There are only 5 days to go until the Electoral
Uprising...Get it straight, because the Corporatist
Media won't: 1) The Bush abomination had a chance to
wipe out Zarqawi and his crew, presented to them by
the CIA, before the start of the Iraq war and didn't
because of domestic political concerns in the ramp up
to their foolish military adventure. 2) The Bush
abomination was warned by the UN about the 380 tons of
high explosives at the site, and US military of
officers confirm that the explosives were still there
when they swept in. 3) The CIA inspector general
finished a report, back in mid-summer, that names high
government officials who failed the country pre-9/11
but the Bush abomination is blocking its release...The
US regimestream news media is complicit (at best) and
the Bush cabal's
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party
is engaged in a massive vote supression operation in
Bardoground States, BUT there is an Electoral Uprising
coming, and the Bush Cabal, the US regimestream news
media and the Bush cabal's
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party,
i.e., the Triad of shared special interest (energy,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, tobacco,
etc.), is going to be repudiated at the Ballot Box on
November 2...Here are SIX important stories. Please
read them and share them with others. Please vote and
encourage others to vote. The life of the Republic
itself is at stake in this election... They cannot
steal it if enough of us vote...Remember Duval County!
www.mediamatters.com: The media has remained largely
silent on The Wall Street Journal's October 25 report
that President George W. Bush's administration passed
up several opportunities to attack and potentially
kill terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the
start of the Iraq war. The Journal article expanded on
a March 2 NBC Nightly News report suggesting that the
administration passed up chances to attack Zarqawi;
the report noted that several former administration
officials and military officers have questioned the
administration's decision to hold off on such attacks.
While the Bush administration has repeatedly called
attention to Zarqawi, their failure to attack him in
2002 has gone virtually unreported. Zarqawi has
recently made headlines in connection with the killing
of 50 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers and is, according to
the Associated Press and The New York Times, "believed
responsible for hundreds of killings."
The October 25 Journal report documented several
former military officers and administration officials
who have questioned the administration's decision to
refrain from attacking Zarqawi's camp, especially in
light of the mounting "toll of mayhem" for which he is
believed to be responsible:
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who was in the White House as the
National Security Council's director for combatting
terrorism at the time, said an NSC [National Security
Council] working group, led by the Defense Department,
had been in charge of reviewing the plans to target
the [Zarqawi's] camp. She said the camp was
"definitely a stronghold, and we knew that certain
individuals were there including Zarqawi." Ms.
Gordon-Hagerty said she wasn't part of the working
group and never learned the reason why the camp wasn't
hit. But she said that much later, when reports
surfaced that Mr. Zarqawi was behind a series of
bloody attacks in Iraq, she said "I remember my
response," adding, "I said why didn't we get that
['son of a b-'] when we could."
Douglas Jehl, NY Times: The Central Intelligence
Agency has blocked, at least temporarily, the
distribution of a draft internal report that
identifies individual officers by name in discussing
whether anyone should be held accountable for
intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, members of Congress from both parties
said.
The delays began in July, at the direction of John E.
McLaughlin, then the acting director of central
intelligence, and have continued since Porter J. Goss
took over as the intelligence chief last month,
members of Congress said. The delays have postponed
the next step in the process, which calls for the
draft report to be reviewed by affected individuals.
It is not known who is named in the report, conducted
by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, an independent
internal investigator. The review was sought in
December 2002 by the joint Congressional committee
that investigated intelligence failures leading up to
the Sept. 11 attacks. The purpose, that panel said,
should be to determine "whether and to what extent
personnel at all levels should be held accountable''
for any mistakes that contributed to the failure to
disrupt the attacks.
JIM DWYER and DAVID E. SANGER, NY Times: White House
officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of
powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast
Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled
Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not
find the explosives when they visited the complex on
April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.
But the unit's commander said in an interview
yesterday that his troops had not searched the site
and had merely stopped there overnight.
The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second
Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he
did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa,
was considered sensitive, or that international
inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003
to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a
decade of monitoring.
Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for
the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort
Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north
toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make
plans for their next push.
"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't
know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get
involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our
mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping
there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave
that very same day. The plan was not to go in there
and start searching. It looked like all the other
ammunition supply points we had seen already."
Ralph Neas, People for The American Way: “There is
something terribly wrong here. The question must be
asked: is the Ohio Secretary of State using his
position for partisan advantage? What is the purpose
for putting an unprecedented number of challengers at
the polls and allowing them to be concentrated in
precincts?
“At a minimum, this creates the potential for long
lines, great confusion and frustration, and
ultimately, the possibility that many working men and
women who can’t afford to stand in long lines on a
work day will effectively be denied the right to vote.
That’s wrong.
“The Secretary of State should protect the rights of
legitimate voters, not curtail them. He should make
decisions that bring more voters to the polls, not
keep them away. He should clear the path to the ballot
box, not put up barriers. There should be nothing to
fear, and everything to gain, from a massive voter
turnout in Ohio.”
Scott McCabe and Dara Kam, Palm Beach Post: Early-voting advocates are angry that outgoing Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore neglected to
put booths in the largely black communities in central
Palm Beach County. County Commissioner Addie Greene accused LePore of
retaliating against black voters who helped thwart her
reelection bid in August by failing to put any of the
eight early polling sites in places such as Riviera
Beach, West Palm Beach and Mangonia Park.
"I'm not trying to be mean," said Greene, who backed
off earlier charges that LePore's motives were because
her opponent was black. "But the people who were the
most disenfranchised are the minorities."
Phillip Carter, The Washington Monthly: The biggest
scandal of the Bush administration began at the top.
A generation from now, historians may look back to
April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the
war in Iraq...
If Osama bin Laden had hired a Madison Avenue public
relations firm to rally Arabs hearts and minds to his
cause, it's hard to imagine that it could have devised
a better propaganda campaign.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200410270007
Media largely silent on WSJ report: Bush admin
"stopped the military from attacking" Zarqawi before
the start of the Iraq war
The media has remained largely silent on The Wall
Street Journal's October 25 report that President
George W. Bush's administration passed up several
opportunities to attack and potentially kill terrorist
leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the start of the
Iraq war. The Journal article expanded on a March 2
NBC Nightly News report suggesting that the
administration passed up chances to attack Zarqawi;
the report noted that several former administration
officials and military officers have questioned the
administration's decision to hold off on such attacks.
While the Bush administration has repeatedly called
attention to Zarqawi, their failure to attack him in
2002 has gone virtually unreported. Zarqawi has
recently made headlines in connection with the killing
of 50 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers and is, according to
the Associated Press and The New York Times, "believed
responsible for hundreds of killings."
The October 25 Journal report documented several
former military officers and administration officials
who have questioned the administration's decision to
refrain from attacking Zarqawi's camp, especially in
light of the mounting "toll of mayhem" for which he is
believed to be responsible:
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who was in the White House as the
National Security Council's director for combatting
terrorism at the time, said an NSC [National Security
Council] working group, led by the Defense Department,
had been in charge of reviewing the plans to target
the [Zarqawi's] camp. She said the camp was
"definitely a stronghold, and we knew that certain
individuals were there including Zarqawi." Ms.
Gordon-Hagerty said she wasn't part of the working
group and never learned the reason why the camp wasn't
hit. But she said that much later, when reports
surfaced that Mr. Zarqawi was behind a series of
bloody attacks in Iraq, she said "I remember my
response," adding, "I said why didn't we get that
['son of a b-'] when we could."
[...]
[Retired] Gen. [John M.] Keane [then-U.S. Army vice
chief of staff] characterized the [Zarqawi's] camp "as
one of the best targets we ever had," and questioned
the decision not to attack it.
>From the original March 2 NBC Nightly News report:
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI (NBC News chief Pentagon
correspondent): With today's attacks, al-Zarqawi, a
Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda, is blamed
for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. But NBC
News has learned that long before the war, the Bush
administration had several chances to wipe out his
terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, perhaps kill Zarqawi
himself, but never pulled the trigger. June 2002, U.S.
government officials say intelligence revealed that
Zarqawi and members of Al Qaeda had set up a weapons
lab at Kirma in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin
and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to
attack the camp and sent them to the White House,
where, say government sources, the plans were debated
to death.
[...]
MIKLASZEWSKI: Four months later, intelligence showed
Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks
in Europe. The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan,
and the White House again killed it. By then, the
administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
ROGER CRESSEY (NBC terrorism analyst): People were
more obsessed with developing the coalition to
overthrow [former Iraqi leader] Saddam [Hussein] than
to execute the president's [Bush's] policy on
preemption against terrorists.
[...]
MIKLASZEWSKI: And despite the Bush administration's
tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they
strike, Zarqawi's killing streak continues today.
As of this writing, the October 25 Wall Street Journal
report was the subject of a Paul Krugman New York
Times column and two newspaper editorial pieces. It
was also mentioned by CNN Crossfire co-host Paul
Begala, WashingtonPost.com "White House Briefing"
columnist Dan Froomkin, and MSNBC host Keith
Olbermann. No other major newspaper, none of the
network news programs, and no primetime news shows on
CNN or FOX News Channel addressed the report. On
MSNBC, it was mentioned only on Countdown with Keith
Olbermann.
>From an October 27 Sarasota [Florida] Herald Tribune
editorial, titled "Zarqawi's escape: Decision against
a pre-invasion strike should be investigated":
To the long and growing list of the Bush
administration's pre-war and post-war misjudgments in
Iraq, add a missed opportunity that might have averted
much of the bloodshed that has marked the U.S.
occupation. A great deal of the havoc in post-war Iraq
-- car-bombings, kidnappings, videotaped beheadings of
hostages, the recent massacre of Iraqi troops -- has
been attributed to a group led by Jordanian terrorist
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His followers have been blamed
for more than 700 deaths. Yet, according to Monday's
Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon drew up a plan,
almost a year before the U.S.-led invasion, to wipe
out Zarqawi's terrorist camp in northern Iraq. ... Why
Bush rejected the Pentagon's plan is a matter for
speculation -- and great regret. That decision, along
with the administration's overall abysmal preparations
for the war in Iraq, should be the subject of a
congressional investigation. Zarqawi's camp was in a
part of Iraq not under Saddam Hussein's control. Yet,
according to a report by NBC last March, military
officials have speculated that the continued presence
in Iraq of Zarqawi -- an al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist
who had fled Afghanistan with his followers -- may
have helped bolster the administration's case for an
invasion.
>From an October 27 Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial,
titled "Incompetence: Zarqawi, explosives got away":
Two news stories out of Iraq Monday illustrated again
the incompetence that President Bush and his national
security team have brought to the war in Iraq: In the
first story, Scot J. Paltrow, a Wall Street Journal
reporter, tells how the White House prevented the
Pentagon from taking out terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi months before the war began. ... Here you
have the perfect storm of incompetence: Before the
war, the Bush administration rejected Pentagon efforts
to take out Zarqawi. Following the war, the Bush
administration failed to secure 377 tons of high
explosives that could help Zarqawi kill more
Americans. Then they tried to hide the loss. It's
mind-boggling.
Host Keith Olbermann on the October 26 edition of
MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:
OLBERMANN: The terror group led by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi is claiming responsibility for the
slaughter of those Iraqi troops and tonight come new
charges that the Bush administration passed up several
opportunities to take out Zarqawi when it could have,
well before the war began in Iraq.
Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda,
accused of most of the violence we have seen in Iraq
since the invasion. Senior Pentagon officials now
telling The Wall Street Journal that in the spring
2002, the U.S. military had Zarqawi in its sights,
tracking him down in Iraq, drawing up a number of
plans to go after him and sending those plans to the
White House. The president personally -- say those
Wall Street Journal sources -- rejected those plans,
choosing instead to wait.
This is not the first time such reports have surfaced.
NBC News having reported in March that the Bush
administration had several chances to wipe out
Zarqawi's terrorist group and perhaps Zarqawi himself,
but it never pulled the trigger.
>From Paul Krugman's October 26 New York Times column,
titled "A Culture of Cover-Ups":
The story of the looted explosives has overshadowed
another report that Bush officials tried to suppress
-- this one about how the Bush administration let Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi get away. An article in yesterday's
Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on an ''NBC
Nightly News'' report from March that asserted that
before the Iraq war, administration officials called
off a planned attack that might have killed Mr.
Zarqawi, the terrorist now blamed for much of the
mayhem in that country, in his camp.
Citing ''military officials,'' the original NBC report
explained that the failure to go after Mr. Zarqawi was
based on domestic politics: ''the administration
feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq'' -- a
part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein --
''could undermine its case for war against Saddam.''
The Journal doesn't comment on this explanation, but
it does say that when NBC reported, correctly, that
Mr. Zarqawi had been targeted before the war,
administration officials denied it.
>From the October 25 edition of CNN's Crossfire:
BEGALA [co-host]: Today's Wall Street Journal reports
that the Bush administration canceled a plan to kill
Iraqi terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the
invasion of Iraq. General John M. Keane, then the
Army's vice chief of staff, called Zarqawi's camp --
quote -- "one of the best targets we ever had" --
unquote.
Former Bush national security aide Lisa Gordon-Hagerty
tells the Journal there was intelligence that
al-Zarqawi was in the camp and when Zarqawi began
murdering American troops, she asked -- quote -- "Why
didn't we get that SOB when we could?" -- unquote.
Good question, Lisa. The Bush administration says one
factor was -- quote -- "the president's decision to
engage the international community on Iraq" --
unquote.
So, if we could kill the No. 1 terrorist in Iraq
without invading, there would be less support for Mr.
Bush's invasion of Iraq. And so Zarqawi is alive.
Scores of Americans are dead, some of them beheaded.
Think about that the next time Mr. Bush lectures you
about how strong he is.
>From Dan Froomkin's October 25 "White House Briefing"
column:
There's the Wall Street Journal weighing in with a
story about how Bush apparently had the chance to kill
terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi before the Iraq
War, but opted not to.
— N.C.
Posted to the web on Wednesday October 27, 2004 at
4:44 PM EST
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27attack.html?oref=login&oref=login
C.I.A. Is Accused of Delaying Internal Report
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: October 27, 2004
ASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - The Central Intelligence Agency
has blocked, at least temporarily, the distribution of
a draft internal report that identifies individual
officers by name in discussing whether anyone should
be held accountable for intelligence failures leading
up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of Congress
from both parties said.
Advertisement
The delays began in July, at the direction of John E.
McLaughlin, then the acting director of central
intelligence, and have continued since Porter J. Goss
took over as the intelligence chief last month,
members of Congress said. The delays have postponed
the next step in the process, which calls for the
draft report to be reviewed by affected individuals.
It is not known who is named in the report, conducted
by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, an independent
internal investigator. The review was sought in
December 2002 by the joint Congressional committee
that investigated intelligence failures leading up to
the Sept. 11 attacks. The purpose, that panel said,
should be to determine "whether and to what extent
personnel at all levels should be held accountable''
for any mistakes that contributed to the failure to
disrupt the attacks.
In a Sept. 23 letter to Mr. McLaughlin, the top
Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee, Representatives Peter Hoekstra of Michigan
and Jane Harman of California, said they were
"concerned that the C.I.A. is unwilling to hold its
officers accountable for failures to meet the
professional standards we know C.I.A stands for.'' On
Tuesday, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia,
wrote separately to Mr. Goss, expressing concern
"about the appearance that the inspector general's
independence is being infringed.''
Neither letter has been made public, but copies were
obtained Tuesday by The New York Times. In both
letters, the members of Congress cited as evidence of
the delays identical letters sent to the intelligence
committees on Aug. 31 by John Helgerson, the C.I.A.
inspector general. The members of Congress described
the delays as a departure from normal procedure.
A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about the
status of the report. An intelligence official said
that Mr. Goss had asked to review the draft himself
before it was distributed further. The official would
not address the question of who might be named in the
document but said, "No C.I.A. official, current or
former, has been found accountable, because we're
talking about a draft.''
Senator Pat Roberts, af Kansas Republican who is
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not
sign the letter that Mr. Rockefeller sent. A
Republican Congressional official said that Mr.
Roberts did not yet believe that the postponement of
the report was a matter for concern and said the delay
was "uncommon but not abnormal.''
Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for Mr. Roberts, said:
"Senator Roberts is closely monitoring the progress of
the C.I.A. inspector general's report on 9/11. Senator
Roberts has already made it clear to the agency that
he expects to see the report upon its completion."
That Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman had called on the
C.I.A. to release the report had been previously
disclosed, but not the contents of the letter. In it,
Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman said that Mr. Helgerson
had indicated that Mr. McLaughlin had broken with
normal practice and directed him "not to distribute
the sections of the report that identify individual
officers by name.''
A spokesman for George J. Tenet, who stepped down in
July after seven years as director of central
intelligence, said that Mr. Tenet had not been
interviewed for the draft report, had not been briefed
on its contents and had not been asked to respond to
it.
James L. Pavitt, who retired in August as the C.I.A.'s
deputy director of operations, also said he had not
seen the report and had not been asked to respond to
it. Mr. Pavitt said in an e-mail message: "We failed
to stop the 11 September attacks. It surely was not
for lack of effort, lack of focus or lack of
courage.''
"Given what we now know, in all the hindsight of the
year 2004, I still do not believe we could have
stopped the attacks,'' Mr. Pavitt added. "If there is
to be blame, it belongs with me, not with the
remarkable folks who worked the counterterrorism issue
day in and day out."
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.
Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy
Subscribe to MMFA Email Updates
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27bomb.html?oref=login&oref=login
MISSING EXPLOSIVES
No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says
By JIM DWYER and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 27, 2004
hite House officials reasserted yesterday that 380
tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from
a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein
controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers
did not find the explosives when they visited the
complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.
But the unit's commander said in an interview
yesterday that his troops had not searched the site
and had merely stopped there overnight.
The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second
Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he
did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa,
was considered sensitive, or that international
inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003
to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a
decade of monitoring.
Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for
the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort
Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north
toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make
plans for their next push.
"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't
know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get
involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our
mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping
there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave
that very same day. The plan was not to go in there
and start searching. It looked like all the other
ammunition supply points we had seen already."
What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an
unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took
on new significance this week, after The New York
Times, working with the CBS News program "60 Minutes,"
reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX
and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion.
Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi
government informed the United Nations International
Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives disappeared
sometime after the fall of Mr. Hussein on April 9,
2003. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded since the
American invasion, was looted in the spring of 2003,
and looters were seen there as recently as Sunday.
President Bush's aides told reporters that because the
soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives
on April 10, they could have been removed before the
invasion. They based their assertions on a report
broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed
video images of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.
By yesterday afternoon Mr. Bush's aides had moderated
their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the
explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want
to comment on the matter until the facts were known.
On Sunday, administration officials said that the Iraq
Survey Group, the C.I.A. taskforce that hunted for
unconventional weapons, had been ordered to look into
the disappearance of the explosives. On Tuesday night,
CBS News reported that Charles A. Duelfer, the head of
the taskforce, denied receiving such an order.
At the Pentagon, a senior official, who asked not to
be identified, acknowledged that the timing of the
disappearance remained uncertain. "The bottom line is
that there is still a lot that is not known," the
official said.
The official suggested that the material could have
vanished while Mr. Hussein was still in power,
sometime between mid-March, when the international
inspectors left, and April 3, when members of the
Army's Third Infantry Division fought with Iraqis
inside Al Qaqaa. At the time, it was reported that
those soldiers found a white powder that was
tentatively identified as explosives. The site was
left unguarded, the official said.
The 101st Airborne Division arrived April 10 and left
the next day. The next recorded visit by Americans
came on May 27, when Task Force 75 inspected Al Qaqaa,
but did not find the large quantities of explosives
that had been seen in mid-March by the international
inspectors. By then, Al Qaqaa had plainly been looted.
Colonel Anderson said he did not see any obvious signs
of damage when he arrived on April 10, but that his
focus was strictly on finding a secure place to
collect his troops, who were driving and flying north
from Karbala.
"There was no sign of looting here," Colonel Anderson
said. "Looting was going on in Baghdad, and we were
rushing on to Baghdad. We were marshaling in."
A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division
thought they had discovered a cache of chemical
weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of
them came down with rashes, and they had to go through
a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he
wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and
because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in
two dozen places, did not care to poke through the
stores at Al Qaqaa.
"I had given instructions, 'Don't mess around with
those. It looks like they are bunkers; we're not
messing around with those things. That's not what
we're here for,' " he said. "I thought we would be
there for a few hours and move on. We ended up staying
overnight."
Thom Shanker and William J. Broad contributed
reporting for this article.
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=17319
Neas: Something Is "Terribly Wrong" in Ohio
Late Wednesday, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell
issued a directive that, for the first time, will
allow political parties to apportion partisan
challengers by precinct instead of polling site,
thereby greatly increasing the number of challengers
at Ohio polling places.
For example, a polling place serving four precincts
would normally have one challenger from each party.
Blackwell’s directive will now allow four challengers
at that location, one for each precinct served.
The deadline for registering partisan poll challengers
passed on October 22nd. A New York Times story the
following day revealed that the Republican Party
registered 3,600 challengers, while the Democratic
Party registered 2,000. Neither party is allowed to
add challengers, but Blackwell’s directive will allow
the parties to concentrate multiple challengers at
polling places with multiple precincts.
People For the American Way Foundation President Ralph
G. Neas said:
“There is something terribly wrong here. The question
must be asked: is the Ohio Secretary of State using
his position for partisan advantage? What is the
purpose for putting an unprecedented number of
challengers at the polls and allowing them to be
concentrated in precincts?
“At a minimum, this creates the potential for long
lines, great confusion and frustration, and
ultimately, the possibility that many working men and
women who can’t afford to stand in long lines on a
work day will effectively be denied the right to vote.
That’s wrong.
“The Secretary of State should protect the rights of
legitimate voters, not curtail them. He should make
decisions that bring more voters to the polls, not
keep them away. He should clear the path to the ballot
box, not put up barriers. There should be nothing to
fear, and everything to gain, from a massive voter
turnout in Ohio.”
People For the American Way Foundation is a founding
member of the nonpartisan Election Protection
coalition, an organization dedicated to voter
education, empowerment and protection. The coalition
will have poll monitors stationed at voting sites
around Ohio on Election Day, and operates a toll-free
hotline, 1-866-OUR VOTE, to provide free legal
assistance and information to voters.
Read Secretary Blackwell's directive
Privacy Policy | Employment | Copyright & Disclaimer
People For the American Way • 2000 M Street, NW, Suite
400 • Washington, DC 20036
Telephone: 202-467-4999 or 800-326-7329 •
pfaw@pfaw.org
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/local_news/epaper/2004/10/08/s3d_voters_1008.html
Lack of early-vote sites near blacks ripped
By Scott McCabe and Dara Kam
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 08, 2004
Early-voting advocates are angry that outgoing
Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore neglected to
put booths in the largely black communities in central
Palm Beach County.
County Commissioner Addie Greene accused LePore of
retaliating against black voters who helped thwart her
reelection bid in August by failing to put any of the
eight early polling sites in places such as Riviera
Beach, West Palm Beach and Mangonia Park.
"I'm not trying to be mean," said Greene, who backed
off earlier charges that LePore's motives were because
her opponent was black. "But the people who were the
most disenfranchised are the minorities."
LePore said that she had her staff calculate the
distance between early voting sites after Greene's
accusations.
The distance from her office to the Palm Beach Gardens
site is 13 miles, which is about 6 miles from Riviera
Beach, where Greene resides. Riviera Beach is about 7
miles from the suburban West Palm Beach office, LePore
said.
"So they have to drive 5 or 6 miles to vote? Come on,"
LePore said Thursday.
LePore said she relied merely on population and
geography to pick the eight early-voting locales.
"We don't look at putting sites where the Democrats
are, where the blacks are, where the Hispanics are,
where the Jewish people are, where the Republicans
are," she said.
Black ministers and civil rights leaders in Duval
County, which has early voting only in the elections
office, have made similar complaints.
LePore said Greene's accusation is "absurd" because
she has worked hard to "enfranchise blacks, Haitians
and Hispanics" in her years as an elections worker.
"We're here trying to do a job and do it to the best
of our ability with all the challenges we've had,
these storms, and to get criticized is just very
frustrating," LePore said.
Florida Senate Minority Leader Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca
Raton, who sponsored the initiative to expand
early-voting polling places, said LePore could have
put out more polling places in the county,
geographically the second-largest in Florida.
Miami-Dade has 20 locations; Broward has about 15,
Klein said.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102704B.shtml
The Road to Abu Ghraib
By Phillip Carter
The Washington Monthly
November 2004 Edition
The biggest scandal of the Bush administration began
at the top.
A generation from now, historians may look back to
April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the
war in Iraq. On that date, "CBS News" broadcast the
first ugly photographs of abuses by American soldiers
at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. There were images of a
man standing hooded on a box with wires attached to
his hands; of guards leering as they forced naked men
to simulate sexual acts; of a man led around on a
leash by a female soldier; of a dead Iraqi detainee,
packed in ice; and more. The pictures had been taken
the previous fall by U.S. Army military police
soldiers assigned to the prison, but had made it into
the hands of Army criminal investigators only months
later, when a soldier named Joseph Darby anonymously
passed them a CD-ROM full of prison photos. The images
aroused worldwide indignation, and illustrated in
graphic detail both the lengths to which the United
States would go to get intelligence, and the extent to
which those efforts had been corrupted by the
exigencies of the difficult war in Iraq.
Two days later, The New Yorker published a report
on Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh. Hersh won a Pulitzer
Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the U.S. Army's
atrocities in Vietnam; now he had come full circle,
documenting the full extent of the abuses at Abu
Ghraib and the Army's initial efforts to investigate
them. Hersh's reporting-which forms the nucleus of his
new book, Chain of Command-helped launch nearly a
dozen different criminal investigations into what
former vice president Al Gore dubbed "the American
Gulag," the extraterritorial chain of prisons and
detainment centers, stretching from Guantánamo Bay to
Afghanistan, set up by the Bush administration to hold
suspected terrorists. More than 300 instances of abuse
in those facilities, from November 2001 to as recently
as March 2004, have been alleged since then. To date,
eight out of 11 investigations have been completed.
They have produced thousands of documents, witness
interviews, military orders, emails, and PowerPoint
briefings, with each one telling a small piece of the
story of how America's vaunted all-volunteer
professional military lapsed into some of the most
unprofessional and despicable conduct of its history.
Forty-five soldiers have been recommended for
courts-martial, and 23 others for summary discharge.
Nearly one year after the first sadistic acts took
place, the extent of the abuses remains unknown. But
by all indications, the worst revelations are yet to
come. In closed-door presentations before Congress,
Pentagon officials revealed evidence of crimes ranging
from the rape of female detainees to the sexual abuse
of minors held at Abu Ghraib.
There is no doubt that the abuses at Abu Ghraib
stand as an indelible stain on the honor of the
American military. What is less clear is the degree to
which the resulting scandal has damaged our national
security and undermined our efforts to bring peace to
Iraq and win the war against radical terrorism-a war
that is as much a fight for the political and moral
high ground as it is a shooting war that pits American
soldiers against Islamist ones. America suffered a
huge defeat the moment those photographs became
public. Copies of them are now sold in souks from
Marrakesh to Jakarta, vivid illustrations of the worst
suspicions of the Arab world: that Americans are
corrupt and power-mad, eager to humiliate Muslims and
mock their values. The acts they document have helped
to energize the insurgency in Iraq, undermining our
rule there and magnifying the risks faced by our
soldiers each day. If Osama bin Laden had hired a
Madison Avenue public relations firm to rally Arabs
hearts and minds to his cause, it's hard to imagine
that it could have devised a better propaganda
campaign.
The damage done by Abu Ghraib might at least have
been minimized had the administration pursued a
strategy of publicly and sincerely holding accountable
those responsible for it. Instead, it has done
something close to the opposite. The Bush
administration has condemned the abuses as the work of
a "few bad apples," while working diligently to get
the story off the front pages and out of the
presidential campaign. In a meeting with Human Rights
Watch executive director Kenneth Roth shortly after
the scandal broke, reports Hersh, National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice argued that the abuses
resulted not from the president's policies in the war
on terrorism, but from "implementation of policy" by
the military. The various committees and commissions
investigating the scandal have more or less abetted
this line of defense. Discussing the results of the
independent investigation into Abu Ghraib he chaired,
former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger
explained that while "institutional and personal
responsibility" for the abuses went all the way to
Washington, they were rooted in the sadism and
brutality of a few individuals-"Animal House on the
night shift," as he put it. While the military's
civilian leadership was guilty of "indirect
responsibility," Schlesinger told reporters, Donald
Rumsfeld's resignation "would be a boon to all of
America's enemies."
Go past the executive summaries and press
releases, however, and a careful reading of the
reports reveals a different story. The devastating
scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn't a failure of
implementation, as Rice and other administration
defenders have admitted. It was a direct-and
predictable-consequence of a policy, hatched at the
highest levels of the administration, by senior White
House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months
after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed
to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month
from election day, almost no one in the press or the
political class is talking about what is, without
question, the worst scandal to emerge from President
Bush's nearly four years in office.
Defenders of the administration have argued, of
course, that there is no "smoking gun"-no chain of
orders leading directly from Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld to Pfc. Lynndie England and her
co-conspirators. But that reasoning-now largely
accepted within the Beltway-betrays a deliberate
indifference to how large organizations such as the
military actually work. In any war, civilian leaders
set strategic aims, and it falls to commanders and
planners at successively lower levels of command to
refine that guidance into executable orders which can
be handed down to subordinates. That process works
whether the policy in question is a good one or a bad
one. President Bush didn't order the April 2003
"thunder run" into Baghdad; he ordered Tommy Franks to
win the war and the Third Infantry Division's leaders
figured out how to make it happen. Likewise, no order
was given to shove light sticks into the rectums of
Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Nevertheless, the road
to the abuses began with flawed administration
policies that exalted expediency and necessity over
the rule of law, eviscerated the military's
institutional constraints on the treatment of
prisoners, commenced combat with insufficient
planning, preparation and troop strength, and thereby
set the conditions for the abuses that would later
take place.
But there's a reason why most of the
investigations into Abu Ghraib have punted on the
essential question of executive responsibility. To
judge the administration's decisions to have been
wrong, after all, requires us to discern what the
right decisions would have been. And to do that, we
must put ourselves in their shoes. Given the
particular conditions faced by the president and his
deputies after 9/11-a war against terrorists, in which
the need to extract intelligence via interrogations
was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by
international law on interrogation techniques were
very constricting-did those leaders have better
alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is
that they did. And we will be living with the
consequences of the choices they made for years to
come.
Breaking the Law
War has always had its own codes and rules, but
the modern laws governing armed conflict were
developed during the 20th century, when industrialized
nations fought large, mechanized, bloody wars of
attrition. World Wars I and II-featuring aerial
combat, bombing campaigns, chemical and trench
warfare, and the slaughter of soldiers and civilians
on an unprecedented scale-spurred the four Geneva
Conventions of 1949, which laid out basic principles
of conduct for civilized nations. These treaties aimed
to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and
to the extent possible, to minimize the suffering
inherent in war. But like their predecessors-the
prisoner-of-war treaty signed in Geneva in 1929, the
Union Army's Lieber Code of 1863, the 1864 Geneva
Convention, and the 1907 Hague Conventions, among
others-the Geneva Conventions of '49 were
fundamentally backward-looking, reflecting the
dominant nature of warfare at the time: large air and
land campaigns between states employing relatively
symmetrical forces. When the treaties mentioned
paramilitaries and non-state guerrillas, they were
typically treated as bandits who played only a
tangential role in the conduct of warfare. The
conventions wholly failed to anticipate the wave of
unconventional warfare that would sweep the world
after World War II, from U.S. and British-sponsored
guerillas in Greece to Communist-backed insurgents in
Vietnam to the asymmetric warfare practiced by the
terrorists of today. By the late 1990s, conflicts in
the Balkans and elsewhere made it clear that
paramilitaries, terrorists, and other irregular
combatants-far from fighting on the margins-had become
the principal security threat to much of the world,
including the United States. Yet international law
continued to treat them as mere criminals, best dealt
with through indictments rather than artillery.
Such was the legal paradigm in place when al Qaeda
attacked the nation on September 11, 2001. By the
conventional laws of war, al Qaeda was neither a state
nor a military; its operatives were neither soldiers
nor civilians. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the
United States launched its armed response in
Afghanistan-and, almost immediately, legal questions
emerged which showcased the difficulty of pounding the
round problem of al Qaeda into the square hole of
existing international law. Unlike a national army, al
Qaeda and the Taliban militia wore no conventional
uniforms, and often did not operate in conventional
units that could be identified or distinguished from
the civilians among whom they hid. Most importantly,
al Qaeda rejected the very notion of the laws of war,
of protecting civilians when at all possible. Indeed,
the terrorists' apocalyptic doctrine expressly made
civilians-in their view, agents of Western cultural
and economic imperialism-legitimate targets.
The inherent nature of stateless terrorism
presented the Bush administration with another
quandary, this one linked to the desperate need, in
the months after 9/11, for reliable intelligence about
the shadowy force that had just murdered more than
3,000 Americans. In a conflict between states,
captured soldiers rarely possess strategically useful
information; they may know about their own unit, or
the plans for the next ground offensive, but rarely
much more than that. A German corporal, or even a
colonel, was unlikely to know much in 1944 about the
big picture on the Western Front, let alone plans for
V-2 strikes on London. Thus nations at war could, in
the past, usually afford to treat prisoners relatively
well-because doing so did not require trading away
significant intelligence opportunities. The war on
terror-an asymmetric war in which small numbers of
combatants could inflict catastrophic damage-changed
that equation. Unlike states, where the most important
intelligence might concern evidence of a nuclear
capability or the presence of tanks near the border,
the most valuable intelligence about al Qaeda
concerned its plans and intentions. Moreover,
rank-and-file enemy operatives might well possess such
information; were U.S. authorities to capture someone
from a terror cell on the eve of its next attack, they
couldn't afford simply to store him in a jail cell
until the war was over. (Similar conditions obtained
once the war in Iraq shifted from a conventional war
fought largely between designated combatants to an
insurgency fought between American soldiers on the one
side, and a hodgepodge of guerrillas and irregulars on
the other.)
In military terms, the global war on terror
shifted the calculus of intelligence-gathering almost
entirely towards human intelligence (HUMINT) of the
kind that can only be produced through clandestine
infiltration, interrogation, and other means.
Satellites, surveillance systems, giant listening
devices, and ground-penetrating radar won't alert the
CIA and FBI to the next terrorist attack, or tell the
U.S. Army where the insurgents have placed explosives
on the highway between Fallujah and Baghdad. Yet here,
too, the Bush administration had a problem: Over the
years, the intelligence community's HUMINT
capabilities had atrophied considerably, in favor of
"technical" intelligence collection systems like
satellites and electronic surveillance. Indeed, where
the Middle East was concerned, the CIA, FBI, and
military had virtually no HUMINT assets in place
before or immediately after 9/11 to provide
intelligence about the terror organization that had
hit the United States. "At the time of the attacks,
it's possible that there wasn't a single such
[clandestine] officer operating today inside Islamic
fundamentalist circles," Hersh writes in, based on
what he says are extensive interviews with current and
former officials in the U.S. intelligence community.
Writing in the Atlantic in the summer of 2001, former
CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht summed it up this way:
"Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life
don't happen." The only way to gather intelligence
about global terrorism would be to extract it from the
terrorists themselves.
Prisoner's Dilemma
These problems converged with the first mass
capture of prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan
in November 2001. Under the Geneva Conventions,
prisoners of war are accorded certain rights and
privileges-among them humane treatment, freedom from
coercive interrogation, and repatriation at the end of
active hostilities. But the Pentagon and CIA needed to
gather HUMINT from these detainees about al Qaeda and
its global terror network. As the Bush administration
saw it, its choice was clear. Al Qaeda posed a clear
and present danger. The nation desperately needed to
gather intelligence about that threat. Either they
could toss out the rule book and operate by any means
necessary, or America would be attacked again.
Any president in that situation would have had to
go beyond the bounds of existing law. But in truth,
there were choices beyond either action or
acquiescence. Well before Mazar-i-Sharif, legal
scholars and philosophers had grappled with the
question of whether a nation could ever justify the
use of torture, assassination, hostage-taking, mass
internment, and other measures. One course would have
been to open up a series of narrow loopholes in the
law, with tight oversight, and require that top
leaders approve every use of extraordinary measures.
This is more or less what former president Bill
Clinton did during the 1990s, when he secretly signed
an order essentially legalizing the assassination of
Osama bin Laden should the opportunity arise.
According to the order, the president had to
personally sanction bin Laden's death-a measure framed
largely at the insistence of Agency officials who
wanted to ensure their agents would not be found
culpable if anything went wrong. (In the end, when the
opportunity did present itself-a planned 1998 raid by
the CIA on the al Qaeda camp at Tarnak Farms near
Kandahar-the Clinton White House was talked out of
it.)
The other option was to sanction a wholesale
abandonment of the law and delegate the responsibility
for its violation down the chain of command to
front-line troops. And that's precisely what the Bush
administration did. They began with the plausible
argument that the Geneva Conventions were
anachronistic in an age of asymmetrical, non-state
warfare. Al Qaeda didn't wear uniforms or fight
according to the laws of war, they reasoned, and so
they were not necessarily entitled to the conventions'
protections. But the lawyers-including White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales, Defense Department general
counsel William Haynes II, Vice President Cheney's
counsel David Addington, and Jay Bybee of the Justice
Department (who now sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals)-went further. They advised the president to
sign a blanket statement of policy that the men
captured in Afghanistan would not be subject to the
Geneva Conventions, and that by executive fiat, they
would all be declared "unlawful enemy combatants," a
category that does not exist in international law.
White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers
also pushed President Bush to sign a secret finding on
Feb. 7, 2002, that would have far-reaching
consequences for the nation and the world. "I...
determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply
to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or
elsewhere throughout the world," this document
determined, adding that the White House also had "the
authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as
between the United States and Afghanistan, but I
decline to exercise that authority at this time." For
all intents and purposes, these memoranda gutted the
Geneva Conventions.
Within months, those first legal memoranda were
joined by more focused opinions from the
administration's top lawyers, each authorizing
specific tactics the Bush administration wanted to use
in the global war on terrorism. In 2002 and 2003,
attorneys in the departments of Justice and Defense
drafted memoranda outlining what international and
domestic law would allow with respect to "coercive
interrogation" practices, eventually settling on a
list of dozens of tactics, among them sleep
deprivation and the use of stressful and painful
physical positions. Such tactics, argued the lawyers,
didn't run afoul of the Geneva Conventions because the
President had already unilaterally declared those
conventions null and void with respect to al Qaeda and
other terrorist detainees. This opinion also rendered
the U.S.'s own federal war-crimes statute impotent,
because that law defines a war crime as a violation of
the existing international laws of war, including the
Geneva Conventions. To be enforced, that law depends
on the existence of a Geneva Convention violation;
similarly, the Uniform Code of Military Justice
prohibits war crimes, but without a Geneva Convention
violation, there was no war crime.
The Bush administration's memoranda also took an
excruciatingly narrow view of the federal torture
statute, essentially defining it out of existence for
the purposes of interrogations in Afghanistan and
Guantánamo Bay: "A defendant is guilty of torture only
if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting
severe pain or suffering on a person within his
custody or physical control." In other words,
interrogation tactics which accidentally result in
severe pain or suffering were not enough to merit the
label of torture. Only tactics which were specifically
intended to cause severe pain and suffering-and
performed by professional torturers with the knowledge
of how their tactics would affect the body-would fit
the definition under federal criminal law. Under this
reasoning, amateur interrogators (such as the reserve
military police soldiers assigned to Gitmo) could
never be guilty because they lacked the skill and
experience to know the exact causal links between
their tactics and the pain and suffering those tactics
would cause. The Justice Department also took the view
that only someone who specifically intended to cause
extreme pain and suffering, on the level of organ
failure and death, would be guilty. This
interpretation set a bar so high that virtually no
prosecutor would ever be able to meet it in court, and
opened the door to any use of coercive interrogation
tactics that fell just shy of the "severe pain and
suffering" threshhold. Justice's interpretation
ensured no U.S. defendants would ever face torture
charges and made the U.N. Convention Against Torture a
dead letter too.
The Bush administration also chose Guantánamo as
the site to hold detainees specifically because it was
thought to be outside the reach of U.S. courts-and it
was, until the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that
detainees there had the right to ask a federal court
for a writ of habeas corpus. In addition, the federal
anti-torture statute excluded from jurisdiction
military bases and diplomatic missions, such as
Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, a loophole that would
remain open until October 2004 when Congress closed
it. Thus, in addition to stripping the detainees
themselves of rights, the administration picked a
place where the law simply had no force-Gitmo provided
the perfect legal black hole in which to house
detainees and practice the dark arts of interrogation.
One of the problems cited by the Schlesinger
report was the disconnect between tactics authorized
at Guantánamo, where "unlawful enemy combatants" were
held and the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and the
tactics authorized in Iraq where the president had
said the Geneva Conventions did apply. As guidance
from the top filtered down through several layers of
command, it became unclear which methods were
appropriate for which location, an ambiguity
compounded by the movement of individual interrogators
and guard force personnel between the two physical
locations. One fateful decision was the one to
"Gitmoize" the prison operation in Iraq in August
2003, a response to the blooming insurgency there and
the failure of the U.S. military prisons in Iraq to
produce intelligence about the insurgency. The
Pentagon brought Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the head
of the Guantánamo Bay facility, to Iraq to make
recommendations on how better to squeeze detainees for
information. His prescription: "Detention operations
must act as an enabler for interrogation... to provide
a safe, secure and humane environment that supports
the expeditious collection of intelligence." Miller
imported a number of the non-Geneva Convention
techniques from Cuba to Iraq to assist interrogators
in gathering information, and by so doing reportedly
turned on a spigot of human intelligence, leading,
among other things, to the capture of Saddam Hussein.
But in his own investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses,
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba reported that this extension
of Gitmo tactics to Iraq had only exacerbated
confusion about what the Geneva Conventions did and
did not authorize, and where Geneva applied, to the
point that intelligence officers and military lawyers
could not define any recognizable lines between the
two modes of interrogation. Under the circumstances,
it was almost inevitable that the techniques
authorized for Gitmo would migrate over to Abu Ghraib.
The investigation by Maj. Gen. George Fay and Lt.
Gen. Anthony Jones, which looked at the role of
military intelligence units in the abuse scandals,
backed up Taguba's findings. According to Gen. Paul
Kern, who oversaw the Fay-Jones inquiry, "the people
who were conducting the interrogations clearly were
feeling a lot of pressure to produce intelligence, as
they should have been. That's what the purpose of the
interrogation is." But when they sought policy
guidance and legal advice about what they could do to
produce intelligence, they got directives back from
headquarters "which were never in our view completely
clarified ... in the end, [headquarters] did not
absolutely make it clear what the boundaries were." An
after-action report on the "legal lessons learned"
from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, authored by the
Army's Judge Advocate General ("JAG") school, found
the same thing: "Detainees are a potential source of
valuable information, and the motivation to extract
that information through interrogation may sometimes
create strong temptation to test the limits of the
[law of armed conflict]. Questions often concerned the
legality of specific proposed interrogation
techniques." Army officers tend to understate these
things, especially in after-action reports, so it's no
surprise that Gen. Kern and the JAG school phrase
their findings so circumspectly. But don't be fooled:
This is the military equivalent of shouting from the
rooftops.
The memos had another practical effect, which was
the evisceration of any legal opposition from the
ranks to the proposed methods of interrogations.
Military units of a certain size are staffed with JAG
officers, chaplains, and other professionals who
typically serve as a unit's legal and ethical
conscience. In formal and informal ways, they vet
operational plans to ensure missions comply with the
laws of war. According to Army doctrine, operational
orders at the brigade level and above must contain an
annex covering the legal implications of the plan,
procedures for dealing with prisoners, and other
issues. It's not clear to what extent the actions at
Abu Ghraib were subjected to this sort of scrutiny
before they were implemented. But even if a young JAG
officer were to raise objections in the field, it's
unlikely they would have gone anywhere. The memoranda
from the White House-signed by the
commander-in-chief's top lawyer -stamped the
interrogation tactics with the imprimatur of legality,
ensuring that any dissent from the field would have
been ignored.
Finally, the memos directly affected the junior
soldiers, like Pfc. England, who now stand accused of
torturing Iraqi prisoners. Every new soldier learns in
basic training that he or she must follow lawful
orders when they are given. But they also learn they
must disobey orders-to kill innocent civilians, for
example, or torture detainees-that are unlawful, and
they cannot invoke "superior orders" as a defense when
those orders are illegal. The junior soldiers now
charged with abuses at Abu Ghraib should have objected
to any orders to abuse prisoners, because they were
patently immoral and unlawful. But in reality, that's
easier said than done. After all, the orders to
interrogate prisoners by coercion had come from the
very highest levels of the administration.
They had been filtered through every level of the
chain of command without objection. Senior
administration lawyers with Ivy League credentials and
decades of experience had approved these procedures,
including some that were startlingly close to those
depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as the
use of stress positions and hoods. It may be
unrealistic to expect that a junior enlisted soldier
such as England, or even her immediate supervisor,
Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, would have the knowledge or
the temerity to contradict such orders when they were
given. The effect of the Bush administration's
exhaustively creative research into breaking the rules
was virtually to ensure that every player in this
tragedy went along and followed orders.
Unintended Consequences
Two other decisions by the Bush administration
also proved fateful, both of them made long before the
Iraq war began. One was the administration's
attempt-directed by Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld-to run the Iraq war with fewer soldiers in
place than considered military opinion believed
necessary. The resulting shortage of troops set the
conditions for abuse at the prison. The after-action
report by the Army's JAG school specifically blames
troop shortages for the chaotic and disorganized
detainee operations in Iraq, sharply criticizing the
decision to delay the deployment of the 800th Military
Police Brigade-the unit responsible for Abu
Ghraib-until well after combat had begun. From the
moment it touched ground, the 800th was behind the
eight ball, and it's not clear the brigade ever got a
handle on the detainee mission.
"There was chaos at Abu Ghraib... there was a very
low ratio of military police to the number of inmates,
which ranged as high as 8,000," Schlesinger noted in
announcing his panels' findings last summer. "At
Guantánamo, which is something of a model, the ratio
of military police to detainees was one to one. At Abu
Ghraib, the ratio of military police was one to 75."
Add in the pressure from the Bush administration to
produce intelligence, and take away the legal
constraints of the Geneva Conventions, and you can
appreciate what a pressure cooker Abu Ghraib became.
Even had there been no bad apples in the 372nd MP
Company, with which Pfc. England served, abuses were
almost inevitable.
The second fateful decision was to rush those
troops that were allocated to Operation Iraqi Freedom
into battle too quickly. During the first Gulf War,
military planners set aside months to build a war
machine in the Arabian desert, allowing units to
stabilize and train together at length before the
start of hostilities-time that was especially valuable
to the hundreds of thousands of reservists called up
for the war. (Indeed, it's worth noting that, although
American soldiers took as prisoners tens of thousands
of Iraqis soldiers during the first Gulf War,
allegations of abuse were sparse.) But the second Gulf
War was launched in a hurry, even before most of the
forces assigned to it were in place. Many have pointed
out that, had the Bush administration not "rushed to
war," U.N. inspectors might have been able to show
that Iraq had no WMD capability; at the very least,
the White House would have had time to line up more
support from our allies. Less widely understood is
that a longer delay would have given military police
and civil affairs units-most of which come from the
reserves-time to arrive, acclimate, and train longer
together, bringing them up to readiness levels
approaching those of active duty troops.
The situation in Iraq deteriorated rapidly after
the United States took Baghdad, with the result that
reserve units had to be called up and immediately
thrown into the fight. The 372nd MP Company hit the
ground in Kuwait in May 2003, and was immediately sent
into Iraq to patrol the town of Al-Hillah with Marines
and Iraqi police units. Although its soldiers received
pre-deployment training in the states after their
February 2003 call-up, they received nothing like the
pre-war training of their active-duty brethren in the
Third Infantry Division, some of whom spent a year in
the Kuwaiti desert before actually crossing into Iraq
in March 2003. When the 372nd went into combat, it was
not ready for war. Perhaps more importantly, the 372nd
MP Company's training records indicates that it barely
trained at all on handling prisoners of war, let alone
managing a maximum-security prison even though
"internment and resettlement" operations are a bread
and butter MP mission. The Taguba report found that
this unit and its parent headquarters-the 320th MP
Battalion and 800th MP Brigade, both reserve
units-suffered from chronically poor training,
resourcing, and leadership. These problems within the
MP units combined with atrocious planning and
resourcing decisions in Washington to create a formula
for disaster.
Creative Tactics
The duty force at Abu Ghraib, then, had ambiguous
policy guidance from Washington, too few men, and too
little training. What happened next should hardly have
been a surprise. Take, for example, the guards'
implementation of the interrogation practices
authorized by the Pentagon. Interrogation tactics like
"sleep deprivation" sound entirely too sterile when
taken out of context-after all, who hasn't been
deprived of sleep, whether by a newborn baby or a
last-minute project at work? What's crucial to
understand is how such methods are translated into
practice in the field. As Hersh writes:
In May 2004, I interviewed a company captain in a
military police unit in Baghdad who told me about an
incident the previous fall in which he was approached
by a junior military intelligence officer who
requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees
awake around the clock until they began talking. "I
said, 'No, we will not do that,'" the captain said.
"The M.I. commander comes to me and says, 'What is the
problem? We're stressed, and all we are asking you to
do is to keep them awake.' I ask, 'How? You've
received training on that, but my soldiers don't know
how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old
kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn't know how to
do it, he's going to get creative.'"
What, exactly, does "creative" mean? Consider the
iconic image of Abu Ghraib: a hooded Iraqi man
standing on an Army rations box with wires extending
from his arms in a grotesque pose almost reminiscent
of a crucifixion. It turns out that this was among the
tactics employed by untrained prison guards and
interrogators as a means both of instilling fear and
of keeping a detainee awake, in faithful execution of
the "sleep deprivation" tactic authorized by the
secretary of defense. Even though the wires were
actually inert, the detainee was likely told that he
would be electrocuted if he moved off the box, which
he would do if he fell asleep. And thus, so
modestly-named a tactic as sleep deprivation was
transformed into something far more sinister. The same
tactic could be used in conjunction with the "stress
position" technique approved by the Pentagon,
according to one former intelligence officer I talked
to. A hooded person forced to stand still on a box for
hours will quickly lose his sense of equilibrium and
orientation. Lower back pain will eventually develop
from the strain of remaining upright for such a long
time; pain in the legs and feet will follow as blood
pools there. Held for several hours without movement,
such a position can induce excruciating pain,
particularly for detainees not in top physical
condition. When the image first surfaced, these
officers said they were not surprised by the tactic.
It was merely a creative attempt by amateurs to
achieve the results desired by their leaders-an
unfortunate twist on the old maxim of Gen. George S.
Patton: "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them
what to do, and they will surprise you with their
ingenuity."
Weighing Torture
There are few slopes more slippery than the one
from small war crimes to large ones, as evidenced by
the incremental movement of U.S. interrogation tactics
from "a little bit of smacky face," as one
intelligence officer described the
officially-sanctioned tactics at Gitmo to The Wall
Street Journal, to the abuses depicted in the Abu
Ghraib photographs. For decades, the laws of war have
stood as a braking point on this slippery slope,
establishing bright-line rules about what is forbidden
even in the heat of combat. Generally speaking,
absolute rules are the only ones that work well in
wartime. Where only vague guidance exists, junior
military leaders may exploit ambiguity to employ
tactics that fall outside the boundaries of acceptable
conduct. In war, there is always some battlefield
exigency or necessity which can be invoked as a
justification before or after the fact. It's one thing
to argue that there was a compelling need for these
tactics, and that therefore they were implicitly
authorized in certain situations but always tightly
controlled; it's quite another to loosen the rules
altogether and let junior soldiers take the initiative
to do what they think must be done.
If our political leaders decide that Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed needs to be immersed in water so that he
spills his guts about the next terror plot, I can
accept that-and I suspect the rest of the world could,
too. But those who take action should also take
responsibility for it. Our soldiers need a better
legal framework to deal with these situations, one
that gives commanders the flexibility to do what must
be done while not stepping on our values or hurting
our strategic interests in the process.
First and foremost, the framework should maintain
existing rules about treating prisoners, because those
should govern all but the most extraordinary of cases.
Second, when a departure is necessary, we should
require authorization from the White House and
Pentagon articulating both the scope of the
authorization and the justification for doing so. Such
authorizations might mirror the kind of court
documents required of the Justice Department when it
applies for a secret warrant under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act. This will let our
soldiers know why they are breaking the rules, and
minimize the cognitive dissonance that led to so much
confusion at Abu Ghraib about what was allowed and
forbidden. Third, the services should actively rely on
their lawyers, chaplains and career non-commissioned
officers to serve as the legal, moral and
institutional checks respectively on this kind of
activity. All three of these systems failed at Abu
Ghraib. Fourth, to the extent practical, we must add
some measure of transparency to detention operations.
The military can't publicize exactly what it's doing
to interrogate prisoners, because that would destroy
the value of these methods, but we should recognize
the value of good publicity and let the Red Cross see
as much as possible.
Finally, the nation's political leaders must
constantly reevaluate these departures from the law,
to ensure we are getting something in exchange for our
calculated decision to break the law. A measured
approach to this problem will ensure that breaches of
international law, if they must occur, will take place
in an orderly and disciplined manner, allowing
soldiers to resume their normal treatment of prisoners
immediately afterwards. What's wrong is to loosen the
restrictions across the board or abandon them
altogether; once discipline is lost, it is nearly
impossible to restore.
There's a reason why career military officers are
among those who have expressed the greatest revulsion
over the Bush administration's cavalier treatment of
the laws of war. These officers aren't soft-minded
idealists who believe in the rule of law for its own
sake. Quite the contrary; three generations of
military officers have grown up respecting the Geneva
Conventions for extremely practical reasons. When the
administration publicly declared in February 2002 that
those conventions would not apply to the detainees at
Guantánamo Bay, many of America's soldiers worried
that this policy would be reciprocated by our nation's
enemies, should Americans themselves ever be captured
in a future conflict. It is worth noting that
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who saw combat in
Vietnam and helped run the first Gulf War, strongly
opposed this move, as did his chief legal adviser,
William Howard Taft IV. The principle of reciprocity
has long served as one of the chief mechanisms for
compliance with the laws of war. The Bush
administration's approach has put future generations
of U.S. military personnel in grave risk of
mistreatment.
But our overriding of international law has also
had much broader implications for U.S. interests.
Although America's record in establishing and
complying with the laws of war has stood the test of
time, the rhetoric of realism and national interest
reigned supreme during most of the Cold War;
international law was relegated to the back burner.
Something changed around the time of the first Gulf
War. In his arguments for that war against Iraq,
then-President George H.W. Bush invoked the language
of international justice. The case for the first Gulf
War hinged on international law and the need to
maintain the rule of law among nations. Bill Clinton
made similar arguments to justify American
interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, and, most
spectacularly, Kosovo, where principles of
international justice were use