disaster in Iraq, doubly bungled, represents the greatest wartime failure since James Madison let the British burn Washington in 1814.

Vice President Dick Cheney, the one top official who avoided denying that oil had anything to do with the Iraq invasion, is precisely the man whose attentions must be examined to illustrate the depth of oil motivations. In 1999, when Cheney was still the head of Halliburton, the oil-services giant, he made a shrewd speech to the London Institute of Petroleum in which he gloomed over coming oil-supply problems: "By some estimates, there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a 3 percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day."

Those barrels would have to come largely from the Middle East, and a few years earlier the Wall Street Journal had reported an Anglo-American oil company consensus: that Iraq, specifically, was "the biggie" in terms of potential future reserves. During 2001, the energy task force that became Cheney's first major assignment as vice president spent much time poring over maps of the oilfields in Iraq and the rival nations—China, Russia, and France among them—to whom Saddam Hussein intended to give the concessions for development. Part of Cheney's mandate involved "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

This was getting down to the primal underpinnings of the 2003 invasion. According to Paul Roberts in his 2004 book The End of Oil, Cheney and his task-force colleagues pored over maps of Iraqi oilfields to estimate how much Iraqi oil might be dumped quickly on the [post-invasion] market. Before the war, Iraq had been producing 3.5 million barrels a day, and many in the industry and the administration believed that the volume could easily be increased to 7 million by 2010. If so—and if Iraq [under U.S. control] could be convinced to ignore its OPEC quota and start producing at maximum capacity—the flood of new oil would effectively end OPEC's ability to control prices.

The Anglo-American firms, in turn, would be in the catbird's seat.

As for the supposed weapons of mass destruction, these had already played a crucial role. The United Nations sanctions imposed in the early 1990s included provisions that Saddam could not sign over development of the big Iraqi oilfields to foreign companies. On one hand, this gave the French, Russians, and Chinese an incentive to get Iraq out from under the sanctions. But on another, the key allegations that enabled the U.S. and Britain to keep sanctions in place were—what else?—Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Without WMD, the sanctions would have fallen away, and the rivals of the U.S. and Britain would have gotten the "biggie" oilfields.

In short, the weapons of mass destruction drumbeat was substantially tied to oil and had already done its essential job by the time the invasion took place. Accept this logic and it makes mincemeat out of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Blair pretense.

The cynic will say, yes, but why could Bush and Rumsfeld not talk a little bit about oil just as the first Bush had prior to the Gulf War? Strategically, there were major differences. In 2003, there was no Kuwait to liberate as a justification for tangling with Saddam. This time it was a flat-out invasion to topple Saddam and take control. Admitting that oil was a principal motivation would have lost the public-relations battle not just in the Middle East but around most of the world. The administration had to have some larger, more noble rationale, and the war on terror offered a broad umbrella. At every opportunity, officials of the Bush administration, not least the president himself, tried to tie Saddam Hussein to terrorism and, indirectly, even to 9/11.

Furthermore, the White House had to consider the huge religious and biblical element of the coalition that elected Bush in 2000. Newsweek polling back in 1999 found that 45 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon and the end times, and almost as many thought that the Antichrist was already alive and on the earth. Because such beliefs concentrate among very pro-Bush evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, my estimate is that some 55 percent of the people who voted for Bush in 2000 would have told pollsters about believing in the end times and Armageddon.

This will strike many as an exaggeration, but the phenomenon is an important one. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals noted in 2003 that since the break-up of the USSR, "evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire." According to University of Wisconsin historian Paul Boyer, by the 1990s many prophecy believers saw Saddam as the Antichrist or his forerunner, partly because Saddam was rebuilding the ancient evil city of Babylon. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye fictionalized the Rapture-Tribulation-Armageddon sequence so successfully that it sold a whopping 60 million copies in book and tape form. Most of the readers were Bush backers.

Politically, this confronted the White House with both a strategic dilemma and a parallel opportunity. On the plus side, the huge chunk of Bush voters would want to view the U.S. attempt to topple Saddam Hussein in terms of the war of good versus evil. Weapons of mass destruction were a prop but collateral to the larger biblical context. Invading Iraq would evoke that context because Saddam was one of the evil ones—maybe the Evil One, given his Babylon tie-in. Toppling him could aspire to biblical interpretation. Aiding Israel was also biblically vital. Bush had already carved out a related, overarching "good versus evil" posture with his heavily religious post-9/11 rhetoric.

The minuses were fewer but cautionary. It was fine for the White House to criticize the United Nations because the international body was a favorite whipping post among the high-octane preachers given to quoting the Book of Revelation. Oil, however, wasn't part of the biblical prophecy framework. In LaHaye's series, petroleum was a minor strategic gambit of the Antichrist, not the business of the good guys. Oil's increasing centrality was a bad sign on the websites of omen-counters like raptureready.com.

Maybe this had something to do with the Bush-Rumsfeld-Blair posture of oil not being at all involved and maybe it didn't. However, the rhetorical fact remains: oil-related motives and objectives were insistently forsworn, even if they were prominent—especially in Dick Cheney's petroleum-savvy mind. Many Americans think his task force has been kept wrapped in secrecy because large oil companies were closely involved, but keeping oil-related war motivations hidden may have been even more vital.

If the Americans and British did act substantially for oil—and that seems highly likely—then it is fair to judge the Iraqi failure by oil-policy yardsticks and outcomes. The quick summation, obviously, is that whereas oil was selling at roughly $30 a barrel in 2002 as the White House was plotting its invasion and occupation, by late 2004 it cost a more painful $40 per barrel. By the time the operation was marking its third anniversary this spring, petroleum was flirting with $75 a barrel.

There is no room in this article to document that prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003, everything about Iraq (and neighboring Kuwait) generally boiled down to oil. Suffice it to say that Iraq's new boundaries were drawn around oil after World War I; Axis forces invaded from Syria in 1941 in pursuit of petroleum; important Persian Gulf surveys generally concentrated on oilfields; the maps Cheney looked at in 2001 were about oil; and on entering Baghdad in 2003, the first government building U.S. troops occupied was the Oil Ministry, with its seismic maps of the rich Iraqi oilfields.

Anglo-American politics had also become increasingly shaped by oil. The Bush administration marked the first time that both the president and the vice president hailed from the oil industry. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in turn, was so close to British Petroleum that wags called BP "Blair Petroleum."

Besides, if oil had nothing to do with the invasion, why did top officials of the Bush administration mention it in predicting how well the invasion would work out? Cheney opined that by the end of 2003, Iraqi oil output would hit 3 million barrels a day, and Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economic adviser, talked about 3-5 million, saying in September 2002, "the key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil" so as to drive down prices. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy in the Pentagon, enthused that increased Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the war. And White House speechwriter David Frum wrote in his 2003 book on Bush that the war on terror was designed to "bring new stability to the most vicious and violent quadrant of the earth—and new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's largest pool of oil."

The best way to assess the oil-related outcomes—all bungles, no boons—is to use three different yardsticks: postwar oil supplies and prices; recrimination against the U.S. dollar; and the rising portion of U.S. defense outlays that had to be spent on protecting land and deep-water oilfields, pipelines, and sea lanes vital to oil tankers.

The administration's hope that a quick and overwhelming victory in Iraq would unleash enough new oil production to flood the markets and undercut OPEC, however absurd in retrospect, tantalized traders during the invasion weeks. On March 21, 2003, the Financial Times noted, "futures prices suggest that when it is over, OPEC will shower the world with crude and the price will fall out of its $22-28 band late next year."

Instead, occupied Iraq turned into a quicksand of guerrilla and sectarian rivalry. Insurgents attacked and disrupted pipelines and refineries, and truck drivers refused to transport oil from the north. During the winter of 2005-2006, Iraqi production dropped as low as 1.1 million barrels a day, and covering this production gap took almost all of OPEC's spare capacity and forced prices higher. Dalton Garis, an economist at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, told the Associated Press in April 2006, "Iraq could be making a tremendous difference." Instead, its shortfall is "a significant contributing factor to the high price of oil."

American economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, in a draft paper entitled "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict," reached a similar but much more detailed and buttressed conclusion. Publicly, Stiglitz and Bilmes attribute $5-10 of the increased per barrel cost of oil to the mess in Iraq, but their private view seems to be that a very large portion of the now $45-per-barrel oil-price increase is attributable to Iraq.

That makes sense if one considers the hostile reactions of many of the world's oil-producing nations to the behavior the Bush administration was exhibiting in Iraq and elsewhere. For several years prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that nation had been insisting—contrary to global policies in effect since the 1970s—that it would price its oil sales in euros, not dollars. Other major OPEC producers—Venezuela and Iran—also began talking about kindred moves and so did elements of the European community. Just after the U.S. invasion, Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote that the real clash was not over weapons of mass destruction but over the dollar versus the euro—"who gets to sell—and buy—Iraqi oil, and what form of currency will be used to denominate the value of the sales ... yet another skirmish in a growing economic conflict." Few others had the courage to raise the issue.

Had a U.S. triumph in Iraq enabled Washington to control and open the oil spigots in Iraq, OPEC would have been obliged to desist from talking about dropping the dollar to price oil in euros or a so-called basket of currencies. But as the various dimensions of U.S. failure became clear in 2003 and 2004, other nations—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Russia (not an OPEC member)—began to show their currency claws. Six months after the U.S. invasion, as Iraqi oil output shrank in the face of relentless sabotage of pipelines and other facilities by insurgents, even Saudi Arabia displayed its disdain, not by currency actions but by giving a big gas-development contract to French Total instead of ExxonMobil.

As of 2006, the U.S. dollar has been dropping again, with the ever more conspicuous failure of Bush administration energy policy—this year the U.S. will spend $300-350 billion on imported oil—a significant backdrop. Should these trends intensify and OPEC cease to price oil in dollars, the added burden on Americans will register in everything from home heating oil in northern winters to the prohibitive cost of long-distance driving in the remote exurbs of metropolitan commuter belts. The effects of the great bungle in Iraq may only be beginning.

Still another oil cost-burden that the Iraqi failure imposes on the American people involves the huge and finally starting to be noticed portion of U.S. defense outlays that are undertaken to protect foreign oil supplies from disruption. Michael Klare, a leading U.S. scholar on resource wars and oil geopolitics, has tabulated oil-related tasks being assumed by the military from South America and West Africa to the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and the Straits of Malacca. His conclusion: the military "is being used more and more for the protection of overseas oil fields and the supply routes that connect them. … Such endeavors, once largely confined to the Gulf area, are now being extended to unstable oil regions in other parts of the world. Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service." How much do these tax-financed costs effectively add to the price of a gallon of gas or heating oil sold in the U.S.—25 cents, 40, 85?

In sum, the energy-related price of the administration's dishonesty and massive miscalculation in Iraq ought to be a central discussion point in this election year and again in 2008. The citizenry has to comprehend just how much is at stake and how the nation's future has been jeopardized.
_________________________________________

Kevin Phillips's latest book, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money, was published in March by Viking Penguin.


July 17, 2006 Issue

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6071201128.html

More Ambiguity About Torture
Dan Froomkin

Rumsfeld Makes Unannounced Visit to Iraq

By Josh White

BAGHDAD, Wednesday, July 12 -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. George W. Casey Jr. said Wednesday that coalition forces in Iraq are focusing on ways to stem the sectarian violence that has claimed the lives of many civilians here in recent days, both saying that the best solution is a...

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

URL: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/26121prs20060711.html

ACLU Applauds Pentagon Memo Stating Military Detainees Covered By Geneva Conventions, But Justice Department Tells Congress It Should "Ratify" Broken Military Commission System (7/11/2006)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@dcaclu.org
Washington, DC - After more than four years of lawlessness, the Defense Department took a big first step toward complying with federal law, by stating that it will comply with Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions when holding detainees. However, just hours after the announcement of the new Pentagon policy, a top Justice Department lawyer urged Congress to “ratify” the military commissions that the Supreme Court invalidated two weeks ago.

“The Pentagon's decision is wholly appropriate, in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and long overdue," said ACLU Director Anthony Romero. However, at the same time that the Defense Department is showing signs of heading in the direction of restoring the rule of law, the Justice Department is urging Congress to abandon it.

The new Pentagon policy reversed a prior Bush Administration claim that detainees were not protected by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. In policies developed in early 2002 by President Bush, Attorney General Gonzales and top Defense Department and Justice Department officials – over the objections of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell – the Administration took the position that individuals held at Guantánamo Bay and many other detainees were not entitled to the basic legal protections outlined in the Geneva Conventions. The July 7, 2006 memorandum from Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England reversed the earlier policy.

The Pentagon memorandum comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that ruled the military commissions established by President Bush to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay are illegal. Congress has started a series of hearings, including three hearings this week, to decide how to try these detainees. Twenty retired generals and admirals, along with prominent senators such as Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, and Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have stated that the court-martial system should be the working model. But at the first hearing on the subject this morning in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Acting Assistant General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Bradbury urged Congress to codify the military commissions that the Supreme Court had found to be illegal.

“It's time for the government to stop trying to weasel out of obeying the Supreme Court and federal law. The Supreme Court made clear that the government could start putting people on trial at Guantanamo immediately if it follows court-martial procedures. We have the best military justice procedures in the world, but the Justice Department is telling Congress to use a broken system instead of the best one.”






© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/fe...ml?id=110008645

Osama in Genevaland
Terrorists are now getting lawful-combatant legitimacy.

Thursday, July 13, 2006 12:01 a.m.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 govern the treatment of lawful combatants and civilians during wartime. But now a new Pentagon memorandum concludes that Common Article 3 of the Conventions also governs the treatment of unlawful combatants: pirates, drug mafias and especially terrorists. So, five years after 9/11, the U.S. is about to give to people who ram commercial jets into buildings many of the same legal privileges and immunities as the average GI.
How did we get to this Osama in Genevaland world? Credit belongs to last week's Hamdan Supreme Court decision, and to Pentagon officials who have overinterpreted the meaning of that decision. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England signed the memo, and our sources tell us it was issued without any wide deliberation with, or even particular awareness by, the White House Counsel's office or the Justice Department. (A White House spokesman didn't respond to our query.)

Mr. England's memo overturns a 2002 Justice Department memo that ruled explicitly that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to members of al Qaeda or the Taliban, a policy change the White House confirmed late on Tuesday. For an Administration that has fought so hard, and in our view rightly, to protect its executive powers, this is being heralded as an embarrassing reversal. It also has the smell of a bureaucratic fiasco, since we can't recall another situation in which Presidential power was so freely handed away.

Some in the Bush Administration claim the memo does nothing more than require the Pentagon to ensure compliance with Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and that troops in the field had to be warned. But Hamdan was a limited and ambiguous ruling: limited, because it dealt solely with the question of military commissions that put terrorists on trial; ambiguous, because Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion did not fully subscribe to the four-Justice majority's reasoning.

At a minimum, the Bush Administration should have thought carefully about Hamdan and interpreted it as narrowly as possible. Instead, Mr. England's memo interprets the ruling in the broadest way possible, applying the standards of Common Article 3 to all "DoD orders, policies, directives, execute orders and doctrine." As a matter of law, every other government agency, including the CIA, will now have to follow the Pentagon's line.

In practice, this means that a captured terrorist such as September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is now protected by Common Article 3. People often associate the Geneva Conventions with guarantees against torture, protection for the wounded and the sick, and other "bare minimum" humanitarian standards. But Common Article 3 goes considerably further, forbidding, for example, "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

What exactly constitutes personal dignity and outrages upon it? Who knows, though we bet the ACLU will be more than happy to supply some answers. Our guess is that the concept can be read so expansively as to forbid the U.S. from so much as shouting at captured al Qaeda suspects, never mind "waterboarding" them, as was reportedly done to break KSM. In a war in which actionable intelligence acquired from captives is crucial to uncovering terrorist plots and preventing future attacks, it's hard to imagine a greater self-inflicted setback to counterterror efforts.


The setback is also political, and by that we don't mean partisan. We mean in the larger sense of the Bush Administration's moral and legal authority for its anti-terror cause. By identifying terrorists as illegal combatants and treating them accordingly, the Administration was attempting to remedy the defects of the pre-September 11 legal architecture for handling terrorists. The pre-9/11 view divided the world between combatants and noncombatants, and viewed terrorism as just another crime to be dealt with through the existing criminal-justice system.
We have learned the hard way that that approach doesn't work. The criminal-justice system takes too long and is complicated by the government's need to keep military secrets. Moreover, according such rights to terrorists who murder women and children gives them moral legitimacy that will make winning this war that much harder. It elevates terrorists nearly to the level of GIs who obey formal rules of engagement and who can be, and as we've seen often are, punished severely for harming innocents.

What the world needs is a new legal framework for distinguishing between legal and illegal combatants, but instead we are now heading toward the European model where terrorism is seen as just another fact of life and not a unique evil or grave threat. In Germany, the High Court earlier this year released from custody Mounir El Motassedeq, an accomplice of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta, on a technicality. Germany may be able to afford such legal exquisiteness; as the main terror target, the U.S. and its citizens cannot.

Already, in the wake of this reversal, the Bush Administration's critics are talking about the "illegality" of its previous failure to abide by Geneva rules. We'll predict that it won't be very long until some European magistrate indicts Donald Rumsfeld or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley or some other U.S. official for "war crimes" for this failure. The Pentagon's new memo won't be much of a defense.
Believe it or not, Congress can still fix this royal mess by following the Supreme Court's Hamdan order to write a new set of procedures and rules for handling unlawful combatants. And Congress can and should say that it is these new rules, not Geneva Common Article 3, that is the controlling law in America. The Pentagon may have surrendered prematurely to legal generals, but that doesn't mean the American people want to.


Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

July 13, 2006

$11 Million Every Hour
What the Iraq War is Costing Us

By Rep. JOHN P. MURTHA

We are spending $8 billion a month in Iraq. that equates to 2 billion dollars a week, or 267 million dollars a day, or 11 million dollars an hour.

Attached are some comparisons between what we are spending in Iraq as we "stay the course" indefinitely and what those funds could be used for instead.

I've been fighting for our military to get out of Iraq because I'm concerned about the loss of our troops and the future of our military and also because I believe they have accomplished their mission there and the Iraqis must resolve their internal conflict themselves. However, I also wanted to demonstrate what these expenses mean to domestic policy in the United States and give you an idea of just some of the things that what we could accomplish with this amount of money.

NATIONAL SECURITY

$33.1 billion/yr Department of Homeland Security FY 07 budget (4 months in Iraq)

$10 billion (1-time) Equipping commercial airliners with defenses against shoulder fired missiles (5 weeks in Iraq)

$8.6 billion/7 years Shortage of international aid needed to rebuild Afghanistan (one month in Iraq)

$5.2 billion (1-time) estimated need for capital improvements to secure public transportation system (trains, subways, buses)

(3 weeks in Iraq)

$1.5 billion/year Radiation detectors needed at all US ports (rejected due to cost) (5 days in Iraq)

$1.4 billion/ year Double the COPS (community police grants) program (5 days in Iraq)

$800 million/year public transportation personnel training and technical support (72 hours in Iraq)

$700 million/year 100% screening of all air cargo - rejected because of (2 days in Iraq) cost (1/4 of domestic shipping and 1/2 of international shipping is done on passenger planes)

$350 million (1-time) Make emergency radio systems interoperable (1.2 days in Iraq) (recommended after 9/11 but hasn't happened yet)

$500 million/year Double the firefighters grant program (2 days in Iraq)

$94 million/year Restore cuts to cities hit on 9/11 in Homeland Security budget (8-1/2 hours in Iraq)

HEALTH CARE/VETERANS

$36 billion/5 years reduction for Medicare spending in President's FY 07 budget (4-1/2 months in Iraq)

$5 billion/5 years Cut in Medicaid in President's FY 2007 budget (2-1/2 weeks in Iraq)

$2.5 billion/5 years VA health care premium increases in this year's budget. Premiums will double and triple and drug co-payments will increase, costing our military retirees $2.4 billion over 5 years (9 days in Iraq)

$100 million Additional funding recommended for mental health research for Veterans (9 hours in Iraq)

$48 million Medical and prosthetic research for Veterans (half a day in Iraq)

$65 million/yr National Institutes of Health research funding cuts in this year's budget (scientists are leaving the field of health research because funding has been cut so severely) (6 hours in Iraq)

$15 billion/yr Provide health insurance to 9 million children with no health insurance (1-1/2 weeks in Iraq)

$118 million/yr The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides nutritional food packages for less than $20 a month to more than 400,000 elderly people - eliminated in the President's budget (12 hours in Iraq)

EDUCATION

$3.4 billion/yr Cut in education budget in President's FY 07 budget from FY 06 funding level (over 40 programs including drug-free schools, federal support for the arts,technology and parent-resource centers). (13 days in Iraq)

$664 million/yr Perkins Loan program cut in President's FY 07 budget (would help 463,000 low-income students attend college) (2-1/2 days in Iraq)

$99 million/yr Even Start (eliminated in President's budget) (9 hours in Iraq)

ENVIRONMENT/INFRASTRUCTURE

$300 million President's cut to EPA budget in FY 2007 (1 day, 3 hours in Iraq)

$253 billion/30 years Clean up contaminated sites in US (Up to 350,000 contaminated sites will require cleanup over the next 30 years according to a report released by the EPA.) (2 years in Iraq)

$9.11 billion National Park Service maintenance backlog (1 month, 10 days in Iraq)

$6 billion Forest Service maintenance backlog (3 weeks in Iraq)

$2 billion Fish and Wildlife Service maintenance backlog (2 weeks in Iraq)

$47.2 billion/yr Miscellaneous user fees throughout government imposed by President's budget on taxpayers (6 months in Iraq)

$1.7 billion/yr Grants to states cut in 2007 budget (1 week in Iraq)

$15 million/yr Double the Save America's Treasures program (cut in half from last year's budget) (1.3 hours in Iraq)

DEFENSE

$6 billion Double the number of Navy ships we are buying in the 2007 bill from 6 ships to 12. (3 weeks in Iraq)

$8 billion Double the number of total Air Force aircraft we are buying in this bill. That's right ? we could double the number of F-22s, Joint Strike Fighters, C-130's, Global Hawks and Predators we are buying. Or, we could double the number of Navy and Marine Corps aircraft we are buying F-18s, V-22s, KC-130Js, and so on. (1 month in Iraq)

Rep. John P. Murtha is a member of Congress from Pennsylvania.

http://counterpunch.org/murtha07132006.html

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,105462,00.html

Army Crew Survives Copter Crash in Iraq
Associated Press | July 13, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter crashed Thursday during a combat patrol southwest of Baghdad, but both pilots survived, the U.S. military said.

The statement did not say what caused the crash nor give a precise location.

However, an Iraqi army official in the area said the helicopter was shot down in the village of Grakoul, located near the town of Youssifiyah about eight miles southwest of Baghdad. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to media.

The names and the conditions of the two pilots were not released, but the statement said they were flown to a U.S. military facility north of the capital.

On April 1, an Apache was shot down near Youssifiyah, killing two crew members. An al-Qaida-linked group claimed responsibility.

A few days later, a videotape was posted on an Islamist Web site showing the crash scene, with several men dragging the burning body of a man across a field while shouting "Allahu akbar," or "God is great!"

Last month, three American soldiers were killed in the same area, and the bodies of two of them were mutilated.

http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,105459,00.html
DoD Wants More V-22s, C-130Js, Humvees
InsideDefense.com NewsStand | Daniel G. Dupont | July 13, 2006
The Pentagon wants Congress to add two V-22s, four C-130Js and one C-17 to its fiscal year 2007 budget, along with thousands of new trucks, according to budget documents sent to Capitol Hill in late June.

InsideDefense.com reported June 30 that the documents, which the Pentagon refuses to release publicly, describe the $50 billion budget amendment or budget allowance intended to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan during the first half of the fiscal year, as well as new equipment to replace systems lost or worn out over the last few years.

A summary obtained this week breaks down how the Defense Department wants lawmakers to allocate the $11.1 billion in the budget amendment for procurement, research and development and the Iraqi Freedom Fund.

A total of $8.7 billion is requested for procurement, along with $314 million for research, development, test and evaluation and $2.2 billion for the Iraqi Freedom Fund.

That $2.2 billion breaks down to $2.1 billion for the Improvised Explosive Devices Defeat Initiative and $100 million for the “Joint Rapid Acquisition” program -- an effort to quickly field needed technologies to deployed troops in the war on terrorism.

All of the RDT&E money in the budget amendment is earmarked for classified activities: $110 million for the Navy, $48.4 million for the Air Force and $156 million for defense-wide programs.

As for procurement, the Army is slated for $4.75 billion, the Air Force for $2.1 billion, and the Navy and Marine Corps a combined $1.7 billion.

The Air Force's requested funds break down in two major areas: $1.2 billion for unnamed classified programs and $909 million for aircraft procurement.

The service wants to buy one C-17 for $225 million, four C-130J aircraft for $307 million and one V-22 Osprey for $146.3 million. C-17A modifications would be funded at $97 million, C-37A mods at $43 million and C-130 upgrades at $90.8 million.

As for the Navy, it is in line for another V-22 as well, at a cost of $101 million. Its other major request is $223 million for tactical vehicles.

Major Marine Corps procurement initiatives in the budget amendment include $451 million for humvees, $76.8 million for Javelin missiles, $83.9 million for the AAV7A1 product improvement program, $45 million for the Light Armored Vehicle PIP and $201 million on unit operations centers.

Most of the Army's money would go toward the purchase or overhaul of major battlefield vehicles and aircraft. The documents show plans for seven new UH-60 Black Hawks to be purchased for $105 million under a multiyear procurement arrangement. Also, the service is in line for $331.5 million to fund CH-47 cargo helicopter modifications, with $90 million of that total set aside for the National Guard.

Also, the Pentagon wants almost $1.4 billion for Bradley Fighting Vehicle sustainment, another $522.8 million for M1 Abrams tank modifications ($100 million of which would go to the National Guard) and another $400 million for the M1A2 tank's System Enhancement Program.

Other major Army procurement items include the Improved Recovery Vehicle ($197 million), the Carrier Mod program ($77.7 million) and modifications to Bradley FIST Vehicles ($130 million).

The service also is in line for major truck purchases should the Pentagon's plans win the approval of Congress. The documents show the Army wants $614.7 million for humvees, with more than $422 million of that total slated for the National Guard and Army Reserve; $220 million for Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles trucks, all for the reserves; and $201.5 million for reserve Family of Heavy Tactical Vehicles trucks. Another $92.6 million is requested for Armored Security Vehicles, while $364 million is earmarked for the “modification of in-service equipment.”

http://www.defensenewsstand.com/defensenew...bj.asp?s=budget

Defense Budget Alert provides complete access to the largest archive of DOD budget information anywhere. In addition to exclusive budget news Defense Budget Alert features all available information on the DOD budget, plus an archive of hard-to-find internal government documents relating to the DOD budget decisionmaking process -- from program budget decisions to congressional debate.

Budget Amendment Includes Funds for V-22s, C-130Js, C-17s, Humvees
DefenseAlert - 7/12/2006
July 12, 2006 -- The Pentagon wants Congress to add two V-22s, four C-130Js and one C-17 to its fiscal year 2007 budget, along with thousands of new trucks, according to budget documents sent to Capitol Hill in late June.
OMB Estimates Another $50 Billion Needed to Fund Iraq, Afghanistan in FY-08
DefenseAlert - 7/11/2006
July 11, 2006 -- The White House Office of Management and Budget estimates the Pentagon will need another $50 billion in emergency spending during fiscal year 2008 to pay for global war on terror operations.

DOD SEEKS TO SHIFT FUNDS FOR ACQUISITION PROGRAMS, RIVERINE FORCES
Inside the Navy - 7/10/2006
The Pentagon’s $4.4 billion omnibus reprogramming request for fiscal year 2006 would shore up the Littoral Combat Ship program, make changes for troubled minehunting and helicopter programs and reallocate over $200 million to buy boats, vehicles and guns for next year’s scheduled deployment of Navy riverine forces to Iraq.

CAIG: FUTURE COMBAT SYSTEM LIFE-CYCLE COSTS SKYROCKET TO $300 BILLION
Inside the Army - 7/10/2006
The life-cycle cost of the Future Combat System has nearly doubled in the last three years to about $300 billion, according to a Defense Department estimate recently submitted to Congress.

ARMY ASKS CONGRESS TO TRANSFER $2.4 BILLION IN REPROGRAMMING NOTICE
Inside the Army - 7/10/2006
The Pentagon wants Congress to approve $2.4 billion in transfers for the Army -- more than half of a $4.4 billion Defense Department-wide request recently sent to lawmakers.

Pentagon Seeks to Shift $4.4 Billion Between Accounts to Keep Solvent
DefenseAlert - 7/6/2006
July 6, 2006 -- The Defense Department is seeking permission from Congress to shift $4.4 billion between dozens of accounts in order to prevent paychecks from bouncing during the final months of the fiscal year and to launch a few new-start weapons programs, including an effort to prevent B-2 bombers from crashing.

AFMC CHIEF DETAILS FY-08 BUDGET WOES, SAYS MORE PERSONNEL CUTS LIKELY
Inside the Air Force - 7/7/2006
The Air Force’s leading research and development organization could be forced in coming months to cut additional personnel as the service braces for another round of significant budget cuts, the command’s chief said last week.

CRENSHAW, ETTER TAKE UNIFIED APPROACH TO CONTROLLING COSTS
Inside the Navy - 7/3/2006
Vice Adm. Lewis Crenshaw, the head of the Navy’s capabilities and resources directorate, and Navy acquisition executive Delores Etter have signed a formal pact to control costs for major acquisition programs and ensure requirements are met.

AS NAVY AIMS TO CUT COSTS, ETTER SAYS TENSION CAN BE ‘VERY HEALTHY’
Inside the Navy - 7/3/2006
Sometimes the Navy leadership’s desire to cut the cost of a major acquisition program by reducing capabilities and the program manager’s desire to preserve those capabilities can lead to tension in the department, but that is not necessarily a bad thing, according to Navy acquisition executive Delores Etter.

OMB DECLARES OPPOSITION TO HOUSE CHANGES IN DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS
Inside the Navy - 7/3/2006
Proposed funding changes for the Zumwalt-class DD(X) destroyer and Joint Strike Fighter programs in the House version of the fiscal year 2007 defense appropriations bill are causing heartburn for the Bush administration.

SENIOR USAF OFFICIALS WARN SERVICE’S FY-08 BUDGET PICTURE LOOKS BLEAK
Inside the Air Force - 6/30/2006
KEYSTONE, CO -- The Air Force could be forced to terminate a major acquisition program in the coming months as the Pentagon gears up for another round of significant budget cuts, according to two senior officials with knowledge of early fiscal year 2008 budget deliberations.

SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE MARKS UP FY-07 HOMELAND SECURITY SPENDING BILL
Inside the Pentagon - 6/29/2006
The Senate Appropriations homeland security subcommittee marked up its main fiscal year 2007 spending bill this week, recommending a total of $31.7 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, according to a June 27 panel statement.

DOD Set to Seek Congressional Permission to Shift Funds for High-Priority Needs
DefenseAlert - 6/28/2006
June 28, 2006 -- The Defense Department is preparing to seek permission from lawmakers to shift hundreds of millions of dollars from low-priority projects to higher-need programs that reflect unforeseen military requirements in the final months of fiscal year 2006, according to Pentagon officials.

DOD Set to Provide Congress 'Details' on $50 Billion Supplemental
DefenseAlert - 6/27/2006
June 27, 2006 -- The Defense Department is preparing to present Congress its formal proposal for how to spend $50 billion in supplemental funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

House Appropriators Call for Tighter MDA Oversight
DefenseAlert - 6/13/2006
June 13, 2006 -- The House Appropriations Committee is looking to tighten congressional oversight of the Missile Defense Agency now that a rudimentary Ballistic Missile Defense System has been deployed.

EMERGENCY SPENDING BILL EARMARKS FUNDS FOR V-22 AND SHIPYARDS
Inside the Navy - 6/12/2006
The $94.5 billion emergency spending bill approved by House and Senate conferees last week includes funding for three Marine Corps V-22 Osprey aircraft and a provision that would earmark $140 million for infrastructure improvements at Gulf Coast shipyards that have Navy contracts and were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

NEW POLICY REQUIRES MAJOR PROGRAMS TO REPORT COST OVERRUNS EARLY
Inside the Navy - 6/12/2006
Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently instituted a policy that gives the Pentagon an early warning if a major acquisition program is running 10 or more percent over the approved baseline cost, the admiral said last week.

OFFICIAL: SUPPLEMENTAL FUNDING DELAYS CHALLENGE ARMY RESET EFFORTS
Inside the Army - 6/12/2006
The greatest challenge to the Army’s reset and maintenance efforts is the way in which they are funded -- in fits and starts as Congress deals with the administration’s supplemental appropriations requests, a service official said last week.

Fate of Major Weapon Systems Detailed in Preliminary FY-08 POM
DefenseAlert - 6/5/2006
June 5, 2006 -- The Army, Navy and Marine Corps are wrapping up first drafts of their respective six-year spending plans, classified documents that spell out what weapon system programs each proposes to fund as well as those targeted for cuts between fiscal years 2008 to 2013, according to Pentagon officials.

Army Memo Guides Spending Cutbacks Until Supplemental Passes
DefenseAlert - 5/30/2006
May 30, 2006 -- Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody directed the Army last week to stop ordering many spare parts and supplies in an effort to pare back spending until Congress passes the fiscal year 2006 emergency supplemental spending bill to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

SENATE PANEL MOVES TO EXTEND REQUIREMENT FOR MINIMUM S&T FUNDING
Inside the Pentagon - 5/18/2006
In an effort to ensure stability in the Defense Department’s science and technology spending, Senate authorizers have proposed extending the numbers of years for which the Pentagon is mandated to increase S&T funding by 2 percent each budget cycle.

HOUSE AUTHORIZERS RAP ARMY FOR FUNDING JNN THROUGH SUPPLEMENTALS
Inside the Army - 5/15/2006
The House version of the fiscal year 2007 defense authorization bill denounces the Army’s continued funding of near-term networking communications efforts using emergency supplemental requests.

Hunter Confident 'Buy America' Language Will Make Final Bill
DefenseAlert - 5/12/2006
May 12, 2006 -- House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is confident that "Buy America" provisions in the fiscal year 2007 defense authorization bill, which the full House approved yesterday by a 396-31 vote, will survive conference negotiations with the Senate. The White House opposes the language.

LAWMAKERS SHAVE $109 MILLION FROM FY-07 BILL FOR INTRATHEATER AIRLIFTER
Inside the Air Force - 5/12/2006
Senate authorizers are recommending stripping the Army of nearly all funding next fiscal year for its Future Cargo Aircraft program.

HOUSE, SENATE PANELS LIMIT CONVENTIONAL SUB-LAUNCHED MISSILE FUNDING
Inside the Pentagon - 5/11/2006
Both the House and Senate defense authorization committees moved last week to strictly limit funding for a new program under which Pentagon leaders hope to modify a small number of submarine-launched ballistic missiles to carry conventional, rather than nuclear, warheads for a mission they dub “prompt global strike.” The panels also added seed money for Army and Air Force efforts that might be viewed as future alternatives to the Navy sea-based missile.

AUTHORIZERS WANT NEW OFFICE TO MANAGE MICROSATELLITE DEVELOPMENT
Inside the Pentagon - 5/11/2006
House and Senate authorizers are calling on the Pentagon to stand up a single program office to manage the development and fielding of small, tactical satellites, which are expected to take on increasing importance in the military’s space portfolio because they may one day offer on-demand capabilities to warfighters.

LAWMAKERS CALL FOR PROGRESS REPORTS ON PENTAGON ACQUISITION REFORM
Inside the Pentagon - 5/11/2006
House authorizers want Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to submit quarterly progress reports to Congress on the Pentagon’s efforts to overhaul its acquisition system, according to the panel’s version of the fiscal year 2007 defense authorization bill.

HOUSE LAWMAKERS QUESTION BMDS BLOCK FUNDING APPROACH
Inside Missile Defense - 5/10/2006
House authorizers are expressing serious doubts about the Defense Department’s ability to develop the Ballistic Missile Defense System on time and under budget using its current “Block” acquisition approach.

LAWMAKERS CUT ALL FUNDS FOR MDA’S HIGH-ALTITUDE AIRSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Inside Missile Defense - 5/10/2006
House authorizers have voted to strip all funds from the Missile Defense Agency’s initiative to design a giant unmanned airship.

NAVY SHIPBUILDING PROGRAMS EMERGE AS MAJOR CONFERENCE ISSUES
Inside the Navy - 5/8/2006
House and Senate authorizers last week marked up legislation that could make the Zumwalt-class DD(X) destroyer, the Virginia-class submarine and the San Antonio-class amphibious ship programs points of contention in the conference process.

SENATE KEEPS V-22 MONEY IN SPENDING BILL, BUT FATE OF FUNDS UNCLEAR
Inside the Navy - 5/8/2006
The $109 billion version of the fiscal year 2006 emergency spending bill passed by the Senate May 4 includes $230 million to buy three V-22 Ospreys for the Marine Corps from Bell Helicopter Textron and Boeing, but it remains unclear whether money to buy these aircraft will make it into law.

BILL DIRECTS ARMY TO FULLY FUND MODULARITY AND RESET OR FACE FCS CUTS
Inside the Army - 5/8/2006
Lawmakers struck back last week at what they see as the Army’s continued refusal to attach an accurate price tag to plans to restructure the force and repair vehicles damaged in the war in Iraq, threatening in the House defense authorization bill to curb funding for the Future Combat System.

ARMY TOLD TO ADD $6 BILLION TO BUDGETS FOR HEAVY COMBAT VEHICLES
Inside the Army - 5/8/2006
House authorizers are recommending procurement account increases for Abrams tanks