From Bagram to Abu Ghraib

For nearly three years, U.S. military authorities have been investigating evidence of torture at American prisons in Afghanistan. But instead of disciplining those involved, the Pentagon sent them to Iraq.

By Emily Bazelon Mother Jones March/April 2005

Hussain Youssouf Mustafa stepped off the bus outside a law office on a busy street in Amman, Jordan, on a bright day in November. The 51-year-old wore a white kaffiyeh and a white robe with square-rimmed glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard. Inside, he sat down at a table that faced a map of the Middle East, and over eight hours and two days answered questions about his two years in American captivity.

Mustafa, who is Palestinian, said he earned a master's degree in Islamic law in Saudi Arabia, but as a young teacher he had trouble making a living in the West Bank. In 1985, he heard that Pakistan was setting up schools for Afghans who were fleeing the Soviet occupation. Mustafa and his wife moved to Peshawar, a city of 1 million near the Pakistani-Afghan border, and for 17 years they lived there and raised eight children, with Mustafa teaching Arabic and the tenets of Islam at a government-run school.

After the American invasion of Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, Mustafa said, Peshawar became tense, with periodic police roundups of suspected militants, although he had no run-ins with the authorities and felt no threat from them. Then, on May 25, 2002, at about 8 p.m., their doorbell rang. Mustafa asked Ibrahim, his youngest son, to answer the door. The boy yelled, "Police!" and ran back into the house, several Pakistani police officers behind him with guns drawn. They took Mustafa in for questioning along with two of his sons, 18-year-old Mohammed and 23-year-old Abdullah. The young men were released later that night. But their father was blindfolded, tightly shackled, and flown to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Built in 1976 for Soviet troops, Bagram is now a heavily guarded U.S. military compound an hour's drive from Kabul, on a desert plain beneath the snow-peaked Panjshir mountains. When he arrived, Mustafa was publicly stripped naked-a humiliation for a devout Muslim-and put into a crowded pen with more than a dozen others. A barrel in a corner served as a toilet. Mustafa stayed in the cell for about two months. From time to time, American soldiers would take one of the detainees away for interrogations. Mostly, Mustafa said, his questioners wanted to know about Al Qaeda. He told them he didn't know anything about the group.

As he told his story, Mustafa refused to be led by Clive Stafford Smith, the human rights lawyer who interviewed him. Had he been beaten when he arrived at Bagram, Stafford Smith asked through a translator; had he been threatened with guns? Mustafa firmly answered no. It was only on the second day of the interview, after Stafford Smith had stopped pressing, that his account turned grim. "Perhaps the worst thing that has ever happened to me took place at Bagram," he began.

During his imprisonment at the compound, Mustafa estimated that he was interrogated about 25 times. Sometimes, he said, the soldiers forced him to kneel on a concrete floor with a bag over his head. Other times they woke him from sleep or interrupted him in prayer. He said he occasionally heard detainees screaming and concluded that they were being beaten. Then one day, he recalled, "an American soldier took me blindfolded. My hands were tightly cuffed, with my ears plugged so I could not hear properly, and my mouth covered so I could only make a muffled scream. Two soldiers, one on each side, forced me to bend down, and a third pressed my face down over a table. A fourth soldier then pulled down my trousers. They rammed a stick up my rectum."

Mustafa said that he was not told why he was brutalized. "The Americans never said anything about why they were doing it to me, so I had to think for many hours and days later, to try to work out what was going through their minds," he told Stafford Smith, pressing the tips of his broad fingers together. "I think maybe they wanted to make me so embarrassed that it would live with me for the rest of my life." He said other prisoners told him that they had experienced similar treatment.

Americans, and the world, have become accustomed to accounts like Mustafa's in connection with Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. But his story hints at another scandal-one that has received little sustained media attention and sparked no public outrage. Over the past three years, numerous reports-from Afghan and American human rights groups, and from the Pentagon itself-have documented allegations of abuse inside U.S. compounds in Afghanistan. Hundreds of prisoners have come forward, often reluctantly, offering accounts of harsh interrogation techniques including sexual brutality, beatings, and other methods designed to humiliate and inflict physical pain. At least eight detainees are known to have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, and in at least two cases military officials ruled that the deaths were homicides. Many of the incidents were known to U.S. officials long before the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted; yet instead of disciplining those involved, the Pentagon transferred key personnel from Afghanistan to the Iraqi prison. "Had the investigation and prosecution of abusive interrogators in Afghanistan proceeded in a timely manner," Human Rights Watch executive director Brad Adams noted in an open letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last fall, "it is possible that...many of the abuses seen in Iraq could have been avoided."

Even now, with the attention of the media and Congress focused on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the problems in Afghanistan seem to be continuing. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, created in 2002 during the early stages of the transition to Afghan self-governance, has collected a total of 120 reports of abuse by coalition forces; 50 of them were made just since last May. Many of the complaints involve excessive force by soldiers during the course of an arrest. But others come from former detainees who say that soldiers stripped them naked and sexually abused them. The Afghan commission and Human Rights Watch, as well as a smaller group, the Washington, D.C.-based Crimes of War Project, have also gathered evidence on detainee abuse at American "forward operating bases" near Kandahar, Gardez, Khost, Orgun, Ghazni, and Jalalabad. Investigators estimate that in each of these places, between 5 and 20 prisoners are held at a time, compared to as many as 200 at Bagram.

It's hard to explain how facts this disturbing have garnered so little attention-especially in light of the connection to Abu Ghraib. According to the U.S. military's own investigators, it was at Bagram that interrogators devised and tested the methods that would shame the United States in Iraq. Documents and witness accounts from both detainees and soldiers starkly portray how an initially disciplined interrogation effort deteriorated, in a climate of lawlessness and pressure to produce intelligence, to the point where officers and soldiers first bent the rules, and finally broke them.

A few weeks after the fall of the Taliban, in January 2002, a State Department memo described Bagram as "a temporary 'collection center' where some detainees stop over enroute to their permanent location," typically Guantanamo. Over the following months, however, Bagram became much more than that-in part because troops in the field kept bringing in detainees who were not deemed valuable enough to send on to Guantanamo but were nonetheless kept at the base for months at a time. Many of them were local men arrested during U.S. raids on villages, according to Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chair of the Afghan human rights commission. The problem, Hakim says, has been that the U.S. military frequently responds to tips from competing tribal factions, but isn't in a position to assess whether those claims are credible, or simply attempts to settle scores. "The Americans get a report that a village belongs to Al Qaeda," he explains. "When we go to check, we find nothing. The commission is very keen to share information about our cross-checking of these local accusations. But the coalition forces do not consult with us or with any other Afghan authority."

In May 2002, a few weeks before Hussain Mustafa was flown to Bagram, a 30-year-old Connecticut reservist was posted to the base as a senior interrogator. He and his team had come from a camp in the Afghan city of Kandahar, where they'd been conducting interrogations according to the 16 methods taught in their training- standard questioning techniques, from "good cop/bad cop" to "we know all"-and become frustrated by their failure to collect abundant useful information.

In Bagram, the interrogation team's number was cut from the 25 they'd had at Kandahar to 7. The team had about 200 prisoners to question and was processing between 35 and 40 a day. The reservist, together with Los Angeles Times reporter Greg Miller, later wrote a book about his experience, The Interrogators; the Army required that he use a pseudonym in writing the book and talking to reporters.

Chris Mackey, as the reservist is known, had been taught that harsh interrogation techniques yielded poor information because they prompted detainees to lie. Still, he recalls, "the more aggressive we were-though we never became physically violent-the more reliable the information was." His team realized that they often got their best information in the last half-hour of a 10-hour session, and they concluded that fatigue was their best available weapon. "We decided by committee that we couldn't get away with sleep deprivation under the Geneva Convention," Mackey says. "So we came up with this technique we called 'monstering.' We said that if you put one interrogator in with one prisoner and scrupulously gave them the same water and food and bathroom breaks, the interrogation could go on as long as the interrogator could stand it. Of course, we were hoping that the interrogator would be fully rested, whereas the prisoner would have just come off the battlefield."

Monstering wasn't in the Army manual, and before he came to Bagram, Mackey wouldn't have imagined improvising techniques that deviated from his training. But in Afghanistan, he increasingly felt compelled to produce intelligence that might help his fellow soldiers. "When I arrived, I would never have countenanced monstering," he told me. "But we saw how little success we were having against a determined enemy. So we went to what we thought was the absolute edge."

The Bush administration had decided at the beginning of the conflict that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the Afghan detainees. But Mackey's commander never told him of that decision, and Mackey worried that he could be disciplined for breaking the rules. "As part of your training as an interrogator, it's hardwired into your system that a violation of the Geneva Convention will bring swift justice down on you," he says. At one point, Mackey remembers, a military police official at Bagram suggested that the interrogators use dogs to scare the detainees. "He was a reservist from Michigan, where there's a big Arab population, and he said that Arabs are terrified of dogs," Mackey says. "I remember sitting in a hot pizza oven of an office, arguing with everyone, trying to figure out how we could do this. But we couldn't-not out of any love for the enemy. We just thought we would get into trouble."

Asked about Mustafa's story of abuse-which would have taken place while his team was based at Bagram-Mackey says the culprits couldn't have been members of his unit, the only one formally questioning prisoners at the base (though he says he can't be sure whether the CIA had interrogators there). Former detainees, he points out, have "everything to gain for their cause by lying or exaggerating wildly." But, he adds, "10 months ago I would have told you, categorically, there was no way that this sort of thing could have happened. Now...the criminal abuses in Iraq-and the murders in Bagram-have robbed me of the comfort and uniformity of blanket denials."

In August 2002, Mackey and his team turned over the detention unit in Bagram to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The new head of the interrogation unit was Captain Carolyn Wood, a 34-year-old officer and 10-year Army veteran. Wood rewrote the interrogation policy set by Mackey's group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manuals. Her expanded list included "the use of dogs, stress positions, sleep management, [and] sensory deprivation," according to an internal Pentagon investigation known as the Fay-Jones report; the report noted that other techniques, such as "removal of clothing and the use of detainee's phobias," were also used at Bagram.

In December 2002, four months after Wood and the 519th took over at Bagram, two detainees died in custody at the base. One was Mullah Habibullah, a 30-year-old man from the southern province of Oruzgan; the other was a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar (many Afghans use only one name), who was married and had a 2-year-old daughter. The men had been hung by their arms from the ceiling and beaten so severely that, according to a report by Army investigators later leaked to the Baltimore Sun, their legs would have needed to be amputated had they lived. The Army's Criminal Investigation command launched an inquiry, but few people outside Afghanistan took notice.

Then in March 2003, New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall tracked down Dilawar's brother in his home village. The man took from his pocket Dilawar's death certificate, which he'd been unable to understand because it was in English. Gall read the document and discovered that the Army pathologist who signed the certificate had checked "homicide" as the cause of death. The Times buried Gall's story on page A14; few other outlets picked it up. It wasn't until May 2004, more than a year later, that the Army released its report on the deaths. In it, investigators implicated a total of 28 military personnel in crimes including negligent homicide, maiming, and dereliction of duty. To date, however, only one person has been charged-Sergeant James Boland, a reserve military police soldier, who is accused of denying medical care to Dilawar and watching a lower-ranking soldier beat Habibullah. "It is left up to the various commanders whether to bring legal action" against any of the other 27, says Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Pamela Hart. So far they have not.

By the summer of 2003, it was the 519th's turn to leave Bagram. Despite Gall's report and the ongoing criminal investigation, they were redeployed to run another prison-Abu Ghraib. There, Wood proceeded to implement new interrogation rules that, as a Pentagon report later noted, were "remarkably similar" to those she had developed at Bagram. In September 2003, the Army probed tips from other military police officers that members of the 519th had beaten prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but the investigators found the allegations unsubstantiated. Members of the 519th have not been directly implicated in the photographed abuses that set off the scandal.

Wood herself testified last summer at a military hearing in the case of Lynndie England, one of the soldiers prosecuted for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Wood said she was "outraged" by the photos she had seen.

Chris Mackey had trained with Wood before she got her command at Bagram. He says that while he was "gravely disappointed" when he found out about her changes to the interrogation rules, he understands what might have been going on. "After she took over, the stakes got very high," he says. "We went from losing three or four soldiers a month to scores of them. She must have been under a tremendous amount of pressure."

Mackey also says he couldn't imagine that Wood's superiors didn't know what she was doing. "I don't think it was sinister and programmatic," Mackey says of the military's handling of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. "But there was horrible incompetence at the leadership and oversight level. People were aware of what we were doing because we were open. [The prison] was practically a Disney ride, with lots of higher-ups and officials coming through. But the common response we got was, Aren't you kind of babying them?"

The deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar weren't the only signals that something was going awry in the Afghan detention centers. In March 2003, just as U.S. troops were streaming into Iraq, American troops in Afghanistan arrested an 18-year-old soldier in the Afghan army, Jamal Naseer, at the behest of a provincial governor embroiled in a dispute with local warlords. The arrest wasn't recorded and no charges were filed, but Naseer was taken to a U.S. base near Gardez. Two weeks later, he was dead. A report prepared for the Afghan attorney general, who considered bringing charges against unnamed American soldiers in the case, found that he had been severely beaten over the course of two weeks. The Afghan investigators and a report by the United Nations also recorded allegations that other prisoners at Gardez had been beaten, immersed in cold water, given electric shocks, hung upside down, and had their toenails torn off. The U.S. Army investigated the circumstances of Naseer's death, but closed its inquiry because there were no records of who was in charge at the base, or of the names of victims and witnesses.

By the summer and fall of 2003, more and more detainees were coming forward to complain about abuse in U.S. custody. In September 2003, a former Afghan police colonel told the Afghan human rights commission that he had been sexually abused while being detained at Bagram, Gardez, and Kandahar for a total of 40 days. Another former detainee named Abdurahman Khadr, who was held at Bagram in March 2003, later testified in a Canadian federal court that U.S. soldiers "got me naked and they were taking pictures of my face and my private parts-just constantly taking pictures of my private parts." Khadr also said that he'd seen other prisoners hung from a wall by their shackles for as long as four days. Two other detainees, Saif-ur Rahman and Abdul Qayyum, told the Associated Press that they had been deprived of sleep, forced to stand for long periods, and taunted by female soldiers during the fall and winter of 2002.

The Army report on the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah documented similar practices. The investigators found that members of the Cincinnati-based 377th Military Police Company, which was based at Bagram along with the 519th, slammed prisoners into walls, twisted their handcuffs, shackled a detainee's arms to the ceiling, and forced water into another detainee's mouth "until he could not breathe." Finally, last June, a grand jury in North Carolina indicted a private CIA contractor, David Passaro, in connection with the death of an Afghan man who had voluntarily surrendered to U.S. troops at another base in Afghanistan; the man had been savagely beaten with a flashlight.

Last summer, a small group of American lawyers began talking about the pattern of misconduct at Bagram and Abu Ghraib laid out in the Army's Fay-Jones report; attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other groups are now preparing to file lawsuits on behalf of a number of detainees who claim to have been tortured in either Afghanistan or Iraq. The lawyers argue that the Bush administration laid the groundwork for abuse by claiming that those captured in Afghanistan were "enemy combatants" not covered by international law. With the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions lifted, says Priti Patel, a lawyer with the group Human Rights First, interrogators developed harsh techniques that ultimately were transferred to Iraq. (The Bush administration has not backed down from its stance on the detainees' legal status; in fact, it has looked for additional ways to hold foreign prisoners outside the reach of American courts. In October, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would allow foreign detainees to be deported to countries that engage in torture. Also late last year, the White House helped kill a legislative provision that would have explicitly banned intelligence officers from torturing detainees.)

The lawyers also fault the military and the Pentagon for failing to track responsibility for the abuses up the chain of command. To date, only 10 soldiers have been prosecuted for crimes involving prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq-none of them above the rank of staff sergeant. "All of the investigations have looked down rather than up," says Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer at the ACLU. "Our goal is to hold high-level officials accountable for the policies and practices that caused widespread torture, and to hold them accountable for their failure to stop the abuse once it came to light. This is really about who bears ultimate responsibility."

Part of the challenge in assigning accountability for the Afghan abuses is that, in contrast to the uproar about Abu Ghraib, very little about them has become public. Last May, the Army assigned Brig. General Charles Jacoby to conduct a review of American detention centers in Afghanistan. Jacoby completed his report in July, but it remains classified; the only hint of its contents has come in the Washington Post, which in December reported that it had found that many of the prisons lacked clear interrogation guidelines, inviting commanders in the field to set their own limits.

Outside investigators, meanwhile, have been almost entirely barred from the Afghan detention centers. The International Committee for the Red Cross has had no access to any of them except Bagram, and even there its representatives have not been able to see all parts of the facility. Former prisoners have said the Red Cross never visited detainees being held in the upstairs cells, including Dilawar and Habibullah. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have not been allowed to visit the base at all; neither has the Afghan human rights commission, which has been asking the U.S. military for access to Bagram and other detention centers for a year. "We expected to have a friendly relationship with the coalition forces," says deputy chair Hakim. "But what the coalition has done, the abuses, overshadows the friendly aspect of the American intervention. I ask you: What is the difference between the Americans and the Soviet forces who occupied Afghanistan?"

In early August 2002, Hussain Mustafa was flown from Bagram to Guantanamo. There, he was held mostly in the prison's "preferred" area, reserved for detainees who were deemed to be cooperating with interrogators. At one point, Mustafa said, he went 10 months without being questioned. "I was led to believe that the frequency of the questioning depended on what they thought you had done," he said. "So I assume from the limited number of times they bothered to question me that they knew all along that I had nothing that I could say."

Mustafa was released from Guantanamo last August. His wife and seven of his children were waiting for him in Jordan. His son Abdullah, however, had died six months earlier. Abdullah had had a heart condition that he'd been able to keep under control in Pakistan, where visits with a specialist were relatively cheap. But when the family moved to Jordan after Mustafa's arrest, he couldn't afford to see a doctor regularly. "It is a nightmare to me that I did not even know Abdullah had died until I was released," Mustafa said, and then he stopped talking.

The day after he finished his interview with Stafford Smith, Mustafa returned to read over his statement and sign it. He brought with him a document stating that he had been "determined to pose no threat to the U.S. Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan"-the standard release that the military gives detainees when they are allowed to return home. Mustafa said he'd been given one other thing when he left Guantanamo: a pair of white canvas sneakers. He shook Stafford Smith's hand and walked out of the law office, the sneakers bright in the autumn sun.

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Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate.com, traveled to Jordan as a Soros Justice Media Fellow to report on the treatment of prisoners captured in Afghanistan.

GI's Rap their Anger - Fighting Words

By Monica Davey The New York Times Sunday 20 February 2005

On one more steaming day in Baghdad, word filtered out to the artillery regiment that some of the younger guys were not going to get to fly home for their promised rest-and-relaxation break. Soldiers fumed. They'd spent months of long hours in this crazy place, knowing that at any moment a homemade bomb might explode, a rocket-propelled grenade might land or an Iraqi child might spit at them.

But though they were armed to the teeth, they chose to respond with a different kind of weapon. They stepped outside and, of all things, began to rap.

"I started doing some of the most outlandish freestyle you can imagine," Javorn Drummond, an Army specialist from Wade, N.C., recalled the other day. "We were just going off about how we do all the work, but we can't go home. We didn't care who could hear. We didn't have to care. I'll tell you, it felt good. At that time, they were killing us. We were working so hard we weren't getting sleep."

Moments like those, when service members turn to rap to express, and perhaps relieve, fear, aggression, resentment and exhaustion, have become a common part of life during nearly two years of war in Iraq. "Rap is the one place," Specialist Drummond said, "where you can get out your aggravation - your anger at the people who outrank you, your frustration at the Iraqi people who just didn't understand what we were doing. You could get out everything."

If rock 'n' roll, the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Creedence Clearwater Revival, was the music of American service members in Vietnam, rap may become the defining pulse for the war in Iraq. It has emerged as a rare realm where soldiers and marines, hardly known for talking about their feelings, are voicing the full range of their emotions and reactions to war. They rap about their resentment of the military hierarchy. But they also rap about their pride, their invincibility, their fallen brothers, their disdain for the enemy and their determination to succeed.

Plenty of soldiers still listen to the twang of country music or the scream of heavy metal. Many, in fact, said that metal - and albums like Slayer's "Reign in Blood" - helped psyche them up for combat as they roared across the desert in the very first days of conflict. But a great many say it was 50 Cent, Pastor Troy or Mystikal (himself, a Gulf war veteran) that kept them chugging along in trucks and Humvees - in one case, manning the Humvee machine gun - miniheadphone lines tucked away under Kevlar vests. They listened to get stirred up on the way to house raids, before tense guard duty assignments or simply when they awoke to another tedious day under that enormous sun.

The more than 1,450 American service members killed in Iraq have also left behind traces of hip-hop scattered in the memories. Sgt. Jack Bryant Jr., of Dale City, Va., who died last Nov. 20 when a makeshift bomb blew up near his convoy in Iraq, had written rap, his father remembered the other day. And Pfc. Curtis L. Wooten, of Spanaway, Wash., who was killed on Jan. 4 when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Balad, had planned to go to school when he got home, his brother said, to become a producer in the hip-hop world.

As for the many soldiers who are writing and performing their own raps, their lyrics sample the lexicon of the war - the Sandbox, I.E.D.'s (improvised explosive devices), I.C.D.C. (the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps) and Haji (the word many soldiers use derogatorily for the enemy) - and the wide scope of their feelings about it. "There is a great potential for ambivalence in their words," said Jeff Chang, author of a new book, "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation" (St. Martin's Press). "That's part of the ambivalence hip-hop has often carried. You hear two ideas in what they are saying here: An implicit critique of 'what am I doing here?' but at the same time, the idea of loyalty to your street soldiers, loyalty to your troops, loyalty to the guys you ride with."

It is the music of Specialist Drummond and his colleagues in the First Armored Division's Second Battalion, Third Field Artillery that makes up much of the background sounds in a new documentary, "Gunner Palace," about the experience of one group of ordinary soldiers in Iraq. The movie, which will open in theaters on March 4 and was directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, records the everyday lives of 400 soldiers living in the bombed-out palace of Saddam Hussein's son Uday after the fall of Baghdad.

Rap might seem at odds with the conformity of military life, but Mr. Tucker, who served in the reserve in the 1980's, sees it as an extension of the cadence, or the calling-out songs to which troops run. And from the lyrics they write, it's clear that some of these soldiers identify their role - urban guerilla warriors fighting an unseen enemy - with that of the heroes of the genre. Even the USO has responded: They sent Nappy Roots, Bubba Sparks, 50 Cent and G-Unit to perform for soldiers in Iraq, and Ludacris appeared at a giant welcome home for soldiers at Fort Hood, Tex.

"Rap has become another part of barracks culture," Mr. Tucker said in a phone interview. "As far as soldiers go, rap is almost the perfect medium: they are able to say so much, to let off steam and also to have so many hidden meanings in what they say."

One day in April 2004 Sgt. Nick Moncrief, who said he had felt close to death many times during his 14 months in Iraq, felt at least four bullets whiz past his face while he was guarding the perimeter of an area in Baghdad. "Those bullets were close to me the way you're close when you're getting ready to kiss a girl."

Not long after that, he scribbled down a rap: "I noticed that my face is aging so quickly/Cuz I've seen more than your average man in his fifties/I'm 24 now/Got two kids and a wife/Having visions of them picturing me up out of they life."

Now back at his post in Germany, Sergeant Moncrief, who also appears in Mr. Tucker's film, has turned 25. "My message in my rap is that I have a lot of anger about the war," he said. "Why are we there? Why me? That's basically what I want to say when I write: Why?"

Some soldiers described jotting down lyrics on scraps of paper at night, between power failures. They rapped to whatever beat they could find - a homemade CD on a boom box or just some drumming on the metal armor of a Humvee. The soldiers joked that they could have even rapped to the beat of gunfire.

In fact, they very nearly did in "mortar alley," a Baghdad spot where service members held freestyle contests outside their sleeping quarters. Half a dozen soldiers or more would gather around; when the mortar rounds started coming - as they so often did between 7 p.m. and midnight - the music swiftly ended and everyone raced inside. As Specialist Terry Taylor, 27, recalls, those raps tended to come particularly fast. "You wouldn't want to wait too long," he said. "We got caught outside with mortars coming more than a few times."

Other nights, Specialist Taylor said, he and his friends would sneak a radio along when they had to escort some high-ranking officer, and rap while they waited through his appointment.

Usually, violence was the inspiration. After a June 2003 shootout that left one man dead, Specialist Taylor wrote: "I can't believe Iraqis are after me/It's got to be a tragedy/The way these people bust and blast at me/Dear God, is this the way it has to be?"

It was one of his "aggression" raps. "For me, this was a way to stand up and say, 'hey, I'm not going to take it,'" he said. "If I didn't feel that, if I didn't get that out there and say that out loud, I just don't think you'd make it. A lot of guys didn't make it. You can't show kindness or weakness out there. This was a way to make it out safe."

His song went on: "You have no success with your bombs now it's mortar attacks/Oh! So you think that we not ready for that/We got snipers on the roof flipping cats like acrobats/And I am the living proof, I'm on guard and I'm going to be there all night/And to me your guerilla tactics is nothing to me but a little monkey fight."

While working on "Soundtrack to War," a film about the role of music in the Iraqi conflict that was broadcast on VH1 last summer, the director George Gittoes said he found that rap had not fully crossed over for all white soldiers, who tended instead to listen to country music. If true, it's a distinction affecting more than just what CD's get played in the barracks. For while country music has by and large been wildly supportive of soldiers and the war, hip-hop's relationship to the conflict and to military life in general, has been a lot more ambiguous and shifting.

Rap was already infusing the culture of soldiers in the first Gulf war, in 1991, when many artists were critical of the administration. Paris wrote "Bush Killa," about the current president's father, and Ice Cube came out with "A Bird in the Hand," a biting look at government policy. (He also appeared in David O. Russell's 1999 film, 'Three Kings," a dark comedy about soldiers in the aftermath of that war.) Still, the symbol of the fearless street soldier was gaining in popularity.

In the months after the terrorist attacks of 2001, Mr. Chang said, some rappers wrote about defending the country. But as the war in Iraq has gone on, more pointedly antiwar songs have emerged. In Jay-Z's 2003 "Beware of the Boys," he wrote: "We rebellious, we back home/Screaming, 'Leave Iraq alone!/But all my soldiers in the field, I will wish you safe return/But only love kills war, when will they learn?"

According to Bakari Kitwana, the author of "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture," "the contradiction that people in the hip-hop culture see is that the war is creating job options and life possibilities not just for Iraqi people but for large American corporations, and meanwhile, the soldiers have no such options."

As for the soldiers, some say the war has helped break down whatever barriers of race or taste there may have been before among the troops on questions of music. Rap, country, metal - it's all Iraq.

"I guess I don't even see the difference between rap and country anymore, except the beat," said Specialist Richmond Shaw, 21, who grew up in Pontiac, Mich., and wrote jarring raps in Iraq. "We're talking about the same things. We're all out here in the middle of this oven. There's nothing going on. It's desolate. We're basically stuck. Dirty, dusty, windy, blowing, miserable."

"I might be part of the Tupac generation," he went on, "but we're all trying to avoid getting shot, and we're all wondering whether people will remember us and we're trying to make difference before we die. Isn't that what country music is about, too?"

Three days after Specialist Shaw's friend was shot in Iraq, he wrote a song. He said he knew he was "living on borrowed time" and needed people back home to know that life there was real, not something on the news, not something in a press conference, not an idea. He sat in his room to write it, looking out, he said, at a river, listening to the constant flapping of choppers going by, and once in a while, gunfire somewhere:

'Trials and tribulations daily we do/And not always life's pains wash away in our pool/When we take a dip, we try to stick to the script/But when those guns start blazing and our friends get hit/That's when our hearts start racing and our stomach gets whoozy/Cuz for y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie."

Rap music, it seems, has been for many soldiers a bridge between their normal lives and the strange, surreal world of their Iraqi service. Their lives, they said, were changed dramatically by war, but their music helped them understand it. Rap, with its stories of crumbling neighborhoods, street violence , wild economic disparities and life-or-death swagger, helped them make sense of what they saw there.

"When you start looking at the fighting between the Sunnis and the Shiites," said Specialist Drummond, 22, who finished four years of service in November after spending more than a year in Iraq, "it's at least as complicated as the fighting between the Bloods and the Crips back home. People can't tell who is who and who is mad at who. Truth is, there are some very scary similarities between what you see in the neighborhoods and what you see in Iraq. I think that's why rap fits both so well."

Unless pressed, Sergeant Moncrief does not talk much about what he saw in the war. He is trying to live in the now, he says. But his raps are still coming.

"I don't know any other way to get my feelings out," Sergeant Moncrief said. "I was scared over there, and frankly, I think if you weren't scared, there was something wrong with you. I rap because I feel it."

Experts see military draft as inevitable

Anti-war activists fear revival of selective service
by MIKE BILLINGTON / The News Journal 02/17/2005

There may come a day when Uncle Sam wants Wayne Flenniken for the U.S. Army.

In many ways, he's an ideal candidate for military service. At 15, he already has finished high school and is enrolled at Delaware Technical & Community College studying Spanish and English. There is a problem, however. Wayne doesn't want any part of Uncle Sam's Army - or anyone else's, for that matter.

"I don't believe in war and I don't like the military in any way, shape or form," he said. "I don't think anyone should be forced to die prematurely."

That's why he went to a draft resistance training session Friday in his hometown of Newark. It's why Wayne has begun building his case as a conscientious objector.

The United States no longer has a military draft and hasn't since 1973, when it converted to an all-volunteer military.

But some anti-war activists say it's only a matter of time before the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress bring it back. Meanwhile, conservatives and moderates outside the administration have taken a hard look at America's military commitments and are urging Congress to beef up the Army and Marines.

Many elected officials say there is no way the draft will be brought back any time soon.

"Our current all-volunteer force is highly effective, well-trained, well-disciplined and capable of handling our global and national security commitments," said Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del. "[Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have continuously stated their opposition to reviving the draft and the House of Representatives overwhelmingly rejected such a proposal last year. I personally oppose it."

Others aren't so certain.

"I don't see the need for a draft, but we need to prepare now in order to avoid having one forced on us in the future," said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del. "We can reduce the stress we are placing on our armed forces by increasing the number of ground troops in the Army and Marine Corps and bringing the size of our military in line with our expanded responsibilities in a post-9/11 world," he said.

Looking for help

A few believe, however, that the White House should get other nations to share the burden in Iraq.

"We have 12 [combat] divisions and 10 are locked down in Iraq, either coming or going," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. "Our ability to have any flexibility with ground forces anywhere else is diminished. If we had to move into Iran, Syria, North Korea or anywhere else, we'd be in real difficulty."

In addition, he said, "we have absolutely spent, exhausted, and in some instances misled the National Guard and the reserves. I've been in Baghdad and Fallujah and I've spoken with them. When they enlisted in the Guard, they never anticipated being sent for two tours of duty in Iraq lasting a year or 18 months. We can't keep asking citizen soldiers to do that."

In a highly critical memo on the use of Reservists, Lt. Gen. James Helmly said virtually the same thing late last year. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, said that "overuse" in Iraq and Afghanistan could result in a "broken force."

Biden co-sponsored legislation with Republican Sen. John McCain and others that allows the Army to increase its active duty strength by 30,000 troops. The Defense Department said earlier this month that it expects to meet that goal by 2007.

Anti-war activists agree with Biden and Helmly that the military needs additional troops.

"We already have our troops stretched to the limit," said J.E. McNeil, executive director of the Center on Conscience & War. The Guard and Reserve cannot continue to provide about 40 percent of the nation's combat troops, Biden said.

As a result, McNeil and other anti-war activists such as Sally Milbury-Steen, executive director of the Wilmington-based peace organization Pacem in Terris, said they think a draft is on the horizon.

"I think there's a very good chance of a military draft in the next two years. We have soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq and now they're heating up the rhetoric on Iran. Where else will the soldiers come from?" Milbury-Steen asked.

Peace activists aren't the only ones thinking seriously about compulsory military service. In a well-publicized letter sent to congressional leaders in late January, conservatives and moderates said flatly that "the United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume."

In that letter, retired military leaders such as Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey joined with defense analysts such as Michele Flournoy and political commentators such as William Kristol in asking Congress "to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. ... it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active-duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."

They do not call for a draft but anti-war activists say they see no other certain way to boost military strength.

"The most probable way they will start is to do a selected draft of medical people, those with specialized computer skills, and those with Arabic language skills and let it spread further," Milbury-Steen said.

'Everything is in place'

If a new draft law is enacted, the government could start sending new recruits to military training very quickly. The reason: Former President Jimmy Carter put the framework of the current Selective Service system in place in 1980. Although Carter never activated it, as part of the framework, young men must register with the government when they turn 18.

That means, Milbury-Steen said, that new recruits could be sent to boot camp within two weeks of the draft law's passage.

"Everything is in place, ready to go," she said.

Charles Pena, director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington-based think tank, does not see a military draft in the future. Instead, he said, the federal government is more likely to require compulsory national service.

"We won't have a draft like we had in the Vietnam era," Pena said. "There are two important stumbling blocks to bringing that back. First, what do you do about women? They weren't drafted before but are now an important part of the military. Second, what happens if someone who is drafted says that he or she is a homosexual?"

Discussion reflects support

There is no groundswell for national service legislation now, Pena said, but it is being discussed by lawmakers and at policy seminars throughout the nation's capital.

"It's lurking right below the surface. There are enough people willing to get behind it on Capitol Hill that it's something that could be done. Right now no one's pushing for it, but just as importantly, no one's pushing against it," he said.

Under national compulsory service, no one would be exempt, he said. People could join the military or perform some other form of community service, Pena said.

Newark resident Jane Curschmann isn't sure there will be a draft. She went to last week's anti-draft training because she has a 13-year-old son and wanted to be better informed about his rights. Judy Butler also attended the session. She doesn't know if there will be a draft but is suspicious of the Bush administration's forceful denials that there are plans to reinstitute one.

"I have a problem with credibility with this particular administration," she said.

Wayne Flenniken's father, Eric, a former Army Reservist, went to the draft resistance training with his son because, while he doesn't have a problem defending the country from enemies, he has a problem sending his son to fight in Iraq.

"I used to be gung-ho when I was younger but this war in Iraq, it all boils down to oil and oil interests. You want to send my son to Iraq to defend Enron? No," he said, "I don't think so."

Contact Mike Billington at 324-2761 or mbillington@delawareonline.com.

Files suggest US troops tried to hide abuses

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | February 18, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A former Iraqi detainee told Army investigators that a US soldier forced him to sign a statement that he had not been abused even though American interrogators in September 2003 had dislocated his arms, beaten his leg with a bat, crushed his nose, and put an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to newly released internal military documents.

In addition, a sergeant at a military camp in southern Afghanistan told an Army investigator in July 2004 that his unit erased a series of digital photographs showing guards beating detainees and aiming guns at hooded prisoners. The sergeant said the pictures were deleted after photos from the Abu Ghraib prison appeared in the media, out of the unit's fear that the pictures could spark a second wave of scandal.

The disclosures provide the first evidence that in both the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of war, soldiers involved in alleged abuse incidents may have sought to suppress evidence of their actions, muddying any inquiry into how pervasive the abuse of detainees was. Other documents released yesterday also suggest that while the military has said it is investigating all allegations of abuse, it is also closing many of the investigations on the grounds that no conclusion can be reached.

''These raise the question of how many other allegations of abuse were buried in the same way," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking government documents on detainee abuses. ''That's very troubling because we already think that abuse was pervasive, but maybe there is a whole layer of abuse that we haven't seen."

Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman, released a fact sheet about the documents and a statement saying, ''The Army remains committed to addressing identified problems in detainee operations and to communicating the progress to the public."

The newly disclosed abuse allegations were among 988 pages of Army Criminal Investigation Division files released yesterday by the ACLU, which is making the documents public when it obtains them from various federal agencies.

In addition to indicating two examples of evidence of abuse that allegedly was suppressed, the documents also indicated that military investigators often closed cases quickly on the grounds that they did not have enough evidence to prove or refute the claims, Jaffer said.

''What we do see here is more evidence of a pattern in which the government failed to aggressively investigate credible allegations of abuse," he said.

The files released yesterday cover eight separate Army investigations in detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the one in which the Iraqi detainee was forced to sign a statement saying he was not abused -- in exchange for his freedom -- and the sergeant in Afghanistan who said soldiers wiped out digital pictures of abuse.

Continued...

War Helps Recruit Terrorists, Hill Told

Intelligence Officials Talk Of Growing Insurgency

By Dana Priest and Josh White Thursday, February 17, 2005; Washington Post Staff Writers

The insurgency in Iraq continues to baffle the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday.

"Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism," he said. "They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

On a day when the top half-dozen U.S. national security and intelligence officials went to Capitol Hill to talk about the continued determination of terrorists to strike the United States, their statements underscored the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq.

"The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists," Goss said in his first public testimony since taking over the CIA. Goss said Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who has joined al Qaeda since the U.S. invasion, "hopes to establish a safe haven in Iraq" from which he could operate against Western nations and moderate Muslim governments.

"Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment," Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate panel. "Overwhelming majorities in Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia believe the U.S. has a negative policy toward the Arab world."

Jacoby said the Iraq insurgency has grown "in size and complexity over the past year" and is now mounting an average of 60 attacks per day, up from 25 last year. Attacks on Iraq's election day last month reached 300, he said, double the previous one-day high of 150, even though transportation was virtually locked down.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that he has trouble believing any of the estimates of the number of insurgents because it is so difficult to track them.

Rumsfeld said that the CIA and DIA had differing assessments at different times but that U.S. intelligence estimates of the insurgency are "considerably lower" than a recent Iraqi intelligence report of 40,000 hard-core insurgents and 200,000 part-time fighters. Rumsfeld told Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.), the committee's ranking Democrat, that he had copies of the CIA and DIA estimates but declined to disclose them in a public session because they are classified.

"My job in the government is not to be the principal intelligence officer and try to rationalize differences between the Iraqis, the CIA and the DIA," Rumsfeld testified. "I see these reports. Frankly, I don't have a lot of confidence in any of them."

After the hearing, Rumsfeld told reporters that he did not mean to be "dismissive" of the intelligence reports.

"People are doing the best that can be done, and the fact is that people disagree," he said. ". . . It's not clear to me that the number is the overriding important thing."

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House panel that the extremists associated with al Qaeda and Zarqawi represent "a fairly small percentage of the total number of insurgents."

Sunni Arabs, dominated by former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, "comprise the core of the insurgency" and continue to provide "funds and guidance across family, tribal, religious and peer-group lines," Jacoby said.

Foreign fighters "are a small component of the insurgency," and Syrian, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian and Iranian nationals make up the majority of foreign fighters, he said.

On terrorism, Goss, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and the acting deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security reiterated their belief that al Qaeda and other jihadist groups intend to strike the United States but offered no new information about the threat.

"It may be only a matter of time before al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons," Goss said.

Tom Fingar, assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, submitted a written statement that said: "We have seen no persuasive evidence that al-Qaida has obtained fissile material or ever has had a serious and sustained program to do so. At worst, the group possesses small amounts of radiological material that could be used to fabricate a radiological dispersion device," or dirty bomb.

Mueller, whose bureau has the lead in finding and apprehending terrorists in the United States, said his top concern is "the threat from covert operatives who may be inside the U.S." and said finding them is the FBI's top priority. But he said they have been unable to do so.

"I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing," Mueller said.

"Whether we are talking about a true sleeper operative who has been in place for years, waiting to be activated to conduct an attack, or a recently deployed operative that has entered the U.S. to facilitate or conduct an attack, we are continuously adapting our methods to reflect newly received intelligence and to ensure we are as proactive and as targeted as we can be in detecting their presence," he said.

Mueller said transportation systems and nuclear power plants remain key al Qaeda targets.

James Loy, acting deputy secretary of homeland security, agreed. In a written statement, he said that despite the efforts of the U.S. intelligence community and his department, and advances in information sharing, technology and organization, "any attack of any kind could occur at any time."

The Return of the Draft: With the army desperate for recruits, should college students be packing their bags for Canada?

By TIM DICKINSON

Uncle Sam wants you. He needs you. He'll bribe you to sign up. He'll strong-arm you to re-enlist. And if that's not enough, he's got a plan to draft you.

In the three decades since the Vietnam War, the "all-volunteer Army" has become a bedrock principle of the American military. "It's a magnificent force," Vice President Dick Cheney declared during the election campaign last fall, "because those serving are ones who signed up to serve." But with the Army and Marines perilously overextended by the war in Iraq, that volunteer foundation is starting to crack. The "weekend warriors" of the Army Reserve and the National Guard now make up almost half the fighting force on the front lines, and young officers in the Reserve are retiring in droves. The Pentagon, which can barely attract enough recruits to maintain current troop levels, has involuntarily extended the enlistments of as many as 100,000 soldiers. Desperate for troops, the Army has lowered its standards to let in twenty-five percent more high school dropouts, and the Marines are now offering as much as $30,000 to anyone who re-enlists. To understand the scope of the crisis, consider this: The United States is pouring nearly as much money into incentives for new recruits -- almost $300 million -- as it is into international tsunami relief.

"The Army's maxed out here," says retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who served as Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush. "The Defense Department and the president seem to be still operating off the rosy scenario that this will be over soon, that this pain is temporary and therefore we'll just grit our teeth, hunker down and get out on the other side of this. That's a bad assumption." The Bush administration has sworn up and down that it will never reinstate a draft. During the campaign last year, the president dismissed the idea as nothing more than "rumors on the Internets" and declared, "We're not going to have a draft -- period." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in an Op-Ed blaming "conspiracy mongers" for "attempting to scare and mislead young Americans," insisted that "the idea of reinstating the draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration."

That assertion is demonstrably false. According to an internal Selective Service memo made public under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency's acting director met with two of Rumsfeld's undersecretaries in February 2003 precisely to debate, discuss and ponder a return to the draft. The memo duly notes the administration's aversion to a draft but adds, "Defense manpower officials concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain special skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers, etc." The potentially prohibitive cost of "attracting and retaining such personnel for military service," the memo adds, has led "some officials to conclude that, while a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis." This new draft, it suggests, could be invoked to meet the needs of both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

The memo then proposes, in detail, that the Selective Service be "re-engineered" to cover all Americans -- "men and (for the first time) women" -- ages eighteen to thirty-four. In addition to name, date of birth and Social Security number, young adults would have to provide the agency with details of their specialized skills on an ongoing basis until they passed out of draft jeopardy at age thirty-five. Testifying before Congress two weeks after the meeting, acting director of Selective Service Lewis Brodsky acknowledged that "consultations with senior Defense manpower officials" have spurred the agency to shift its preparations away from a full-scale, Vietnam-style draft of untrained men "to a draft of smaller numbers of critical-skills personnel."

Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone that preparing for a skills-based draft is "in fact what we have been doing." For starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses and doctors. But that's not all. "Our thinking was that if we could run a health-care draft in the future," Flahavan says, "then with some very slight tinkering we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short." In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people with your skills, Selective Service has the means to draft you -- and quick.

But experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel with special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more soldiers, not just more doctors and linguists. "What you've got now is a real shortage of grunts -- guys who can actually carry bayonets," says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be necessary, he adds, "to deal with the situation we've got ourselves into. We've got to have a bigger Army."

Michael O'Hanlon, a military-manpower scholar at the Brookings Institute, believes a return to a full-blown draft will become "unavoidable" if the United States is forced into another war. "Let's say North Korea strikes a deal with Al Qaeda to sell them a nuclear weapon or something," he says. "I frankly don't see how you could fight two wars at the same time with the all-volunteer approach." If a second Korean War should break out, the United States has reportedly committed to deploying a force of nearly 700,000 to defend South Korea -- almost half of America's entire military.

The politics of the draft are radioactive: Polls show that less than twenty percent of Americans favor forced military service. But conscription has some unlikely champions, including veterans and critics of the administration who are opposed to Bush's war in Iraq. Reinstating the draft, they say, would force every level of society to participate in military service, rather than placing a disproportionate burden on minorities and the working class. African-Americans, who make up roughly thirteen percent of the civilian population, account for twenty-two percent of the armed forces. And the Defense Department acknowledges that recruits are drawn "primarily from families in the middle and lower-middle socioeconomic strata."

A societywide draft would also make it more difficult for politicians to commit troops to battle without popular approval. "The folks making the decisions are committing other people's lives to a war effort that they're not making any sacrifices for," says Charles Sheehan-Miles, who fought in the first Gulf War and now serves as director of Veterans for Common Sense. Under the current all-volunteer system, fewer than a dozen members of Congress have children in the military.

Charlie Moskos, a professor of military sociology at Northwestern University, says the volunteer system also limits the political fallout of unpopular wars. "Without a draft, there's really no antiwar movement," Moskos says. Nearly sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, he notes, but they have no immediate self-interest in taking to the streets because "we're willing to pay people to die for us. It doesn't reflect very well on the character of our society."

Even military recruiters agree that the only way to persuade average Americans to make long-term sacrifices in war is for the children of the elite to put their lives on the line. In a recent meeting with military recruiters, Moskos discussed the crisis in enlistment. "I asked them would they prefer to have their advertising budget tripled or have Jenna Bush join the Army," he says. "They unanimously chose the Jenna option."

One of the few politicians willing to openly advocate a return to the draft is Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, who argues that the current system places an immoral burden on America's underprivileged. "It shouldn't be just the poor and the working poor who find their way into harm's way," he says. In the days leading up to the Iraq war, Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the draft -- with absolutely no deferments. "If the kids and grandkids of the president and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to Iraq, we never would have gone -- no question in my mind," he says. "The closer this thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we'll be out of Iraq."

But instead of exploring how to share the burden more fairly, the military is cooking up new ways to take advantage of the economically disadvantaged. Rangel says military recruiters have confided in him that they're targeting inner cities and rural areas with high unemployment. In December, the National Guard nearly doubled its enlistment bonus to $10,000, and the Army is trying to attract urban youth with a marketing campaign called "Taking It to the Streets," which features a pimped-out yellow Hummer and a basketball exhibition replete with free throwback jerseys. President Bush has also signed an executive order allowing legal immigrants to apply for citizenship immediately -- rather than wait five years -- if they volunteer for active duty.

"It's so completely unethical and immoral to induce people that have limited education and limited job ability to have to put themselves in harm's way for ten, twenty or thirty thousand dollars," Rangel says. "Just how broke do you have to be to take advantage of these incentives?" Seducing soldiers with cold cash also unnerves military commanders. "We must consider the point at which we confuse 'volunteer to become an American soldier' with 'mercenary,' " Lt. Gen. James Helmly, the commander of the Army Reserve, wrote in a memo to senior Army leadership in December.

The Reserve, Helmly warns, "is rapidly degenerating into a broken force." The Army National Guard is also in trouble: It missed its recruitment goals of 56,000 by more than 5,000 in fiscal year 2004 and is already 2,000 soldiers short in fiscal 2005. To keep enough boots on the ground, the Pentagon has stopped asking volunteer soldiers to extend their service -- and started demanding it. Using a little-known provision called "stop loss," the military is forcing reservists and guardsmen to remain on active duty indefinitely. "This is an 'all-volunteer Army' with footnotes," says McPeak. "And it's the footnotes that are being held in Iraq against their wishes. If that's not a back-door draft, tell me what is."

David Qualls, who joined the Arkansas National Guard for a year, is one of 40,000 troops in Iraq who have been informed that their enlistment has been extended until December 24th, 2031. "I've served five months past my one-year obligation," says Qualls, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the military with breach of contract. "It's time to let me go back to my life. It's a question of fairness, and not only for myself. This is for the thousands of other people that are involuntarily extended in Iraq. Let us go home."

The Army insists that most "stop-lossed" soldiers will be held on the front lines for no longer than eighteen months. But Jules Lobel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing eight National Guardsmen in a lawsuit challenging the extensions, says the 2031 date is being used to strong-arm volunteers into re-enlisting. According to Lobel, the military is telling soldiers, "We're giving you a chance to voluntarily re-enlist -- and if you don't do it, we'll screw you. And the first way we'll screw you is to put you in until 2031."

But threatening volunteers, military experts warn, could be the quickest way to ensure a return to the draft. According to O'Hanlon at the Brookings Institute, such "callousness" may make it impossible to recruit new soldiers -- no matter how much money you throw at them. And if bigger sign-up bonuses and more aggressive recruitment tactics don't do the trick, says Helmly of the Army Reserve, it could "force the nation into an argument" about reinstating the draft.

In the end, it may simply come down to a matter of math. In January, Bush told America's soldiers that "much more will be asked of you" in his second term, even as he openly threatened Iran with military action. Another war, critics warn, would push the all-volunteer force to its breaking point. "This damn thing is just an explosion that's about to happen," says Rangel. Bush officials "can say all they want that they don't want the draft, but there's not going to be that many more buttons to push."

(Posted Jän 27, 2005)

Official: 13,000-17,000 insurgents in Iraq

Baghdad blast kills more than 20 police applicants
From Barbara Starr CNN Washington Bureau Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Insurgent estimates
Total: 13,000 to 17,000
Baathists: 12,000 to 15,000 (5,000 "committed")
Non-Iraqi nationals: 500
Zarqawi backers: 1,000

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. military faces between 13,000 and 17,000 insurgents in Iraq, the large majority of them backers of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party, a senior military official said Tuesday.

Those figures came to light the same day an apparent suicide bombing killed more than 20 people in central Baghdad as they waited in line to apply to be police officers, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

The bulk of the insurgency is made up of 12,000 to 15,000 Arab Sunni followers of Saddam's party, the official told CNN. The Baath Party was overthrown by a U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Of those, the source said 5,000 to 7,000 are considered "committed" fighters, with the rest considered "fence-sitters," criminals or "facilitators" who contribute material support or sanctuary to the guerrillas.

The official, who is familiar with the region, said about 500 other fighters have come from other countries to battle the U.S.-led forces in Iraq, while another group of fewer than 1,000 are believed to be followers of Jordanian-born Islamic terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Members of Congress have been pressing senior officers for an assessment of the strength of the insurgency since Iraq's January 30 elections.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Sen. John McCain criticized Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for lacking a readily available estimate of the armed opposition.

"I don't know how you defeat an insurgency unless you have some handle on the number of people that you are facing," the Arizona Republican said.

Told by Myers that some numbers exist but are classified, McCain said, "I think the American people should know the extent of the enemy we are facing."

The numbers are considerably higher than the 5,000 fighters that Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, estimated in November 2003. The Pentagon cautioned, however, that trends are difficult to track.

The official who provided Tuesday's estimate said the U.S. military believes it killed between 10,000 and 15,000 guerillas in combat last year -- perhaps as many as 3,000 during the November push to retake the western Iraqi city of Falluja from insurgents.

But because others join the insurgency to replace those killed, Pentagon analysts have difficulty matching the current number against previous assessments.

In the wake of the elections, in which Iraqis turned out to vote for a transitional parliament, U.S. commanders expressed hope that Iraqis will rethink their commitment to the insurgency.

Bombings target police
In Tuesday morning's bombing, at least 22 people were killed and nearly 30 wounded, said Thair al-Nakib, a spokesman for interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

"To attack and brutally murder patriotic and innocent Iraqis on their way to volunteer to protect their homeland is a crime against all people of Iraq," al-Nakib said in a statement.

A representative with the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division said 27 people were wounded in the blast, which witnesses said took place at an Iraqi army post.

Meanwhile, an Iraqi politician survived an attempt on his life Tuesday, but his two sons and a bodyguard were killed, police said.

Unknown gunmen opened fire on Mithal al-Alousi's convoy in Baghdad, police said. Al-Alousi is the general secretary of the Iraqi Nation Democratic Party.

Tuesday's violence followed a pair of suicide bombings Monday against police that killed 27 Iraqis, officials said.

In Mosul, a suicide bomber outside Jumhuriya Hospital summoned policemen to him and detonated a bomb, killing 12 and wounding four, officials and witnesses said.

About a half-hour later near a Baquba police station, an explosives-laden taxi blew up, killing 15 people, police said.

Col. Dana Pittard, commander of the 3rd Brigade, U.S. 1st Infantry Division, said the dead were civilians looking for work as police officers or in other positions at the station.

The car bomb was within 50 feet (15 meters) of the police complex and was inside a security cordon at the time of the blast.

Is This The Best We Can Do?

Why Latinos — and all Americans — are not served well by the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General.

Alberto Gonzales was confirmed Thursday by a 60-36 vote of the U.S. Senate as the nation’s first Latino Attorney General — 157 years and two days after the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, on February 1, 1848. That treaty ended the Mexican-American War, which began, ironically, as a dispute over Texas, where Gonzales was born and raised. Gonzales, now the highest-ranking Latino in government, is practically the poster child for Article IX of the treaty which conferred "the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution" upon the new Mexican-Americans and their descendants.

And now look how far we’ve come... or have we? Gonzales is touted as the proverbial "bootstrap" success story — the second of eight children, whose parents were children of Mexican immigrants, Gonzales was the only one in his family to complete college. Many of us share Gonzales’ story. Like Gonzales, I was born and raised in Houston. My father, like Gonzales’ father, was a construction worker. In fact, like Gonzales, I attended Douglas MacArthur High School. Gonzales and I have much in common actually — similar family backgrounds and early education, both active in our communities, an interest in political science (his undergraduate major) — and we both ended up in law school.

Then why, people ask me, don’t I join in the "victory?” Why don’t I join the Latinos across the United States who hail Gonzales’ appointment as a sign of how far we have come, how we finally have a place at the table. Because I refuse to overlook the glaring injustices in Gonzales’ record simply for the sake of putting a brown face in the White House. Because I don’t believe (as some groups have conceded) that Gonzales "is not nearly as bad as we might have expected." Because I want to believe that just policies, human rights, and due process are infinitely more important than playing the race card. This myopic view — that a Latino, any damn Latino, in the White House will trickle down to the rest of us — has allowed many to turn a blind eye to Gonzales’ track record on important legal issues. As a Latina, I feel my duty to my community is to do my homework — to understand just exactly what Alberto Gonzales will bring to the White House.

There is more to Gonzales than the January 2002 memo he sent to President Bush in which he wrote, "In my judgment, this new paradigm [of war] renders obsolete [the Geneva Convention’s] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." In that memo, Gonzales acknowledges that this position "would likely provoke widespread condemnation among our allies and in some domestic quarters." Despite repeated requests to explain the memo in his confirmation hearing, Gonzales failed to offer any legal reasoning for his conclusions in the memo and opted instead to "promise" the Senate that, as Attorney General, he will abide by treaties prohibiting the torture of prisoners.

In support of the Senate’s confirmation of Gonzales, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), said, "Judge Gonzales doesn't owe anybody an apology for his record, but some owe him an apology for rimracking him with phony allegations instead of honoring his willingness to serve his country." Sen. McConnell is correct; Gonzales doesn’t owe anyone an apology — he owes us an explanation. As Attorney General, Gonzales essentially represents the citizens of the United States. That includes me. I want Gonzales to explain how the legal reasoning he used in the January 2002 memo will translate to the policies he will set as our Attorney General.

More than that, I want Gonzales to explain the legal reasoning he used in his work before he was appointed White House Chief Counsel by George W. Bush. For example, as chief legal counsel for then-Gov. Bush in Texas from 1995 to 1997, Gonzales was responsible for writing a memo on the facts of each death penalty case — Bush decided whether a defendant should live or die based on Gonzales’ memos. During Gonzales' term, Texas executed more prisoners than any other state. An examination in 2003 of the Gonzales memoranda by the Atlantic Monthly concluded: "Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." His memos caused Bush frequently to approve executions based on "only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute." Rather than informing the governor of the conflicting circumstances in a case, "The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration — one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions."

Then, as a Texas Supreme Court Justice, Gonzales accepted donations from litigants. In the weeks between hearing oral arguments and making a decision in Henson v. Texas Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance, Justice Gonzales collected a $2,000 contribution premium from the Texas Farm Bureau (which runs the defendant insurance company in the case). In another case, Gonzales pocketed a $2,500 contribution from a law firm defending the Royal Insurance Company just before hearing oral arguments in Embrey v. Royal Insurance. In law school, we learned to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Did Gonzales miss that class?

Gonzales was then Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1998-2000. During that time, Dick Cheney was head of Halliburton, which was the second-largest corporate contributor to Texas Supreme Court races. Over a period of seven years, five cases involving Halliburton came before the court, and the court consistently ruled in favor of the corporation or let a lower court decision favorable to Halliburton stand without re-hearing the case. During this same period, Gonzales lawfully accepted $14,000 from Enron, yet he subsequently did not recuse himself from the Administration’s investigation of the Enron scandal when he was White House counsel.

Doesn’t this "color" Gonzales’ bootstrap success story? As the People for the American Way points out, Gonzales’ record reveals "a lawyer who too often allows his legal judgment to be driven by his close relationship with the President rather than adherence to the law or the Constitution. The risk that such lack of independence poses for his ability as Attorney General to be the lawyer for all of the people of this country is simply too great to warrant his confirmation."

I want Gonzales to live up to what former President Jimmy Carter said at the 2004 Democratic Convention: “In repudiating extremism, we need to recommit ourselves to a few common-sense principles that should transcend partisan differences. First, we cannot enhance our own security if we place in jeopardy what is most precious to us, namely the centrality of human rights in our daily lives and in global affairs. Second, we cannot maintain our historic self-confidence as a people if we generate public panic. Third, we cannot do our duty as citizens and patriots if we pursue an agenda that polarizes and divides our country. Next, we cannot be true to ourselves if we mistreat others. And finally, in the world at large, we cannot lead if our leaders mislead.”

Gonzales does not come close to this "ideal." Latinos who blindly stand behind Gonzales have lost sight of more than our future — they have forgotten our past and our present. Believe me, I know plenty of brilliant, talented, judicious Latinas/os, including some from high-ranking government positions, and we could have done a lot better than Gonzales. Confirming his nominationn, given his clear record of injustices, tells the world that not only is he the best we think we can do, but that a record of supporting torture and death doesn’t bother us. As a Latina committed to social justice, plenty of things the Bush administration has done have been "not in my name," but this nomination and confirmation are one of the worst.

Rumsfeld Debating Whether to Avoid Germany

Thu Feb 3, 2005 06:06 PM ET By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday he has not decided whether to attend an international security conference next week in Germany, where he might be subject to arrest on a war-crimes complaint.

"I have not made a final decision on that (attendance). And there are several factors," Rumsfeld told reporters when asked if he would go to the prestigious annual private Munich Conference on Security Policy Feb. 12-13 when he is in Europe next week.

He conceded in response to questions at a press conference that one problem was the jurisdiction of a German court over a 160-page criminal complaint filed Nov. 30 with the federal prosecutor's office in Germany accusing him of war crimes in connection with detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

That complaint was brought by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a group of lawyers representing Iraqis who say they were mistreated by U.S. forces at the Baghdad prison.

The complaint also names other senior U.S. military authorities, including former U.S. commander in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet.

"It's certainly an issue, as it was in Belgium. It's something that we have to take into consideration," Rumsfeld said of the suit on Thursday. "Whether I end up there we'll soon know. It'll be a week, and we'll find out."

The German prosecutor's office has taken no action on he complaint, based on a 2002 German law that the gives the Karlsruhe Court "universal jurisdiction" in cases involving alleged war crimes.

A similar law was previously passed in Belgium but later modified, and cases against U.S. and other officials, including Cuban President Fidel Castro, were dismissed or rejected.

Officials of the Munich conference, which marked its 40th anniversary last year, earlier told the Washington Post that Rumsfeld might not attend. It draws members of (the U.S. Congress), cabinet ministers, lawmakers and prominent analysts and politicians from many parts of Europe and Asia.

Rumsfeld told reporters on Thursday he would attend an informal meeting of NATO defense ministers in Nice, France, Feb. 9-10 and was likely to make other stops, but that his final schedule was not complete.

"I'm going to be in Nice. And I'm very likely going to visit some other locations in that part of the world during that period," he said.

1,444 American Soldier's Lost in Iraq to-date!

As we go through our day - how many times do we think of what is happening in the world? Do we think about or discuss what is happening outside of these United States? We are so fortunate to live in freedom and yet, some of us don't understand the price that is paid daily with the injury and loss of our soldiers over seas. The most depressing but telling site on the internet -->>> the Iraq Coalition Casualties page. It is not for the faint of heart - but it definitely paints a very grim picture for our troops. Not only does it list casualities - but shows wounded and then tells poignant stories about these brave - and lost souls.

The number of American solders dead at 1,444.
The total number of Coalition dead stands at 1,615.

141 soldiers died in November 2004
77 died in December 2004
127 died in January 2005
4 have died so far in February 2005

A variety of reports have listed more than 20,000 U.S. troops getting evacuated for 'medical issues' in the last two years.

Take time today and put a face on these soldiers lives - get to know these young men and women who have been taken from us - most of them because of not having adequate protection - from lack of armor - body and vehicle.

Write your congressman and tell them we want out - save a life today by taking action.

Harry Reid | Voting No on Gonzales

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid issued the statement below in response to today's confirmation by the Senate of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General. The statement is a powerful renunciation of torture and Gonzales's active role in making it acceptable U.S. policy. While we applaud this position in favor of law and principle, there are a few facts we should not lose sight of: Alberto Gonzales did write, at the behest of George W. Bush, legal opinions that dismissed U.S. law, International law, and the Geneva conventions, laying the groundwork for the atrocities we are discovering at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. That very same Alberto Gonzales will now be the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the United States. That is deeply troubling.

For the record, the Senate vote was largely along party lines, with all Republicans and six Democrats voting to confirm. The Democrats who voted to confirm Gonzales were: Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. The final vote was 60-36 in favor of confirmation. Several Democrats and at least one Republican chose not to vote.

Thursday 03 February 2005

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid released the following statement:

Our great Nation was founded on the idea of human rights. From the very beginning, we were designed to be a place where men and women could live free, a place where no man was above the law, a place where the state would never trample on the rights of individuals.

We did not always live up to our ideals. Along the way, we stumbled. We have made mistakes. But we always worked to correct our mistakes. We worked to uphold the core values that formed our national soul.

Because of our unshakable belief in human rights, we became a ray of light, a beacon for people in other parts of the world. America has been that beacon because we are a nation governed by laws, not by men.

We are a nation where no one, not even the President of the United States, is above the law. We are a nation where our military is bound by the uniform Code of Military Justice and the laws of war. And we are a nation that even at war stands for and upholds the rule of law.

There is no question gathering intelligence from suspects in our war on terror is critical to protecting this great Nation. No one in this Chamber would argue otherwise, I would think. These are very bad people with whom we are dealing. But when interrogation turns to torture, it puts our own soldiers at risk. It undermines the very freedoms Americans are fighting to protect.

We are a nation at war - a war in Iraq and a war against terrorism war does not give our civilian leaders the authority to cast aside the laws of armed conflict, nor does it allow our Commander in Chief to decide which laws apply and which laws do not apply. To do so puts, I repeat, our own soldiers and our Nation at risk.

But that is what has occurred under the direction and coordination of the man seeking to be Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, a man I personally like, but whose judgment on these very serious matters was flawed and is flawed.

I have heard a great deal on this Senate floor about Judge Gonzales's background over the last few days, how his parents were migrant farm workers, and how he worked his way up from poverty. It is an inspiring story, and it is one that resonates with me.

I met with Judge Gonzales after the President sent his nomination to the Senate. We talked about our childhoods, about coming from small rural towns, some would say without many advantages. The fact that someone from a place called Humble, TX, and someone from a place called Searchlight, NV, have had an opportunity to achieve their dream is what America is all about.

But, embodying the American dream is not a sufficient qualification to be Attorney General of the United States.

The Attorney General is the people's lawyer, not the President's lawyer. He is charged with upholding the Constitution and the rule of law. The Attorney General must be independent, and he must be clear that abuses by our Government will not be tolerated. Judge Gonzales's appearance before the Judiciary Committee raised serious questions about his ability to be that force in the Justice Department. That is why I am going to vote against him.

In 2002, Judge Gonzales provided legal advice to the President of the United States calling parts of the Geneva Conventions obsolete and quaint - that is what he said, they were obsolete and quaint - opening the door for confusion and a range of harsh interrogation techniques.

What are the Geneva Conventions? At the end of the Civil War, people from around the world decided there should be some semblance of order in how war is conducted. Starting in 1864, there was a convention adopted, and there have been four revisions to the Geneva Convention. That is why it is referred to as the Geneva Conventions because it is, in effect, four treaties.

This is basically an agreement concerning the treatment of prisoners of war, of the sick, wounded, and dead in battle. These are treaties that relate to what happens to human beings in war. These conventions have been accepted by virtually every nation in the world.

A former Navy judge advocate general, RADM John Hutson, said:

"When you say something down the chain of command, like 'the Geneva Conventions don't apply,' that sets the stage for the kind of chaos we have seen."

The President signed an order accepting the reasoning of the Gonzales memo. The Presidential order was the legal basis for the interrogation techniques and other actions, including torture, which simply took as fact that the Geneva Conventions did not apply.

Can you imagine that, the United States saying the Geneva Conventions do not apply? But that is what took place.

Our military lawyers, not people who are retired acting as Monday-morning quarterbacks, but our military lawyers who are working today, who are experts in the field, have said the interrogation techniques authorized as a result of the Presidential order and allowed under the Gonzales reasoning were in violation of the U.S. military law, the U.S. criminal law, and international law.

According to RADM Don Guter, a former Navy judge advocate general:

"If we - we being the uniformed lawyers - that is, the lawyers who are in the U.S. military -- had been listened to and what we said put into practice, then these abuses would not have occurred."

So the people who serve in our military who gave legal advice said this should never have happened.

After the scandal at Abu Ghraib and the recent allegations of abuse at Guantanamo, I expected at this hearing before the Judiciary Committee to hear Judge Gonzales discuss the error of the administration's policies and the legal advice he provided the President.

When he came before the committee, Judge Gonzales stood by his legal reasoning and the policy of his reasoning. Judge Gonzales called the President's Geneva determination "absolutely the right decision."

With regard to the legal opinion Judge Gonzales solicited in the Justice Department so-called "torture memo," he stated at his hearing, "I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the Department," even though the Department itself has now disavowed this legal reasoning.

I heard Senator Kennedy state that the dean of Yale Law School, probably the No. 1 law school in the entire country, has said he has never seen legal reasoning as bad as the Gonzales memo. That is pretty bad.

For example, military lawyers who are experts in the field have said without the order issued by the President, at Mr. Gonzales's behest, they would take the position that the interrogation techniques used against Taliban prisoners and later in Iraq would be violations of U.S. military law, U.S. criminal law, and international law.

So who are we to believe? These people who are dedicated to making sure that they, as the legal officers of the U.S. military, do what is right? They say we should follow the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said - not necessary.

I will say a word about the interrogation techniques that were authorized. They included forced nakedness, forced shaving of beards, and the use of dogs, just to name a few. Many are specifically designed to attack the prisoner's cultural and religious taboos.

In describing them, the similarities to what eventually happened at Abu Ghraib are obvious. Once you order an 18-year-old, a young man or woman, to strip prisoners naked, to force them into painful positions, to shave their beards in violation of their religious beliefs, to lock them alone in the dark and cold, how do you tell him to stop? You cannot.

We have seen the pictures of naked men stacked on top of each other in the so-called pyramid; rapes of men, rapes of women, leading in some cases to death. How does one tell an American soldier that torture is a valid treatment as long as the Government says the prisoner is not covered by the Geneva Conventions?

Any student of history would know that the North Vietnamese said captured U.S. pilots were not protected as prisoners of war because there was no declared war. That is what happened in the Vietnam war. They kept our men in solitary confinement for months, sometimes years at a time.

I will tell my colleagues about one of our men and what that man said about his treatment by the Vietnamese:

"It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment..."

Here, I would make an editorial comment that this man knows about any other kind of treatment. He was brutally beaten, limbs broken, limbs already broken rebroken. So he knows what he is talking about. So I repeat, a direct quote:

"It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. Having no one else to rely on, to share confidences with, to seek counsel from, you begin to doubt your judgment and your courage."

The man who said these words was a Navy pilot, LCDR John McCain. For John McCain and all our soldiers serving across the globe, we need to stand against torture because of what it does to us as a country, to those serving now, to the future servicemen of our country, and what it does to us as a nation.

If we fail to oppose an evil as obvious as torture obvious it is wrong for my country when I reflect that God is just."