Iraq Posts

The NYTimes is reporting that a military analyst who leaked the "Collateral Murder" videos to Wikileaks has been arrested. 

If you missed the leaks at the time, you can watch them at CollateralMurder.com. They are videos taken from the gun-sights of US helicopters, complete with the commentary from military personnel firing down into the Iraqi neighborhoods below them. The videos capture the killing of civilians, including two Reuters journalists. They show just how impersonal murder has become. This is a video game war and there's no real consequence to shooting the wrong target from thousands of feet away.

I occasionally go back to my blogging archives to pick out interesting articles from one, five and ten years ago.

ONE YEAR AGO: The Not-Quite-So Young Quakers

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool
new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it).

And yet? All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!?

Published 9/14/2008.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Vanity Googling of Causes

A poster to an obscure discussion board recently described typing a particular search phrase into Google and finding nothing but bad information. Reproducing the search I determined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actually quite accurate. I've been hearing an increasing number of stories like this. "Cause Googling," a variation on "vanity googling," is suddenly becoming quite popular. But the interesting thing is that these new searchers don't actually seem curious about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?

Published 10/2/2004 in The Quaker Ranter.

TEN'ISH YEARS AGO: War Time Again
This piece is about the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia (Wikipedia). It's strange to see I was feeling war fatigue even before 9/11 and the "real" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There's a great danger in all this. A danger to the soul of America. This is the fourth country the U.S. has gone to war against in the last six months. War is becoming routine. It is sandwiched between the soap operas and the sitcoms, between the traffic and weather reports. Intense cruise missile bombardments are carried out but have no effect on the psyche or even imagination of the U.S. citizens.

It's as if war itself has become another consumer good. Another event to be packaged for commercial television. Given a theme song. We're at war with a country we don't know over a region we don't really care about. I'm not be facetious, I'm simply stating a fact. The United States can and should play an active peacemaking role in the region, but only after we've done our homework and have basic knowledge of the players and situation. Isolationism is dangerous, yes, but not nearly as dangerous as the emerging culture of these dilettante made-for-TV wars.

Published March 25, 1999, Nonviolence.org

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. 

To American eyes the news of the escalating war in the Caucasus nation of Georgia almost reads as farce: a breakaway region of a breakaway region, tanks rolling to maintain control of... well, not that much really. We wonder how it could be in either Russia or Georgia's interests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia's de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fighting the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunting the giant to its north?

But the farce turns to weariness as we realize just how familiar this all is. Tiny ethnic enclaves with centuries of animosities and well rehearsed stories of atrocities committed by the other set fighting by the breakdown of an empire that had uneasily united them in repression. Change a few details and we could be talking recent conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil billions and human trafficking add fuel to the fire. We've been fighting these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven't we learned how to stop them?

Seriously: otherwise strong economies collapse under the chaos that these territorial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in marginal areas and all sides would be better off if the politicians stopped worrying about these contested territories and just focused on building a economy attractive to international trade.

Why hasn't the world learned the mechanisms to end these conflicts before they erupt into open warfare? Where is the political will to end this class of war once and for all? Disease and terrorism are the invariable fruits of these conflicts and strike us all across national boundaries. The "international community" needs to be mean more than impressive choreography and a few thousand athletes in Beijing. This week's real gold metal will go to the leaders that can transcend macho posturing and weak-willed apologizing and get those Russian tanks out of Georgia.

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.

I thought it might be fun to dip into the blog archives every month or so to pull up some old chestnuts:

• A year ago: Blushing over Chris M's QuakerQuaker carnival and a Quaker post Who Am I to Decide Anything about leaderless dynamics and theological creep among liberal Friends;
• Six Years Ago: Dick Cheney's Rambo Complex ("Bush and Cheney are snoring in the bleacher seats when it comes to the world's most pressing and intractable conflict. They're dreaming of cinematic glory.");
• Ten(ish) Years Ago: Stop the Zipper War Before it Starts, an editorial against Bill Clinton's Iraq sabre-rattling in the midst of the Monica Lewinski scandal.

• Pentagon lobbies for escalation of Afghan war (Washington Post)
  With violence on the decline in Iraq but on the upswing in Afghanistan, President Bush is facing new pressure from the U.S. military to accelerate a troop drawdown in Iraq and bulk up force levels in Afghanistan, according to senior U.S. officials.
  (tags: nv)
• Kirk W on Quaker and other meanings for worship
  I’ve found some food for thought in the word “worship.” It never occurred to me, until now, that the Quaker phrase “meeting for worship” might mean something different to other people.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry)
• Susanne K on the dinosaurs in our midst
  Sometimes it feels like the church community itself is the dinosaur. If it isn’t half-extinct already, it seems like it ought to be. That is - believe it or not - entirely to be expected!
  (tags: quaker quaker.vision)
• A new visitor to Friends describes why he left Unitarianism
  It's a circle-the-wagons,insular,bubble mentality that reminds me a little of a Soviet Propaganda film. This defensive posture couches all events, identities, policies, and daily minutia in cloying, self-referential terms of purpose and esoteric phrasing.
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity comment)
• Bold Juniper in new city, new meeting, drawn in by Christmas songs
  The Christmas songs were creating a bridge between what I enjoyed most about the Episcopal services of my childhood and the silence and Light of the Quaker worship of my adulthood. It drew me a little closer to finding my place the Meeting community.
  (tags: quaker)
• Susanne K on the centrality of serving the marginalized
  A faith community that does not evoke the sense of God’s abundance is not doing its job. A church/Meeting that doesn’t put care for the marginalized at the center is “letting its sheep stray”. Like Fox, I can tap into a whole lot of anger on this
  (tags: quaker quaker.vision quaker.alienation comment)