The Undoing Begins

By Dan Froomkin

Today's dramatic announcement from the White House that U.S. detainees are covered by the Geneva Convention is the first of what may be several major policy reversals forced by the recent Supreme Court decision curbing President Bush's assertion of nearly unlimited executive power in a time of war.

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Pentagon revises Guantanamo detainee policy
The White House said Tuesday that a new Pentagon memo concludes all detainees held in U.S. military custody around the world are entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13813974/from/ET/

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/world/11...artner=homepage

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060710/pl_af...anistanrumsfeld

Drug money fueling Taliban resurgence: Rumsfeld by Jim Mannion
Mon Jul 10, 3:46 PM ET



US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called on Russia and Europe to do more to stem drug trafficking from Afghanistan, warning that it is fueling a Taliban resurgence and threatens to undermine Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld, in comments at a news conference here and on the flight from Washington, acknowledged that the level of Taliban-inspired violence in Afghanistan is "higher than it has been."

"I'm concerned about the role that narcotics are playing in this sense: when there's that much money involved, you have to worry that it is going to be attractive," he told reporters traveling with him.

"And I do worry that the funds that come from the sale of those products could conceivably end up adversely affecting the democratic process," he said.

"Any time you have that much money floating around and you have people like the Taliban it gives them the opportunity to fund their efforts in various ways," he said.

At a news conference following his meeting here with President Emomali Rackmanov, Rumsfeld laid the blame for the drug problem on demand from Europe and Russia and said they should do more to stop it.

"The question was posed, 'What went wrong?' There are too many people demanding drugs and supplying large amounts of money to get them. That's what's going wrong," he said.

Dealing with it will require a comprehensive effort by the Afghan government including crop substitution, subsidies, eradication and stronger law enforcement.

"And I would submit that while it's in the interest of the Afghan government to work on the problem, it's also in the interest of Russia and Western Europe to recognize that it's partly their problem as well. And to increase their efforts to help deal with it," he said.

He said intelligence indicates that the Taliban are both reaping funds from the drug trade and by providing protection to drug traffickers.

Taliban-inspired forces have mounted larger, better coordinated attacks on US and NATO forces this year than at any time since their ouster in a US-led campaign in late 2001, US military officials have said.

Tactics borrowed from Iraqi insurgents -- notably roadside bombings and suicide attacks -- also are having a deadly effect.

The upsurge has come as NATO is expanding its presence in Afghanistan, moving troops into volatile Taliban strongholds in the south for the first time as part of a strategy to take over the lead from US forces by the end of this year.

The United States has 23,000 troops in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld put the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) at about another 15,000 to 20,000 and Afghan security forces at about 70,000.

"Will there be a need for more than that, that's the kind of thing General Eikenberry is looking at with the Karzai government," he said, referring to the US commander in Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry.




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U.S. Officials Condemn Video of Mutilated Soldiers
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service


WASHINGTON, July 11, 2006 – U.S. officials are condemning a terrorist video reported to show the mutilated corpses of American soldiers.
The terrorists say the video is of two American soldiers captured near Yusifiyah, Iraq, June 16 and killed sometime later. The soldiers were members of the 1st Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of Multinational Division Baghdad.

"Multinational Division Baghdad condemns the release of the video in the strongest of terms," the command said in a news release. "It demonstrates the barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life."

The video, uploaded on a terrorist Web site yesterday, shows the mutilated bodies of two men dressed in Army camouflage uniforms. The video shows the terrorists hoisting the severed head of one of the soldiers and makes the other soldier's identity clearly recognizable.

Officials called it ironic that the U.S. Congress and military are debating the nature of Geneva Accord protections as this grisly video is playing.

Terrorists know the value of videos like this, U.S. military officials in Baghdad said. They noted that snipers in Iraq often have videographers taping their murders and that people can buy DVDs of the murders in stores in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

These videos are little more than "snuff films," officials said. The airing of the video on the Internet only reinforces coalition determination "to catch the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice," the release said.



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DAILY BRIEFING
July 11, 2006

The Clinger-Cohen Act: 10 Years Later
A four-part series

The Clinger-Cohen Act, 10 Years Later: The Five Percent Solution
By Wes Andrues
letters@govexec.com

Editor's Note: Ten years ago, Congress passed the Information Technology Management Reform Act, later renamed for its co-sponsors, Rep. William Clinger, R-Pa., and Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine. The Clinger-Cohen Act fundamentally changed federal procurement of information technology, requiring that IT purchases be handled as capital investments and that chief information officers be appointed to lead the process of planning, acquiring and managing technology. In this four-part series running over a month's time, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Wes Andrues, an IT policy consultant and CIO Certificate holder from the National Defense University, looks at the changes in the technology acquisition landscape in the years since the law was passed.
With the arrival of the Clinger-Cohen Act's 10th anniversary, it's worth pausing and asking: Are we better off? A decade on, has this legislation achieved its aims?

It may come as no surprise that there is no clear "yes" or "no" answer. The landscape of federal information technology is not a clearly defined plain of reference points that can be empirically studied in pure isolation. The CCA is just one of at least half a dozen major pieces of legislation with implications for IT. It shares space with a host of laws and memoranda and executive orders, all of which tend to make it difficult to issue tidy proclamations about where we are in terms of how well the government buys and uses information resources.

That said, there is a passage tucked within the CCA that provides some tangible scope to the legislation -- a tiny little nuance of a mathematical formula upon which to gauge the grand question of progress. "It is the sense of Congress," the passage reads, "that, during the next five-year period beginning with 1996, executive agencies should achieve each year at least a 5 percent decrease in the cost (in constant fiscal year 1996 dollars) that is incurred by the agency for operating and maintaining information technology, and each year a 5 percent increase in the efficiency of the agency operations, by reason of improvements in information resources management by the agency."

It's fitting that Congress only indicated its "sense" that this goal be achieved, because it defies objective measurement. Apparently, legislators simply wanted to impart their overall expectation that somewhere, somehow, the government should reap some tangible benefit as a result of the law. Nevertheless, the question persists: Have agencies achieved the CCA's pair of 5 percent directives - if not within five years, then in the 10 years since the law was passed?

Perhaps the easiest and most obvious means to address this is to look first at the anticipated reduction in costs. The steady rise in the aggregate IT budget line would certainly seem to mock Congress' intent. When the CCA was passed, the federal IT budget was $28 billion. It now stands at more than $64 billion, despite the fact that the price of a government PC has fallen more than 50 percent in the past decade. So while Congress envisioned a 5 percent spending decrease, the cost of IT is actually rising at an average of 9 percent a year.

To be sure, a host of both anticipated and unforeseen factors has contributed to the spending increases, including Y2K, homeland security efforts, military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the heady requirements posed by major cybersecurity initiatives. Given the major changes in the world in the past decade, rising budgets can be forgiven, if not expected. What's more significant is how the money is being spent. A great deal of the expertise associated with the implementation of new and upgraded systems lies not in government but in industry, which has resulted in significant increases in outsourcing. According to a report by market research firm INPUT in Reston, Va.,, the outsourcing market is one of the most dynamic sectors of federal IT, expected to reach over $17 billion by 2010.

This growing outsourcing market could, in theory, be tempered by cost-cutting measures such as offshoring, but lawmakers are largely opposed to government operations being sent overseas. So, not only is federal IT governance expensive in and of itself, but exigencies have arisen that demand the commitment of more dollars, and the government cannot numb the bite by subscribing to the same cost-cutting measures available to industry.

DAILY BRIEFING
July 11, 2006
Review of Army combat program challenges need for lighter vehicles
By Megan Scully, CongressDaily


An independent analysis of the Army's Future Combat Systems concludes that the service will have no need to transport its future fleet of combat vehicles on a C-130 Hercules cargo plane, debunking a requirement set years ago by officials intent on creating a lighter, more easily deployable ground force.

In a recent congressionally ordered review of the $160 billion program, the Alexandria-based Institute for Defense Analyses found no operational scenario in which the service would need to airlift the vehicles on a C-130, which can hold just over 20 tons of cargo.

A Pentagon summary of the study, obtained by CongressDaily, was sent to Capitol Hill earlier this month, along with an independent cost estimate that put the total price tag to develop, build and operate the massive modernization program at $300 billion -- $175 billion more than initial projections.

The reviews delivered a double blow to FCS, a complex system of manned and unmanned air and ground vehicles linked by a high-tech network.

Lawmakers and Government Accountability Office officials have become increasingly wary of the program's management and its increased costs. The Army, too, is trying to restructure the program and remove any non-essential costs.

For the last several years, Army and industry officials have struggled to engineer a future vehicle, complete with new protection systems, that fits the stringent weight, height and width parameters for transport in the belly of a C-130. So far, the service has fallen far short of that requirement, with weight estimates for future vehicles projected at 24 tons to 28 tons.

Using armor and other technologies now available, the Army would have to sacrifice "too much lethality and survivability" to design a 20-ton FCS vehicle, a House Armed Services Committee aide said in a recent interview.

The study could help the Army ease its requirements a bit -- a move that could speed vehicle development and, ultimately, bring down program costs. The projected price tag for the so-called Manned Ground Vehicles, of which the Army intends to buy nearly 5,000, is $10 million each.

"If you're not constrained, if you take off an engineering constraint, you may be able to reduce some costs," a former senior Army official said.

The Institute for Defense Analyses also found that the military has an adequate number of C-17 Globemaster III and C-5 Galaxy, far larger cargo planes, to transport FCS. The Army will still depend heavily on ground and sea transport for FCS, easing demands for airlift.

"No additional investments above and beyond what is planned and programmed would be required for the air transport of MGV variants," according to the summary of the study.

Some top Army officials have long questioned industry's ability to design a 20-ton combat vehicle that meets all FCS requirements, stating that 24-ton variants are far more achievable.

But advocates of the requirement have argued that keeping the vehicles to 20 tons forces the service to design a platform for urban warfare -- one that can maneuver through narrow city streets and across bridges.

The Army has not altered plans for the size of the FCS ground vehicles.

"We will respond to Army requirements," said a spokesman for General Dynamics Corp., which is developing manned ground vehicles with BAE Systems. "Right now, the Army is providing requirements and we're moving ahead."

By comparison, the Abrams tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicle, lynchpins of the Army's legacy armored force, top the scales at 68 tons and 33 tons.

The comparatively new Stryker vehicle, considered the precursor to FCS, weighs in at 38,000 pounds. But even at that weight, the Army can only transport Stryker on a C-130 under ideal circumstances. Hot weather, for example, can strain the aircraft, already burdened with the heavy load.

Additionally, the Army had to secure waivers from the Air Force in 2002 to fly the combat vehicles aboard a C-130 because the Stryker's height and weight dimensions did not meet requirements.

Still, the service can fly only a pared-down Stryker on a C-130. Heavy add-on armor packages, attached to the Stryker vehicles used in Iraq and Afghanistan, cannot accompany the vehicle in flight.

US court asked for gag order in Iraq rape-murder
Tue Jul 11, 2006 1:21 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A lawyer for a former U.S. soldier charged with killing a family of four in Iraq and raping one of them asked a judge on Tuesday for a gag order preventing officials from President George W. Bush on down from commenting on the case.

Without that, a court filing said, 21-year-old Steven Green will not get a fair trial. He pleaded not guilty last week to four counts of murder and one count of rape, and a Kentucky grand jury is currently considering the case against him.

"This case has received prominent and often sensational coverage in virtually all print, electronic, and Internet news media in the world," the filing in U.S. District Court in Louisville, Kentucky, said.

"Strong and inflammatory opinion is rampant, including the President in a nationally televised interview deeming the alleged conduct of the defendant to be a 'despicable crime' and opining that he was 'staining the image, the honorable image of the United States military'," the motion said.

The motion, filed by Scott Wendelsdorf, a public defender assigned to Green, also cited comments on the case from Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Green, discharged from the Army with a personality disorder, was charged with taking part in a home invasion, rape and murder in March in Mahmudiya, Iraq, while on duty with the Kentucky-based 101st Airborne.

Fourteen-year-old Abeer al-Janabi was raped and killed. Her parents and 6-year-old sister were also slain.

Four other soldiers still with the 502nd Infantry Regiment also face rape and murder charges and a fifth a charge of failing to report it.

A group led by al Qaeda in Iraq meanwhile has released gruesome footage of two corpses it said were U.S. soldiers killed in June to avenge the rape and murder of the Iraqi girl.

Since the military announced its investigation, Iraqis and their government have expressed mounting outrage over the case, which comes after several other murder probes involving U.S. troops. Many Iraqis have complained the troops can kill with impunity.



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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio...nevaconvdoc.pdf

Defense Department Memorandum on Detainees

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/world/mi...ast/11iraq.html

Violence
Insurgent Group Posts Video of 2 Mutilated U.S. Soldiers
By EDWARD WONG
Published: July 11, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 10 — Insurgents posted an Internet video on Monday showing the mutilated bodies of two American soldiers abducted in June and found murdered days later during a search by American and Iraqi forces south of Baghdad. A message with the video says the soldiers were killed out of revenge for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl in March, a crime in which at least six American soldiers are suspects.

The video is the first released during the war that shows detailed and graphic mutilations of American soldiers. It also deepens the mystery surrounding the rape and killing of the Iraqi girl and the slayings of her parents and younger sister.

American officials have said that the soldiers implicated in that crime are from the same platoon of the 502nd Infantry as the two abducted soldiers, but investigators have yet to draw a direct link between the events.

“We present this as revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade,” says a message in Arabic on a title card at the start of the nearly five-minute video. Militants had learned of the crime early on and “decided to take revenge for their sister’s honor,” the message says, according to a translation by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Internet postings.

It is questionable whether the soldiers were actually killed out of revenge. Iraqis around Mahmudiya, where the rape and murders took place, believed at the time that the girl and the other three victims were killed by other Iraqis in sectarian violence, according to the mayor of Mahmudiya and American military officials. The mayor said the possible involvement of American soldiers only became apparent on June 30, when the American military announced it had opened an investigation into the crime.

The two abducted soldiers were Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore. They were kidnapped June 16 when insurgents ambushed a traffic checkpoint they had set up in the hostile town of Yusufiya, near Mahmudiya. A third soldier was killed during the ambush. The military is investigating why the soldiers were operating alone in a vehicle outside their base, something virtually unheard of in Iraq.

The video shows two white bodies with tattered green Army uniforms drenched in blood. One of the soldiers has been decapitated, and the head sits next to the body, whose chest has been cut open.

The bodies lie on a bridge over a river, and at least three pairs of sandaled feet belonging to insurgents cluster around them. At one point, an insurgent’s arm picks up the decapitated head. Another insurgent steps on the face of the other soldier.

The video also plays old audio messages from both Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who was killed in an American airstrike in early June. An umbrella group associated with Mr. Zarqawi, the Mujahedeen Shura Council, put out the video.

The soldiers’ bodies were discovered by American troops on a road around Yusufiya booby-trapped with homemade bombs. An Iraqi defense official said at the time that the soldiers had been “brutally tortured.”

The video emerged on a day when at least 30 Iraqis were killed in a spiraling cycle of sectarian violence, and after the American military released the names of five of the soldiers implicated in the rape and murder investigation. The military announced that the five soldiers had been charged and would face hearings that could lead to courts martial.

On June 30, a discharged private first class, Steven D. Green, was arrested by federal authorities in North Carolina for his role as the ringleader of the group and is scheduled to be arraigned in August.

Sergeant Paul E. Cortez, Specialist James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard have been charged with rape, murder and arson in the March 12 episode, the military said Monday.

Sergeant Anthony W. Yribe has been accused of dereliction of duty for failing to report the crime. “He was not there that day, but afterward had some tacit knowledge of it, as alleged,” said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell IV, a spokesman for the American military.

All five soldiers are being held in Iraq. The 502nd Infantry is part of the 101st Airborne Division, but has been deployed south of Baghdad and attached to the Fourth Infantry Division.

Two bombings in a Shiite enclave killed at least 10 people and wounded dozens on Monday, while gunmen executed seven civilians in a bus in a Sunni Arab neighborhood, plunging Baghdad into another round of daytime sectarian violence.


At least 13 Iraqis died in other shootings and bombings around the country, bringing the day’s death toll to at least 30 and highlighting the immense challenges facing the new government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Such attacks have become the hallmark of what many Iraqis now call a low-level civil war.

The two explosions in the Sadr City neighborhood, a vast Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, appeared to be retribution for a particularly brutal episode on Sunday in which Shiite militiamen rampaged through the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Jihad, pulling people from their homes and cars and shooting them in the head.

The death count from that violence has fluctuated wildly, with some Iraqi officials reporting more than 40 killed, while an American military spokesman said Monday that American troops knew of no more than 14 deaths.

The first bomb in Sadr City went off at about 9:40 a.m., inside a commercial building on a strip of shops and homes. A second bomb, planted in a car, exploded five minutes later as people were rushing to the scene, witnesses said. The explosions shattered the windows of storefronts for blocks around. Four cars erupted in flames.

“We want security,” said a white-bearded man, Lefta Enayid, as he hobbled around the charred scene in a robe. “We don’t want the government to remain handcuffed. We want the government to fight those who set off the car bombs. We’re so sick of this.”

On July 1, a suicide car bomber roared into a street market in Sadr City, killing at least 62 people in the deadliest explosion in Iraq in months. Sadr City is the home of the powerful Mahdi Army militia, and Sunni neighborhoods were raided by armed groups and attacked with mortars for days afterward.

The British ambassador to Iraq, William Patey, acknowledged on Monday that sectarian violence was on the rise. “Yesterday’s deliberate shooting of civilians in Baghdad’s Al Jihad district, last week’s bombing in Sadr City and an increasing number of sectarian killings are all horrific acts which the British government absolutely condemns,” he said in a written statement.

In a speech in Iraqi Kurdistan, Mr. Maliki called for unity among Iraqis without specifically addressing the latest round of killings. “Our fate is to work together to defeat the terror and the mutineers of our political process,” he said. “This can be achieved only by unity and adherence and commitment to the Constitution.”

Inside the fortified Green Zone, the trial of Saddam Hussein resumed, but in the absence of the top defendants. The lawyers for Mr. Hussein and three co-defendants said they were boycotting the proceedings unless a long list of demands were met, including improved security for the lawyers.

Mr. Hussein and seven co-defendants are being tried for the executions of 148 men and boys from the Shiite town of Dujail following what Mr. Hussein called an assassination attempt on him in 1982. The trial has been plagued by the killings of at least three defense lawyers, as well as a judge and his son.

The trial has entered its final phase, with the defense scheduled to make its final arguments this week; a verdict is expected in the fall.

On Monday, two minor defendants, Ali Dayih and Muhammad Azzawi, both former Baath Party officials from Dujail, made their arguments. Prosecutors have asked that Mr. Azzawi be acquitted for lack of evidence.

Mr. Azzawi, once a farmer in Dujail, defended himself by saying, “I am a man of honor and well raised, from a good origin, and it would not suit me to do such acts.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/washington/11jags.html

Military Lawyers Prepare to Speak on Guantánamo
By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: July 11, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 10 — Four years ago, the military’s most senior uniformed lawyers found their objections brushed aside when the Bush administration formulated plans for military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This week, their concerns will get a public hearing as Congress takes up the question of whether to resurrect the tribunals struck down by the Supreme Court.

“We’re at a crossroads now,” said John D. Hutson, a retired rear admiral who was the top uniformed lawyer in the Navy until 2000 and who has been part of a cadre of retired senior military lawyers who have filed briefs challenging the administration’s legal approach. “We can finally get on the right side of the law and have a system that will pass Supreme Court and international scrutiny.”

Admiral Hutson, one of several current and former senior military lawyers who will testify this week before one of the three Congressional committees looking into the matter, plans to urge Congress to avoid trying to get around last month’s Supreme Court ruling.

Beginning shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the military lawyers warned that the administration’s plan for military commissions put the United States on the wrong side of the law and of international standards. Most important, they warned, the arrangements could endanger members of the American military who might someday be captured by an enemy and treated like the detainees at Guantánamo.

But the lawyers’ sense of vindication at the Supreme Court’s 5-to-3 decision is tempered by growing anxiety over what may happen next. Several military lawyers, most of them retired, have said they are troubled by the possibility that Congress may restore the kind of system they have long argued against.

Donald J. Guter, another retired admiral who succeeded Admiral Hutson as the Navy’s top uniformed lawyer, said it would be a mistake for Congress to try to undo the Supreme Court ruling. Admiral Guter was one of several senior military judge advocates general, known as JAG’s, who after objecting to the planned military commissions found their advice pointedly unheeded.

“This was the concern all along of the JAG’s,” Admiral Guter said. “It’s a matter of defending what we always thought was the rule of law and proper behavior for civilized nations.”

One of the more intriguing hearings will be held Thursday as the current top military lawyers in the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marines testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The main issue at stake will be whether they express the same concerns of those out of uniform who have been critical of the administration’s approach.

Longstanding custom allows serving officers to give their own views at Congressional hearings if specifically asked, and some in the Senate expect the current uniformed lawyers to generally urge that Congress not stray far from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the system that details court-martial proceedings.

Senator Bill Frist, the Republican leader, told reporters on Monday that he did not expect the Senate to take up any legislation on the issue until at least after the August recess of Congress.

The opportunity to rewrite the laws lies in the structure of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which emphasized that Congress had not explicitly approved deviations from ordinary court-martial proceedings or the Geneva Conventions.

The court majority said the military commissions as currently constituted were illegal because they did not have the same protections for the accused as do the military’s own justice system and court-martial proceedings. In addition, the court ruled that the commissions violated a part of the Geneva Conventions that provides for what it said was a minimum standard of due process in a civilized society.

In response, some legislators have said they will consider rewriting the law to make that part of the Geneva Conventions, known as Common Article 3, no longer applicable.

“We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops,” Admiral Hutson 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.”

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, which will hold its hearing on Tuesday, said: “The first people we should listen to are the military officers who have decades of experience with these issues. Their insights can help build a system that protects our citizens without sacrificing America’s ideals.”

Underlying the debate over how and whether to change the law on military commissions is a battle over the president’s authority to unilaterally prescribe procedures in a time of war. The Supreme Court’s decision was a rebuke to the administration’s assertions that President Bush’s powers should remain mostly unrestricted in a time of war.

Most military lawyers say they believe that few, if any, of the Guantánamo detainees could be convicted in a regular court-martial.

Lt. Col. Sharon A. Shaffer of the Air Force, the lawyer for a Sudanese detainee who has been charged before a military commission, said she was confident that she would win an acquittal for her client, who is suspected of being an accountant for Al Qaeda, under court-martial rules.

“For me it was awesome to see the court’s views on key issues I’ve been arguing for years,” Colonel Shaffer said.

The majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, said the two biggest problems with the commissions were that the military authorities could bar defendants from being present at their own trial, citing security concerns, and that the procedures contained looser rules of evidence, even allowing hearsay and evidence obtained by torture, if the judge thought it helpful.

Colonel Shaffer said she was restrained under the rules from calling as a witness a Qaeda informant whose information had been used to charge her client. “I’m going to want for my client to face his accuser,” she said, “and for me to have an opportunity to impeach his testimony.”

Iraq’s Civil War Spins out of US and Iraqi Government Control

DEBKAfile Exclusive Military Report

July 11, 2006, 7:39 PM (GMT+02:00)


Four essential factors underlie the deadly upsurge of Shiite-Sunni sectarian savagery in Baghdad this week:

1. No one, including US forces, has stepped in to halt the sectarian cleansing operation engulfing Baghdad in the last six months, the largest of its kind the world has seen in recent years.

Shiite fighters, many in the uniforms of the new Iraqi national army or Iraqi security forces, are battling Sunni gunmen, in defiance of their duties to - and the authority of – the Nouri al-Maliki government. This conflict is nothing but outright civil war.

First the two hostile camps fought one another for Baghdad suburbs. In early June, they clashed over the control of streets. Now they are dueling for single buildings that overlook strategic sections or installations in the capital. Some streets are consequently ruled half and half, and any Sunni or Shiite venturing into the wrong end of the street takes his life in his hands.

2. The most powerful military force in Baghdad today is the radical Shiite cleric Moqatada Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia. With an estimated 15,000-20,000 men under arms, the Mehdi Army outnumbers the government’s military and security forces’ strength in the capital.

3. In contrast, the Sunni’s command only a few thousand fighting men. Most belong to the various insurgent groups and Islamist terrorist organizations linked to al Qaeda, which are also responsible for attacks on the American Army and Iraqi officials and institutions.

The Sunni groups seek to compensate for their numerical inferiority in three ways:

First, they are drawing Sunni fighters from all over Iraq - albeit with small and variable results.

Second, they are perpetrating large-scale massacres of Shiites as a deterrent to their militias spreading out to more sectors of the capital.

Third, they have enlisted prominent Sunni clerics for decrees ordering all Sunnis to rally for the war on their Shiite compatriots.

Last week, they persuaded Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi, the most prominent Sunni Muslim religious authority today, who is obeyed even by al Qaeda, to publish a dispensation permitting all Sunni guerrilla fighters to join the ranks of Iraqi security forces and police for the sake of saving Sunni positions in Baghdad. Incredibly, notorious al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents are ready to join the forces pledged to hunt them down, on the authority of an imam of high repute, because they are convinced that the last Sunni stand in the heart of Baghdad is impending.

Fourth, the fortified Green Zone, nerve center of the Iraqi government and high command, and seat of the US embassy and military headquarters, goes on functioning calmly in the eye of the storm of civil warfare and apparently divorced from its violent currents. However, intelligence sources estimate that, after the bloody struggle is decided, the Green Zone will find itself held to siege by the winning side.

The descent of Sunni-Shiite duel in Baghdad into sheer brutality was highlighted on Sunday, July 9. Shiite gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms put up fake roadblocks, stopped cars for inspection and pulled the passengers out. When the names on their identity cards proved the terrified passengers to be Sunnis, they were shot dead on the spot. Altogether 41 Shiites, including women and children, were mercilessly murdered in this way.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that Shiite militiamen committed this slaughter in revenge for the killing of Abu Dar’a by the Sunni commandos of the 37th Battalion of the Iraqi government’s special operations force a few days earlier.

Abu Dar’a was condemned to death during Saddam Hussein’s rule as a murderous robber chief. He was awaiting sentence in March 2003, when the US-led invasion of Iraq began. Saddam then opened the prison doors and let hundreds of hardened criminals loose on the streets. Abu Dar’a, given a new lease of life, took up residence in Baghdad’s Sadr City, joined Muqtada Sadr’s militia and embarked on a career as terminator of Sunni Muslims in the area north of Baghdad. His savagery earned him the soubriquet of the “Shiite Zarqawi.”

The Medhi Army, burning to avenge his death, was responsible for the furious Shiite rampage against Sunnis of the last few days.

This fresh crisis sent prime minister Maliki speeding to Irbil, the Kurdistan capital Monday, July 10, for what was officially designated as a visit to the Kurdish parliament. Maliki went there to plead urgently with Iraq’s Kurdish president Jalal Talibani and the Kudistani prime minister Masoud Barzani, for several thousand Kurdish peshmerga commandos, as the only force capable of saving Baghdad. He appears to have given up on an American forces coming to the rescue.

DEBKAfile’s Iraq sources reveal that the two Kurdish leaders were in no hurry to respond to the Iraqi prime minister’s appeal. They see no profit in intervening in a Shiite-Sunni civil conflict, especially when the Kurdish community is itself split into Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Furthermore, whereas they are not keen on seeing central government in Baghdad collapse, neither are they willing to fight for its survival. And lastly, Maliki offered the Kurdish no real incentives for sending their best troops to fight in Baghdad.

In the absence of a competent army available to stem the bloody spiral of death gripping the heart of the Iraqi capital, Shiite-Sunni violence will probably intensify in the days to come and threaten to spill out into the rest of Iraq.

http://govexec.com/dailyfed/0706/071106cc.htm

Rethinking Embattled Tactics in Terror War

By Dana Priest

Five years after the attacks on the United States, the Bush administration faces the prospect of reworking key elements of its anti-terrorism effort in light of challenges from the courts, Congress and European allies crucial to counterterrorism operations.

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

GUARD TROOPS SLOW TO FILL PRESIDENT'S ORDER AT BORDER
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Bush administration said yesterday that 2,834 National Guard troops are on assignment to the U.S.-Mexico border, though most of them are still in transit or training and not actively helping support the U.S. Border Patrol.

About 300 are part of the Joint Task Force headquarters, and another 912 are "forward deployed," meaning they are active in supporting the U.S. Border Patrol, the Guard said. The more than 1,600 remaining troops are still in training or transit.

Although only one-third of the forces are forward-deployed, the administration said, that ratio will build gradually as other troops complete training.

President Bush in May called for 6,000 National Guard troops to work on the border in a support role, conducting surveillance and helping build infrastructure such as vehicle barriers. The administration promised 2,500 troops by the end of June and 6,000 by August, to be stationed until more Border Patrol agents can be hired.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that the deployment of Guard troops "has freed up nearly 200 Border Patrol agents already to spend more time literally walking the borders."

He said that action and Mr. Bush's other border security moves have reduced illegal immigration. "Immigration into the United States across the Mexican border has actually been declining since the year 2000, and it's down dramatically in the last few months. So it's working," he said.

The Guard was credited with helping apprehend 518 illegal aliens, 21 vehicles, 4,770 pounds of marijuana and 18.5 pounds of cocaine as of yesterday. The Guard also helped rescue 10 illegal aliens and provided support duty to allow 187 Border Patrol agents to conduct patrols, administration figures show.

Lt. Col. Mike Milord, a spokesman for the National Guard, said most of the 300 or so troops at the headquarters will be assigned for one or two years, while the other troops are more likely to be filling their yearly training commitments.

Training lasts anywhere from five days to several weeks, depending on the tasks, he said.

The Associated Press, quoting Guard officials in border states, said last week that the administration would fall short of its goal of 2,500 guard troops assisting by July 1.

Mr. Bush's credibility on immigration enforcement is at stake as he negotiates with members of Congress on a reform program. Republicans in both the House and Senate have wondered whether the president is serious about border security.

"Where have you been the last five years while your administration failed to secure the border and enforce immigration laws?" House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, said last week after Mr. Bush said he wanted to help employers verify their workers.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20...04835-7886r.htm
Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Cong...r=1&oref=slogin

GOP Lawmakers Propose Weapons Sanctions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 11, 2006
Filed at 6:31 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Responding to North Korea's missile tests, congressional Republicans urged greater efforts to build a national missile defense system and proposed new sanctions on nations doing weapons business with North Korea.

''We have to have a defense that allows us to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles,'' said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., at a news conference Tuesday.

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, also said the North Korean test-firing last week of seven missiles including one that potentially could reach the United States underscored the need for a U.S. missile defense system.

''We and the rest of the world would feel much safer if in fact we had a missile defense system up and operating,'' he said.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he planned to introduce legislation that would add North Korea to a nonproliferation act that currently outlines sanctions against foreign individuals who supply weapons technology to Iran and Syria.

''North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons and its possession of long-range missiles that could potentially hit the U.S. is a grave threat to the security of the American people and to peace and stability in East Asia,'' Frist said in a statement.

The nonproliferation act, passed in 2000, originally applied only to Iran. It was expanded to include Syria in 2005.

Under the measure, the president can impose sanctions on any foreign person who transfers goods and technologies to those countries that contribute to their ability to produce missiles, nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. Foreign persons who acquire such items from those countries are also subject to sanctions.

The sanctions for such people could include a ban on their obtaining U.S. government contracts or U.S. export licenses.

Hunter said he planned to confer with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., about putting more money for missile defense in a defense spending bill now being negotiated between the House and Senate so the country can ''move ahead with these systems as rapidly as possible.''

Americans, he said ''are in a race against time'' in defending themselves against threats such as the North Korean Taepodong-2 missile, which failed its July 4 test but is thought to have been designed to be capable of hitting the western United States.

The Pentagon says the current system is capable of defending against a limited number of missiles in an emergency, and President Bush earlier said the United States had a ''reasonable chance'' of shooting down the North Korean long-range missile had it not failed.

More than $100 billion has been spent on the program since 1983, including $7.8 billion authorized for the current fiscal year.

Hunter criticized Democrats who opposed Bush's 2001 decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and who have annually sought cuts in the administration's missile defense spending proposals.

In May the House defeated a Democratic-supported amendment that would have cut $4.7 billion from the $9.1 billion allotted for missile defense in the 2007 defense bill.

''It's time for the Democrats to stop fighting the ghost of Ronald Reagan,'' Hunter said. Reagan was an early supporter of a missile defense system, that opponents derided as ''Star Wars.''

But Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., author of the amendment to cut missile defense spending, said numerous government studies have come out against building a weapons defense system that has yet to be proven reliable in test runs.

Spending billions on a system before it has been adequately tested would give Americans a false sense of security, he said. ''It's too bad people are choosing to politicize this issue.''

Hunter acknowledged the missile interception system is still in an ''immature state.''

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jul2006/20060711_5632.html


Iraqi Ambassador: U.S. Sacrifices Have Given Iraqis New Hope
By Samantha L. Quigley
American Forces Press Service


HOLMDEL, N.J., July 11, 2006 – U.S. military men and women have given the Iraqi people hope, Iraq's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations said during a July 9 ceremony here at the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans' Memorial.

Molly Morel, an American Gold Star Mother from Tennessee, talks with Ambassador Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations. Photo by Samantha L. Quigley (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi spoke to a group of American Gold Star Mothers, mothers who have lost a child in the service of the United States. The women listened intently as Istrabadi expressed deep gratitude on behalf of his country.

"I know that there's no particular word of condolence or consolation that would mean very much in comparison to the loss that you have suffered, and so I'm not going to try to console you for that loss," he said.

Instead, the ambassador painted a picture of what his country was like after Saddam Hussein came to power and what he has seen happen in recent years, thanks in part to the Gold Star Mothers' children.

He told of his parents' two exiles from their country, the most recent in 1970, just after Saddam came to power. Istrabadi's father decided to leave Iraq shortly after an televised hanging of 13 men interrupted family programming on the equivalent of the eve of a major Islamic holiday. "I will forget many things in my life, but I will never forget the faces of those 13 men," he said.

Over the next three and a half decades, Iraq was ruled by perhaps the most tyrannical regime on the face of the earth since fascism gripped Europe, Istrabadi said. Two million Iraqis were killed by Saddam's regime and, to date, 270 mass graves with the remains of 400,000 people have been discovered.

"Political prisoners were being executed en masse in my country, the country in which the rule of law, itself, as a concept, originated thousands of years ago," Istrabadi said.

Though Saddam was growing older, the hope for regime change was slim. Saddam's grandson, Mustapha Qusay Hussein al-Tikriti, 14, was an heir apparent, the ambassador said.

The Iraqi people had every reason to believe that the next 50 years were going to look very much like the previous 35, Istrabadi said. That all changed on July 22, 2003, when Saddam's two son's and the grandson, Mustapha, were killed in a firefight with U.S. troops in Mosul. U.S. troops had moved into the country as a liberating force on March 19, 2003.

"The intervention of the United States in my country has been a lifeline for us," Istrabadi said. "It has restored hope for us that our future will be very different from our past."

That past included state-sanctioned torture chambers and rapes. The regime was so controlling that Iraqis were required to have a license to own a simple typewriter, Istrabadi said.

Iraq does not have a perfect democracy yet, he admitted, describing democracy as a process. That process is working in Iraq as evidenced by changes resulting from two successful elections and a referendum that created a permanent Iraqi constitution, he said. He participated in those elections, voting for the first time as an Iraqi citizen at age 42.

The political changes that came with the elections are reflected in the Iraqi people, he said.

"I can't explain it, really, but you could see in their faces there was a change," he said of his first trip back to Baghdad after the fall of Saddam's regime. "They were more relaxed. They weren't just going about their business and hurrying back. You would hear laughter in the streets again."

Istrabadi admitted that speaking to mothers who have lost children fighting on behalf of his country is perhaps the hardest thing he's had to do. He expressed regret over those deaths, but assured the mothers their losses were not in vain.

"You have given us the opportunity to remake our country into a decent place to live, a place to raise our children, (a) place of which we can be proud again, rather than cringe every time that we have to admit that we are Iraqis," he said. "Words of thanks seem to me to be insufficient to convey to you the thanks of a country, a grateful nation, which has lingered too long under tyranny.

"For me and for my country, our gratitude to the United States and to the sacrifices of its sons and daughters and its mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and children, will be eternal," Istrabadi said.

After his speech, mothers who had lost children fighting in Iraq hugged Istrabadi and thanked him for his words. They almost didn't hear them, however, because he had considering canceling the appearance after his own mother recently fell ill.

Istrabadi said his mother urged him to keep his appointment. "(She said,) 'This event you are going to is extremely important. You must go,'" he said.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editor...ok/4032404.html

Krauthammer: Logic went AWOL in high court ruling on tribunals
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

OUR big wars, 1861, 1941, 2001 — and the war on terror ranks with the
big ones — have a way of starting in the first year of a decade.
Supreme Courts, which historically have been loath to intervene against
presidential war powers in the midst of conflict, have tended to give
the president until mid-decade to do what he wishes to the Constitution
in order to win the war.

During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus —
trashing the Bill of Rights or exercising necessary emergency executive
power, depending on your point of view. But he got the whole
troublesome business done by 1865 and the Supreme Court stayed away.

During World War II, FDR interned Japanese-Americans. He, too, was left
unmolested by the court. But Roosevelt also got his war wrapped up by
1945. Had the current war on terror followed course and ended in 2005,
the sensational just-decided Hamdan case concerning military tribunals
for Guantanamo prisoners would have either been rendered moot or drawn
a yawn.

But, of course, the war on terror is different. The enemy is shadowy,
scattered and therefore more likely to survive and keep the war going
for years. What the Supreme Court essentially did in Hamdan was to say
to the president: Time's up. We gave you a half-decade of emergency
powers, but that's as far as we go. From now on, the emergency is over,
at least judicially, and you're going to have to operate by peacetime
rules.

Or as Justice Anthony Kennedy, the new Sandra Day O'Connor, put it,
Guantanamo (and by extension, war-on-terror) jurisprudence must
henceforth be governed by "the customary operation of the Executive and
Legislative Branches." This case may be "of extraordinary importance,"
but it is to be "resolved by ordinary rules."

All rise: The Supreme Court has decreed a return to normality. A lovely
idea, except that al-Qaida has other ideas. The war does go on. One can
sympathize with the court's desire for a Harding-like restoration to
normalcy. But the robed eminences are premature. And even if they
weren't, they really didn't have to issue a ruling this bad.

They declared illegal Bush's military tribunals for the likes of Salim
Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard. First, because
they were not established in accordance with congressional authority.
And second, because they violated the Geneva Conventions.

The first rationale is an odd but fixable misreading of congressional
intent. The second is a grotesque and unfixable misreading of the
Geneva Conventions.

The court feels that the president slighted Congress by unilaterally
establishing military commissions. What is odd about this
solicitousness for the powers of the legislature is that Congress,
which is populated entirely by adults, had explicitly told the
judiciary just six months ago that when it comes to Guantanamo
prisoners, the judiciary — every "court, justice, or judge" — should
bug off.

The Detainee Treatment Act in December 2005 not only implicitly
endorsed what the administration was doing with prisoners, it
explicitly told the judiciary to leave the issue to Congress and the
president to resolve, as they have historically.

The court's wanton overriding of Congress and the president is another
in a long string of breathtaking acts of judicial arrogance. But it is
fixable. The Republican leadership of the Senate responded to the
court's highhandedness by immediately embarking on writing legislation
establishing military tribunals.

The unfixable part of the Hamdan ruling, however, is the court's
reading of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva
Conventions, which were designed to protect civilian populations and
those combatants who respect them, were never intended to apply to
unlawful combatants, terrorists of the al-Qaida kind. The court
tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan — and by
extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden — the kind of
elaborate legal protections that one expects from "civilized peoples."

This infinitely elastic concept will allow courts to usurp from
Congress and the president the authority to fashion the procedures for
military tribunals — an arrogation that mocks the court's previously
expressed solicitousness for congressional authority.

But no matter. Logic has little place here. The court has decreed:
There is no war — or we will pretend so — and henceforth it shall be
conducted by the court. God save the United States. (This honorable
court can fend for itself.)

Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist based in
Washington, D.C. (letters@charleskrauthammer.com)

http://www.dod.mil/news/Jul2006/20060710_5619.html


Iraqi Tells Gold Star Mothers Their Sacrifice Not in Vain
By Samantha L. Quigley
American Forces Press Service


HOLMDEL, N.J., July 10, 2006 – More than 40 American Gold Star Mothers and their guests from around the country came together here yesterday to honor the children they've lost in the country's conflicts.

Members of American Gold Star Mothers Inc., are escorted by New Jersey State Troopers to the New Jersey Vietnam Memorial. A ceremony at the memorial July 9 honored the mothers and the children they lost in America's conflicts. Photo by Samantha L. Quigley (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

The ceremony, held at the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans' Memorial here, included a roll call honoring servicemembers from World War I through the global war on terrorism. Mothers who lost children in Vietnam and the global war on terrorism, including operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, placed wreaths near the center of the memorial.

Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, served as keynote speaker and thanked the mothers for the sacrifices their sons and daughters have made for his country.

"We were a country without hope," Istrabadi said. "The intervention of the United States in my country has been a lifeline for us. It has restored hope for us that our future will be very different from our past."

Hearing laughter in Iraq's streets again and no longer feeling the need to cringe when admitting their heritage is part of what America's intervention has given back to his country, he said.

"These are not small things. These are things for which this country, and you as individuals and your children, have earned our tremendous gratitude," Istrabadi said. "Words of thanks truly seem to me to be insufficient to convey to you the thanks of a country, a grateful nation, which has lingered too long under tyranny."

Iraq's gratitude to the United States and the families who have sacrificed personally "will be eternal," he said.

While Istrabadi spoke directly to events in Iraq, his message resonated with all the Gold Star Mothers: Their children did not die in vain.

Among those inspired by his words was Renate DeAngelis, a New York Gold Star Mother delegate who lost her son, 22-year-old Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher W. DeAngelis, when the USS Stark was attacked on May 17, 1987. He was one of 37 killed when the Iraqis hit the guided-missile frigate with two missiles during the Iran-Iraq War.

"It was absolutely beautiful," DeAngelis said of yesterday's ceremony. "(It was) very moving."

DeAngelis, who has lived with her grief for more than 19 years, said older Gold Star Mothers help those with more recent losses deal with their grief. "With the younger mothers, it's too new," she said.

All participants in yesterday's ceremony got the opportunity to acknowledge a friend or family member who died while serving the nation.

The visit to the memorial began with a viewing of "Twilight's Last Gleaming," a short movie dedicated to Gold Star Mothers.

The group will conduct its annual business meeting today and tomorrow in Mount Laurel, N.J.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...0711-irin01.htm
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
11 July 2006


AFGHANISTAN: UN concerned at deteriorating security
KABUL, 10 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - The United Nations’ top envoy to Afghanistan has expressed concern at the deteriorating security situation in the south and called for more development work as well as further military and diplomatic intervention to curb the growing threat of insurgency in the country.

“These are difficult times for Afghanistan. They are difficult times for the south but backing away is not an option,” Tom Koenigs, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative to Afghanistan told reporters on Monday in the capital, Kabul.

Afghanistan is suffering its worst level of Taliban-led violence since the militia was ousted by US-led coalition forces in late 2001. More than 1,100 people, including nearly 50 foreign troops, have lost their lives in insurgency-related violence this year alone, particularly in the south of the country.

US led-coalition troops and Afghan forces killed more than 40 insurgents in a raid in southern Afghanistan, the coalition reported on Monday. An Afghan soldier was killed and three coalition soldiers are said to have been wounded in the operation which took place in Oruzgan province.

On Sunday, a Canadian soldier in the coalition was killed during fighting in Kandahar province. Two Canadians were among a number of coalition and Afghan troops wounded on Saturday.

“I think the analysis of the situation in the south makes it obvious that support is more needed than ever,” he said. “One policeman for every 1,500 Afghans is not enough.” Koenigs praised the UK for plans to send extra troops to Afghanistan.

Nearly 900 extra British troops are to be sent to Afghanistan, UK Defence Secretary Des Browne announced. He said the reinforcements, which will boost troop levels to 4,500, will help security and reconstruction efforts in the southern province of Helmand. More helicopters will also be provided – travel by road in the south is becoming increasingly risky .

Commenting on recent remarks by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called for rooting out terrorists and insurgents beyond the boundaries of Afghanistan, the UN envoy said: ”Insurgency should be equally addressed outside Afghanistan as it has been addressed inside the country.”

Karzai’s government has repeatedly pointed the finger at neighbouring Pakistan as being behind the current wave of insurgency in Afghanistan.

[ENDS]

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...711-rferl01.htm

Afghanistan: Foreign Minister Attacks Pakistani Support For 'Terrorism'
By Ahto Lobjakas

Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta used an appearance before the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee in Brussels today to appeal for greater international support. Spanta identified intensified insurgent attacks -- mainly in the south of the country -- as the main danger. He also made it clear Kabul thinks Pakistan is behind what he described as "terrorists" bent on destroying his country.

BRUSSELS, July 11, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Minister Spanta's comments are the latest iteration of a message that has been coming out of Kabul for some time and that he stressed during a recent U.S. visit. Identifying the intensifying insurgency in the south of the country as the main threat facing Afghanistan, he firmly placed its roots outside his own country.

Most of the time today, Spanta spoke in general terms about "other countries" where "terrorists" receive training, funding, and ideological support. He said only a small share of arrested insurgents came from Afghanistan itself. The rest are from the Middle East, North Africa, Chechnya, and Uzbekistan, but their majority comes "from one neighboring country."

But in other, more innocuous contexts, the Afghan foreign minister made no secret he means Pakistan. He said Afghanistan appreciates Pakistan's support but said Kabul also has a "legitimate expectation" that the country do more to fight terrorism.

A 'Symptom'

Spanta said the insurgency in Afghanistan was only a "symptom," and said the international community must fight the "sources" outside -- clamp down on countries that fund, train, and ideologically support terrorists.

The minister went further, suggesting "some neighbors" are using terrorism to try and subvert Afghanistan's sovereignty.

"Some countries have still not realized that Afghanistan is not a military-strategic [adjunct] of any country, but a neighbor, a brother of equal standing and a neighbor," Spanta said. "And neither we nor the international community have yet succeeded in getting this realisation into the heads of policy makers in some neighboring countries. That is, the creation of a kind of protectorate in Afghanistan remains a kind of foreign policy [objective] and these countries use terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy."

Again, Spanta left little doubt that he means Pakistan. He praised cooperation with Iran and other major regional countries.

Fingering Islamabad

Spanta also pointedly said that Afghanistan had shown "goodwill" in stopping what he described as an earlier "media war" against Pakistan. He also said Kabul will not allow parts of Afghanistan to become involved in separatist-linked violence in Pakistan's Baluchistan region -- and expects the same in return.

The minister said he believes the increase in fighting in Afghanistan has been partly sparked by certain recent "geostrategic developments." He said the rapprochement between the United States and India is being seen by "some regional countries" as highly dangerous. These countries now want to show their strength and demonstrate that without their cooperation "no country is in a position to bring stability to Afghanistan."

Government Overmatched?

Spanta vowed that Afghanistan will defend its sovereignty and democratic government, but he said the means for that fall woefully short. He said the Afghan National Army numbers only about 36,000 troops, while the police force has an estimated 26,000 men. Yet, he pointed out, Afghanistan is twice the size of Germany.

He said that most of the security forces are very poorly equipped, while their adversaries have access to modern technology.

"A simple example: In the Sangin district in Kandahar [province], there live more than 40,000 people, but we have 41 policemen with three very outmoded Russian jeeps, while the terrorists who come from the other side [of the border] to attack drive [Toyota] Landcruisers, Japanese cars [equipped] with climate control," Spanta said.

He appeared to give support to efforts to resuscitate local, pro-government militias. He said the best way of protecting local people was by mobilizing locals -- albeit within the law and under Kabul's coordination.

NATO In The South

The minister fielded a number of questions from EU deputies suggesting the extension of NATO forces in the south of the country has served as a "provocation" for the local population. He rejected the suggestion, saying the vast majority of Afghans, while not "happy" about the presence of foreign troops, would not want them to leave for fear of what would follow their departure.

Spanta reiterated the view often expressed by Afghan and NATO officials that the insurgents represent only a small minority of the population.

"We have a small minority, a very well-organized minority with strong links to other countries, [with] a fanatical ideology which hates and is bent on destroying all the achievements of humanity in terms of democracy, human rights, [and] women's emancipation," Spanta said.

He described the conflict as a battle between moderates who want a stable Afghanistan and those who want a "land without a country" to spread international terrorism.


Copyright © 2006. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060711/us_nm/iraq_usa_rape_dc

US court asked for gag order in Iraq rape-murder Tue Jul 11, 1:21 PM ET

A lawyer for a former U.S. soldier charged with killing a family of four in Iraq and raping one of them asked a judge on Tuesday for a gag order preventing officials from President George W. Bush on down from commenting on the case.

Without that, a court filing said, 21-year-old Steven Green will not get a fair trial. He pleaded not guilty last week to four counts of murder and one count of rape, and a Kentucky grand jury is currently considering the case against him.

"This case has received prominent and often sensational coverage in virtually all print, electronic, and Internet news media in the world," the filing in U.S. District Court in Louisville, Kentucky, said.

"Strong and inflammatory opinion is rampant, including the President in a nationally televised interview deeming the alleged conduct of the defendant to be a 'despicable crime' and opining that he was 'staining the image, the honorable image of the United States military'," the motion said.

The motion, filed by Scott Wendelsdorf, a public defender assigned to Green, also cited comments on the case from Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Green, discharged from the Army with a personality disorder, was charged with taking part in a home invasion, rape and murder in March in Mahmudiya, Iraq, while on duty with the Kentucky-based 101st Airborne.

Fourteen-year-old Abeer al-Janabi was raped and killed. Her parents and 6-year-old sister were also slain.

Four other soldiers still with the 502nd Infantry Regiment also face rape and murder charges and a fifth a charge of failing to report it.

A group led by al Qaeda in Iraq meanwhile has released gruesome footage of two corpses it said were U.S. soldiers killed in June to avenge the rape and murder of the Iraqi girl.

Since the military announced its investigation, Iraqis and their government have expressed mounting outrage over the case, which comes after several other murder probes involving U.S. troops. Many Iraqis have complained the troops can kill with impunity.




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71 Iraqis Killed in 15 Attacks, a Shi'i Group Joins Sunnis in Demanding a Timetable for US Withdrawal from Iraq

AP Headline: Attacks Across Iraq Kill at Least 47

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA Associated Press Writer

Jul 11, 2006, 1:05 PM EDT

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --

Sunni Arab representatives said Tuesday they will end their boycott of Iraq's parliament following a call for reconciliation by a Shi'i cleric and promises that a kidnapped colleague will be released.

The easing of tensions in the government came on a day of violence. Bombings and shootings killed at least 47 people nationwide.

Gunmen seized an Iraqi diplomat on leave from his post in Iran as he was driving near his Baghdad home. Iraq's Foreign Ministry said Wissam Jabr al-Awadi was a consul in the Iranian city of Kermanshah, a city with a large Kurdish population near the border with Iraq.

The Iraqi Accordance Front suspended its participation in parliament meetings earlier this month after one of its members, Tayseer al-Mashhadani, was kidnapped in a Shi'i neighborhood in Baghdad. Many Sunnis blamed cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, although the organization has denied any involvement.


Al-Sadr has called for unity. A leading Sunni politician said the bloc was responding, in the first sign of accommodation by both sides amid a sharp rise in sectarian tensions.

"We have decided to attend the meetings as of tomorrow in response to the call by Muqtada al-Sadr," lawmaker Adnan al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press. Two of al-Mashhadani's guards were released last week.

Noureddine al-Hyali, another member of the bloc that holds 44 seats in the 275-member parliament, said that contacts had been made with the kidnappers and "we have received promises ... that Tayseer al-Mashhadani will be released within days." He quoted the kidnappers as saying "she is our guest," indicating that she was being treated well.

Earlier this month, Sunni politician Ayad al-Samarra'ie said a group claiming to be holding al-Mashhadani demanded the release of 25 Shi'is detained by U.S. forces in return for her freedom. The group also purportedly called for a timetable for withdrawing coalition troops, the release of all detainees, and a halt to attacks on Shi'i mosques.

Al-Sadr aide Awas al-Khafaji denied that the Mahdi Army was behind the violence and accused the U.S. of trying to stoke sectarian tensions.

"What is happening in Iraq is a U.S. plot to target the patriotic elements in Iraq and this is shown through the attempts to create a gap between al-Mahdi Army and the Sunnis," he said in the holy city of Najaf.

A series of brazen attacks struck the Baghdad area and northern Iraq, killing at least 47 people and wounding 65.

A parked car bomb followed by a suicide attacker on foot struck a restaurant frequented by police near the heavily guarded Green Zone, killing at least five people and wounding 10, Lt. Mohammed Khayoun said, although there were conflicting accounts.

The U.S. military said three bombs exploded, including two suicide bombers wearing explosive vests, followed by another bomb. It said 15 local civilians and an Iraqi policeman were killed and four Iraqis were wounded. Iraqi soldiers and coalition forces responded to the scene, according to a statement.

The blast occurred about 200 yards from the entrance to the Green Zone, the fortified area that houses the U.S. and British embassies and Iraqi government offices.

AP Television News video showed U.S. and Iraqi forces at the site of the blast, with rubble piled outside the restaurant. Three Iraqis carried a body in a blanket.

A female Shi'i lawmaker from al-Sadr's bloc, Gufran al-Saadi, said the explosions occurred as her convoy was entering the Green Zone. "I suspect that some groups are targeting me," she said. "I have received threats from groups that I cannot name now."

The ministers of interior and defense were called to parliament in order to explain why the government's security plan has failed to curb violence in Baghdad.

The security situation has not improved since Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki unveiled a major security plan in Baghdad last month.

Gunmen in the capital intercepted a minivan with Shi'i passengers planning to carry a coffin to Najaf. All 10 people on board were killed in the attack in the southern neighborhood of Dora, police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.

A bomb planted under a fuel tanker exploded between a market and a medical center in the southeastern Baghdad suburb of Nahrawan, killing two people and wounding 18, Lt. Bilal Ali said. It set off a fire that was extinguished, Ali said.

A bomb in a parked car also exploded in the central Baghdad neighborhood of Karradah, killing two people and wounding six, he said.

Gunmen in three cars attacked a Saudi Arabian import/export company in the upscale Mansour neighborhood in western Baghdad, killing five Iraqi employees before fleeing, Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

Northeast of Baghdad, gunmen in a speeding car fired randomly at textile shops in Baqouba, killing two shop owners and wounding four others, police said.

Clashes between Iraqi forces and Iraqi resistance fighters broke out near the northwestern city of Mosul. Brig. Khalaf al-Jubour said 10 policemen who were part of an oil-protection force were killed in the fighting near Sharqat, 45 miles south of Mosul.

Police also said gunmen opened fire on an Iraqi army convoy near Sharqat on Monday evening, killing nine soldiers and wounding three.

A parked car bomb later exploded in a busy bus and taxi depot in the city, killing at least two people and wounding six, police said.

Gunmen killed an engineer with Iraq's North Oil Co. and his driver in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad.

Gunmen ambushed a minivan in Taji, 12 miles north of the capital, killing one passenger and wounding five, Lt. Mohammad Khayoun said.

Gunmen broke into a bakery in Baghdad, killing two workers.

A bomb in a parked car struck a house being used by Iraqi police in southwestern Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiyah, killing three policemen and wounding seven others. A mortar round hit a house elsewhere in the neighborhood, wounding one civilian.

A bomb exploded near the private clinic belonging to the wife of the governor of the dangerous Salahuddin province in Tikrit. Dr. Amira Qassim al-Rubai'ie later died of her wounds and two of her aides were seriously wounded.

A bomb in a parked car targeting a police patrol exploded in front of a Shi'i mosque in Baghdad, wounding three policemen and three civilians.

---

Associated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub, Qais al-Bashir and Bassem Mroue contributed to this report in Baghdad.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/review/ar...ervice_ID=11652

Image of the U.S. falls again
7/10/2006 3:30:00 PM GMT

By: Daniel Ellsberg

According to recent opinion polls, most Iraqis don't believe that we're making things better or safer in their country. What does that say about the legitimacy of prolonged occupation, much less permanent American bases in Iraq?

What does it mean for continued American armored patrols such as the one last November in Haditha, which, we now learn, led to the deaths of a Marine and 24 unarmed civilians?

Questions very much like these nagged at my conscience at the height of the Vietnam War, and led, eventually, to the publication of the first of the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971, 35 years ago.

As a former Marine Commander and defense analyst in 1970, I had exclusive access to highly classified defense documents for research purposes.

They came to be known as the Pentagon Papers and constituted a 47-volume, top-secret Defense Department history of American involvement in Vietnam titled, "U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68."

The Pentagon Papers made it very clear that I, like the rest of the American public, had been misled about the origins and purposes of the war I had participated in - just as are the 85% of the troops in Iraq today who still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that he was allied with Al Qaeda.

That period had several similarities to this one. Congress was debating the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Indochina while President Nixon was making secret plans to expand, rather than exit from, the ongoing war in Southeast Asia - including a major air offensive against North Vietnam, possibly using nuclear weapons. Today, the Bush administration's threats to wage war against Iran are explicit, with officials reiterating regularly that the nuclear "option" is "on the table."

Americans saw the color photographs of the My Lai massacre; now we are seeing photographs eerily similar to those from Haditha: women, children, old men and babies, all shot at short range.

What was it that prompted me to begin copying 7,000 pages of highly classified documents - an act that I fully expected would send me to prison for life? I came to the conclusion that the system I had been part of, giving my unquestioning loyalty to for 15 years, as a Marine, a Pentagon official and a State Department officer in Vietnam, was a system that lies reflexively, at every level, from sergeant to commander in chief, about murder. And I had the evidence to prove it.

The papers showed very clearly how we had become engaged in a reckless war of choice in someone else's country - a country that had not attacked us - for our own domestic and external purposes. It became clear to me that the justifications that had been given for our involvement were false. And if the war itself was unjust, then all the victims of our firepower were being killed without justification.

That's murder.

Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civilian and military officials in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, National Security Agency and White House who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates - so far carefully concealed from Congress and the public - about prospective or actual war crimes, reckless policies and domestic crimes: the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran or the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choose to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth - earlier than I did - before more lives are lost or a new war is launched.

Haditha holds a mirror up not just to American troops in the field, but to our whole society. Not just to the liars in government but to those who believe them too easily. And to all of us in the public, in the administration, in Congress and the media who dissent so far ineffectively or who stand by as murder is being done and do nothing to stop it or expose it.

Americans must summon the civil courage to face what is being done in their name and to refuse to be accomplices. The Voters' Pledge is one way to do this. The Voters' Pledge is a project comprising many of the major organizations in the antiwar movement, including United for Peace and Justice, Peace Action, Gold Star Families for Peace, Code Pink, and Democracy Rising, as well as groups with broader agendas like the National Organization for Women, Progressive Democrats of America, AfterDowningStreet.com, and magazines including the American Conservative and The Nation.



The goal of this coalition is to build a base of antiwar voters that cannot be ignored by anyone running for office in the United States. We want millions of voters to sign the pledge and say no to pro-war candidates.

You can help right now by visiting www.VotersForPeace.US and immediately signing the Voters' Pledge.

Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst who helped bring about an end to the Vietnam War when he released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its scandalous activities during that war.

Rumsfeld to Afghans: U.S. isn't leaving - Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060711/ap_on_re_as/rumsfeld_18

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff07112006.html

Krauthammer and Justice Davis
Does a State of War Give Bush a Right to Commit War Crimes?
By DAVE LINDORFF

Right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer has weighed in against the Supreme Court's latest ruling in Hamdan, claiming that the Court erred in barring President Bush from denying Guantanamo detainees the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. The basis for his argument is that the U.S. is at war, and that traditionally "supreme courts have been loath to intervene against presidential war powers in the midst of conflict."

Let's look at this assertion for a minute.

First of all, the fact that in the past, presidents have grievously abused their power during wartime, and damaged the Constitution in the process, is hardly grounds for letting this president do so again. Krauthammer cites, for example, President Lincoln's famous revocation of the age-old common law right of habeas corpus--the right to have one's imprisonment brought before a judge--to justify Bush's current denial of habeas corpus to captives in Guantanamo Bay.

Well, what Krauthammer fails to mention is that in 1866, the Supreme Court slapped down the administration of the assassinated President Lincoln, overturning the detention and execution order (never carried out) of one Lambdin P. Milligan, who had been arrested on orders of the president on a charge of treason and denied habeas rights. In that ruling, the Justice David Davis wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence, as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority. (Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866))

Those stirring words should be mailed to every member of Congress as they now consider the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, with many Republicans clamoring to pass a law exempting the Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva Convention's jurisdiction.

Second, let's examine Krauthammer's (and the Bush administration's) premise that the nation is at war, and that therefore the president can claim special powers.

Is the country at war?

Certainly it's not at war in Afghanistan, where there is an elected government, and where U.S., British, French, German, Canadian and other military forces serve at the invitation of the government. To call the small-scale fighting against remnant Taliban fighters a war would be to say that the U.S. is always at war, for U.S. military forces have been in combat situations somewhere in the world almost constantly, especially since World War II. Consider Korea, Indochina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, etc. (have I forgotten any?). If these situations, in which U.S. forces were shooting and being shot at, were all to be called states of war, then by Krauthammer's faulty "logic," the U.S. should have been under presidential rule, with the Constitution suspended, for several generations already.

Clearly this is absurd. For the term "war" to have any meaning, it must refer to a condition in which the nation itself is in jeopardy. Certainly it was this threat to America's very existence that led Lincoln to declare martial law in some jurisdictions, and to suspend the protections of the Constitution, rightly or wrongly.

Happily, nothing like that kind of threat pertains today.

Neither the fighting in Afghanistan, nor the larger fighting in Iraq--which was certainly a war (with us as the invader!), but which is now a police action at the request of a sovereign government, in the words of our president himself--is a war.

The only "war" that can be at issue then, is the so-called "war on terror." But is this in any way a real "war"? Unless one believes the self-serving clap-trap of the administration that the soldiers in Iraq are fighting in the war on terror--an absurdity because there were no terrorists in Iraq before the U.S. invaded that country, and now what is called "terrorism" in Iraq, at least as directed against U.S. interests, is nothing but garden variety guerrilla warfare against a foreign army (ours)--the answer has to be no. As Bush famously declared back on April 30, 2003, major combat ended in Iraq over three years ago. There is no war in Iraq.

That leaves the global "war" on terrorism. But let's get real. This is no more a war than was the "war" on drugs or the "war" on poverty. Sure, there may be a few soldiers who are involved, but mostly it's about spying, monitoring, infiltrating and arresting suspected terrorists. To call that kind of thing a war is to debase the currenty of the language beyond recognition. (The truth is there are probably more actual U.S. military forces involved in the so-called "war" on drugs than there are involved in the so-called "war" on terror.)

Moreover, while terrorists certainly can threaten the lives and safety of Americans, they cannot threaten the survival of or the territorial integrity of the United States, which is after all what wars are all about.

Furthermore, Krauthammer speaks of presidents needing to be able to suspend Constitutional rights and to claim special extra-constitutional powers during wars, and of the tradition of them then restoring those rights after a conflict ends. But the administration has made it clear, in between stirring calls for "total victory," that there will be no end to this "war" on terror. And indeed there cannot be, for there will always be those who will seek to disrupt or punish a global power like the U.S. through the use of terror. To accept the argument that fighting against such threats requires a suspension of rights and a president with dictatorial powers is to say that the Constitution, with its separation of powers and its Bill of Rights, is finished.

Like the administration he serves, Krauthammer is simply wrong, and surely in making such a preposterous claim has surrendered the right to call himself a conservative.

Justice Davis, writing at a time right after the nation had fought a four-year war for its very survival, a year after the president had been slain by an agent of the enemy, and while forces of resistance in the South were continuing to battle U.S. occupation troops, had it exactly right when he said: "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace."

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is "The Case for Impeachment",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/183865.php

Beheading Desecration Video of Dead U.S. Soldiers Released on Internet by al Qaeda (Video/Images)
A brutal video showing the desecration of the bodies of two U.S. soldiers has been released on the internet by an al Qaeda linked group. The Jawa Report has obtained a copy of the video. The video and images from it are posted at the end of this article. Go to Link for the video.

This video shows the true face of the enemies we fight. However you feel about the war in Iraq, this should enrage you. They are ruthless barbarians who boast about killing those they have taken hostage.

We show you these images so that you will understand what it is we are up against. The video and images should enrage you. If you do not have righteouss anger after seeing this, you are beyond hope. Update: Or, as reminded by Jason in the comments, they ought to at least give you clarity and resolve to defeat them.

Update: John at Powerline laments that POTUS has not followed Putin's example, and ordered the killing of the AQ scum who did this. However, I have received several e-mails from officers serving in Iraq who wanted the video.

One Air Force officer told me he was about to do a brief and wanted to show it to his men. So, if POTUS hasn't directly ordered revenge, I have a feeling the military is about to take it upon themselves to find and kill the AQ bastards who did this.

Vengeance may not always be swift, but it is always sweet.

UPDATE II: Allahpundit over at Hot Air had put up most of the vid that we sent him, but Michelle Malkin asked him to take it down. It was very disturbing, so we understand. Images still posted below.

Update III: With Allahpundit's help, we have posted a shortened version of the video below. Scroll all the way to the end of this post. Very graphic.

Links to original vid will be sent via e-mail to members of intel community, bloggers, or media on request. Please e-mail Rusty (not Vinnie) directly.

UPDATE: SITE now reporting:

The Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq issued today, July 10, 2006, a 4:39 minute video that shows the mutilated corpses of the two American soldiers the group stated to have captured on June 19, 2006. The extremely graphic footage is preceded by an audio clip of a past Usama bin Laden speech, and an audio track from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is heard over the scenes in which the Mujahideen display and prod the corpses.

A message introducing the video states that this video is presented as “revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade,” referencing the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family by a group of American soldiers in al-Mahmoudiya.

UPDATE II:MSM now reporting:
Here is a film on the remains of the bodies of the two American soldiers kidnapped near Yussufiyah (south of Baghdad). We are showing it to avenge our sister who was raped by a soldier belonging to the same division as these two soldiers," said a preamble by the Mujahedeen Al-Shura Council, an al-Qaeda dominated alliance of armed Sunni groups in Iraq.

When guerillas learned of the rape, "they repressed their sighs to avoid news of the affair spreading but they swore to avenge their sister", the council said on its usual website.

"Praise God, they captured two soldiers from the same division as this vile crusader. Here are the remains ... to rejoice the hearts of the faithful," the statement said

WARNING: Graphic description, images & video below.

The two victims, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, were members of the 101st Airborne division abducted by al Qaeda in Iraq. A third soldier died in the attack.

Their bodies were later recovered not far from where they had been kidnapped. The US military now says that their corpses were found tied together with a bomb between them. Three roadside bombs were planted around the bodies. The bodies had been decapitated.

The video bears the logo of The Mujahadin Shura Council and al Qaeda in Iraq. Contrary to reports by al Qaeda and in the MSM, the video appears to show that the two soldiers were already dead before at least one of them was beheaded.

After a brief introdcuction with an image and the voice of Osama bin Laden, the video shows the two dead soldiers lying on a bridge. Both are already dead.

One of the men has already been beheaded, the other man is dead. An al Qaeda member holds the severed head of one of the dead soldiers.

One of the two soldiers appear to have been shot, the other has multiply wounds but appears to have also been hit by an explosive.

The video also blurs out one of the dead men's genitels, apparently al Qaeda believes showing that would be over-the-top.

Later, an image of the now dead leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, is superimposed over the film. Zarqawi had personally murdered several people by beheading and then released those films on the internet.

The entire video has a voice over of what sounds like Abu Musab al Zaraqawi [UPDATE: Confirmed by MSM] calling Muslims to jihad. A nasheed, or Islamic jihad song, can also be heard in the background.

The new head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, had claimed that he had personally "slit the throats" of Tucker and Menchaca. The video seems to suggest otherwise and that the al Qaeda leader is lying. But, it's possible that he happened to be at the ambush. Not likely, but possible. Update 7/11: George tells me that Rita Katz at SITE now confirming that Abu Hamza al-Muhajir's claim is bogus. Not that it took a rocket scientist to figure that out. But it is interesting that the new leader of al Qaeda would want to tie himself to the old leader who did personally behead his victims.

UPDATE IV: And so the media frenzy begins. The NY Times, yes the NY Times actually questions the validity of the "Mahmudiya rape-murder" defense by al Qaeda. More then that, the NY Times actually questions whether the U.S. soldiers accused of the mass-murder were actually involved at all.

UPDATE 7/11: Greyhawk points out to me that my interpretation here is off. The villagers simply didn't know, at first, that it might have been U.S. soldiers. Good point. I would also caution him that some portion of Iraqi locals almost always suspect the U.S. was behind every death in Iraq. Paranoia and conspiracy theories run rampant.

But he also makes a related point in an e-mail to me, that others have also pointed out. When the Mujahidin Shura Council (the al Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq) first announced that they had killed Menchaca & Tucker, they said nothing about the rape-murder case. In fact, the two were killed before the investigation was announced.

http://www.dawn.com/2006/07/11/int1.htm

Iraq seeks end to US soldiers’ immunity

BAGHDAD, July 10: Iraq will ask the United Nations to end immunity from local law for US troops, the human rights minister said on Monday, as the military named five soldiers charged in a rape-murder case that has outraged Iraqis.

In an interview a week after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for a review of foreign troops’ immunity, Wigdan Michael said work on it was now under way and a request could be ready by next month to go to the U.N. Security Council, under whose mandate U.S.-led forces are in control of Iraq.

“We’re very serious about this,” she said, blaming a lack of enforcement of U.S. military law in the past for encouraging soldiers to commit crimes against Iraqi civilians, such as the alleged rape and murder of a teenager and killing of her family.

“We formed a committee last week to prepare reports and put it before the cabinet in three weeks. After that, Maliki will present it to the Security Council. We will ask them to lift the immunity,” Mr Michael said. “If we don’t get that, then we’ll ask for an effective role in the investigations that are going on.

“The Iraqi government must have a role.”

Analysts say it is improbable the United States would ever make its troops answerable to Iraq’s chaotic judicial system.

The day before handing formal sovereignty back to Iraqis in June 2004, the US occupation authority issued a decree giving its troops immunity from Iraqi law. That remains in force and is confirmed in an annexe to Resolution 1546, the Security Council document that established the U.S.-led force’s mandate in Iraq.

Many Iraqis have complained for the past three years about hundreds of civilians killed by U.S. troops and abuses such as those highlighted in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2004.

But a handful of new U.S. investigations into incidents including the killing of 24 people at Haditha and the quadruple murder and rape at Mahmudiya have caused an outcry that prompted the newly formed national unity government to speak out.

Some government supporters have also added their voices to calls for U.S.-led forces to start withdrawing from Iraq soon.

‘CLIMATE OF IMPUNITY’: Mr Michael said a failure by US commanders to hold soldiers to account had fostered a climate of impunity among troops: “One of the reasons for this is the UN resolution, which gives the multinational force soldiers immunity. Without punishment, you get violations. This happens when there is no punishment.”

US commanders insist troops are not immune from justice and must answer to US military law. But officials concede that a flurry of cases reflect a crackdown aimed at restoring their credibility with Iraqis. Sixteen troops were charged with murder in Iraq in recent weeks, as many as in the previous three years.

Four soldiers were charged on Saturday with rape and murder in the Mahmudiya case, dating from March. A military official named them on Monday as Privates First Class Jesse Spielman and Bryan Howard, Sergeant James Barker and Specialist Paul Cortez.

All are accused of conspiring with Steven Green, then a private in the 502nd Infantry Regiment, who was charged as a civilian with rape and murder in a U.S. court last week.

Civilian prosecutors say four soldiers went to the home after drinking, intending to rape 14-year-old Abeer al-Janabi and left a fifth manning their nearby checkpoint. They say Green shot Janabi’s parents and 6-year-old sister, before he and one other raped the teenager and Green also then shot her dead.

Sergeant Anthony Yribe was charged with dereliction of duty for failing to report what he knew of the case.

U.S. officials had said the girl was aged over 20. However, documents obtained on Sunday showed she was 14. —Reuters

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.truthout.org/docs_2006/071006R.shtml

A Day in the Life
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 10 July 2006

Upon reading of the astonishing shooting incident in the al-Jihad neighborhood of Baghdad yesterday, I sat down and attempted to imagine, simply, what it must be like to live in that city these days. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be surrounded by constant violence, escalating cycles of revenge, and a total absence of government control.

Pretend you live in Iraq. The day starts, as it usually does, with you wondering what will happen because of the bombings and killings the day before. Several members of a Shiite family were mowed down by gunmen in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad yesterday, and three others were shot to death in an ice cream shop. A Sunni cleric was shot to death yesterday, and several people died when a Baghdad mosque was bombed. Four children were killed by mortars in the capital. Outside Baghdad, three US Marines died when their convoy was bombed in al-Anbar.

You hear about all this - Shiites killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shiites, the mosque getting bombed and the Marines getting killed - and you know what you knew the day before, and the day before that: someone, somewhere is going to try to exact revenge today for the mayhem of yesterday. It could be Shiite revenge, Sunni revenge or American revenge, but the arc always arrives at the same spot. Someone is going to die today, and you hope it isn't you.

You attempt to go about your business, but that is hardly a simple task. Every neighborhood you pass through is barricaded and patrolled by "neighborhood governments" who are armed to the teeth and murderously distrustful of outsiders. Kidnappings happen all the time. Islamic fundamentalists, once a rarity in Iraq, now patrol the streets doling out punishment to anyone deemed to be dressed improperly.

If your errand is to get some gasoline, you'll be in line for the rest of the day and into tomorrow. If you're looking for food, your chore is equally daunting. Fresh food is hard to come by, and not a good idea generally. Electricity is off for hours at a time, turning your refrigerator into a useless hotbox, and anything you buy will spoil quickly in the stifling heat.

There is no true government outside the so-called "Green Zone" set up by the Americans. Beyond the concrete barricades and hard-eyed soldiers, it is a free-for-all. As you walk, you catch a snippet of the American president bragging about Iraqi democracy on someone's radio, and you laugh to yourself at the absurdity. You laugh quietly, however, and not for long. You don't want to draw any attention to yourself.

You turn the corner into the al-Jihad neighborhood of western Baghdad and head for a vegetable stand a friend told you was good. Before you can get there, you see three cars drive up and stop. Out of the cars pile several black-clad men toting assault rifles, and you dive for cover, and you watch.

The guns erupt and people begin to drop. The gunmen begin kicking in doors and dragging people out into the street, where they are riddled and left to bleed out. You see several people hanged by improvised nooses, and you see others held down and tortured to death with power drills. From one kicked-in apartment door you hear horrifying screams and the sound of a hammer pounding, and you realize that someone inside is being pegged to a wall.

Before you turn to flee, you recognize the shooters as members of the Shiite militia they call the Mahdi Army, which is controlled by powerful cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Mahdi fighters means the ones dying are Sunnis. You count more than fifty bodies on the ground before you duck behind some cars and sprint around a corner. The vegetables can wait.

On your way back home, you hear a distant boom. When you get back to the relative safety of your own neighborhood government-guarded apartment, you hear that two car bombs went off at a Shiite mosque not too far away. You do a little mental calculus: The Shiites gunned down yesterday means the Sunnis who died today paid for that carnage, and the Shiite mosque bombing today means the Sunnis outraged by the massacre in al-Jihad reached out to touch someone.

The electricity comes on for a little while that night, and you tune in to an Al Jazeera news broadcast. You hear the Iraq deputy prime minister for security affairs, Salam al-Zawbae, accuse the defense and interior ministries within his own government of helping the militias organize and carry out the attacks. "Interior and defense ministries are infiltrated," says Zawbae, "and there are officials who lead brigades who are involved in this. What is happening now is an ugly slaughter."

The power abruptly cuts off again and the television screen goes blank. You sit in the dark and think about Bush's happy comments on Iraqi democracy, the words you heard on that radio before the shooting started. Politicians loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr control more than thirty seats on the so-called Iraqi parliament, making any attacks against the Mahdi Army a ready excuse to explode the government. The civil war playing out in the streets is also being fought by those supposedly elected to lead Iraq out of chaos.

You hand-roll a cigarette made of black market tobacco, and you sit in the dark, and you try to guess who will die tomorrow. You hope, as always, that it isn't you.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

-------

http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/2006...82100-1040r.htm

Are the military panels needed?
By Bruce Fein
July 11, 2006


Congress should reject President Bush's plea to authorize military commissions to try noncitizen illegal combatants for war crimes when they are already immobilized indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay.
In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (June 29, 2006), the U.S. Supreme Court held the president's order creating such commissions in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva Conventions because of structural and procedural deficiencies. But as Justice Stephen Breyer emphasized in a concurring opinion, nothing in Hamdan "prevents the president from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary [for military commissions]."
Hamdan itself combined with testimony of then Assistant Attorney General (and now Secretary for Homeland Security) Michael Chertoff disprove the need for military commissions bereft of core procedural safeguards to try war crimes, such as a prohibition on secret or unsworn evidence. Customary courts-martial following the UCMJ are up to the task.
Neither speedy punishment nor national security justifies military commissions, as the leisurely proceedings against Hamdan corroborate. In November 2001, during hostilities between the United States and the Taliban, Salim Hamdan was captured by militia forces and turned over to the U.S. military. In June 2002, he was transported to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention as an enemy combatant, a status later confirmed by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. Hamdan has never questioned the government's power to detain him for the duration of active hostilities. Even if acquitted of war crimes, he would not go free.
Over a year after arriving at Guantanamo, President Bush identified Hamdan as eligible for trial by military commission for then-unspecified crimes. After another year elapsed, Hamdan was charged with one count of conspiring with al Qaeda members to commit murder and terrorism. In furtherance of the conspiracy, Hamdan allegedly acted as Osama bin Laden's body guard and driver; transported weapons for al Qaeda; drove bin Laden to terrorist training camps; and, received weapons training there.
A military commission did not convene on a battlefield to try Hamdan for war crimes based on fresh evidence. It convened years after the alleged wrongdoing and distant from any war zone. Moreover, a trial of Hamdan pursuant to the UCMJ in a Guantanamo facility would not create the safety risks to a surrounding community as would a trial in a civilian courtroom. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 28, 2001, then Assistant Attorney General Chertoff hypothesized but one example of a safety need for a military commission that bears no resemblance to Hamdan's situation: "If it were to turn out that we apprehended 50 al Qaeda terrorists in the field in Afghanistan, the president might well wonder whether if it made sense from the standpoint of our national security to bring those people back to the United States, put them in a courtroom in New York or Washington or in Alexandria and try them. I think as we sit here now there is still a conflict going on in a prisoner-of-war camp in Afghanistan, where some of the people who have been apprehended apparently seized the camp and are now trying to fight with the Northern Alliance. So plainly that is an instance in which the president could well determine that while we have jurisdiction to bring these people back and try them domestically, it makes no sense to do so when we can also try them for violation of the laws of war under the well-accepted principle of military commissions."
Mr. Chertoff added, however, that "our [regular] legal system is terrific and can handle these [terrorism] cases," and, "that the history of this government in prosecuting terrorists in domestic courts has been one of unmitigated success and one in which the judges have done a superb job of managing the courtroom and not compromising our concerns about security and our concerns about classified information."
President Bush's military commissions should continue to be rejected by Congress because they gratuitously create unreasonable risks of erroneous convictions without advancing the safety of the American people. If the president has his way, the accused and his civilian counsel would be excluded from, and precluded from learning what evidence was presented during, any part of the proceedings the presiding officer closes. Grounds for closure would "include the protection of information classified or classifiable; ... information protected by law or rule from unauthorized disclosure; the physical safety of participants in commission proceedings, including prospective witnesses; intelligence and law enforcement sources, methods, or activities; and other national security interests." Further, unsworn and coerced testimony would be admissible, in addition to hearsay.
In contrast, trial by courts-martial under the UCMJ would prohibit secret evidence and require sworn testimony. The reliability of verdicts compared with military commissions would be sharply advanced. And the government invariably wins when justice is done.

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant with Bruce Fein & Associates and the Lichfield Group.

Rumsfeld Says Taliban Will Be Defeated

By Josh White

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, July 11 -- U.S. defense and military officials told local leaders in the southern city of Qalat on Tuesday that the way to thwart an increasingly aggressive Taliban movement is to build a strong government.

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

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Ground_c...tment_0710.html
Ground commanders' questions about detainee treatment went unanswered

RAW STORY
Published: Monday July 10, 2006


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Newly-released documents reveal that requests by military commanders in Afghanistan for the Defense Department to clarify which interrogation methods could and could not be used against prisoners were ignored by the highest levels of the military, RAW STORY has learned.

The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act request, contain a report by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, who was tapped to conduct a comprehensive review of Defense Department interrogation operations.

According to the Church report, military commanders in Afghanistan sought clarification from United States Central Command (Centcom) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in January of 2003. They described interrogation techniques being employed, and recommended that the techniques be approved as official policy in Afghanistan.

Unanswered questions

Some of the techniques described had already been approved by the Secretary of Defense exclusively for use at Guantánamo. Some had since been rescinded. When senior officials failed to respond as to whether those techniques were appropriate, the ground command in Afghanistan subsequently adopted their own techniques as policy, acting on the theory that "silence is consent."

According to a report by Brigadier General Richard Formica, as late as May 2004 Coalition Joint Task Force-7 was operating under a set of rules that had been approved by Gen. Sanchez in September of 2003, but rescinded a month later. The September order included approval of the use of military dogs, stress positions, sleep adjustment and environmental manipulation. All of these techniques were rescinded in an October memo.

The new documents reveal that an officer on the ground tried to confirm the policy in February 2004, asking of the September Sanchez memo "Can you verify that this is a valid, signed policy? If not, can you send me (or steer me toward) the current policy?"

The officer received a reply that consisted of a copy of the signed September memo and no mention of the October memo. It wasn't until May 21, 2004 that, after some media attention, "anyone in [the unit] became aware that the 14 Sep 03 policy had been superceded."

Defining abuse

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld later approved "sleep adjustment" but not "sleep deprivation," which was defined as "keeping detainee awake for more than 16 hours or allowing a detainee to rest briefly and then repeatedly awakening him, not to exceed four days in succession."

Still, without clear guidelines, military leaders on the ground took it upon themselves to invent their own guidelines and definitions for "sleep deprivation."

One commander at Guantánamo came up with his own definition of sleep deprivation - "I define 'sleep deprivation' as keeping a detainee awake continuously for five or six day's [sic] straight."

Based on the advice of military lawyers and an United States Army Ranger course in which soldiers were subjected to days that lasted for 20 hours, a unit devised its own policy on how long detainees could be interrogated. "If it was okay to subject our soldiers to twenty-hour days, then in our mind's [sic] it was okay to subject the terrorists to twenty-hour interrogations."

In at least one instance, a detainee was interrogated for 20 hours every day for almost two months.

New methods, fatal consequences

Evidence in the Church Report also suggests that in developing techniques, interrogators interpreted the rules extremely broadly. In particular, Alpha Company, 519th MI Battalion developed a variety of techniques that went well beyond those authorized. Some of these techniques, including stress positions, were similar to those authorized by the Secretary of Defense in December 2002 for use at Guantánamo.

In an investigation in which Marines were ordered by a superior officer to strip detainees and take their money, an investigator stated that, "the alleged conduct is a pattern of abuse of detainees in direct contravention to the Marine policy of 'No Better Friend, no worse enemy,' as well as the law of war. A Senior Naval Officer's conduct of publicly humiliating these Iraqis clearly jeopardized the Battalion's mission and the Battalion's standing with the public....these acts could have been a "tipping point" resulting in hostility against coalition forces."

A detainee named Awayed Wanas Jabar died in U.S. custody in Iraq after having his legs tied to the bars of a window and a strap of engineer tape tied tightly around his midsection. A preliminary inquiry stated that, "His position resembled that of a person who had been crucified."

According to one Marine, the detainee seemed "exhausted, with his entire bodyweight appearing to be supported by the strap around his midsection." Jabar remained in that position for at least an hour and a half and died approximately 15 minutes after the tape was cut.

Because no autopsy was conducted, an investigation was unable to conclude if the cause of death was asphyxia.

The Church Report also identified several cases in which medical personnel failed to act after witnessing behavior that should have led them to suspect detainee abuse.

The report found two cases where military physicians in Bagram reported no evidence of trauma when subsequent autopsies found severe soft tissue injuries. In one instance in Iraq, military physicians documented concerns about possible detainee abuse in a memorandum dated six months after the detainee's death.

'International law violated'

"It is the Defense Department's responsibility to ensure that prisoners are treated humanely, as the Geneva Conventions require," said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU attorney. "But as these documents show, the Defense Department allowed abusive interrogation practices to flourish."

"These documents further confirm that systemic command failures led to the widespread abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad," added ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh.

The ACLU is calling for an independent investigation into alleged detainee abuse.

http://rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=ht...1101459_pf.html

Army to End Expansive, Exclusive Halliburton Deal
Logistics Contract to Be Open for Bidding

By Griff Witte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 12, 2006; A01



The Army is discontinuing a controversial multibillion-dollar deal with oil services giant Halliburton Co. to provide logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide, a decision that could cut deeply into the firm's dominance of government contracting in Iraq.

The choice comes after several years of attacks from critics who saw the contract as a symbol of politically connected corporations profiteering on the war.

Under the deal, Halliburton had exclusive rights to provide the military with a wide range of work that included keeping soldiers around the world fed, sheltered and in communication with friends and family back home. Government audits turned up more than $1 billion in questionable costs. Whistle-blowers told how the company charged $45 per case of soda, double-billed on meals and allowed troops to bathe in contaminated water.

Halliburton officials have denied the allegations strenuously. Army officials yesterday defended the company's performance but also acknowledged that reliance on a single contractor left the government vulnerable. The Pentagon's new plan will split the work among three companies, to be chosen this fall, with a fourth firm hired to help monitor the performance of the other three. Halliburton will be eligible to bid on the work.

The decision on Halliburton comes as the U.S. contribution to Iraq's reconstruction begins to wane, reducing opportunities for U.S. companies after nearly four years of massive payouts to the private sector.

Of the more than $18 billion Congress allocated for reconstruction in late 2003, more than two-thirds has been spent and more than 90 percent has been contractually obligated, according to the inspector general's office overseeing reconstruction work. The rest of the money, which is collectively known as the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund, needs to be obligated by the end of September.

Army spokesman Dave Foster said in a written response to questions that funding for 11 contracts covering various aspects of reconstruction -- including transportation, communications, water distribution and the electric grid -- will expire this fall. While the contractors will be allowed to finish any work previously requested, no new work can be ordered after September.

Among those contracts is another Halliburton deal, for up to $1.2 billion to restore oil services in southern Iraq. As with the others, it will not be extended.

"The Iraq reconstruction is winding down . . . so there is no need for new contracts to replace the existing," Foster said.

Instead, the Iraqi government will have to find its own contractors to do the work, which includes tackling a large number of projects left undone by the United States.

"This is the year of transition for Iraqi reconstruction. The U.S.-funded projects are being completed and transferred to Iraqi management and control," said James Mitchell, spokesman for the inspector general's office.

That office has repeatedly warned of a "reconstruction gap" between what the United States promised in rebuilding the country after the spring 2003 invasion and what it has delivered. For instance, a contract aimed at building 142 new health centers across Iraq instead produced 20 before the program ran out of money.

The heavy involvement of U.S. contractors in Iraq has been one of the defining features of the American presence there, with private companies called on for duties as varied as guarding supply convoys and analyzing intelligence.

No contractor has received more money as a result of the invasion of Iraq than Halliburton, whose former chief executive is Vice President Cheney.

The logistics work is performed through a subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root Services Inc. Last year, the Army paid the company more than $7 billion under the contract, according to a search of government contracting data by Eagle Eye Inc., a private consulting firm. The number this year is expected to be between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to Randy King, a program manager with the Army.

The company maintains that its billing disputes with Defense Department auditors have been resolved and that its work has received rave reviews from the military. "By all accounts, KBR's logistical achievements in support of the troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan have been nothing short of amazing," said company spokeswoman Melissa Norcross in a statement.

King, the Army official, agreed yesterday. "Halliburton has done an outstanding job, under the circumstances," he said. He added that Pentagon leaders ultimately decided they did not want to have "all our eggs in one basket" because multiple contractors will give them better prices, more accountability and greater protection if one contractor fails to perform.

Halliburton initially won the contract in December 2001. At the time, the deal was relatively modest in size, but stubborn insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched U.S. troops and kept Halliburton busy trying to meet their needs.

Known formally as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP, the contract "has expanded beyond what anyone could have imagined," said Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller from 2001 until 2004 and now a vice president at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. "The KBR people themselves would point out that the challenges they had coming out of Iraq, over and above everything else they had to do, were taxing their systems. You're really asking too much of one firm to be able to manage all of this."

The original contract included one base year with nine option years. The Army says it will not pick up the next option year and instead plans to put out a new request for proposal by the end of the month. It expects to announce winners in November.

The bidding on the new contract is likely to attract some high-profile suitors, including weapons makers Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp.

"These are huge contracts. They are among the biggest government services contracts that have ever been created," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a defense research organization in Arlington. "Most of the big, integrated defense contractors recognize that new sales of military hardware are going to be hard to come by in the years ahead. There's a general migration to services. And no contract on the horizon is bigger in services than LOGCAP. It's just too big to ignore."

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a frequent Halliburton critic, said he would like to see even more companies included as winners in order to increase competition as work arises. But he welcomed the move away from the exclusive contract with Halliburton as a good first step. "When you have a single contractor, that company has the government over a barrel," Waxman said. "One needs multiple contractors in order to have real price competition. Real competition saves the taxpayer money."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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

War Veterans Denied GI Bill Benefits
By Ron Martz
Cox News Service

Monday 10 July 2006

Summerville, Georgia - Andy Rowe thought he had life after the Army pretty well figured out before he came home from eight months in Afghanistan in November 2003.

An Army reservist since high school, Rowe, 27, planned to serve out the remaining four months of his military obligation in the inactive Reserve, get his honorable discharge and then use his GI Bill education benefits to go to college, just as his father did more than 30 years ago.

But Rowe soon realized that, despite his time in a combat zone, he didn't qualify for those education benefits unless he remained in the Reserves or Guard.

It's the same for tens of thousands of National Guard and Army Reserve troops mobilized since 9/11 - the largest deployment of reservists since World War II.

When military benefits were updated in 1984 through a law called the Montgomery GI Bill, members of Congress and even the military did not envision reservists being called into active duty as frequently as they are today. The law did not extend full college benefits to citizen soldiers and terminated them once they left the Guard or Reserve.

But since 2001, more than 500,000 reservists and Guard troops have been deployed for homeland security duties or sent to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet when they get home, they don't get the same benefits as those who were active-duty service members.

"Looking at how the Reserve forces are being used now, it really upset me," said Rowe, called up from the inactive Reserves to serve in Afghanistan.

Retired Army Col. Bob Norton is deputy director for government relations for the Washington-based Military Officers Association of America, which is lobbying for an extension of benefits.

"Under the law, [reservists and Guard troops] are veterans for every single benefit except the education benefits," Norton said.

Primary opposition to changing the education benefit for reservists and Guard troops - those on duty one weekend a month and two weeks in summer unless they are called to active duty - is coming from the Pentagon's Office of Reserve Affairs. Pentagon officials fear changes could hurt attracting and keeping men and women who sign up for the Guard or Reserve.

"It has proven to be a very attractive recruiting tool, and its effectiveness as a retention tool is certainly equally important to the Reserve components," Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs Thomas Hall testified in March before the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

The Military Officers Association has helped put together a consortium of about 40 groups and service organizations that represent more than 5.5 million vets - including such stalwarts as the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Association of the U.S. Army and Military Order of the Purple Heart - collectively known as the Partnership for Veterans Education. Several higher education associations such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the American Council on Education also are part of the consortium. Its aim: to try to persuade Congress to provide more equality in education benefits for citizen soldiers.

The group is pushing especially hard for what it is calling the Total Force Montgomery GI Bill. One major selling point of this proposal is the portability of GI Bill education benefits. That would allow reservists such as Rowe to earn credits for education while mobilized, just like active-duty troops do, and then use them after they leave the service.

Current law gives troops who serve on active duty three or more years to collect up to $1,034 a month for 36 months as full-time students. That benefit is available up to 10 years after discharge.

Reserve and Guard troops can earn 60 percent of that, or about $22,000, if they are mobilized for 15 months - the average length of deployment - and then go to school full time. However, they can collect only if they remain in a Guard or Reserve unit. If they go into the inactive Reserve - also known as the Individual Ready Reserve - as Rowe did, or are discharged, they no longer are eligible for education benefits.

"Right now, it's a double standard. They are treating these reservists like second-class citizens," Norton said. U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) said Marine reservists in his congressional district who were deployed after 9/11 alerted him to the disparity in benefits.

"When I heard about it, I didn't think it was right," Matheson said.

Last year, he co-sponsored with Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) legislation that would enable Guard and Reserve troops who have accrued 24 months of active service within the last five years to be eligible for 100 percent of GI Bill education benefits.

Some unofficial cost estimates of the Total Force Montgomery GI Bill run as high as $4.5 billion for the first 10 years, although the Congressional Budget Office has yet to weigh in with more detailed figures.

Despite its cost, which could become a key obstacle in Congress, the bill now has 140 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, including Georgia Democrats John Barrow, Sanford Bishop, John Lewis and David Scott and Republican Nathan Deal.

"This is truly a bipartisan issue because it's about veterans," Matheson said.

The MOAA's Norton said another measure in the works is an amendment offered by Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) to the fiscal year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill.

This amendment would enable Guard and Reserve members mobilized for active duty to use their GI Bill education benefits after they leave military service.

Hall, the assistant secretary of defense who also is a retired rear admiral, told members of Congress that such a change could affect troop retention.

"The fact that a member must continue to serve in the Reserves to maintain eligibility has greatly assisted the Reserve components as a whole in maintaining consistently high retention rates over the years and has increased the education level of our Reserve forces," he said.

But Norton contends that the Defense Department's own survey data show education is not a major factor in an individual's decision to re-enlist or extend in the Guard or Reserves.

Rowe said education benefits he thought he would receive as a reservist were only part of his decision to enlist in 1996, when he was 17 and still a high school junior in his hometown of Summerville.

"My father instilled a true sense of patriotism in me, and I wanted to do something for the country," Rowe said.

His father, Tim, had served in the Air Force and used his GI Bill benefits to obtain an education degree and become a teacher.

Rowe went to basic training between his junior and senior years in high school and then was assigned to a unit - first in Chattanooga, and later in Atlanta - as an information systems specialist. He served nearly six years in the active Reserve force before transferring to the Individual Ready Reserve.

In April 2003 he was recalled to active duty and sent to Afghanistan, giving up his civilian job as a project manager for a telecommunications company.

"All I wanted to do when I came home was get another job and go back to school. But then when I applied I found out I couldn't use the GI Bill so I had to reconsider things," he said.

Rowe now works for Covista Communications out of Chattanooga and said that the issue for him is not so much the money as the principle.

"I don't think there's anything that will be done to help me now, but I think it's something that definitely needs to be done for soldiers in the future," he said.

-------

Ron Martz writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/38771/

Why Stay In Iraq, Dick?

By Dahr Jamail, TruthOut.org. Posted July 11, 2006.


While the U.S. military futilely spins its wheels in the bloody sands of Iraq, it's the Iraqi people who are suffering the most. Tools

Surprise, surprise. In an interview with John King from CNN last Thursday, Dick Cheney said that withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be the "worst possible thing we could do."

Doing his best to stoke the always simmering fears of so many US residents (let us be careful how we use the word "citizen"), Cheney said of the terrorist groups in Iraq, "If we pull out, they'll follow us."

Because according to Cheney, "This is a global conflict. We've seen them attack in London and Madrid and Casablanca and Istanbul and Mombasa and East Africa. They've been, on a global basis, involved in this conflict. And it will continue -- whether we complete the job or not in Iraq -- only it'll get worse. Iraq will become a safe haven for terrorists. They'll use it in order to launch attacks against our friends and allies in that part of the world."

Lovely to watch how people like Cheney, and the minions who support his ilk, conveniently forget that there was no terrorism in Iraq prior to the US invasion/occupation. And one must love his "logic." For according to Cheney, "whether we complete the job or not in Iraq" his beloved "terrorism" will "continue" ... "only it'll get worse."

Then why stay in Iraq, Dick?

Because when Dick said, "only it'll get worse," if he'd been referring to the situation on the ground in Iraq, he'd have been 100% accurate.

For starters, things for the US military continue to disintegrate. With raping and pillaging being carried out by soldiers who have long since surrendered the war for "hearts and minds," other lesser reported developments underscore the trajectory of the military in Iraq.

According to the Arabic al-Sharqiyah Television channel, on July 6th :


Gunmen shot down two US Apaches in al-Zur village, north of al-Miqdadiyah in Diyala Governorate, northeast of Baghdad. Security sources and local residents said that both gunships were seen crashing in one of the village's farms, and reported that a US APC carrying 15 US soldiers was destroyed in clashes that raged in the cities and villages located north of al-Miqdadiyah. The US Army is yet to comment on the incident, which comes at a time when US and Iraqi forces are besieging areas north of al-Miqdadiyah, including al-Zur village.

This comes at a time when the US military are once again aggressively attacking the forces of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- an action which threatens to spread violence deeper into southern Iraq as well as unifying Shia and Sunni against the occupation forces. Think March and April, 2004 -- a time when Shia and Sunni were, at times, literally fighting side by side against US soldiers in places like Najaf and Fallujah.

While the military futilely spins its giant wheels in the bloody sands of Iraq, it continues to be the Iraqi people who are suffering the most.

Here is a recent email from an Iraqi friend:


Dear Dahr,


How are you doing? I hope you are fine. I'm sorry for not keeping in touch with you, but as you know the situation is bad here and it gets so much worse and worse that words cannot describe it.


I really want you to remember someone named Abdul Razak who you met one day here. He was responsible for the corpses' freezer at one of the hospitals where you visited. This was the man who helped you as you nearly fainted when you tried to enter the freezer. This man, unfortunately, was found killed and his body thrown away on a street on the 4th of April of this year. I met his wife and his five children. The oldest child is a girl who is 20 years old and the youngest is 6 years old. They live in a rented house. The father's salary was the only source of money for the whole family. Now, as he is dead, they have no source of money.

I tried to help them by getting some donations for them from the staff working in the hospital where he used to work, but it seems that it is not enough. Of course for a big family like his, this makes it more difficult. But I hope we can ease their pain and help them manage their life by finding someone who can donate some money. I am wondering if you can get some donations for this family to start a new life and construct a small project to help them manage their life. Thank you in advance ...


I get these regularly, and several of my colleagues who have also worked in Iraq are telling me that they too are receiving requests for help nowadays.

Here is another email I received the day before the aforementioned, from another friend in Baghdad:


Dear friend,


Maybe this is the last message I am going to send ... really I don't have anyone here. I am like a foreigner in my own country. I am really feeling very afraid. I am living next to Al Sadr City and the Al Sadr militia is killing anyone who is Sunni, especially when any explosion attacks the Shia. They come to our zone and take Sunni people from their houses and kill them. They killed one of my relatives. They killed my neighbor, who was only 26 years old. My friend, the situation now in Baghdad is very bad. Do you know that there is no work and no safety, even in my own house? I'm very sad to tell you that I am very tired from changing my house. My family and I leave the house every month for three weeks and we run away like some one who did a crime. What is our crime?


We are in a very bad situation. It is so bad now. Please help, is all that I ask as we need help now. We are living, just waiting for our turn to die ... Please help us if you can ... I don't have any one to ask but you.

So while Iraqis are being killed or fearing death as they suffer through the daily hell that is the US occupation, Cheney, the real force behind this "administration," tells CNN, "No matter how you carve it -- you can call it anything you want -- but basically, it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

Guess what, Dick -- moral and sane Americans "don't have the stomach for this fight" because this fight should have never taken place. And anyone with a soul, let alone a conscience, should be more than happy to see US troops in Iraq "packing it in."

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reports from Iraq.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060712/pl_nm/...DMzBHNlYwM3MDM-

Bush judicial nominee struggles to win Senate OK
By Thomas Ferraro
Tue Jul 11, 9:00 PM ET

The Pentagon's top lawyer drew bipartisan fire on Tuesday for coercive techniques used to question terrorism suspects as he struggled to win U.S. Senate confirmation to a seat on a federal appeals court.

William Haynes defended the Defense Department's detention and interrogation policies for enemy combatants that he helped draft after the September 11 attacks.

"The armed services operate within a tradition of restraint," Haynes, the department's general counsel, told a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing.

"I have, along with others, endeavored ... to develop appropriate guidelines for treatment and questioning of terrorists," Haynes said. "Information is critical."

Yet Democrats and a few Republicans questioned if Haynes went too far, some particularly critical of the recommended use of dogs to exploit phobias of detainees.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada threatened to block President George W. Bush's nomination of Haynes to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, citing a letter from 20 retired military officers who expressed concern about the nominee.

"We'll do whatever is necessary to protect the judiciary," Reid told reporters when asked if Haynes would be filibustered.

Sixty votes would be needed in the Republican-led, 100-member Senate to end a filibuster. Members of both parties said it was unclear if it could be mustered.

Haynes said the policies he embraced did not lead to abuse of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, sand that those actions were not authorized.

Haynes also said the policies were drafted with the Justice Department and input from Defense Department "working group."

But Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), a South Carolina Republican, said, "The working group was a sham" and its concerns ignored. He declined to say if he would oppose the nominee.

An August 2002 Justice Department memo said only the most severe types of torture were not permissible under U.S. and international agreements against torture. This was later replaced with a broader definition.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the military tribunal system set up to try enemy combatants.

Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), an Arizona Republican, said he was awaiting a response from Haynes to a recent letter he sent him. "I'm not blocking it (the nomination), but I have questions," McCain said.




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U.S. Troops Will Benefit From Clarity, Experts Say

By Thomas E. Ricks

The biggest effect of the Pentagon's acceptance of a recent Supreme Court ruling that requires it to abide by the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners is likely to be not at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp or in U.S. courtrooms but on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, military...

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

Army to End Expansive, Exclusive Halliburton Deal

By Griff Witte

The Army is discontinuing a controversial multibillion-dollar deal with oil services giant Halliburton Co. to provide logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide, a decision that could cut deeply into the firm's dominance of government contracting in Iraq.

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

http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=1169

Iraq’s Civil War Spins out of US and Iraqi Government Control

DEBKAfile Exclusive Military Report

July 11, 2006, 7:39 PM (GMT+02:00)

Four essential factors underlie the deadly upsurge of Shiite-Sunni sectarian savagery in Baghdad this week:

1. No one, including US forces, has stepped in to halt the sectarian cleansing operation engulfing Baghdad in the last six months, the largest of its kind the world has seen in recent years.

Shiite fighters, many in the uniforms of the new Iraqi national army or Iraqi security forces, are battling Sunni gunmen, in defiance of their duties to - and the authority of – the Nouri al-Maliki government. This conflict is nothing but outright civil war.

First the two hostile camps fought one another for Baghdad suburbs. In early June, they clashed over the control of streets. Now they are dueling for single buildings that overlook strategic sections or installations in the capital. Some streets are consequently ruled half and half, and any Sunni or Shiite venturing into the wrong end of the street takes his life in his hands.

2. The most powerful military force in Baghdad today is the radical Shiite cleric Moqatada Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia. With an estimated 15,000-20,000 men under arms, the Mehdi Army outnumbers the government’s military and security forces’ strength in the capital.

3. In contrast, the Sunni’s command only a few thousand fighting men. Most belong to the various insurgent groups and Islamist terrorist organizations linked to al Qaeda, which are also responsible for attacks on the American Army and Iraqi officials and institutions.

The Sunni groups seek to compensate for their numerical inferiority in three ways:

First, they are drawing Sunni fighters from all over Iraq - albeit with small and variable results.

Second, they are perpetrating large-scale massacres of Shiites as a deterrent to their militias spreading out to more sectors of the capital.

Third, they have enlisted prominent Sunni clerics for decrees ordering all Sunnis to rally for the war on their Shiite compatriots.

Last week, they persuaded Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi, the most prominent Sunni Muslim religious authority today, who is obeyed even by al Qaeda, to publish a dispensation permitting all Sunni guerrilla fighters to join the ranks of Iraqi security forces and police for the sake of saving Sunni positions in Baghdad. Incredibly, notorious al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents are ready to join the forces pledged to hunt them down, on the authority of an imam of high repute, because they are convinced that the last Sunni stand in the heart of Baghdad is impending.

Fourth, the fortified Green Zone, nerve center of the Iraqi government and high command, and seat of the US embassy and military headquarters, goes on functioning calmly in the eye of the storm of civil warfare and apparently divorced from its violent currents. However, intelligence sources estimate that, after the bloody struggle is decided, the Green Zone will find itself held to siege by the winning side.

The descent of Sunni-Shiite duel in Baghdad into sheer brutality was highlighted on Sunday, July 9. Shiite gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms put up fake roadblocks, stopped cars for inspection and pulled the passengers out. When the names on their identity cards proved the terrified passengers to be Sunnis, they were shot dead on the spot. Altogether 41 Shiites, including women and children, were mercilessly murdered in this way.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that Shiite militiamen committed this slaughter in revenge for the killing of Abu Dar’a by the Sunni commandos of the 37th Battalion of the Iraqi government’s special operations force a few days earlier.

Abu Dar’a was condemned to death during Saddam Hussein’s rule as a murderous robber chief. He was awaiting sentence in March 2003, when the US-led invasion of Iraq began. Saddam then opened the prison doors and let hundreds of hardened criminals loose on the streets. Abu Dar’a, given a new lease of life, took up residence in Baghdad’s Sadr City, joined Muqtada Sadr’s militia and embarked on a career as terminator of Sunni Muslims in the area north of Baghdad. His savagery earned him the soubriquet of the “Shiite Zarqawi.”

The Medhi Army, burning to avenge his death, was responsible for the furious Shiite rampage against Sunnis of the last few days.

This fresh crisis sent prime minister Maliki speeding to Irbil, the Kurdistan capital Monday, July 10, for what was officially designated as a visit to the Kurdish parliament. Maliki went there to plead urgently with Iraq’s Kurdish president Jalal Talibani and the Kudistani prime minister Masoud Barzani, for several thousand Kurdish peshmerga commandos, as the only force capable of saving Baghdad. He appears to have given up on an American forces coming to the rescue.

DEBKAfile’s Iraq sources reveal that the two Kurdish leaders were in no hurry to respond to the Iraqi prime minister’s appeal. They see no profit in intervening in a Shiite-Sunni civil conflict, especially when the Kurdish community is itself split into Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Furthermore, whereas they are not keen on seeing central government in Baghdad collapse, neither are they willing to fight for its survival. And lastly, Maliki offered the Kurdish no real incentives for sending their best troops to fight in Baghdad.

In the absence of a competent army available to stem the bloody spiral of death gripping the heart of the Iraqi capital, Shiite-Sunni violence will probably intensify in the days to come and threaten to spill out into the rest of Iraq.

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=9292

July 12, 2006
Pentagon Switch on Geneva Elicits Hope, Skepticism

by Jim Lobe
Tuesday's announcement by the administration of President George W. Bush that detainees held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere will be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions has provoked both hope and skepticism from human rights activists.

While some rights groups hailed the Pentagon's decision to apply the protections of Geneva's Common Article 3 to all detainees in its custody as a significant breakthrough, others said the administration's past record – particularly its definition of "humane" treatment – gave them little confidence that the move would make any substantive difference.

Indeed, the fact that senior administration officials, including White House spokesman Tony Snow, denied that the decision constituted a reversal of the administration's previous policy against affording Article 3 rights to terrorist suspects added to the skepticism among some experts.

"This looks like a PR [public relations] exercise," said Scott Horton, an international law professor at Columbia University, who has played a major role in the debate over the application of the Geneva Conventions to the administration's "global war on terror."

"Given our experience dealing with this administration and the DoD [Department of Defense] on these issues for a period of several years now, we're best advised to be skeptical and cautious," he told IPS.

Horton and other analysts also noted that Tuesday's announcement applied only to detainees in military custody and not to those held by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in various undisclosed locations around the world. The CIA has reportedly used "water-boarding" and other aggressive interrogation techniques that human rights groups say amount to torture.

"Today's action is a significant step," said Larry Cox, the executive director of the U.S. section of Amnesty International (AIUSA), in a more hopeful take on Tuesday's announcement. "However, we urge that these basic protections [under Article 3] apply to all detainees, including those in secret CIA custody."

The decision, which came in the form of a memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, followed a Supreme Court ruling 10 days ago that the administration lacked the constitutional authority to establish military tribunals for terrorist suspects without the explicit approval of Congress.

The same ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, also asserted that all detainees in the war on terror were entitled as a matter of law to the due process protections guaranteed by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which, among other provisions, bans the imposition of sentences by courts that fail to provide "judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples" – a standard on which, the court suggested, the Pentagon's military commissions fell short.

Article 3 also requires that all detainees be treated "humanely" under all circumstances and bans "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

Until Tuesday's release of the England memo, which calls for "all DoD personnel [to] adhere to these standards," the administration had denied that detainees in the war on terror were entitled to Article 3 protections.

In a February 2002 directive prepared by political appointees in the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the White House over the objections of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and senior military lawyers, Bush ordered that Article 3 standards should "not apply to either al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees."

Instead, the directive ordered that detainees be treated "humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."

The administration has since insisted that all detainees have indeed been treated "humanely" despite a flood of reports by human rights groups, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, former detainees, and detainee attorneys about practices ranging from sexual humiliation and exposure to extreme temperatures to physical assaults and water-boarding, in which the subject is made to believe that he is drowning.

A 2005 report by the deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over Guantanamo, such techniques were reviewed and deemed "humane."

"The problem is, they have hijacked the term 'humane,' and pumped it full of meaning that no one else in the world shares," according to Horton. "They take words that we think we all understand and they give it a secret and opposite meaning."

He pointed to statements by Snow and other senior officials Tuesday as evidence that England's memo may indeed have no substantive impact on the treatment of detainees.

"It's not really a reversal of policy," Snow told reporters, while Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman stressed that, "Humane treatment has always been the standard for detention and interrogation operations of the Defense Department."

Similarly, Daniel Dell'Orto, a senior Pentagon lawyer, insisted Tuesday at a Senate hearing on the future of the military tribunals that the administration already complies with Article 3. "The memo … doesn't indicate a shift in policy," he said. "It just announces the decision of the court." He added that U.S. military forces currently hold roughly 1,000 detainees worldwide, including some 460 at Guantanamo.

Those statements were clearly of concern to Ari Cover, an expert at Human Rights First (HRF) who noted that the England memo, which endorses Article 3, refers directly to Bush's 2002 directive that explicitly denied Article 3 protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees even while it insisted that they would be treated "humanely."

"My question is, how do these two memos square with each other?" he said. "I'm hopeful that they're at least saying we're going to comply with the Supreme Court, and hopefully it's a lot more than that."

He suggested that the lack of clarity may reflect the continuation of an internal debate within the administration between hardliners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who oppose Geneva protections for suspects in the war on terror, and the State Department and uniformed military who have long supported them.

In this view, Tuesday's announcement may indeed have been PR designed mainly to persuade Congress that the administration is acting in good faith and that only minor changes to the Pentagon's military tribunals are needed to satisfy the court's concerns.

It may also be designed in part to quiet popular outrage in Europe – including appeals by a number of leaders there that Guantanamo be closed – at U.S. detention practices in advance of Bush's trip next weekend to the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Still, activists remain hopeful that Tuesday's announcement indicates that the pro-Geneva faction within the administration has gained the upper hand.

"I think it's moving back towards where it should have been all along," said Katherine Newell-Bierman, who covers detention policy for Human Rights Watch. "I think the military wants this; they want standards that reflect their values and training."

(Inter Press Service)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1101276_pf.html

Sectarian Fights Pose Risk to Iraq
Envoy Warns Against Troop Withdrawal

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 12, 2006; A10



America's top envoy in Baghdad yesterday denied that Iraq is now embroiled in a civil war but acknowledged growing concern that sectarian clashes could derail the new government if violence is not brought under control. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad also said the new security crackdown in Baghdad has been a disappointment and is being reviewed to make "adjustments."

"I do not believe that what's happening could be described . . . as a civil war. But there is significant sectarian violence, there's no question about that," he said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ". . . There is a risk that the sectarian conflict will expand, state institutions will be overwhelmed. And that's what needs to be avoided." For now, however, he said the government is holding together, and political parties are committed to trying to prevent a full war.

Khalilzad also warned that a "precipitous" U.S. withdrawal could ensure a sectarian war drawing in neighboring states, disrupting oil supplies and expanding current fighting into a regional conflagration. The next six months will be critical to the transition, he said.

"Given the risks of -- kind of an abandonment strategy for Iraqis, for the region and for the world, we need to do everything prudently we can to help them stand on their own feet, contain the violence," the envoy said.

Khalilzad, who is in Washington to give briefings and organize a visit by new Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, also said the United States and Iraq have set up a new commission to outline terms and conditions for the U.S. withdrawal of troops, bringing Iraq into the decision making process for the first time. Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq, will meet with Maliki and other top Iraqi officials when he returns to Baghdad to begin the process.

Khalilzad's comments came on the same day that two Democratic senators just back from Baghdad warned that Iraq is close to civil war. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), who is ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and has visited Iraq seven times, described Baghdad as "a city in tatters."

In a broad-brush assessment on a day when at least 60 died in a dozen bombings, Khalilzad said Americans should be patient and "strategically optimistic" about Iraq.

Sunnis generally have undergone a "tectonic shift" in their views about the new government and are increasingly turning away from the insurgency. "Many are now considering the pursuit of their goals by means other than violence," he said. Meanwhile, the majority Shiites now understand that they cannot govern Iraq alone.

A new "chasm" also now splits Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda's foreign fighters, he added. Some insurgents have even asked the government to arm them to fight foreign terrorists.

Iraq's leadership increasingly understands that reconciliation with most elements of the armed opposition -- not including foreign fighters -- is both "possible and essential" to stabilize the country, Khalilzad said.

On the ground, security forces have grown over the past year from 168,000 to 265,000. By summer's end, about 75 percent of counterinsurgency operations will be led by Iraqi units, with U.S. forces acting only as mentors or in support roles, Khalilzad said. But he acknowledged that the Iraqi military and particularly the police need to achieve greater readiness. And he said the clampdown in Baghdad was not meeting goals of decreasing the violence there. "It has not produced the results I expected so far," he said.

Khalilzad also noted the significant challenge ahead in the deferred debate on the new constitution and provisions for a federal structure that many Sunnis believe will put them at a disadvantage -- particularly when it comes to revenue from oil resources that are largely in Shiite and Kurdish areas.

Khalilzad, an Afghan American and one of the few Muslims in U.S. diplomatic ranks, charged that Iran is increasingly meddling in ways that threaten to destabilize Iraq. If it persists, he warned, the United States, Iraq and other allies will need to consider unspecified but "necessary measures" to block Tehran's arms, funds and training to extremist groups.

There are improvements along the Syrian border, which has been the main pipeline for insurgents and supplies, but Khalilzad said Syria has not changed its basic policy.

On the controversial issue of eventual amnesty, Khalilzad said there will not be a double standard for those who killed U.S. forces and others who killed Iraqis, an issue on which there are still divisions within Iraqi society.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Administration Says It's Meeting Geneva Convention Standard

WASHINGTON-While acknowledging convention protections apply to
detainees, President Bush hits resistance in Congress by declaring
treatment won't change. By Peter Spiegel and Maura Reynolds.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e5K...Io30G2B0HhDa0ET

Marines Try Lighter Touch in Ramadi
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e5K...Io30G2B0HhDb0EU

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,105160,00.html

Semper Fi Sauvignon
Defense Tech | By Noah Shachtman | July 12, 2006

From the halls of Montezuma to Inchon to Fallujah, the United States
Marine Corps have proved themselves to be the meanest, toughest, most
resourceful warriors on the planet.

Now, a single test remains for this hallowed assemblage of fighters:

Make a rich, smooth Cabernet Sauvignon.

Fortunately, the former Marines at Firestone Vineyards are meeting the
challenge, by producing "Jarhead Red."

The wine is "a robust, full-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon. It was aged in
French oak barrels for eight months. It offers flavors of plum, cassis
and black currant with fine tannins on the finish," according to
Firestone's website. "Jarhead Red is available in 750ml (the Rifleman)
and 1.5L (the Sergeant). Occassional availability on larger formats
including 3.0L (the Sergeant Major) and 5.0L (the Commandant)."

Third-generation wine grower Adam Firestone (CAPT 1984-91) and
vineyard foreman Ruben Dominguez (SGT USMC 1979-84) came up with the
Cabernet in "in 1999 as a celebratory bottling for the annual Marine
Corps Scholarship Foundation Birthday Ball in Los Angeles," Firestone
explains. "Over the years, the wine gained a following by word of
mouth and was enjoyed at Birthday Balls around the country. To meet
this growing demand, the wine was released for distribution, with net
proceeds benefiting the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation."

And, before you ask, Adam Firestone wants to be clear: "There is no
affiliation between the wine and the movie 'Jarhead.'" Instead,
according to a press release, He created Jarhead Red [to] fortify his
loyalty to the Marine Corps and [to] extend it to his skill in
winemaking."

Ooo-rah!

For more on this article please see the Defense Tech Blog at http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002573.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0711/dailyUpdate.html

Iraq will ask UN to revoke US troops' immunity
Allegations of criminal acts prompt the considered action in the Security Council.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Iraq will ask the United Nations Security Council to end the immunity that US troops have from Iraqi laws.

A week after Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, asked for a review of the immunity that has been granted to foreign troops, Iraqi Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael said the review is now underway, reports Reuters. She added that a request to end the immunity could be ready for the United Nations, under whose mandate the US-led forces serve in Iraq, in August.

"We formed a committee last week to prepare reports and put it before the cabinet in three weeks. After that, Maliki will present it to the Security Council. We will ask them to lift the immunity," Michael said. "If we don't get that, then we'll ask for an effective role in the investigations that are going on. The Iraqi government must have a role."

Jurist, a legal website, reports on the US immunity in Iraq.

A decree issued by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) provided that "the MNF [Multi-National Force], the CPA, Foreign Liaison Missions, their Personnel, property, funds and assets, and all International Consultants shall be immune from Iraqi legal process," including "any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in Iraqi courts or other Iraqi bodies, whether criminal, civil, or administrative." When the Coalition Provisional Authority was replaced by Iraq's interim government in June 2004, the immunity language was annexed to the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the US-led occupation.

Reuters also reports that although "Iraqis have complained for three years about hundreds of civilians killed by US troops and abuses such as those highlighted in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2004," recent allegations of murder and rape against US troops in towns like Haditha and Mahmudiya have so inflamed the Iraqi public that the new government has felt compelled to act. The news agency reported that Mr. Maliki said "a lack of enforcement of US military law in the past had encouraged soldiers to commit crimes against Iraqi civilians."


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Reuters reports in another story that White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissed Maliki's comments, calling them a "hypothetical game."

He added, "We also understand Prime Minister Maliki's concerns and we want to make sure he's fully informed and also that he is satisfied, regardless of what the treaty situation may be on these issues, that justice truly is being done, and that he can make that demonstration to his people as well."

The Los Angeles Times reports that Monday the US military identified the five soldiers charged in connection with the rape and murder of a 14-year old Iraqi girl and three members of her family.

At a news conference, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said two sergeants were among the soldiers facing charges. The military identified the soldiers as Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe, Spc. James P. Barker, Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard. Yribe is charged with dereliction of duty for allegedly failing to report the attack. The others face rape and murder charges. They will all face the equivalent of a military grand jury to determine whether they should be tried.

Stephen Green, a former US soldier, was charged last week with one count of rape and four of murder. He is being held without bail. Reuters offers a factbox with the details of the case as is known so far.

The Associated Press reports that an institute which monitors terrorist websites says an Al Qaeda-linked group released a video that showed the mutilated bodies of two US soldiers. The group kidnapped the two soldiers last month. A third soldier was killed during the incident. The video included a claim that the two troops had been killed because of the rape and murders in Mahmudiya.

According to the [Washington-based, independent] SITE Institute, the statement by the insurgents said that as soon as fighters heard of the rape-slaying, "they kept their anger to themselves and didn't spread the news. They decided to take revenge for their sister's honor," the statement said. "With Allah's help, they captured two soldiers of the same brigade as this dirty crusader."

The Mujahedeen Shura Council is an umbrella organization of several Islamic extremist groups, including Al Qaeda in Iraq. It claimed responsibility for shooting down a US Apache helicopter in the Youssifiyah area in April. US investigators had said there was no evidence linking the deaths of the three soldiers last month to the alleged rape-slaying.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the US military condemned the video, saying "It demonstrates the barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life."

But as bad as the news coming out of Iraq may be, it could be worse, according to Rod Nordland, who served as Newsweek's Baghdad bureau chief for two years. In an interview last week with Foreign Policy magazine, Mr. Nordland talked about how information and news were handled in Iraq.

It's a lot worse over here [in Iraq] than is reported. The administration does a great job of managing the news. Just an example: There was a press conference here about [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi's death, and somebody asked what role [US] Special Forces played in finding Zarqawi. [The official] either denied any role or didn't answer the question. Somebody pointed out that the president, half an hour earlier, had already acknowledged and thanked the Special Forces for their involvement. They are just not giving very much information here.

Nordland also told the magazine that while it's hard to hide things like "living conditions have gotten so much worse, violence is at an even higher tempo, and the country is on the verge of civil war," the administration has been successful because "most Americans are not aware of just how dire it is and how little progress has been made." Nordland said "it was not true" that the Iraqi army is performing better and is ready to take over more responsibilities. Nordland also alleges that some embedded reporters have been "blacklisted" by the military because it was "unhappy with their work."

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20060706_kmiec.html

In the Wake of the Supreme Court's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Decision, Should We Opt for An International Tribunal for Gitmo Detainees?
By DOUGLAS W. KMIEC

Leaders of Congress from both parties are anxious to address the implications of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, which rejected the Administration's claim that the President had the option to try detainees by military commission. Notably, the Justices did confirm the President's authority to detain enemy combatants for the length of the hostilities without a trial of any sort. Yet the indeterminate length of a war on terror, and considerations of basic fairness, demand a careful review of alternatives that won't consign detainees to legal limbo indefinitely.

So what are these alternatives? In this column, I'll consider that question.

The Typically-Cited Alternatives: Enabling Statute, Civilian Criminal Trial, and Court Martial


The most simple would be Congressional approval of the President's original plan for military commissions. After all, the Hamdan decision found no explicit constitutional limit on the President's choice of tribunal structure, assuming Congress passed legislation endorsing that structure.

But there's one catch: The Constitution isn't the only relevant source of law here. In Hamdan, the Court seemed to suggest that even alleged al Qaeda members fall under the protection of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, which by its terms calls for a "regularly constituted court."

It is a reasonable inference that Justice Stevens - the author of the Hamdan opinion -- would not find even congressionally-approved commissions to meet the treaty obligation. Justice Kennedy, whose vote was necessary to the outcome of the closely-split decision, left the matter undecided. Congress, of course, could eliminate the doubt by trumping the treaty, but doing so would be politically difficult.

Criminal trial in a U.S. federal court is another possibility - and one that might allow the government to add conspiracy charges that could be otherwise unavailable. Whereas a plurality of the Hamdan justices questioned whether conspiracy could be tried as part of the law of war before a commission, it is plain that the federal courts have jurisdiction over this offense.

After all, Zacarias Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh both faced charges of conspiring to murder U.S. nationals, providing material support and services to foreign terrorist organizations, engaging in prohibited transactions and the like. Lindh plea-bargained his way into a long sentence, which I bet he and lawyers now regret, and the jury sent Moussaoui away for life.

Nominally, both proceedings were successful, but at a cost. Moussaoui's process in particular, took over five years and necessitated circumventions of basic constitutional guarantees. For instance, despite the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, Moussaoui was accorded only a modified right to confront the witnesses against him.

Bad law has a way of spreading, and the Moussaoui verdict now stands as an infectious precedent - one highly capable of being misused even in non-terror contexts. One of the salutary reasons for segregating terror trials into commissions was to avoid distorting the regular criminal process with precedents like these, tolerable only due to particular war-on-terror circumstances.

Of course, one of the other reasons was to have a forum willing to accept evidence gathered by battlefield and military interrogation - which, not surprisingly, does not involve the niceties of search warrants and Miranda warnings. Much military interrogation evidence is simply inadmissible in regular courts - unless, of course, we make more Moussaoui-like exceptions, this time to Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination. Such exceptions, as I've contended, should be avoided.

Trial by court-martial is also a possibility. The Hamdan decision speaks approvingly of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and it should. The UCMJ is entirely appropriate for uniformed armies - on our side or against us - that observe the law of war. But al Qaeda is not among them.

The Geneva Conventions do not mandate, and the Hamdan Court did not hold, that we must treat captured al Qaeda terrorists as we do POW soldiers. Despite its reference to Common Article 3 of Geneva, surely Hamdan did not mean to obliterate any difference between a soldier targeting military installations and a renegade enemy of mankind aiming deliberately to kill or maim innocent civilians. Courts-martial are best reserved for those who fight with honor.

The Alternatives That Are Often Overlooked

In addition to these three much-discussed alternatives to military commissions, there are four more options that are often overlooked.

First, there's the option of simply sending some of these people home (or if their home country will not have them, to another that will). Surely by now, we know enough to realize some do not pose a threat, or, at least, a substantial and specific enough threat to justify continued detention.

Second, there's the option of handing off more problematic cases to foreign courts that would also have jurisdiction. Doubtless, with respect to some detainees, given what we have learned of their hostile intent and activities, it would be imprudent to just release them, even if their actions fall well short of any war crime. If possible, these foreign nationals should be returned to their home country for prosecution under that country's laws. Detainees might well be subject to prosecution for a wide variety of crimes under foreign law, from immigration violations to the forgery of official documents, unlawful financial transactions, illegal possession or acquisition of weapons, and so on. This option, of course, necessarily depends on the home countries' giving the U.S. adequate assurances that the detainees will be effectively prosecuted, fairly treated, and if convicted, appropriately punished.

Third, while the United States has made well-articulated objections to the jurisdiction and procedures of the International Criminal Court, there are other international options. In particular, more serious war criminals might be redirected to one of the ad hoc international tribunals with which the Bush administration has fully cooperated in the past, such as that for Kosovo or East Timor. Dispatching United Nations Ambassador John Bolton to persuade the UN Security Council to extend the jurisdiction of an existing ad hoc tribunal would take advantage of available judges, staffs, procedural rules, and facilities already in place. It would also reassure the world community that we have not stacked the deck.

Finally, there will be some cases where a military trial is preferable for reasons of preserving military secrets. In such cases, consideration might also be given to the use of military tribunals created jointly by the United States and one or more other states involved in an international coalition. (This assumes we have no relevant secrets from our allies, of course.) The joint military tribunals of Nuremberg were effective in bringing even the most heinous war criminals to justice - after World War II; perhaps the same is possible during an ongoing, but attenuated, conflict such as the "war on terror."

The Flawed Hamdan Ruling Still Left the Administration Some Room to Maneuver

As a matter of legal interpretation, the Hamdan ruling was deeply flawed. Justice Jackson, the author of the Supreme Court decision that articulated the limits on Harry Truman's Korean Conflict seizure of steel mills, once said that the Justices "are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final." Here, the Justices, though final, were fallible indeed.

In Hamdan, the Justices in the majority disregarded rather explicit statutory limits on their own jurisdiction -- thereby failing to give Congress proper deference. And, of course, they also failed to give deference to the President's reasonable construction of his authority to create separate military commissions under Title 10, let alone his necessarily substantial wartime powers, both those specially conferred after 9/11 and those historically exercised. Even their own Chief Justice's view - expressed while he served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit - seems not to have commanded their respect.

The rebuffed political branches seem inclined at the moment to simply engage in legislative tit-for-tat, making military commissions law by Presidentially-signed statute, rather than Presidential order. But perhaps, instead of this one-size-fits-all domestic course, Congress and the President should explore multiple forums informed by the qualitatively different detainees presently held in Cuba. Doing this requires thinking outside the box - that is, beyond our shores - to identify the full range of fair mechanisms that are international in character for handling the detainees of an international war on terror.

Is the War on Terror an International Conflict?

Ironically, to apply Geneva to al Qaeda in Hamdan the Court had to conclude that the present war is "not of an international character." To indulge the Court's conclusion requires more patience and suspension of belief than anyone should be asked to muster. Even if one was inclined to construe these rather clear words as referring to a conflict between a nation and a group of non-national radical Islamists rather than a conflict taking place in solely one nation (the President's wholly reasonable interpretation), the President's view, as a foreign affairs precedent, the separation of powers, and common sense, deserved to be credited.

The Court's illogic aside, America was founded upon a document designed to show "a decent respect to the Opinions of Mankind." And like it or not, international opinion is a component of the war on terror. The President has candidly acknowledged the international criticism of Gitmo. Reliance in whole or part upon an international tribunal might be just the remedy to ameliorate the concern of the world community.

And as for John Roberts, it is just important for him not to leave the building - or at least to limit the occasions for his recusal.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060711-110049-8290r.htm
GAO report faults Bush Iraq strategy
By Christina Bellantoni
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
July 12, 2006

A Government Accountability Office report released yesterday asserts that the Bush administration's Iraq strategy is inadequate and was poorly planned, backing up some politicians' charges that a prolonged stay in the country is only fueling sectarian violence.
David M. Walker, the U.S. comptroller general, told lawmakers that President Bush did not give proper consideration to conditions on the ground and said the administration is not demanding accountability for the $1.5 billion per week that the United States spends in Iraq.
Details from the report, which included descriptions of a bloated Iraqi bureaucracy and widespread mismanagement of reconstruction funding, were revealed at a House subcommittee hearing called by Rep. Christopher Shays, Connecticut Republican.
"I am not afraid we will lose the war in Iraq, in Iraq," said Mr. Shays, one of the most politically endangered House Republicans. Mr. Shays is a moderate whose district is strongly Democratic. "I am deeply concerned we will lose the war in Iraq here at home."
Also yesterday, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, suggested that sectarian violence will continue in Iraq because the administration lacks a victory plan.
"After all of our achievements -- and they are real, they are significant -- the larger reality is that Iraq and the success of our mission there remains a prisoner to terrible and growing violence and a lack of a plan to stop it," he said.
Mr. Biden, who has said he will pursue a White House bid in 2008, and Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat, toured Iraq last week and noted a lack of basic civilian services such as trash collection and running water, as well as an increasing unemployment rate that is exacerbating the growth of insurgent groups.
"I still don't see a strategy for victory in Iraq. The only strategy I see is the strategy to prevent outright defeat," Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Reed, the co-sponsor of a failed measure to begin "phased redeployment" of troops from Iraq by Dec. 31, agreed.
Mr. Walker told the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security, emerging threats and international relations that the Bush administration plan lacks transparency, including details of which agencies are responsible for the various efforts in Iraq and how the U.S. role will evolve as more Iraqi forces become prepared.
Most striking was the charge that the administration has not given Congress enough information on the estimated costs and funding sources, making a price tag for reconstruction impossible to calculate because the length of time U.S. forces will remain is not clear.
"We still don't know how long we're going to be there," Mr. Walker said.

The GAO report recommends that the National Security Council outline a comprehensive strategy for Iraq with "milestones" and "metrics" so Congress can assess the progress and the problems on the ground.
Ambassador James Jeffrey, senior adviser to the secretary of state for Iraq, told the subcommittee that the administration is heartened by Iraq's new government and impressed with Iraqi courage.
Mr. Shays, who last month voted in favor of a symbolic House resolution that rejected a timetable for troop withdrawal, said bringing home U.S. troops before Iraqi forced are prepared would be outrageous.
Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, said the United States must remain with Iraq as part of the war on terror.
"We have to be ready and willing to stay the course. That course may take some time," he said. "This is something we can't back away from, even though, I agree with you, there's a lot of shortcomings."
Lawmakers said voters want to know when troops will start to come home.
Mr. Biden, who voted in favor of the "phased redeployment" proposal last month, said U.S. military leaders in Iraq made it clear that they intend to withdraw some troops this year and that Iraqi officials support such a move.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115...w_20070711.html

Divisions Persist on Detainee Policy

Senate Hearing Airs Rift Between White House,
Key Republicans on Prosecuting Suspects
By JESS BRAVIN
July 12, 2006; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- A Senate hearing yesterday made clear that nearly five years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Bush administration and key Republican lawmakers are at odds over how to prosecute suspected terrorists swept up in military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Late last month, the Supreme Court struck down the administration's plan, which called for military tribunals operating outside traditional rules of evidence and without judicial review or congressional oversight. The justices found that neither the president's constitutional role as commander in chief nor a Sept. 18, 2001, congressional resolution authorizing a military response to the terrorist attacks empowered President Bush to set up courts separate from the existing Uniform Code of Military Justice, which codifies U.S. and international laws of war, such as the Geneva Conventions.


Acting U.S. Assistant Attorney General Steve Bradbury (left) and Defense Department Principal Deputy General Counsel Daniel Dell'Orto spoke at yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the legal rights of detainees and enemy combatants.
Yesterday, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England issued a memorandum to the armed forces explaining that the Supreme Court, "as a matter of law," had found that a Geneva provision known as Common Article 3, listing several prisoner safeguards, applied to the conflict with al Qaeda. He instructed military personnel to comply with Common Article 3 -- but then asserted "it is my understanding" that existing interrogation practices and other prisoner policies already do so. He gave subordinates three weeks to review their procedures to ensure they comply with the Geneva provision, which bars not only torture, but also "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "It is not really a reversal of policy. Humane treatment has always been the standard, and that is something that they followed at Guantanamo."

The England memorandum affects only the Defense Department, leaving unclear what safeguards apply to prisoners held by other agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency.

Other administration officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that the problem wasn't the tribunal plan itself, but simply that Congress hadn't explicitly approved it. They suggested lawmakers address it by authorizing the president to proceed as he had planned to all along.

"The most expeditious way to do it would be to essentially ratify the process that's already in place with the military commissions," said Daniel Dell'Orto, the Defense Department's principal deputy general counsel.

But some Republicans joined Democrats in asserting that the Supreme Court ruling demanded more. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican and an Air Force Reserve judge, said the starting point shouldn't be the military-commission regulations drafted internally by the Pentagon general counsel, but rather the Uniform Code of Military Justice, with changes regarding evidence and procedures based on specific national-security needs.

"If you'll adopt that attitude and that approach, we can get a product not only that will pass court muster, but the nation can be proud of," Sen. Graham said. "If you fight that approach, it's going to be a long, hot summer."

In ruling for Guantanamo prisoner Salim Hamdan, the Supreme Court found that the administration's plan didn't afford essential judicial guarantees, such as the right to attend all trial proceedings and challenge any prosecution evidence. Steven Bradbury, an acting assistant attorney general, testified that such rules were "unworkable" because "sources and methods of intelligence...simply cannot be shared with the defendant himself, who's a terrorist."

But Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the Navy lawyer assigned to represent Mr. Hamdan, testified that those rules presumed the defendant's guilt -- and made it easy to convict an innocent defendant. After appearing in military-commission hearings before courts shut them down, Lt. Cmdr. Swift said he found that the procedures "were simply inadequate to ensure that trials produced accurate results." Mr. Hamdan, who admits serving as Osama bin Laden's driver, denies involvement in terrorism.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) recalled that he and other lawmakers had introduced legislation after 9/11 that would have authorized a military-commission system. The White House rebuffed such efforts, fearing that congressional action could dilute what it considered the president's unilateral war powers. Mr. Specter revived his bill hours after the Supreme Court ruled, and yesterday he asked administration officials to prepare a response within two weeks. Mr. Bradbury was noncommittal.

Several Democrats argued that the Supreme Court ruling was fatal not only to the military commissions but also to other administration policies, such as the warrantless electronic-surveillance program, that the White House says spring from the president's commander-in-chief function or Congress's military-force resolution.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) asked if the Justice Department was reviewing other policies "that are also based on the [military-force resolution] -- which has been discredited by the Supreme Court -- so that we will avoid a Supreme Court decision" striking them down.


Mr. Bradbury replied that there was no formal review under way, and suggested the court's decision wasn't the broad repudiation of administration legal theories that critics have claimed.

But even some White House allies weren't so sure. Theodore Olson, a former solicitor general, testified that the court's decision "seriously diminishes the significance of the [military-force resolution] as a congressional endorsement of war powers."

Mr. Dell'Orto testified that the military holds about 1,000 prisoners world-wide. All were captured in antiterrorism operations, with about 450 held at Guantanamo Bay. Ten of those had been charged before the military-commission system the court struck down, but none of the trials had progressed beyond preliminary hearings.

Late in the afternoon, the committee was slated to consider another aspect of the legal tangle emerging from Guantanamo: the president's nomination of Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II, who oversaw the military commissions, interrogation practices and other prisoner policies, to a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va.

As the civilian head of the Pentagon's legal office, Mr. Haynes has divided military lawyers. Some have praised his embrace of the administration's campaign to fashion aggressive new standards for treating suspected terrorists, while others have castigated him for deviating from decades' old military application of the Geneva Convention and other laws of war.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HG11Df01.html

Afghanistan reels under bumper harvests
By Jason Motlagh

Afghanistan boasts two bumper crops this season, and both could be lethal to the already fledgling authority of its government.
Western officials expect the largest-ever opium crop in the face of a toothless US$1 billion eradication campaign. And contrary to earlier pronouncements by military officials, the Taliban are gaining steam in the volatile southern provinces, where fighting has raged at levels not seen since the US-led invasion that toppled the al-Qaeda-allied Islamic fundamentalist movement five years ago.

Forty thousand tons of narcotics were burned last week at a ceremony in Kabul to show the state's determination to stamp out illegal drugs that now account for nearly half of its gross domestic product. This came just one week after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a five-hour pit stop for a meeting with President Hamid Karzai to affirm Washington's full support of his efforts to steer reconstruction and defeat a reconstituted Taliban.

But if US President George W Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad last month to look the new Iraqi prime minister "in the eye" and give reassurances is held to measure, gestures of this scale are exceeded only by the turmoil they betray.

As the war in Iraq usurps the brunt of US military might, the insurgent and narco threats in Afghanistan have arisen at the flank. After diminished harvests under the Taliban, the country now produces about 90% of the world's opium, making it the number one global heroin producer and trafficker. Recent estimates indicate that the poppy crop in Helmand province, a militant stronghold, will more than double from last year, despite the presence of 3,300 British troops.

This comeback is trumped by that of the Taliban, which is waging a fierce campaign to destabilize the south as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces complete a takeover of peacekeeping responsibilities there from the US by the end of July. Since mid-May, more than 700 people have been killed in sporadic clashes. Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, estimates there are 20-25 heavily armed militias operating in five southern provinces for a total of 3,000-5,000 men spoiling to test the resolve of Western security forces - hardly a "spent force" as some officials have described.

Lieutenant-General Karl Eikenberry, head of US forces in Afghanistan, said at a Pentagon news conference last month he was "confident the situation will improve by the end of this year". This view is not shared by retired General Barry R McCaffrey, who last week issued a troubling report after his second trip to inspect US military operations in which he argued circumstances would grow worse before they improved.

According to his report, the Taliban operated in small units three years ago; last year, they grew to company-sized units of 100-plus men; and for this year's summer fighting season they are maneuvering in 400-strong battalion-sized units. When fighting broke out May 18 in Helmand, 300-400 militants bearing assault rifles and machine guns reportedly attacked a police and government headquarters, killing 16 officers, an American civilian and a Canadian soldier. "They appear to have received excellent tactical, camouflage and marksmanship training," McCaffrey noted. The militants have become "very aggressive and smart in their tactics".

That month, Taliban commander in Helmand, Mullah Mohammed Kaseem Farouqi, bragged to The Times of London newspaper by satellite phone of having "between 2,500 and 3,000 men" with "thousands more ... in their homes waiting for [his] message to fight". He also claimed to have "hundreds" of volunteers ready to become suicide bombers, a method new to Afghanistan that, along with a 30% influx of roadside bombs compared to last year, denote imitation of the Iraqi insurgency. More than suicide bombings have been recorded in the past three months.

Karzai is sometimes called the "mayor of Kabul" since his authority is tenuous at best in regions outside the capital. The pro-Western leader nominally heads a democratic regime with a stable currency, but fault lines plague the country. "Afghanistan has never had a stable government," Marina Ottaway, an expert on democracy and rule of law at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Asia Times Online. "An extremely weak government in a large country with a $600 million budget is just not capable of doing enough for the country in the foreseeable future."

Unconfirmed coalition death tolls reveal roughly 20 insurgents are killed for every Afghan or Western casualty, but the frequency of Taliban attacks has increased as it seeks to expand its influence in the northern and western provinces. Eroding security has scaled back UN operations to just six out of 50 districts nationwide. There are further reports that militants have crept within 25 miles of Kabul itself, which has experienced unprecedented spasms of violence recent weeks.

For the second day in a row, multiple bombs exploded in the capital last Wednesday, killing one bystander and wounding 47. The latest attack took place during rush hour, targeting government workers and security forces, according to witnesses. Such emboldened tactics indicate Kabul is no longer an exception to the turmoil that has paralyzed vast swathes of the country, as Afghans frustrated with a corrupt government's failure to deliver on promises of security and economic development look elsewhere.

In the absence of viable economic alternatives, some NATO officials and experts say the war on drugs has reinforced the Taliban's power. Militants have offered to protect lucrative crops, using kickbacks from drug smugglers to fuel their campaign. "Like it or not, the opium trade is a huge part of the Afghan economy," Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told Asia Times Online. "Warlords and farmers may support Karzai in the abstract, but not when he is compelled to target their only reliable source of livelihood.

"Even supporters of the war on drugs need to wake up and smell the coffee ... The anti-drug-effort needs to be put on the back burner at least until we can fight off the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces."

Jawad insists the Taliban relies on intimidation tactics to subdue Afghanis living in the countryside. They include killing moderate tribal leaders and clergy to create a climate of fear, and burning down schools and medical clinics. A United Nations report confirms that on average, a school is torched or a female teacher is killed every day somewhere in the country. In a recent bout of fighting near Kandahar, the US military said several insurgents "used innocent Afghan civilians as shields" to escape to nearby villages.

The latest counter-offensive waged by international troops, dubbed Operation Mountain Thrust, kicked off in mid-June to beat back Taliban forces. The effectiveness of the 10,000-man sweep has received conflicting reports, but Afghan Defense Minister Rahim Wardak recently said insurgents had been "coming out with bigger groups and confronting us directly" since the beginning of the operation. Afghan officials say the Taliban wanted to discourage the further deployment of NATO forces (now at 21,000 troops), spearheaded by Britain and Canada, as they take over security responsibilities from the US, which is drawing down its presence to 17,000 troops from 23,000.

Washington has spent $1.3 billion on reconstruction projects over the past four years and will remain Afghanistan's largest benefactor, but anti-Americanism continues to percolate at a grassroots level. The US military has relied heavily on air strikes to pound Taliban enclaves in rugged terrain, an approach experts say tends to backfire and foster support for insurgents in bombed areas. "Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren't your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesman to become your enemies," military analyst William S Lind wrote in a June 23 United Press International story. "In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42-centimeter siege mortars."

Fifteen innocent villagers were killed in a May air strike, setting the stage for mass riots that rocked the capital the following week when a US military truck hit civilians in a traffic accident. Official reports put the death toll as high as 20 people; aid agencies were burned and looted; and protesters shouted "Death to America" in the streets.

Karzai has long opined that the West has not provided enough resources to hasten economic and political reform in his country, while ignoring the alleged sanctuary given to Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives by Pakistan inside its lawless border region. Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, a key Washington ally in its global "war on terror", has been accused of allowing Islamist militants - including Osama bin Laden - to infiltrate and recruit from remote Pashtun tribal areas, a charge he denies.

Pakistan has already deployed more than 80,000 troops along its western border, adding 10,000 more during Rice's visit, and officials in Islamabad counter the Taliban are regrouping on the Afghan side.

According to McCaffrey's report, the Afghan Army is "miserably under-resourced" to be effective against a Taliban bent on "waiting us out" in the coming years. He said they possessed "shoddy small arms", if any at all, relaying that Afghan field commanders told him they tried to seize weapons from the Taliban for their own troops to use.

The national police, whose US-sponsored training program is three years behind schedule, is in tatters as well, "badly equipped, corrupt, incompetent, poorly led and trained, riddled by drug use" and without infrastructure.

The former Gulf War commander recommends the US provide "at least five years of continued robust ... military presence" or six ground combat battalions and extensive air and armored support, along with special forces permitted "unilateral action" in counter-terror operations.

"The Afghan national leadership," he writes, "is collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years - leaving NATO holding the bag - and the whole thing will again collapse into mayhem.

"They do not believe the US has made a strategic commitment to stay with them for the 15 years required to create an independent, functional nation-state, which can survive in this dangerous part of the world."

Other experts are less sanguine about the future and argue the US has already paid dearly. Indeed, half of the 141 American servicemen killed in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion died last year, Defense Department records show. The BBC has also reported that Pakistan-based foreign militants with links to al-Qaeda have been offering large bounties to Afghans to kill US soldiers.

"This becomes increasingly expensive in terms of blood and treasure," said the Cato Institute's Galen Carpenter, urging a 10-15 month timetable for the Karzai government to take responsibility for its own national security. "Otherwise this could become an endless mission where we're slowly bled. We can't make Afghanistan into a model of stability."

Jason Motlagh is deputy foreign editor at United Press International in Washington, DC. He has reported freelance from Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean for various US and European news media.

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