Month: July 2003
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Salon.com Life | Discontented Americans
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Let’s Blame Canada
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Pentagon may punish GIs who
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Drudging Up Personal Details (washingtonpost.com)
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ABCNEWS.com : Soldiers Stuck in
ABCNEWS.com : Soldiers Stuck in Baghdad Feel Let Down
F A L L U J A H, Iraq, July 16� The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. “I’ve got my own ‘Most Wanted’ list,” he told me.
He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime.
“The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz,” he said.
He was referring to the four men who are running U.S. policy here in Iraq � the four men who are ultimately responsible for the fate of U.S. troops here.
Those four are not popular at 2nd BCT these days. It is home to 4,000 troops from the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. The soldiers were deployed to Kuwait last September. They were among the first troops in Baghdad during the war. And now they’ve been in the region longer than other troops: 10 months and counting.
They were told they’d be going home in May. Then in early July. Then late July. Then last week they heard that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had mentioned them on Capitol Hill.
“The 2nd Brigade is � the plan is that they would return in August, having been there something like 10 months,” said Rumsfeld.
He added: “The services and the Joint Staff have been working with Central Command to develop a rotation plan so that we can, in fact, see that we treat these terrific young men and young women in a way that’s respectful of their lives and their circumstances.”
Solid words from a solid source. Soldiers called their families. Commanding officers began preparations.
�I Don�t Care Anymore�
Now comes word from the Pentagon: Not so fast.
The U.S. military command in Iraq said Tuesday it plans to complete the withdrawal of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division by September, but officials said they could make no hard promises because of the unsettled state of security in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.
“If Donald Rumsfeld were sitting here in front of us, what would you say to him?” I asked a group of soldiers who gathered around a table, eager to talk to a visiting reporter.
“If he was here,” said Pfc. Jason Punyahotra, “I would ask him why we’re still here, why we’ve been told so many times and it’s changed.”
In the back of the group, Spc. Clinton Deitz put up his hand. “If Donald Rumsfeld was here,” he said, “I’d ask him for his resignation.”
Those are strong words from troops used to following orders. They say they will continue to do their job, but they no longer seem to have their hearts in the mission.
“I used to want to help these people,” said Pfc. Eric Rattler, “but now I don’t really care about them anymore. I’ve seen so much, you know, little kids throwing rocks at you. Once you pacify an area, it seems like the area you just came from turns bad again. I’d like this country to be all right, but I don’t care anymore.”
Wondering Why
What they care about is their families. Sgt. Terry Gilmore had to call his wife, Stacey, this week to her that he wouldn’t be home in a few weeks to see her and their two little children.
“When I told her, she started crying,” Gilmore said, his eyes moistening. “I mean, I almost started crying. I felt like my heart was broken. We couldn’t figure out why they do it. Why they can keep us over here right after they told us we were coming home.”
Sgt. Felipe Vega, who oversees the platoon, sat alone in the platoon quarters, writing a letter. A photo of his wife, Rhonda, was taped to the wall above him.
It is Vega’s job to maintain morale. That’s not easy, he told me, when the Army keeps changing the orders.
“They turn around and slap you in the face,” he said.
When asked if that’s the way it feels, he said, “Yeah, kicked in the guts, slapped in the face.”
Losing Faith
The 2nd Brigade originally came to Kuwait for six months of exercises. Then they stayed to fight the war. Like the others, Vega thought that would be the end of it.
“What was told to us in Kuwait,” he said, “was the fastest way to go home was through Baghdad. And that’s what we did.”
But more than three months later they are still here.
“Well it pretty much makes me lose faith in the Army,” said Pfc. Jayson Punyhotra, one of the soldiers grouped around the table. “I mean, I don’t really believe anything they tell me. If they told me we were leaving next week, I wouldn’t believe them.”
Fighting words from men who are eager to put down their weapons.
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Wired News: Upload a File,
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Yahoo! News – Iraq Pressure
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Salon.com | Joe Conason’s Journal
Salon.com | Joe Conason’s Journal
President Bush’s astonishing new reason for the war with Iraq: Saddam wouldn’t let weapons inspectors in.
July 15, 2003 | A “darn good” quote that almost nobody quoted
“We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.”George W. Bush uttered that amazing sentence yesterday to justify the war in Iraq, according to the Washington Post…
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HomeStarrunner Characters
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Pattern of Corruption By PAUL
Pattern of Corruption
By PAUL KRUGMANMore than half of the U.S. Army’s combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn’t have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn’t supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support; Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?
How did we get into this mess? The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn’t an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence.
Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from “people around the White House” urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein. His account seems to back up a CBS.com report last September, headlined “Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11,” which quoted notes taken by aides to Donald Rumsfeld on the day of the attack: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
But an honest intelligence assessment would have raised questions about why we were going after a country that hadn’t attacked us. It would also have suggested the strong possibility that an invasion of Iraq would hurt, not help, U.S. security.
So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the failure to predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence officials were expected to support the case for an Iraq war.
The story of how the threat from Iraq’s alleged W.M.D.’s was hyped is now, finally, coming out. But let’s not forget the persistent claim that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, which allowed the hawks to pretend that the Iraq war had something to do with fighting terrorism.
As Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence official, said last week, U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a “meaningful connection” to Al Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia.
And during the run-up to war, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, was willing to provide cover for his bosses � just as he did last weekend. In an October 2002 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he made what looked like an assertion that there really were meaningful connections between Saddam and Osama. Read closely, the letter is evasive, but it served the administration’s purpose.
What about the risk that an invasion of Iraq would weaken America’s security? Warnings from military experts that an extended postwar occupation might severely strain U.S. forces have proved precisely on the mark. But the hawks prevented any consideration of this possibility. Before the war, one official told Newsweek that the occupation might last no more than 30 to 60 days.
It gets worse. Knight Ridder newspapers report that a “small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department” were sure that their favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, could easily be installed in power. They were able to prevent skeptics from getting a hearing � and they had no backup plan when efforts to anoint Mr. Chalabi, a millionaire businessman, degenerated into farce.
So who will be held accountable? Mr. Tenet betrayed his office by tailoring statements to reflect the interests of his political masters, rather than the assessments of his staff � but that’s not why he may soon be fired. Yesterday USA Today reported that “some in the Bush administration are arguing privately for a C.I.A. director who will be unquestioningly loyal to the White House as committees demand documents and call witnesses.”
Not that the committees are likely to press very hard: Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems more concerned about protecting his party’s leader than protecting the country. “What concerns me most,” he says, is “what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the C.I.A. in an effort to discredit the president.”
In short, those who politicized intelligence in order to lead us into war, at the expense of national security, hope to cover their tracks by corrupting the system even further.