Recently in iraq wars Category

Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":

"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

The latest in the growing scandal of the CIA's destroyed torture tapes comes from the US Justice Department:

The department is taking an even harder line with other Congressional committees looking into the matter, and is refusing to provide information about any role it might have played in the destruction of the videotapes.

The Times article goes on to explain that scheduled grilling of CIA officials by the House Intelligence Committee will almost definitely be postponed because of the Justice Department's obstruction.

2002: the CIA tortures prisoners and films the proceedings;
2005: the CIA destroys the evidence because it would implicate those agents who conducted torture;
2007: the Justice Department tries to shut down Congressional investigations into the tapes' destruction.

Thankfully Congressional leaders don't seem to be standing down in the wake of the Justice Department bullying, with both Democrats and Republicans vowing to press on. From the Washington Post: "Congressional leaders from both parties alleged that Justice is trying to block their investigation and vowed to press ahead with hearings." Will Congress finally start demanding accountability for how American intelligence forces have been acting since 2001? Well, don't hold your breath. Still we might all be in store for some interesting revelations over the next couple of weeks.

Poor Cindy Sheehan, the famous anti-war mom who camped outside Bush's Crawford Texas home following the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she's all but resigned from the protest movement. She posted the following on her Daily Kos blog

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party... However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war movement comes from Democratic Party connections. Her tragic story, soccer mom looks and articulate idealism made her a natural poster girl for an anti-Bush movement that has never really been as anti-war as it's claimed.

Congressional Democrats had all the information they needed in 2002 to expose President Bush's outlandish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they authorized his war of aggression anyway. More recently, Americans gave them a landslide vote of confidence in last November's elections but still they step back from insisting on an Iraq pull-out. The Nonviolence.org archives are full of denunciations of President Clinton's repeated missile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before reinventing himself as a earth-toned eco candidate, Al Gore positioned himself as the pro-war hawk of the Democratic Party.

Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insiders of both major American political parties. But as long as the movement is fueled with political money it will be beholden to those interests and will ultimately defer to back-room Capital Hill deal-making.

I feel for Cindy. She's been on a publicity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground herself. Defeating war is the work of a lifetime and it's the work of a movement. Sheehan's witness has touched people she'll never meet. It's made a difference. She's a woman of remarkable courage who's pointing out the puppet strings she's cutting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.

---

Nonviolence.org's fundraising campaign ends in a few hours. In four months we've raised $150 which doesn't even cover that period's server costs. This project celebrates its twelfth year this fall and accurately exposed the weapons of mass destruction hoaxes in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Congress. Cindy signed off:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it. It's up to you now.

Sometimes I really have to unite with that sentiment.

From the New York Times : "I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted today of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the war in Iraq."

The Washington Post notes that Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be indicted on criminal charges in modern times.

This has been a long time coming. This is the first conviction arising from the Bush Administration's deliberate campaign to mislead Congress and the American people into the war in Iraq. Libby was Vice President Cheney's right hand man and orchestrated a nasty smear campaign against the family of Joseph Wilson, a state department diplomat who researched, questioned and publicly doubted one of the major pieces of "evidence" of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program cited by the President George W Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Libby was found guilty of perjury and making false statements to investigators. In the course of the trial, it became clear that his boss, the Vice President, was actively involved in the smear. From the Post again: "Testimony and evidence revealed that the vice president dictated precise talking points he wanted Libby and other aides to use to rebut Wilson's accusations against the White House, helped select which journalists would be contacted and worked with Bush to declassify secret intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons that he believed would contradict Wilson's claims."

Unfortunately deliberately misleading Congress and the American people and holding up the most obvious forgery as a cause of war is still not considered a treasonable offense. Pity.

Some good questions asked over at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo: about Vice President Cheney's complicity in and essential authorship of one of the central lies at the core of the Bush administration's case for war

The truth, though, is that we are not really examining the cover-up in this case so much as we are still living within it. Most of the key facts of this episode either remain entirely concealed or buried under a mass of government produced misinformation.

Some good questions asked over at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo: about Vice President Cheney's complicity in and essential authorship of one of the central lies at the core of the Bush administration's case for war

The truth, though, is that we are not really examining the cover-up in this case so much as we are still living within it. Most of the key facts of this episode either remain entirely concealed or buried under a mass of government produced misinformation.

I must be honest and admit that I've always found President Bush's State of the Union speeches unbearable. The distortions and half-truths are infuriating and the unearned confidence of a draft-dodging rich kid turned failed military adventurer just sends my blood pressure through the roof. I wish I could be detached enough to listen at least to the art of fine speech-writing but the message gets in the way.

Better then to listen to the Democratic response, given by Senator James Web. The transcript is over on the NYTimes and the video is over on YouTube. Here's a taste.

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues ­ those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death ­ we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way. We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us ­ sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

Worth a look: Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo.com had the neat idea to set up a YouTube group for people to give their own video responses to the State of the Union.

In the news:  more than 1,000 service members sign petition to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), organized by the Appeal for Redress campaign sponsored by a handful of military antiwar groups including Nonviolence.org alums Veterans for Peace. The simple petition reads:

As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

Supporting the troops means making sure American lives aren't being wasted in dead-end wars. Their service and their sacrifice has been too great to continue the lies that have fueled this conflict since the very beginning, starting with the mythical Saddam/Al Qaeda connection and the phantasmic weapons of mass destruction. The current escalation (euphemised as a "surge") of troop levels is simply an escalation of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?

Update: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq government fumbled the executions.. Meanwhile, the UN puts the 2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000. When will Bush admit he's fumbled this whole war?

What are the Iraqis and the American administrators thinking? Another botched execution in Baghdad, this time of Saddam Hussein's half brother. Why are the executioners dressed like terrorists, their faces covered with hoods? The videos of Saddam's execution looks like it took place deep in some hidden-away warehouse.

I'm not a big believer in capital punishment. It's primitive and barbaric and it reeks heavily of vigilante justice and the terrorist code. But if you're going to do it, you have to imbue the moment with all the solemnity of the state. The symbolism has to make clear that this is culmination of a long, considered process, that this is a necessary part of a nation's duty to provide law and order to its people.

But the new round of videos coming out of Baghdad look too much like the execution videos made by insurgents kidnapping Western workers and activists. Is the new Iraqi government simply insurgents in suits? Why doesn't Washington even care about the symbolic appearance of these high-profile executions?

World headlines for the hanging of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He was executed for the mass killing of civilians in the small village of Dujail in 1982. An assassination attempt had been made as his motorcade went through town; he wanted revenge against the Shiite militia behind the attack. All accounts point to his crackdown as being particularly horrific and brutal.

Yet the next year, President Ronald Reagan sent aid Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to talk with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz about ways that the United States and Iraq could work together. As Z Magazine reported recently, the Reagan Administration went on provide billions of dollars of credit to Saddam's regime, along with US military intelligence to help it in its war against Iran. The US knew about Saddam's cruelty and despotism but didn't care until Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened US oil interests in the Persian Gulf.

This is such old news. I've been talking about the hypocrisies of the 1980s Baghdad/Washington alliance for the entire eleven year history of Nonviolence.org. But yet... Hussein was tried and convicted for this kind of old news. If Ronald Reagan didn't mind his despotism back in the 1980s, then why all the self-righteousness now? Reagan's aid Rumsfeld just stepped down from the Bush Administration as the long-serving Secretary of Defense this country has ever seen: the history and the actors who cozied up to Saddam then are still in Washington.

What has the world gained by the killing? President Bush thought the hanging so trivial that he told his aids that they shouldn't even bother to wake him up with the news. The reality is that Saddam has been a footnote since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. While his death may serve as some sort of catharsis for Iraqis, it hardly matters. Hanging him is merely political theater. It does nothing to stem the bloodletting of the civil war that now rages in Iraq.

It's worth pulling this site out of the semi-retirement of the last few months to happily report that Bush has finally fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It should have happened years ago. Like his boss, Rumsfeld is a man of big ideas but little experience. He has let half-baked ideology trump expertise. For six years he's over-ruled generals to wage a foolish war in Iraq. He famously thought that Iraq could be won with a minimum of ground troops, that high tech wizardry could win a dirty insurgency.

Yesterday's election were a clear message to President Bush that his Iraq policy is unpopular, wrong, and just plain stupid. What's surprising is that our stonewalling president reacted so swiftly by sacking Rumsfeld. He must be terribly afraid of the consequences of a Democratic House of Representatives. Finally he will be accountable to the American people. This war has been immoral and badly-fought. It's time that it ends.

It's gotten so messy that even a pacifist like me can't insist on immediate withdrawal. Like Rumsfeld I'm an ideologue; unlike him I know I'm not qualified to decide on the right mix of diplomacy and military policing needed to keep Iraq and Afghanistan from falling into even greater chaos. A number of top U.S. generals have spoken out in the war, both directly and indirectly and I suspect they have some good ideas--ones that will protect our troops and serve the clear national interest we have in keeping Iraq from civil war. Let's hope they get to speak and that the president and next secretary of defense start to listen.

I'm returning from a working summer sabbatical from Nonviolence.org to find the world situation both completely the same and completely different. It is the best of times and the worst of times, no? My April editorial, Making Friends, Making Enemies and Looking Toward the Future is a call to peace that's as relevant to developments in Israel, Lebanon, Iran and iraq but just as likely to be ignored.

Sometimes it feels that war is inevitable. The terrain of southern Lebanon is once more being chewed up by tanks and rockets. Israel's army and the Hezbollah militia keep one-upping the level of violence. Wars of evident defense can be a great recruitment tool for angry young men and neither military force is in any danger of being overwhelmed or destroyed. That thankless job goes to the civilians caught in the middle. Warfare in the age of terror consists of slaughtering innocents in the name of righteous self-defense. Hostilities never really end, they take a break after enough blood has been spilt to satisfy the powers behind the killing.

The Hezbollah rockets heading south and Israeli tanks going north are symbols of the proxy war that is being run from thousands of miles away. Hezbollah's arms come from Iran, Israel's from the United States. While there might be simmering resentments and isolated acts of violence, there would not be a war without these sponsors. The fighting in Lebanon could be switched off like a light bulb with the slightest nod from either Washington or Tehran.

iraq is the other front of this proxy war. Yesterday General John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East, told the Senate that Iran could slide into civil war. The BBC is reporting that senior British diplomat William Patey informed Tony Blair last week that "the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of iraq is probably more likely at this state than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy."

Baghdad has more-or-less seen fighting since American troops entered it but the decentralized insurgency is giving way to a kind of sectarian violence that is far more dangerous. If Patey's prophecy comes to pass iraq will be our next Lebanon: a bloody, seemingly-intractable civil war lasting decades, turned on and off by diplomatic whim from abroad, a killing field where innocents die for the false rhetoric of idealism far far away.

Images from Wikipedia articles on the Israel-Lebanon conflict and iraq War

The current war talk against Iran is hopelessly short-sighted. A successful US military action would only delay Iran's getting nuclear weapons by another ten years or so but it would greatly increase the chance that they'd want to use them. A war would justify Tehran's paranoia and legitimize a strike-back against the US or our allies when they finally do perfect the bomb.

It is widely rumored that the top US civilian leadership wants to use "tactical" nuclear weapons to destroy the underground labs where Iranian scientists are refining the uranium. The US military is reportedly very against this, and this is most likely why we're seeing all of these retired US generals calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Although a dozen-or-so countries have nuclear weapons, no one has used them since the US bombed Japan fifty years ago. No country wants to be the first to use them again, knowing there would be an incredible international backlash against them. If the US did launch even a limited nuclear attack against Iran, it would make the use of atomic weapontry more acceptable.

Nuclear weapons are a fact of life now. Iran is going to get them, sooner or later. Many of the countries in the region have bombs--Pakistan, India, Israel, China. The US can't put this genie back in the bottle. We need to build an international consensus that their use in unacceptable in any circumstance. Which means we need to stop planning on using them ourselves.

Seymour Hersh's article on US war preparations has a great quote in it from an unnamed "European official":

Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it. If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.

We have two choices: bomb Iran now, which would possibly hold off the threat another ten years but would certainly turn younger Iranians against us for generations to come. Or we could manage the situation as best we can, using international inspectors to delay atomic weapons if possible but launching not bombs but the "charm offensive." We need to think about what the Iranian-US relationship will look like ten and twenty and fifty years from now. Even a "small" war now would lead to a huge war then.

All wars start decades before the bullets start flying. The seeds of World War II were in the debilitating reparations the victorious allies forced on a defeated German twenty years before at the end of World War I. By 1938 the war was all-but-inevitable. We can only stop wars if we look to the future and build friends of our enemies now. Iran will change. United States actions now will shape the future of Iran. Let's not muck it up.

As iraq slides ever more incontrovertibly into civil war, President Bush looks elsewhere to secure his legacy. Seymore Hersh writes in the New Yorker of The Iran Plans

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change... A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy."

Sad news coming over the internet: after 100 days of captivity, Christian peacemaker Tom Fox was found dead yesterday in iraq, the status of his three companions unknown.

The Christian peacemaker Teams issued an elegant and heartfelt statement beginning "In grief we tremble before God who wraps us with compassion." Fox knew the risk he was taking going to iraq unarmed. But he also knew that this witness  would mean more to the iraqi people than a hundred tanks. He knew the war we peacemakers wage is the Lamb's War, a war won not through strength but through meekness, our only weapon our humilty before God and our love of neighbor. Our prayers are with his family and friends, may God's comfort continue to hold them through these aching times.

More history and resources on our Christian peacemaker Team Watch

The UK News Telegraph is confirming what many of us in the peace movement have been worrying about all day: that at least some of the four westerners abducted in iraq over the weekend were members of the Christian peacemakers Teams

A British anti-war activist abducted in iraq was investigating human rights abuses with a group called the Christian peacemakers Team when he was held.

Norman Kember, 74, the only publicly-named abductee, is a former secretary of the Baptist peace Fellowship in England and a board member of the English Fellowship of Reconciliation. He's been an outspoken opponent of the war in iraq. In the April/May 2005 edition of FOR's newsletter (pdf) he talked about challenging himself to do more:

Now personally it has always worried me that I am a ‘cheap’ peacemaker (by analogy with Bonhoeffer’s
concept of ‘cheap’ grace). Being a CO in Britain,talking, writing, demonstrating about peace is in no
way taking risks like young service men in iraq. I look for excuses why I should not become involved with
CPT or EAPPI. Perhaps the readers will supply mewithwith some?

Here at Nonviolence.org, I'm occassionally chatised for being more concerned about western victims of violence (indeed, how many iraqis were abducted or killed this weekend alone?). It's a fair charge and an important reminder. But perhaps it is only human nature to worry about those you know. I've probably met Norman in passing at one or another international peace gathering; I might well know the three unidentified abductees. I suspect a peace movement veteran like Kember would be the first to tell me that pacifists shouldn't sit contentedly in middle-class comfy armchairs simply souting slogans or dashing off emails (Quaker Johan Maurer, wrote an impassioned blog post about this just last week). Part of the reason folks put themselves on the lines for organizations like Christian peacemakers Teams is that they want to do their peace witness among those facing the violence. When the victims aren't just "them, over there" but to "us, and our friends, over there" it becomes more real. This is what the families of the American military casualties have been telling us. Now, with Kember and the three others missing, our worry is made more real. For better or worse, the peace movement is scanning the headlines from iraq with even more worry tonight.

Our prayers are with Kember, as they are with all the missing and all the victims of this horrible war.

The Pentagon has just admitted that it used white phosphorous as incendary chemical weapon in it's attacks against insurgents in Falluja last November. It has vigorous denied repeated eyewitness accounts until this week's announcment. The weapon use was captured by an Italian documentary team.

• U.S. admits using phosphorus as weapon in iraq, 11/16
• US defends use of white phosphorus weapons in iraq, Reuters, 11/16
• UK used white phosphorus in iraq, BBC
• US forces used 'chemical weapon' in iraq, The Independent

A U.S. State Department release from last December categorically denied the use of illegal weapons in Falluja. It has been amended this week:

Finally, some news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used "outlawed" phosphorous shells in Fallujah. Phosphorous shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.

[November 10, 2005 note: We have learned that some of the information we were provided in the above paragraph is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, "The Fight for Fallujah," in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, "as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes …." The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.]

More on the history of white phosphorous as a weapon can be found on Wikipedia's white phsophorus entry. The BBC has also compiled a fact sheet on phosphorous. Eighty countries have signed Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which bans its use as an incendaiary weapon against civilitan populations. The United States has refused to sign the treaty and is officially exempt.

According to some news accounts, while "white phos" is a chemical and a weapon (that burns flesh in a quite gruesome way), it is not technically considered a "chemical weapon." Such Orwellian distinctions seem a little too esoteric for us here at Nonviolence.org.

There's a reasonable expectation that intelligence agencies should be possessed of a certain degree of intelligence. The graphic pictures of U.S. military personnel torturing prisoners in iraq and Guantanamo Bay outraged Americans and brought condemnation from all corners of the civilized world.

The stories that came out of Badgdad's Al Grahib prison gave a boost to the iraqi insurgency, proof of the brutality of the American invaders that could be paraded across the screens of Al Jazeera. We've never heard that any reliable intelligence information ever came from the degrading interrogation practices employed at Al Grahib, which shouldn't be a surprise: torture has never been a particularly effective intelligence-collection technique (many of the detainees at Al Grahib were taxi drivers at the wrong place at the wrong time when a military sweep came through). Torture's real purposes are usually much baser: revenge, humiliation and base cruelty.

Lesson to the White House: Unless you want to stroke the insurgency (and get more U.S. soldiers killed), lay off the torture.

Unfortunately we have a White House that doesn't learn lessons very well. The U.S. Senate voted 90-9 last week on a John McCain-sponsored amendment to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees held by the United States government. President George W. Bush is now actively lobbying the Senate to add a loophole that would allow U.S. intelligence agency to continue torture.

Yes, that's right, the President of the United States ("Beacon of the Free World," "The Light of Democracy," etc.) is officially going on record as a supporter of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. It's a sign of a certain kind of inhumanity, or at least insensitivity, that Bush even had the guts to approach the author of the anti-torture amendment asking for the CIA exemption, for McCain spent much of his Vietnam War service being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.

What kind of intelligence is needed to know Bush's lobbying is yet another gift to the propaganda arm of iraqi insurgency? It looks like we'll be getting to that 2,000th solider soon.

Now that the evidence is building that the Plame outing was a political dirty trick from one of the top White House aid, should we really be sorry for jailed reporter Judith Miller? Is she really being so righteous in protecting her sources? She knew Karl Rove was using her to discredit an outspoken critic of the Administration's claims on iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Judith Miller was one of the Bush Administration's favorite reporters over the time it was trying to sell a second iraq war to the American people. She never heard an iraqi tall tale that she didn't believe and she frequently regurgitated the outlandish stories not only of White House insiders like Karl Rove but also shady iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi.

Was Judith Miller really so naive? Or was she consciously engaged in selling the war to New York Times readers? Was she being partisan herself? We expect a certain amount of objectivity and critical thinking in the pieces from a paper of the stature of the New York Times but we rarely saw that in Judith Miller's reporting. At what point does a reporter become the mouthpiece of policiticans?

Howard Kurtz at the post compares current events to Watergate:

Unlike Deep Throat, who was risking his FBI career by telling Woodward about the Nixon spying operation and cover-upRove and whoever else leaked Valerie Plame's CIA connection to Novak and other journalists were doing partisan dirty work, and some may have been committing a crime. Cooper and others have argued that they can't make a distinction between "good guy" and "bad guy" sources -- a promise is a promise -- but helping White House officials finger a covert operative is not exactly the kind of work that builds public support for the Fourth Estate.

Rove posing as a patriot

There's evidence that one of President Bush's key aids was involved with the leak that revealed a CIA agent's identity. Republican political hack Karl Rove is being named as someone who told Time Magazine that a whistleblower against the Bush's weapons of mass destructions lies was a CIA agent. More background of the story from two years ago, White House treasonable dirty tricks against whistleblower's wife.

The first question: are we surprised? Of course the smear campaign was orchestrated out of the White House. The whole war has everything to do with politics. Facts were inconveniences when it came to building a case against iraq. We now know that the decade of sanctions against Saddam Hussein worked. His military was a shambles and he had no money to engage in researching or building weapons of mass destruction. The war was a political ploy by the White House. It propped up the President and kept terrorism in the spotlight. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the London bombings were carried out by iraqi insurgents, people who might not be terrorists if we hadn't gone and invaded iraq (yes, there were terrorist before but every act of violence inspires acts of counter-violence).

Karl Rove's job has been to get George W. Bush elected and then re-elected. The role of political consultants is supposed to stop there. The job of governance and statemanship should be left to the President himself. This Administration is more overtly political than any in recent history. Why was Karl Rove selling the war against iraq?

Judith Miller in cursor.org parody photo referring to her tendency to print dubious WMD intelligence from Ahmed Chalabi, Bush's favorite iraqi exile before the war and allegation he now spys for Iran.

Yesterday the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals about the most important Freedom of the Press case in recent memory. It appears very likely that two reporters, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Time's Matt Cooper, are heading to jail for refusing to tell a federal prosecutor who told them that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. The informant was almost certainly a Bush Administration hack trying to smear Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who had recently gone public with doubts about iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The cases are ironic to the point of parody. Judith Miller never even wrote an article. Matt Cooper's article in Time criticized the Bush Administration for engineering the leak. These were the responsible journalists and they're the ones going to jail? Robert Novak, the journalist who actually did out Plame's CIA employment, is not under investigation or under threat of jail. Observers think that the federal prosecutor actually knows the identity of the informant but as of this date, this person hasn't been charged.

It's not an easy case. I frequently questioned Judith Miller's shoddy reporting during this time. She relied on shady off-the-record public officials way too much. She never heard a weapons of mass destruction story she didn't believe. She was guilable and time has proven she was wrong. Good reporting consists of more than sitting around a White House water cooler and printing the spin from the bottom-feeding political hacks trying to get a story in the Times. But she is a reporter for a major paper. She's done a lot of good work. She shouldn't go to jail simply for talking to someone. Sometimes those shady conversations in White House basements do lead to important journalism and we need to protect that.

And in all the court manoeuvrings we're forgetting that someone exposed a CIA agent, her undercover assignments and her network of on-the-ground informers, all to play politics in Washington. Someone very near the White House committed treason. Shouldn't that be the big story?

Update:

Apparently Matt Cooper's notes indicate that Presidential right-hand man Karl Rove is one of the sources behind the leak.

Today's Washington Post has an article claiming that the Army is "bungling recruitment. The continuing stream of combat deaths in iraq make the armed forces a less attractive option than they once were:

Nearly every day, anywhere from one to several U.S. soldiers or Marines die in iraq, and even more are wounded. The news doesn't always make the front pages anymore, but the casualty rate has apparently registered deeply in the consciousness of young Americans and their families. The result is a dangerous decline in new enlistments that is depleting U.S. military resources and weakening our capacity to face additional conflicts or threats from abroad.

In many ways, it's great that the army is becoming unpopular again! Some pacifists extrapolate this to say the draft will have to be reinstated soon but I think this is unlikely, as the Army and Congress know the outcry and mass protests that would erupt. The short term effect will be sloppier procedures on the ground, as too few soldiers stretched too thin take shortcuts that inevitably result in unnecessary deaths and more atrocities in the prisons.

Is there a way the peace movement could take advantage of the growing unease and worry about life in the military to open conversations and get our message out to a wider audience?

It seems beyond yesterday's news but the findings of the presidential commission on intelligence gives more evidence about the deeply-flawed U.S. prewar intellegence on iraq.

Here's the New York Times' analysis on the report

"It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom," the commission said. But that understated indictment is about the extent of the commission's effort to explain the responsibilities of the nation's highest officials for one of the worst intelligence failures of modern times.

So the latest and presumably the last official review of such questions leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions "harden into presumptions," as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.

Here at Nonviolence.org, we just wish we had a dollar for every yahoo who sent nasty emails insisting weapons of mass destruction were about to be found. Even more disturbing is that all this may not be yesterday's news. As the Times also reported, the report says that the U.S. "knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors.

The New York Times is reporting that "at least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials."

Today of course is the day iraq votes. Much of what we'd say here has been written elsewhere: that large-scale violence continues in iraq; that voter intimidation will happen in some areas; that major parties have called for a boycott of the election. Is violence-torn, occupied iraq ready for elections?

Update: early reports say iraqi turnout is higher than expected: The London Times, the New York Times. Let's hope this is accurate, it would certainly be a positive development.

Update 3/8/05: Slate has an overview of conservative blogger coverage of an iraqi poll showing optimism for the future. We certainly hope the future is bright too, but the bloggerrati trumpeting the new poll are the same ones that continued insisting on iraqi weapons of mass destruction long after all reasonable people knew they didn't exist. While we here at Nonviolence.org could chime in with daily reports of happy or miserable iraqis and blustering commentary based on ideological slant, the lasting impact of the elections won't be decided by mouse-clutching reporters or bloggers but by the iraqi people themselves.

Over at the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh is reporting that forces in the Bush Administration are looking at war with Iran now.

"This is a war against terrorism, and iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."

Preparations include new war plans and fairly open hints by the Vice President that Israel start the Iran War by attacking its weapons productions facilities.

Hersh also reports that the Pentagon is now doing the secret "special ops" operations that used to be performed by the CIA. This isn't just a change in uniform: after the CIA was caught trying to overthrow governments and assasinating world leaders, the agency was put under congressional oversight. The Pentagon doesn't have that oversight. Followup in today's New York Times:

Among the C.I.A.'s concerns, former intelligence officials have said, are that an expanded Pentagon role in intelligence-gathering could, by design or effect, escape the strict Congressional oversight imposed by law on such operations when they are carried out by intelligence agencies.

This isn't a war on terrorism (neither iraq or Iran have conducted terrorist operations against the United States). This is a war against Muslim nations that threaten to have too much power.

First-hand accounts from journalists at the scene of yesterday's Mosul blast at a U.S. based that killed 24 and wounded 64.

At the Washington post, The Bush administration is facing a wave of new allegations that the abuse of foreign detainees in U.S. military custody was more widespread, varied and grave in the past three years than the Defense Department has long maintained. More at the ACLU, who's spearheading disclosure of U.S. torture practices in iraq, Afghanistan and GITMO.

The Lancet medical journal has estimated that 98,000 iraqis have died because of the invasion and occupation of iraq.

The only way the United States will have anything resembling a victory in iraq is if our actions prove that we really mean all our talk about democracy and justice.

60 Minutes is doing a story tonight on the 5500 soliders who have disobeyed orders and deserted their military duties since the start of the iraq War, focusing on those who have gone to Canada:

One soldier, Pfc. Dan Felushko, 24, tells Pelley, "I didn't want...'Died deluded in iraq' over my gravestone."

But it's not just self-protection. It's also about duty:

[Jeremy Hinzman] later adds that his contract with the military was "to defend the Constitution of the United States, not take part in offensive, preemptive wars."

Good point. These soldiers have presumably seen first hand the erosion of American values on the battlefields of the "war on terror." They've seen abuse of military prisoners and the abandonment of the Geneva Convention. It's quite easy to see how someone who passionate loves America could really hate this war. American freedoms come not just from wartime adventures: they also come from those brave men and women of conscience who have stood up for what we believe in as a country. We last talked about this back in April, Conscientious Objection, After You're In. See also our Resources on Concientious Objection

The CBS 60 Minutes episode will air tonight, Wednesday Dec. 8, at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

The United Nations reports that Afghan Poppy Growing Reaches Record Level. It's nice to know that the Bush Administration made Afghanistan safe for heroin production. A U.N. official is quoted as saying that "the fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is becoming a reality." The officially-recognized, U.S.-backed Afghan government effectively only rules the immediate area around the capitol--President Hamid Karzai could just as well be addressed as Mayor Karzai.

Afghanistan's Taliban banned production of heroin; unlike the U.S. Army, the ban was effectively enforced (the Taliban in 2001 dropped its production by 95%). After the U.S. military came in, production soared again. Today eighty-seven percent of the world's opium production now comes from the Afghan countryside according the U.N. The U.S. Department of Justice calls heroin a significant drug threat. In 1998, the national Drug Abuse Warning Network found that coroners implicated heroin in 4,300 deaths. I don't have access to current information and the sources of American heroin, but the numbers suggest that the Taliban's crackdown on Afghan poppy production might have saved more American lives than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. I don't mean to minimize the atrocity and horror of those attacks but instead to put the current rise in drug production and trafficking in perspective: a country under U.S. occupation is producing enough drugs to kill thousands of Americans every year. This is also an issue of homeland security.

Despite the news from Afghanistan and the still-missing iraqi weapons of mass destruction, President Bush and his hawks are scoping out the next target of U.S. military aggression. In the New York Times, Bush Confronts New Challenge on Issue of Iran

In an eerie repetition of the prelude to the iraq war, hawks in the administration and Congress are trumpeting ominous disclosures about Iran's nuclear capacities to make the case that Iran is a threat that must be confronted, either by economic sanctions, military action, or "regime change."