Monday, June 18
The Abu Ghraib Cover-Up
The article reveals how Maj General Taguba, who had been put in charge of the Abu Ghraib investigation was threatened by top Pentagon brass.A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. … Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”
“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.“
Pressure also applied to Senator Warner, then head of armed services to "back off".
A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it — insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.
That Lt. General Sanchez clearly knew what was already going on.
Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003 — when much of the abuse took place — Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on.”
Yes, of course he did. Sanchez is the one who oversaw and installed Gen Geoffrey Miller as commander of Tier 1A/1B immediately after he arrived from instituting "Alternative Interrogation Techniques" authorized by SecDef Rumsfeld at Gitmo.
Contrary to claims that these were merely "frat-boy pranks", Taguba reported to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz that this was far more than just simple "abuse".
In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”
And there was more which Taguba revealed to Hersh.
I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.
Rather than wanting to discover the truth, the brass at the Pentagon did everything they could to stay at arms length from the facts and the pictures.
When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”
After watching Rumsfled's performance before the Senate, Taguba was appalled.
“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”
It was also clear to Taguba that there were others in the chain of command above Lindy England and Sgt Graner, as well as Military Intelligence were involved in all this.
“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”
...
Taguba’s assignment was limited to investigating the 800th M.P.s, but he quickly found signs of the involvement of military intelligence—both the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, commanded by Colonel Thomas Pappas, which worked closely with the M.P.s, and what were called “other government agencies,” or O.G.A.s, a euphemism for the C.I.A. and special-operations units operating undercover in Iraq. Some of the earliest evidence involved Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, whose name was mentioned in interviews with several M.P.s. For the first three weeks of the investigation, Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated requests. When the investigators finally located him, he asked whether he needed to shave his beard before being interviewed—Taguba suspected that he had been dressing as a civilian. “When I asked him about his assignment, he says, ‘I’m a liaison officer for intelligence from Army headquarters in Iraq.’ ” But in the course of three or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he began to suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more intimately involved in the interrogation process—some of it brutal—for “high value” detainees.
Jordan was eventually charged but his attorneys have vigorously defended him claiming that he wasn't properly advised of his rights prior to his interrogation by Taguba. Now isn't that ironic?
During his investigation Taguba discovered that there were likely only one or two possible al-Qeada members in all of abu Ghriab. Most prisons were either guilty of petty crimes or completely innocent. But that didn't seem to sway the Pentgon brass to be as cautious with their rights as they were with Jordan's.
The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”
After the investigation Taguba was demoted and eventually fired.
Taguba had been scheduled to rotate to the Third Army’s headquarters, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004. He was instead ordered back to the Pentagon, to work in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. “It was a lateral assignment,” Taguba said, with a smile and a shrug. … A retired four-star Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent to the job in the Pentagon so that he could “be watched.” Taguba realized that his career was at a dead end. …
In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba. “I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.”
So with a wimper rather than a bang, ended the 35 year career of a fine officer who withstood open bigotry to rise to the rank of General and still managed kept his integrity and values intact.
Vyan
Sunday, June 17
Iraq is NOT Korea, It's Northern Ireland and we're the Brits
Today on Fox News Sunday General Patraeus yet again claimed that we should be able access the success (or lack thereof) of The Surge™ by this September.
[By then we should have a] reasonable and a realistic sense [of whether the escalation is] working or not working. I’ve said that all along. I started saying that back in January. I think we’ll have had by then our forces in the mix for a good several months.
Although he also stated that the escalation won't be "done" by then...
Wallace: [Do you believe] the job will be done by September?
Patraeus: I do not, no
Instead Patraeus went on to endorse the so-called Korea Model for Iraq, where we are likely to have forces in place for the next 50 years!
Are you fracking kidding me?
I knew that neo-con lapdogs like Patreaus had a problem with The Book Learnin' and The Science and stuff, but I really didn't really that they were completely ignorant of history too.
The nutshell of the Korean Model goes like this, as described by Dan Froomkin in the WaPo.
It’s troubling because American troops have been in South Korea for more than 50 years — while polls show the American public wants them out of Iraq within a year.
It’s flawed because in South Korea, unlike Iraq, there’s something concrete to defend (the border with North Korea); and because Iraq, unlike South Korea, happens to be in a state of violent civil war.
It’s dangerous because the specter of a permanent military presence in Iraq is widely considered to be one of the most inflammatory incitements to Iraq’s ever-growing anti-American insurgency, and may even be destabilizing to the entire region.
And it’s telling because it gives credence to persistent suspicions that establishing a long-term strategic presence in the Middle East was a primary motivation for this misbegotten war in the first place.
To his credit Patraeus did throw a pinch of salt on this Iraq is Korea nonesense.
[The Iraq conflict] is not one that’s going to be resolved in a year or even two years. In fact, typically, I think historically, counterinsurgency operations have gone at least nine or ten years.
The question is, of course, at what level, how much will we have to continue to contribute during that time, how much more can the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government pick up as it goes along, and I think that’s the real question. And I’m not sure what the right analogy is, whether it’s Korea or what have you. I think all that the folks in Washington were trying to indicate by that was that there’s some possibility of some form of long-term security arrangement over time, and I think in general that that’s probably a fairly realistic assessment, assuming that the Iraqi government, in fact, does want that to continue and, of course, it is very much up to them and their sovereignty is paramount in all of this.
The Korea War began as a conflict between two distinct states, the communist Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the North which was supplied and supported by China vs the capitalist People's Republic of Korea in the South which were supported by UN Forces which were largely American. Technically that War never really ended, there was a cease fire called in 1953, three years after hostilities began but either side actually surrendered and both North and South Korea have certainly not re-unified and completely reconcilled. That's why our troops are still there.
There was no insurgency in Korea.
There was no internecine warfare or religious sectarian violence.
There was no Abu Ghraib.
There was no al Qeada, or al-Sistani or al-Sadr.
We did not invade a sovereign nation without legitimate justification or provocation - we were invited to support the South under UN Security Council Resolution 62 in response to the attack by North Korea against the South.
IMO and as James Carrol of the Boston Globe has noted (h/t teacherken) A far better model than Korea for the current conflict in Iraq would be The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
There you have 30 years of intense sectarian violence between Protestant Unionist and Roman Catholic Nationalist who sought to create an independent Republic of Ireland, and an end to their occupation by the British Army.
They did have their own version of al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents, namely the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as well as loyalist paramilitary forces similar to the Shia Militias such as the Ulster Voluanteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA).
Like our own forces in Iraq, British forces who claimed to simply be trying to "keep the peace" were seen as working in collusion with unionist forces and were attacked frequently with bombings (IED's?) which did manage to occur even on British soil. (I guess fighting them "over there" really didn't help them all that much did it?)
Much like the split between Sunni and Shia in Iraq, the divide between Irish Catholics and Protestants goes back some centuries - all the way to 1609 and two bloody ethno-religious conflicts over plantation rights in 1641 and 1689.
Because of the weight of all this history, the conflict in Northern Ireland was thought to be insurmountable and intractable. Yet eventually solutions began to be found over the course of 3 tumultuous years in involving two cease-fires (in 1994 and 1996) and a shift from the use of arms to the use of persuasion through the political process via the IRA's political wing Sinn Fein and it's leader Gerry Adams.
But it wasn't easy.
On June 16, 1994, just before the ceasefires, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) killed two UVF members in a gun attack on the Shankill road. In revenge, three days later, the UVF killed six civilians in a shooting at a pub in Loughinisland, County Down. The IRA, in the remaining month before its ceasefire, killed four senior loyalists, three from the UDA and one from the UVF. There are various interpretations of the spike in violence before the ceasefires. One theory is that the loyalists feared the peace process represented an imminent "sellout" of the Union and ratcheted up their violence accordingly. Another explanation is that the republicans were "settling old scores" before the end of their campaigns and wanted to enter the political process from a position of military strength rather than weakness.
Eventually, in August 1994, the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire. The loyalist paramilitaries, temporarily united in the Combined Loyalist Military Command, reciprocated six weeks later. Although these ceasefires failed in the short run, they mark an effective end to large-scale political violence in the Troubles as it paved the way for the final ceasefire.
The second cease-fire was implemented in 1996 and helped paved the way for the Belfast Agreement in 1998 between all four major parties, including Sinn Fein, establishing a "power-sharing" model for an independant and self-governing Northern Ireland.
This Model, one that focuses not on overwhelming military might but instead on persuasion and diplomacy is one that has a far better hope of ending the violence in Iraq than The Surge. As both the ISG and Harry Reid have noted we can not win Iraq militarily anymore than the British Empire was likely to crush the IRA and other nationalists in Northern Ireland.
But here's the thing, one major factor in helping lend legitimacy to Sinn Fein was the involvment of Senator George Mitchell who crafted The Mitchell Principles in 1997 which were signed both by Sinn Fein and the British Government and began to create a pathway to peace. It took the diplomatic intervention of a neutral third party to bring the various factions to the table. It should also be noted that Mitchell's efforts were helped greatly by President Bill Clinton who in placed Gerry Adam's on the world stage by inviting him to Washington in 1996 (although not to the White House - that step would take several more years).
Another model which fits far better than Korea is that of the Bosnia War, where an enormous three part US, Russian and European forces ended a brutal complex three-way conflict between Muslim, Croat and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. (This is the model originally suggested by General Shinseki)
And look, it didn't take 50 years did it?
Again President Bill Clinton took the initiative and used diplomacy to forge a consensus among the world's nations and leaders that the ethnic cleansing taking place in that region had to be stopped. His efforts led the the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, just 3 years after he took office.
Unfortunately, we are not a neutral third party in Iraq as we had been in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia. We have far too much skin-in-the-game to be able to negotiate cleanly and evenly with all parties, just as the Brits couldn't. They failed at it for 30 years.
We can't win this militarily and we can't just walk away without risking everything turning to complete crap. Even though there is the thin-hope that our departure might help the Iraqis refocus (as has been advanced by John Murtha), just as the the Brit leaving Northern Ireland did. But the rub is that in their case there was an agreement in place and we don't yet have even that.
Basically, we're screwed.
We've flushed our credibility completely away with the lack of WMD's, lack of Yellowcake, the Torture, the Abu Ghraib, the failure of the rebuilding process, the failure to train and equip the Iraqi Forces and now this bull-crap about Korea and keeping our forces in the region for the next half century.
What's needed are new and innovative diplomatic solutions, and they just might have to come from some very unexpected quarters such as France (who happened to have control of the mines the Yellowcake was supposedly taken from) or possibly Germany (who had custody of "Curveball" and knew he was full of it) or other countries who still have some diplomatic clout and credibility left, someone who hasn't made the wrong decision time after time after time.
Frankly, we don't need the Iraqi Parliament to decide everything - because that process is going to take years. (Look at how well our own government is doing with Immigration, eh? Does anyone think a forced deadline would help our Congress Git 'er Done? I don't.) The Iraqis are not going to simply jump up and crank out legislation and complex agreements on our timetable. Not gonna happen, even if they weren't as dysfuctional as family of crack-addicts.
Instead, based on the Northern Ireland and Bosnia Models what I think is needed is to get together the major faction leaders - some Sunni, some Shi'a, some Kurd - including people like Sustani and al-Sadr and have them hammer out the details of some type of basic roadmap to peace and conditions for a cease-fire by the insurgents and militias in a Summit. It doesn't have to happen in Iraq, the Dayton Accords didn't take place in Bosnia - they were in Ohio. But it does have to happen, and once it does the Iraqi Parliament can simply vote on it and begin to flesh out the details.
It won't happen overnight. It won't be pretty. Northern Ireland is still going through the birth-pains of becoming a brand new democracy.
Iraq hasn't even begun conception yet but sadly, it's going to take someone else - someone neutral who hasn't shredded their own credibilty like paper-mache - to get this party started.
Exactly who that might be (Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, France, Italy?) is the 640,000 live question.
Vyan
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