Casualties in Iraq - Since war began (3/19/03): 2695

How much longer are you going to be silent?

Now is the time to get out and make sure you are registered to vote - and vote out the incumbent - that means let's change out every seat in the Senate and Congress!

It does not matter what party you are registered to - we need to make a big statement this year and take a stand against King George and his unAmerican ways!

In Combat American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 2695
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03) 2558
Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 2228
Since Handover (6/29/04): 1829
Since Election (1/31/05): 1259
Americans Wounded: 20000 - 48100

Let's shake things up before our great nation is totally descimated by these politicians!!

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

By Mark Mazzetti The New York Times Sunday 24 September 2006
Washington - A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, "Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement," cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report "says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," said one American intelligence official.
More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document's general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.
Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.
National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.
Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.
Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said that its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.
Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said that the White House "played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism." The estimate's judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.
Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.
"Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe," concludes one, a report titled "9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges." "We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism."
That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. "The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry," it states.
The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, "exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies."
On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says that "Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack."
The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.
The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of "self-generating" cells inspired by Al Qaeda's leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.
It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.
In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda's current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.
But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.
In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate's conclusions in public speeches.
"New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge," said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. "If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide," said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte's top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said that the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.
The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.
The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain's domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, "emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat."
More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of "D+" to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that "there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking."

Bill Clinton Warns Against Torture Approval

By Randall Mikkelsen Reuters Thursday 21 September 2006
Washington - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton joined a chorus of critics of Bush administration proposals for treating suspected terrorists, saying it would be unnecessary and wrong to give broad approval to torture.
In an interview with National Public Radio aired on Thursday, Clinton said any decision to use harsh treatment in interrogating suspects should be subject to court review.
"You don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture," Clinton said.
Clinton was president during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and on the USS Cole, all linked to al Qaeda. Critics accused him of doing too little to contain a growing threat of terrorism.
Clinton's successor, President George W. Bush, wants Congress to narrowly define prisoner protections under the Geneva Conventions and allow a program of CIA interrogations and detentions that critics have said amount to torture.
The White House denies the program involves torture. The U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down Bush's original plan.
Clinton warned against circumventing international standards on prisoner treatment, citing U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, criticism of treatment at the Guantanamo Bay prison for suspected terrorists and a secret CIA prison system outside the United States.
"The president says he's just trying to get the rules clear about how far the CIA can go when they're when they whacking these people around in these secret prisons," Clinton said in NPR's "Morning Edition" interview, recorded on Wednesday.
"If you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, we're going to be in real trouble," he said.
Like other critics, he said information obtained with harsh treatment may be unreliable and adopting abusive practices could lead to captured U.S. troops being subjected to the same.
Even if there were circumstances where such treatment is necessary to prevent an imminent attacks, Clinton said: "You don't make laws based on that. You don't sit there and say in general torture's fine if you're a terrorist suspect. For one thing, we know we have erred in who was a real suspect."

Strained, Army Looks to Guard for More Relief

By Thom Shanker and Michael R. Gordon The New York Times Friday 22 September 2006
Washington - Strains on the Army from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so severe that Army officials say they may be forced to make greater use of the National Guard to provide enough troops for overseas deployments.
Senior Army officers have discussed that analysis - and described the possible need to use more members of the National Guard - with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's senior adviser on personnel, David S. C. Chu, according to Pentagon officials.
While no decision has been made to mobilize more Guard forces, and may not need to be before midterm elections, the prospect presents the Bush administration with a politically vexing problem: how, without expanding the Army, to balance the pressing need for troops in the field against promises to limit overseas deployments for the Guard.
The National Guard has a goal of allowing five years at home between foreign deployments so as not to disrupt the family life and careers of its citizen soldiers. But instead it has been sending units every three to four years, according to Guard officials.
The question of how to sustain the high level of forces abroad became more acute this week as General John P. Abizaid, the senior American commander in the Middle East, said that the number of troops in Iraq, currently at more than 140,000, could not be expected to drop until next spring at the very earliest.
That disclosure comes amid many signs of mounting strain on active Army units. So many are deployed or only recently returned from combat duty that only two or three combat brigades - perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops - are fully ready to respond in case of unexpected crises, according to a senior Army general.
An internal Army document that was provided to The New York Times notes that the demand for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has greatly exceeded past projections that predicted earlier troop reductions. According to the document, the Army needs $66.1 billion to make up for all of its equipment shortfalls. Referring to the units that are to deploy next to Iraq and Afghanistan, or are in training, the document shows a large question mark to indicate their limited readiness.
The Army had to offer generous new enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 to attract recruits into such dangerous jobs as operating convoys in Iraq. It was able to meet its active-duty enlistment goals this year with the addition of 1,000 new recruiters.
Enmeshed in negotiations with Bush administration officials over its spending request for next year, neither Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff, nor any of his top Pentagon aides would agree to be interviewed about the personnel stresses they are confronting. But Army officials have shared their concerns with retired Army officers and members of Congress, and quietly distributed budget tallies, including the internal document on troop and equipment demands, to their supporters. Military officers and civilian Pentagon officials interviewed for this article would discuss the issues only on condition of anonymity.
An examination of the Army's plan for deploying its force shows some of the ways it has been overextended.
In overhauling its structure, the active-duty Army is growing to 42 combat brigades. Army officials have said they want to establish a pattern in which an active brigade spends two years at home for each year it is deployed overseas.
But so many units are needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that combat brigades are generally spending only a year at home for each year they are deployed. Military analysts concluded that this has severely reduced the number of forces that are available for other contingencies.
"The continuing frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the U.S. Army so thin that there are few brigades ready to respond to crises elsewhere," said Lynn Davis, a senior analyst in the Arroyo Center, a division of the RAND Corporation that does research for the Army.
Ms. Davis said that there was no quick fix for the limited number of troops. The longer-term solution, she said, was to rely more on the National Guard or to increase the number of Army brigades, a move that would cost billions of dollars.
Gordon R. Sullivan, the former Army chief of staff and president of the Association of the United States Army, said in an interview that the Army was simply too small for the many responsibilities it faced and should be expanded from about 500,000 in the active force to some 560,000. It also needs to make greater use of the National Guard, he said.
"The biggest challenge is manpower," General Sullivan said.
Barry R. McCaffrey, the retired four-star Army general, also asserted that the armed forces needed to be expanded. "We cannot sustain the current national security policy with an Army, Marine Corps, Air Force lift capability and Special Operations forces of this size," he added. "They are clearly inadequate."
The pace of deployments and financing shortfalls, he said, had taken a toll of units in the active duty Army and the National Guard. "One third is completely ready to fight, and two-thirds are severely impaired," he said.
Asked if it was true that only a handful of combat brigades not currently deployed were immediately ready for a crisis, a spokesman for the Army said he could not address specifics because the information was classified.
Mr. Rumsfeld has not favored substantially expanding the Army, concluding that such a step would draw money from programs he favors to overhaul the military and calculating that the high level of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will prove temporary. Congress, however, has mandated a temporary 30,000-soldier increase for the Army.
As for whether any decision on mobilizing more members of the Guard can be expected, Mr. Chu, the Pentagon's chief personnel officer, declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed on Army discussions about how to meet its needs.
But active commanders have highlighted the issue. At a recent conference at Fort Benning, Ga., Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the head of the Army's Forces Command, which oversees training and mobilization for all Army forces in the continental United States, suggested that the service needed to make greater use of the National Guard if the United States was to pursue what the Bush administration has described as a "long war" against Islamic terrorists.
"If we are going to prosecute this long war, we need relatively unencumbered access to the citizen soldier formations," General McNeill said.
The equivalent of several Guard brigades are deployed today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sinai, the Horn of Africa and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Sending more Guard units to Iraq is politically sensitive because of complaints from families and employers while the Guard and Reserve were used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004.
Restrictions on the use of the Guard are a matter of interpretation. Guard officials said that under President Bush's current mobilization order, its members may not be called up if they have served for 24 consecutive months. But a conflicting Defense Department policy interprets the order as limiting the call-up of those who have tallied 24 months of total service, regardless of the length of time served consecutively. That view would put more Guard members off-limits for remobilization without a new order from the president.
If the military cannot deploy enough members of the Guard by following either interpretation of the rules, officials may be forced to propose that Mr. Rumsfeld advise President Bush of the need to sign a new mobilization order that would reset the clock for many Guard members who have already served overseas.
Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, the head of the Guard, said his forces would be prepared to meet current requirements and to send more forces if needed.
"Can I sustain that?" General Blum said. "I say the answer is, 'Absolutely' - if three things remain, three critical things."
He said Guard members must continue to feel that what they are doing is important and that they have the support of the American people. Finally, he said, "We've got to give them some predictability or some kind of certainty so they can balance their civilian life, with their employers and their family, with their military service to the nation."
Given the lengthy lead time required for calling up, training, equipping and deploying Guard forces, Pentagon officials said that if more Guard members were mobilized, it would probably be for a rotation that begins in 2008.
Even so, Pentagon and military officials said that it was unlikely that any decision on a Guard mobilization would be necessary for several months or even into next year, which would place any announcement beyond the November mid-term Congressional elections.
To take on a greater load in Iraq and remedy existing equipment shortfalls, the Guard needs $23 billion over five years, Guard officials say.
"There is no brigade in the United States Army active, Guard or reserve that is completely ready back at home," General Blum said. "That is to ensure that every brigade overseas is completely ready. And by ready I mean completely equipped. Right now, the key to readiness of the total force is equipping it, resetting it and modernizing it. It is a function of time and money."
The stress of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted senior Army officers to pass a colorful hand card around Capitol Hill explaining that it will take $17.1 billion in extra spending over the next year to repair and replace tanks, trucks, radios and other equipment for the total force. The card indicates that another $13 billion is needed each year for the following five years to fix and replace equipment.
One Army official said this week that the service is seeking about $138 billion for the next fiscal year, compared with the $112 budget request the Army submitted last year.
-------

CIA "Refused to Operate" Secret Jails

By Guy Dinmore Financial Times
Wednesday 20 September 2006
The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror suspects to the military-run detention centre at Guantánamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the secret facilities, according to former CIA officials and people close to the programme.
The former officials said the CIA interrogators' refusal was a factor in forcing the Bush administration to act earlier than it might have wished.
When Mr Bush announced the suspension of the secret prison programme in a speech before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, some analysts thought he was trying to gain political momentum before the November midterm congressional elections.
The administration publicly explained its decision in light of the legal uncertainty surrounding permissible interrogation techniques following the June Supreme Court ruling that all terrorist suspects in detention were entitled to protection under Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.
But the former CIA officials said Mr Bush's hand was forced because interrogators had refused to continue their work until the legal situation was clarified because they were concerned they could be prosecuted for using illegal techniques. One intelligence source also said the CIA had refused to keep the secret prisons going.
Senior officials and Mr Bush himself have come close to admitting this by saying CIA interrogators sought legal clarity. But no official has confirmed on the record how and when the secret programme actually came to an end.
John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, who was interviewed by Fox News on Sunday, said in response to a question of whether CIA interrogators had refused to work: "I think the way I would answer you in regard to that question is that there's been precious little activity of that kind for a number of months now, and certainly since the Supreme Court decision."
In an interview with the Financial Times, John Bellinger, legal adviser to the state department, went further, saying there had been "very little operational activity" on CIA interrogations since the passage last December of a bill proposed by Senator John McCain outlawing torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners.
Mr Bellinger said the secret prisons remained empty for the moment. But he defended the US position that use of such prisons did not contravene international conventions as some in Europe have argued. He also said that, theoretically, the Pentagon as well as the CIA had the legal right to run such facilities. The CIA declined to comment.
Key figures among the 14 prisoners transferred to Guantánamo, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been held in secret centres for three years or more.
-------

US War Prisons Legal Vacuum for 14,000

By Patrick Quinn The Associated Press
Sunday 16 September 2006
In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.
Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.
"It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release - without charge - last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."
Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.
Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.
Defenders of the system, which has only grown since soldiers' photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world, say it's an unfortunate necessity in the battles to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep suspected terrorists out of action.
Every U.S. detainee in Iraq "is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq.
But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers, lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.
Building for the Long Term
Reports of extreme physical and mental abuse, symbolized by the notorious Abu Ghraib prison photos of 2004, have abated as the Pentagon has rejected torture-like treatment of the inmates. Most recently, on Sept. 6, the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual banning forced nakedness, hooding, stress positions and other abusive techniques.
The same day, President Bush said the CIA's secret outposts in the prison network had been emptied, and 14 terror suspects from them sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to face trial in military tribunals. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the tribunal system, however, and the White House and Congress are now wrestling over the legal structure of such trials.
Living conditions for detainees may be improving as well. The U.S. military cites the toilets of Bagram, Afghanistan: In a cavernous old building at that air base, hundreds of detainees in their communal cages now have indoor plumbing and privacy screens, instead of exposed chamber pots.
Whatever the progress, small or significant, grim realities persist.
Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons - unknown in number and location - remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture doesn't cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law's oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.
"If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. "You can't have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get yourself out of there."
The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the "war on terror" ends - as it determines.
"I don't think we've gotten to the question of how long," said retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy. "When we get up to 'forever,' I think it will be tested" in court, he said.
The Navy is planning long-term at Guantanamo. This fall it expects to open a new, $30-million maximum-security wing at its prison complex there, a concrete-and-steel structure replacing more temporary camps.
In Iraq, Army jailers are a step ahead. Last month they opened a $60-million, state-of-the-art detention center at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad's airport. The Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.
Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just "security detainees" held "for imperative reasons of security," spokesman Curry said, using language from an annex to a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.
Questions of Law, Sovereignty
President Bush laid out the U.S. position in a speech Sept. 6.
"These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation," he said. "We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle."
But others say there's no need to hold these thousands outside of the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared last March that the extent of arbitrary detention here is "not consistent with provisions of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of security."
Meanwhile, officials of Nouri al-Maliki's 4-month-old Iraqi government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq's national rights.
"As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person," said Fadhil al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. "The detention should be conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary."
At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it has been "a daily request" that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.
There's no guarantee the Americans' 13,000 detainees would fare better under control of the Iraqi government, which U.N. officials say holds 15,000 prisoners.
But little has changed because of these requests. When the Americans formally turned over Abu Ghraib prison to Iraqi control on Sept. 2, it was empty but its 3,000 prisoners remained in U.S. custody, shifted to Camp Cropper.
Life in Custody
The cases of U.S.-detained Iraqis are reviewed by a committee of U.S. military and Iraqi government officials. The panel recommends criminal charges against some, release for others. As of Sept. 9, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq had put 1,445 on trial, convicting 1,252. In the last week of August, for example, 38 were sentenced on charges ranging from illegal weapons possession to murder, for the shooting of a U.S. Marine.
Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, the U.S. command says, not including many more who were held and then freed by local military units and never shipped to major prisons.
Some who were released, no longer considered a threat, later joined or rejoined the insurgency.
The review process is too slow, say U.N. officials. Until they are released, often families don't know where their men are - the prisoners are usually men - or even whether they're in American hands.
Ex-detainee Mouayad Yasin Hassan, 31, seized in April 2004 as a suspected Sunni Muslim insurgent, said he wasn't allowed to obtain a lawyer or contact his family during 13 months at Abu Ghraib and Bucca, where he was interrogated incessantly. When he asked why he was in prison, he said, the answer was, "We keep you for security reasons."
Another released prisoner, Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how his guards would wield their absolute authority.
"Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood," he quoted an interrogator as saying, "or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years."
As with others, Karim's confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-U.S. resistance. "I will hate Americans for the rest of my life," he said.
As bleak and hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation is even less known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in 2002-2004, but if Abu Ghraib-like photos from Bagram exist, none have leaked out. The U.S. military is believed holding about 500 detainees - most Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians.
The United States plans to cede control of its Afghan detainees by early next year, five years after invading Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaida's base and bring down the Taliban government. Meanwhile, the prisoners of Bagram exist in a legal vacuum like that elsewhere in the U.S. detention network.
"There's been a silence about Bagram, and much less political discussion about it," said Richard Bennett, chief U.N. human rights officer in Afghanistan.
Freed detainees tell how in cages of 16 inmates they are forbidden to speak to each other. They wear the same orange jumpsuits and shaven heads as the terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted inmates at that Cuba base. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.
Guantanamo received its first prisoners from Afghanistan - chained, wearing blacked-out goggles - in January 2002. A total of 770 detainees were sent there. Its population today of Afghans, Arabs and others, stands at 455.
Described as the most dangerous of America's "war on terror" prisoners, only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with crimes. Charges are expected against 14 other al-Qaida suspects flown in to Guantanamo from secret prisons on Sept. 4.
Plans for their trials are on hold, however, because of a Supreme Court ruling in June against the Bush administration's plan for military tribunals.
The court held the tribunals were not authorized by the U.S. Congress and violated the Geneva Conventions by abrogating prisoners' rights. In a sometimes contentious debate, the White House and Congress are trying to agree on a new, acceptable trial plan.
Since the court decision, and after four years of confusing claims that terrorist suspects were so-called "unlawful combatants" unprotected by international law, the Bush administration has taken steps recognizing that the Geneva Conventions' legal and human rights do extend to imprisoned al-Qaida militants. At the same time, however, the new White House proposal on tribunals retains such controversial features as denying defendants access to some evidence against them.
In his Sept. 6 speech, Bush acknowledged for the first time the existence of the CIA's secret prisons, believed established at military bases or safehouses in such places as Egypt, Indonesia and eastern Europe. That network, uncovered by journalists, had been condemned by U.N. authorities and investigated by the Council of Europe.
The clandestine jails are now empty, Bush announced, but will remain a future option for CIA detentions and interrogation.
Louise Arbour, U.N. human rights chief, is urging Bush to abolish the CIA prisons altogether, as ripe for "abusive conduct." The CIA's techniques for extracting information from prisoners still remain secret, she noted.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government's willingness to resort to "extraordinary rendition," transferring suspects to other nations where they might be tortured, appears unchanged.
Prosecutions and Memories
The exposure of sadistic abuse, torture and death at Abu Ghraib two years ago touched off a flood of courts-martial of mostly lower-ranking U.S. soldiers. Overall, about 800 investigations of alleged detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to action against more than 250 service personnel, including 89 convicted at courts-martial, U.S. diplomats told the United Nations in May.
Critics protest that penalties have been too soft and too little has been done, particularly in tracing inhumane interrogation methods from the far-flung islands of the overseas prison system back to policies set by high-ranking officials.
In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed or suspected killings of detainees, the New York-based Human Rights First reports. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has been five months in jail. The group reported last February that in almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never announced or reported as undetermined.
Looking back, the United States overreacted in its treatment of detainees after Sept. 11, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a noted American scholar of international law.
It was understandable, the Princeton University dean said, but now "we have to restore a balance between security and rights that is consistent with who we are and consistent with our security needs."
Otherwise, she said, "history will look back and say that we took a dangerous and deeply wrong turn."
Back here in Baghdad, at the Alawi bus station, a gritty, noisy hub far from the meeting rooms of Washington and Geneva, women gather with fading hopes whenever a new prisoner release is announced.
As she watched one recent day for a bus from distant Camp Bucca, one mother wept and told her story.
"The Americans arrested my son, my brother and his friend," said Zahraa Alyat, 42. "The Americans arrested them October 16, 2005. They left together and I don't know anything about them."
The bus pulled up. A few dozen men stepped off, some blindfolded, some bound, none with any luggage, none with familiar faces.
As the distraught women straggled away once more, one ex-prisoner, 18-year-old Bilal Kadhim Muhssin, spotted U.S. troops nearby.
"Americans," he muttered in fear. "Oh, my God, don't say that name," and he bolted for a city bus, and freedom.

The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies

By Frank Rich The New York Times Sunday 17 September 2006
Rarely has a television network presented a more perfectly matched double feature. President Bush's 9/11 address on Monday night interrupted ABC's "Path to 9/11" so seamlessly that a single network disclaimer served them both: "For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression."
No kidding: "The Path to 9/11" was false from the opening scene, when it put Mohamed Atta both in the wrong airport (Boston instead of Portland, Me.) and on the wrong airline (American instead of USAirways). It took Mr. Bush but a few paragraphs to warm up to his first fictionalization for dramatic purposes: his renewed pledge that "we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them." Only days earlier the White House sat idly by while our ally Pakistan surrendered to Islamic militants in its northwest frontier, signing a "truce" and releasing Al Qaeda prisoners. Not only will Pakistan continue to harbor terrorists, Osama bin Laden probably among them, but it will do so without a peep from Mr. Bush.
You'd think that after having been caught concocting the scenario that took the nation to war in Iraq, the White House would mind the facts now. But this administration understands our culture all too well. This is a country where a cable news network (MSNBC) offers in-depth journalism about one of its anchors (Tucker Carlson) losing a prime-time dance contest and where conspiracy nuts have created a cottage industry of books and DVD's by arguing that hijacked jets did not cause 9/11 and that the 9/11 commission was a cover-up. (The fictionalized "Path to 9/11," supposedly based on the commission's report, only advanced the nuts' case.) If you're a White House stuck in a quagmire in an election year, what's the percentage in starting to tell the truth now? It's better to game the system.
The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that's why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he's about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word context, as in "the context in which I made that statement last year." The vice president invoked "context" to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its "last throes."
The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase "I haven't read the story." He told Tim Russert he hadn't read The Washington Post's front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone "stone cold" or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report(PDF) contradicting the White House's prewar hype about nonexistent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Nor had he read a Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was "no evidence of resumed nuclear activities" in Iraq. "I haven't looked at it; I'd have to go back and look at it again," he said, however nonsensically.
These verbal tics are so consistent that they amount to truth in packaging - albeit the packaging of evasions and falsehoods. By contrast, Condi Rice's fictions, also offered in bulk to television viewers to memorialize 9/11, are as knotty as a David Lynch screenplay. Asked by Chris Wallace of Fox News last Sunday if she and the president had ignored prewar "intelligence that contradicted your case," she refused to give up the ghost: "We know that Zarqawi was running a poisons network in Iraq," she insisted, as she continued to state again that "there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda" before the war.
Ms. Rice may be a terrific amateur concert pianist, but she's an even better amateur actress. The Senate Intelligence Committee report released only two days before she spoke dismissed all such ties. Saddam, who "issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with Al Qaeda," saw both bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as threats and tried to hunt down Zarqawi when he passed through Baghdad in 2002. As for that Zarqawi "poisons network," the Pentagon knew where it was and wanted to attack it in June 2002. But as Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News reported more than two years ago, the White House said no, fearing a successful strike against Zarqawi might "undercut its case for going to war against Saddam." Zarqawi, meanwhile, escaped.
It was in an interview with Ted Koppel for the Discovery Channel, though, that Ms. Rice rose to a whole new level of fictionalizing by wrapping a fresh layer of untruth around her most notorious previous fiction. Asked about her dire prewar warning that a smoking gun might come in the form of a mushroom cloud, she said that "it wasn't meant as hyperbole." She also rewrote history to imply that she had been talking broadly about the nexus between "terrorism and a nuclear device" back then, not specifically Saddam - a rather deft verbal sleight-of-hand.
Ms. Rice sets a high bar, but Mr. Bush, competitive as always, was not to be outdone in his Oval Office address. Even the billing of his appearance was fiction. "It's not going to be a political speech," Tony Snow announced, knowing full well that the 17-minute text was largely Cuisinarted scraps from other recent political speeches, including those at campaign fund-raisers. Moldy canards of yore (Saddam "was a clear threat") were interspersed with promising newcomers: Iraq will be "a strong ally in the war on terror." As is often the case, the president was technically truthful. Iraq will be a strong ally in the war on terror - just not necessarily our ally. As Mr. Bush spoke, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, was leaving for Iran to jolly up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Perhaps the only way to strike back against this fresh deluge of fiction is to call the White House's bluff. On Monday night, for instance, Mr. Bush flatly declared that "the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad." He once again invoked Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, asking, "Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia?"
Rather than tune this bluster out, as the country now does, let's try a thought experiment. Let's pretend everything Mr. Bush said is actually true and then hold him to his word. If the safety of America really depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad, then our safety is in grave peril because we are losing that battle. The security crackdown announced with great fanfare by Mr. Bush and Mr. Maliki in June is failing. Rosy American claims of dramatically falling murder rates are being challenged by the Baghdad morgue. Perhaps most tellingly, the Pentagon has nowstopped including in its own tally the large numbers of victims killed by car bombings and mortar attacks in sectarian warfare.
And that's the good news. Another large slice of Iraq, Anbar Province (almost a third of the country), is slipping away so fast that a senior military official told NBC News last week that 50,000 to 60,000 additional ground forces were needed to secure it, despite our huge sacrifice in two savage battles for Falluja. The Iraqi troops "standing up" in Anbar are deserting at a rate as high as 40 percent.
"Even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude we are winning," John Lehman, the former Reagan Navy secretary, wrote of the Iraq war last month. So what do we do next? Given that the current course is a fiasco, and that the White House demonizes any plan or timetable for eventual withdrawal as "cut and run," there's only one immediate alternative: add more manpower, and fast. Last week two conservative war supporters, William Kristol and Rich Lowry, called for exactly that - "substantially more troops." These pundits at least have the courage of Mr. Bush's convictions. Shouldn't Republicans in Congress as well?
After all, if what the president says is true about the stakes in Baghdad, it's tantamount to treason if Bill Frist, Rick Santorum and John Boehner fail to rally their party's Congressional majority to stave off defeat there. We can't emulate our fathers and grandfathers and whip today's Nazis and Communists with 145,000 troops. Roosevelt and Truman would have regarded those troop levels as defeatism.
The trouble, of course, is that we don't have any more troops, and supporters of the war, starting with Mr. Bush, don't want to ask American voters to make any sacrifices to provide them. They don't want to ask because they know the voters will tell them no. In the end, that is the hard truth the White House is determined to obscure, at least until Election Day, by carpet-bombing America with still more fictions about Iraq.

A Call for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to Resign

By Senator Robert C. Byrd US Senate Floor Remarks
Wednesday 13 September 2006
US Senator Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., has called for President Bush to ask for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Byrd is the longest serving member of the Congress and the third-ranking Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He has seen some of the low points in the American foreign policy throughout his career. Senator Byrd believes that there ought to be accountability when policy leads to disastrous consequences, and, in the case of this Administration, that accountability ought to start with the man who is responsible for the ill-fated war and reconstruction plan in Iraq: Secretary Rumsfeld. Byrd also hopes that a new Secretary of Defense would send an important signal to the world that the United States is willing to consider new approaches and alternatives to the sole-minded approach that this Adminstration seems wedded to.
Mr. President,
September 11 has come and gone, and as we remember those lost on that fateful day, and contemplate events since the horrific attack, one truth stands out.
The war in Iraq has backfired, producing more recruits for terrorism, and deep divisions within our own country. It is a war we should never have begun. The detour from our attack on Bin Laden and his minions, hiding in the cracks and crevices of the rough terrain of Afghanistan, to the unwise and unprovoked attack on Iraq has been a disastrous one. Mr. Bush's war has damaged the country because he drove our blessed land into an unnecessary conflict, utterly misreading the consequences, with the result now being a daily display of America's vulnerabilities to those who wish us ill. The United States is a weaker power now, especially in the Middle East, but also in the court of world opinion. Where is the America of restraint, of peace and of inspiration to millions? Where is the America respected not only for her military might, but also for her powerful ideas and her reasonable diplomacy?
Our country may have deviated occasionally from its positive global image in the past, but Abu Ghraib, the body snatching for torture, euphemistically called rendition, Presidential directives which unilaterally alter conditions of the Geneva Convention - these are not the stuff of mere slight deviations from the America of peacefulness, fairness, and goodwill. These are major policy and attitudinal changes of Tsunami-sized proportions. Our friends shake their heads in disbelief. Our enemies nod wisely and claim they knew all the while. I cannot remember a time in our history when our elected leaders have failed the people so completely, and yet, so far, are not held accountable for costly misjudgments and outright deceptions.
Take our Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, for example. He misread the Iraqi situation entirely. He adamantly dismisses suggestions for a larger force in Iraq. He failed to object when the White House's Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi army, only to have them go underground and provide fodder for the insurgency. He insisted that the Iraqi people would view our soldiers as liberators not occupiers, and even failed to properly anticipate the equipment needs of our men and women in harm's way.
Secretary Rumsfeld continues to insist that we are not facing a civil war in Iraq despite convincing evidence to the contrary, and yet he sits comfortably in his office as the echo of his errors in judgment and strategy continues to cost thousands of lives.
Then there is President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. These men continue to try to make the American public swallow whole the line that the war in Iraq is the front line of a global war on terror, which must be continued at all costs. Stay the course, they say, despite three years of discouragingly little progress in Iraq. The body count is approaching 2,700 for our side, tens of thousands for the beleaguered Iraqi people, and billions of American tax dollars, of which an embarrassingly large chunk has been wasted by irresponsible contractors, and government officials who lack the proper respect for the public purse. Many of our allies have left the field, recognizing the truth that the Administration fails to see: namely, we had the weapons to win the war, but not the wisdom to secure the peace.
Yet, too many in the public are complacent about the numerous violations of their trust and the continuing loss of life in Iraq. Some of our citizens have apparently been convinced that it is unpatriotic to criticize one's country when that country is engaged in an armed conflict. In fact, in our land today, there is a troubling tolerance for government overreaching on fronts at home as well as abroad. This Administration has repeatedly used fear and flag-waving to blunt the traditional American insistence on the Bill of Rights, personal freedom of thought and action, privacy, and one's right to speak and write as one pleases. Such a cynical exercise on the part of high officials of our government is unconscionable. It is shameful behavior for which there is no excuse.
The Congress, under the control of the President's party has been submissive, a lap dog wagging its tail in appreciation of White House secrecy and deception. Even the vast majority of the opposition party has been too quiet for too long - unable to find its voice, stunted by the demand to "support the troops." We forget, too often, that there is a very real difference between support for the troops and support for an unnecessary war. The men and women of our military did not ask to go to those faraway places, but they were willing. They answered their country's call. We have an obligation to support them, but we do not need to follow blindly the unthinking policies that keep them mired in the middle of a civil war.
The American public is our last best hope now. Our people must demand more from their representatives in the Congress and from their leaders in the White House. Donald Rumsfeld should be replaced by the President because he has made so many grievous errors in judgement on Iraq and because a new voice at the helm of the Department of Defense could be a breath of fresh air for our policies in Iraq. His replacement would be good for our country. Yet even a sense of the Senate vote of "no confidence" in Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership has been blocked by the President's party in the Senate. Personal accountability has been long absent from this Administration, and this Senator would like to see it return.
One would hope that men and women who rise to positions of awesome responsibility would have the grace, dignity, and honor to know in their own hearts when a well-timed resignation would advance patriotic goals. But, too often, the selfish love of power or some misguided show of toughness wins the days to the detriment of our country's fortunes. Donald Rumsfeld ought to step down or his President ought to ask him to. There is too much at stake for any other course. Personally, I believe the President is derelict in his duties when he does not ask for Mr. Rumsfeld's latchkey. The bungling and loss of life attendant to this tragic three-year long debacle in Iraq have hurt this country, its public image, and its ability to achieve numerous other national and international goals. That kind of dangerous ineptitude cannot be excused.
But like so many things when it comes to Iraq and the Middle East in general, the United States of America is stuck in neutral, with the only thing showing vigorous movement the ever spiraling price of gasoline. We have destabilized the Middle East, and handed the mullahs a way to affect the daily lives and livelihood of every American, and the efficacy of our military might - the oil supply lines upon which our economy and our military depend.
Now that oil supply is a favorite target for terrorists who have learned the joys of bombing pipelines, and listening to America bite its nails about the high cost of gasoline, while it laments its lack of foresight in developing alternative fuels.
Now, we have passed yet another anniversary of the bloody attacks which precipitated the disastrous situation in which our country finds itself today. Yet, while we mourn, there are hard truths to confront.
Our attention has been shifted, by design and deception, too quickly from the war in Afghanistan - a war that we needed to fight and win. Now the Taliban is on the rise in that country. Al Qaeda continues to find sanctuary in the mountains. Violence is on the rise, and peace and stability are in jeopardy.
North Korea, probably reacting to our doctrine of preemption and our newfound bellicosity, has increased its nuclear capability. Iran has been emboldened by our inability to stop the violence in Iraq, and by the lukewarm support we have garnered from traditional allies. Even the people of Turkey, one of the United States' staunchest allies with Turkey a member of NATO, and a model of secular Muslim democracy, have turned against us. A survey conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States indicates that Iran has become one of the most popular countries in Turkey, and that there is a growing willingness to identify with radical Islam. A display of ineptitude and spectacular miscalculation in Iraq has cost us dearly. Disenchantment at home with the dismal results in Iraq will have reverberations for years, much like the failure in Vietnam did in the 1960's.
President Bush insists that his war must go on. He defends warrantless wiretapping of our own citizens as essential to his cause, despite a court decision that the President has no such authority under our Constitution. He defends torture and rendition, and says that they have produced valuable evidence which has subverted several terror attacks on our country. But, his credibility is so damaged that it is difficult to believe him. He demands the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely, and then to try them using military tribunals which deny basic rights, also in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling. He seems convinced that he can "win" a global war on terror despite the demonstrated failure of his policies of unilateralism, militarism, overheated rhetoric, and a pathological dislike of diplomacy. It is up to the Congress to change course and to stop the heinous raiding of constitutionally protected liberties by a White House which does not fully appreciate the true meaning of the word freedom. I hope that we may find the courage.

Murtha Lays the Dead at Rumsfeld's Door

By Jason Leopold t r u t h o u t Report
Friday 15 September 2006
Democratic congressman John Murtha released a 12-page report outlining severe shortfalls plaguing the US Army as thousands of troops prepare to be deployed to Iraq.
Murtha, a 37-year Marine Corps veteran who entered the political arena in 1990, said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld bears full responsibility for the military's consistent readiness failures and demanded that the Defense Secretary resign.
"Many Army combat and support units scheduled to deploy to Iraq in 2007 will have less than the required one year period for rest and re-training," the report says. "This is one of the key indicators that lead many Army officials to conclude that current deployment rates cannot be sustained without breaking the force."
Murtha publicized the report at a news conference Wednesday where he was joined by Congressman David Obey, D-Wisconsin. Murtha read the most explosive parts of the report, much of which is based on detailed, internal Army documents his staff requested over the past few months.
The findings are damning.
"In effect, the Army has become a 'hand-to-mouth' organization," Murtha said, reading from the report. "Its inability to get ahead of the deployment and training curves is rooted in the Secretary's miscalculations and blind optimism about troop and industrial surge requirements for the US occupation of Iraq."
Murtha added that "thousands of key Army weapons platforms - such as tanks, Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles - sit in disuse at Army maintenance depots for lack of funding ... there are over 600 tanks - enough for one full Army division - sitting at Anniston Army Depot."
An Army spokesman said Murtha's report is wildly overblown, and released a statement in response to the congressman's charges.
"Today's Army is the highest quality Army this Nation has ever produced - it has not 'gone south,'" a statement released by the Army says. "To imply otherwise is an insult to the young men and women who have volunteered to protect our nation's freedoms."
But Murtha refuses to back down. Frustrated by the White House's refusal to hold Rumsfeld accountable for failing to prepare for a lengthy ground war in Iraq, which, according to career military officials have led to thousands of US casualties, Murtha released a resolution calling for Rumsfeld to immediately step down.
"For the good of the country, the United States of America must restore credibility both at home and abroad and the first step toward restoring that credibility must be to demonstrate accountability for the mistakes that have been made in prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq byimmediately effecting the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and replacing him with someone capable of leading the nation's military in a strategy to resolve our deployment in Iraq," Murtha's resolution says.
Megan Grote, a spokeswoman for Murtha, said the resolution has five co-sponsors and is gaining support among House Democrats. However, she cautioned not to read too much into that, since the resolution is just starting to make the rounds among Murtha's colleagues in the House.
"It's still too early to know, because it's only been a day since the resolution was released," Grote said. "There are other members who've called for [Rumsfeld] to resign in the past whose offices may not have heard about the resolution yet."
Career military officials have long believed the reason the Iraq war hasn't been a "cakewalk," as Bush administration officials described it prior to the March 2003 US-led attack, is because of the flawed war plan Rumsfeld designed in 2002.
In October 2002, Rumsfeld ordered the military's regional commanders to rewrite all of their war plans to capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence, and speedier deployment in the event the United States decided to invade Iraq.
The goal was to use fewer ground troops, a move that caused dismay among some in the military who said concern for the troops requires overwhelming numerical superiority to assure victory.
Rumsfeld refused to listen to his military commanders, saying that his plan would allow the military "to begin combat operations on less notice and with far fewer troops than thought possible - or thought wise - before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks," the New York Times reported in its October 13, 2002, edition.
Military officials viewed Rumsfeld's approach as injecting too much risk into war planning and said it could result in US casualties that might be prevented by amassing larger forces, according to published reports.
Those predictions have been borne out over the past 41 months, and that is of grave concern to Murtha, who spent most of his life in the military. Murtha said during Wednesday's news conference that issues plaguing today's military are so severe that "of the 16 active-duty, non-deployed combat brigades in the United States managed by the Army's Forces Command, the vast majority of them are rated at the lowest readiness ratings."
"The situation facing the Army Guard and Reserve is comparatively worse," Murtha added. "Of all the Guard units not currently mobilized, about four-fifths received the lowest readiness rating. Personnel shortages are the major reason behind the decline in Guard and Reserve readiness-shortages created for the most part by mobilizations having lapsed or personnel having been pulled from units to augment others. Perhaps most troubling to many of the Army's senior uniformed leaders is the lack of national attention to the Army's plight."

CIA Learned in '02 That Bin Laden Had No Iraq Ties

Report Says By Walter Pincus The Washington Post Friday 15 September 2006
The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and two GOP colleagues on the committee disclosed this information for the first time in the panel's report on Iraq released last week. They wrote in the "additional views" section of the report that the Cabinet-level Iraqi official "said that Iraq has no past, current, or anticipated future contact with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda" and that the official "added that bin Laden was in fact a longtime enemy of Iraq."
On Sept. 25, 2002, just days after the CIA received the source's information, President Bush told reporters: "Al-Qaeda hides. Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world.... [Y]ou can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."
According to the three Republicans, the CIA said it did not disseminate the intelligence about the lack of a Hussein-bin Laden connection because "it did not provide anything new."
But other information obtained at the same time from the same source that paralleled what administration officials were saying was immediately passed on to "alert" the president and other senior policymakers, the three Republicans said. A "highly restricted intelligence report" conveyed the source's claim that although Iraq had no nuclear weapon, Hussein was covertly developing one and had stockpiled chemical weapons, according to the committee members.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said he could not provide additional information about the situation beyond what is in the Senate report, but he added that "the agency's decisions to disseminate intelligence are not guided by political considerations."
Committee staff members would not expand on the report's language other than to say the Hussein-bin Laden material was maintained within the CIA at a high level with limited access.
Former senior CIA officials said it was unclear what happened to the Hussein-bin Laden information, although two former aides to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said they could not remember if they received the original information. "Nothing was withheld from the White House," one former aide said, although there was "a lot of debate inside the agency about the Saddam-al-Qaeda relationship" because it was the focus of repeated questions from administration officials, including Vice President Cheney and his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The high-level Iraqi official, who was not identified in the Senate report, was Naji Sabri, then foreign minister. A senior CIA officer, after months of trying, was able to question him through a trusted agency intermediary when Sabri was in New York City around Sept. 19, 2002.
According to former intelligence officials, the CIA case officer filed two separate reports describing his questioning of Sabri. One, involving the Iraq weapons program, would go to analysts interested in that subject, the officer believed; the second, about Hussein and bin Laden, would go to the CIA counterterrorism center. The officer, however, passed his material on to senior agency officials in New York and was not aware of how it was eventually distributed.
Sabri's role as an intelligence source for the CIA has already been publicly reported. New details, including a payment of $200,000 to the intermediary and a secret signal system to assure the CIA officer that Sabri was cooperating, are contained in the recently released book "Hubris," by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek and David Corn, Washington correspondent for the magazine the Nation.

62,006 - The Number Killed in the "War on Terror"

62,006 - The Number Killed in the "War on Terror" By David Randall and Emily Gosden The Independent UK
Sunday 10 September 2006
The "war on terror" - and by terrorists - has directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth.
If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths - of insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds - are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000.
The extraordinary scale of the conflict's impact, claiming lives from New York to Bali and London to Lahore, and the extent of the death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan, has emerged from an Independent on Sunday survey to mark the fifth anniversary of 11 September. It used new, unpublished data supplied by academics and organisations such as Iraq Body Count and Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, plus estimates given by other official studies.
The result is the first attempt to gauge the full cost in blood and money of the worldwide atrocities and military conflicts that began in September 2001. As of yesterday, the numbers of lives confirmed lost are: 4,541 to 5,308 civilians and 385 military in Afghanistan; 50,100 civilians and 2,899 military in Iraq; and 4,081 in acts of terrorism in the rest of the world.
The new figure on civilian deaths from Iraq Body Count, a group of British and US academics, is especially telling. Just two and a half years ago, its estimate of the number of civilian dead in Iraq passed 10,000. Today, it says, that figure has gone beyond the 50,000 mark - a huge leap largely attributable to terrorist acts and the breakdown of civil authority.
Iraq Body Count's careful methodology - of recording a death only when it appears in two independent media reports - almost certainly produces a substantial underestimate. Even the Iraqi Health Ministry reports a slightly higher figure, and President Bush's much-quoted figure of 30,000 civilian dead dates from December 2005, when it tallied with the then IBC figure. Insurgent deaths are not included in the IBC figures, and neither are those of Iraqi police when engaged in combat-style operations.
Estimates of the former are, together with the number of Iraqi military killed in the battle phase of the Iraq occupation, the biggest unknown of the conflict. One US news report guessed the insurgent dead in Iraq at 36,000 since 2003, while the number of Iraqi military killed during the invasion phase remains unknown and unknowable.
Neither category is included in our figure of 62,006 confirmed directly killed. Nor does it include any figures for people later dying from wounds received, or the increased mortality owing to lack of health care. Estimates for one or the other ranging up to 130,000 have been produced, but are based on little more than educated (and uneducated) guesswork or, as with the controversial Lancet estimate of 98,000 deaths due to extra mortality, by amplifying a survey of 988 households into a nation-wide conclusion.
What is certain is the wretched state of health care in Iraq. In March 2006 the campaign group Medact reported that 18,000 physicians have left since 2003; an estimated 250 of those that remained have been kidnapped and, in 2005 alone, 65 killed. Medact also said that "easily treatable conditions such as diarrhoea and respiratory illness caused 70 per cent of all child deaths", and that "of the 180 health clinics the US hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed and none has been opened". In May, a survey by the Iraq government and Unicef reported that a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition.
In Afghanistan, the most reliable recorder of civilian deaths is Professor Marc Herold, whose latest figures range from 4,541 to 5,308. He does not include those who die subsequently from their injuries or in refugee camps.These "indirect" deaths have been put at anything from 8,000 to 20,000. More accurate are estimates of refugee numbers. In July, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said there were 2.2 million Afghans who had fled abroad and at least 153,200 displaced internally. For Iraq, there were 888,700 external refugees, and 1.3 million people displaced inside the country. An estimated 40 per cent of the Iraqi middle class have left Iraq.
Beyond the blood price, there is a dollar and sterling cost. In July it was reported that the US Congress had approved $437bn (£254bn) for costs related to the "war on terror". This, a sum greater than those spent on the Korean and Vietnam wars, compares to the $375bn that Make Poverty History says is needed to clear the debts of the world's poorest nations. The British Government has spent £4.5bn on Iraq and Afghanistan.
IRAQ: Orphaned and Badly Burned at 12
The image of a despairing 12-year-old orphan lying on a filthy Iraqi hospital bed, his arms burnt off above the elbow, symbolised the "collateral damage" of the second Gulf war. Ali Abbas had 60 per cent burns after an American bombing raid on the Baghdad suburbs hit his home and killed 15 of his relatives, including his parents and his brother.
Three years later the young Iraqi, now a teenager living in Britain, enjoys cycling around London's Richmond Park on a special bicycle and playing games on his PlayStation with his feet. He will be taking his GCSEs next year, at a private school whose headmaster has waived the usual £8,000 annual fees. According to his teachers Ali, 15, is fluent in English and is particularly good at geography.
He is not a typical teenager, his therapist, Grania Hyde-Smith, said; Ali cannot brush his teeth, bathe or use the lavatory unaided. "He is a well-adjusted teenager. And when you consider what he's been through, that is a brilliant, inspirational and remarkable achievement."
Although he spends school holidays in Iraq, Ali is not sure that he will end up there. "I found my house on Google Earth the other day, where it had been. I found a white spot from the sky. When I went there last summer it seemed a dangerous place," he said.
JORDAN: Shot by a Lone Extremist
Christopher Stokes was with a tour group visiting the Roman amphitheatre in Jordan's capital, Amman, when he was shot by a lone extremist last week. The 30-year-old had given up his accountancy job to tour the Middle East. "Christopher lived his dreams," his father Rod, 59, said. "He travelled because he wanted to meet people."
SPAIN: Bombed on Way to Work
Maria Moyano did not drive to work on the morning of the Madrid bombings in March 2004; she was awaiting delivery of her new car. The 30-year-old economics student had just returned from studying in America and was planning a July wedding. Her body was so badly mutilated in the blast that it took several days to identify her.
USA: Passenger on United 93
Deora Bodley was a first-year student at a Catholic university in California. The 20-year old San Diegan was the youngest of 44 passengers killed when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a Pennsylvania field on 11 September 2001. She was supposed to take the flight an hour later, but wanted to get home sooner to her family and boyfriend.
AFGHANISTAN: Killed at a Checkpoint
Nasrat Ali Hassan was shot as he passed a Canadian military checkpoint outside Kandahar in March. The 45-year-old father of six was a passenger in a rickshaw taxi, and was allegedly shot four times. The price of compensating his family should start with Canadian citizenship, according to the victim's eldest brother.
BALI
Although the Australian and British victims of the Bali bombings in October 2002 were widely reported, many of the dead killed in the Bali attack were Indonesian. Made Wijaya, 39, was a taxi driver waiting for fares outside the Sari Club. He left behind a wife and three children. Seven people from his village died, all of them taxi drivers.

Bush Duped Public On Iraq

Rockefeller: Bush Duped Public On Iraq CBS News
Saturday 09 September 2006
When the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified version of its findings this past week, the Republican chairman of the committee, Pat Roberts, left town without doing interviews, calling the report a rehash of unfounded partisan allegations.
Its statements like this one, made Feb. 5, 2003, by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell that have become so controversial, implying Iraq was linked to terror attacks.
"Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associated collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants," Powell said.
But after 2 1/2 years of reviewing pre-war intelligence behind closed doors, the lead Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, who voted for the Iraq War, says the Bush administration pulled the wool over everyone's eyes.
"The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion and 69 percent of the people, at that time, it worked, they said 'we want to go to war,'" Rockefeller told CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. "Including me. The difference is after I began to learn about some of that intelligence I went down to the Senate floor and I said 'my vote was wrong.'"
Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq - even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.
He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'"
Does Rockefeller stands by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade?
"Yes. Yes. [Saddam] wasn't going to attack us. He would've been isolated there," Rockefeller said. "He would have been in control of that country but we wouldn't have depleted our resources preventing us from prosecuting a war on terror which is what this is all about."
Republicans say there was flawed intelligence to be sure, but they insist there was no attempt to mislead the public.
"In 2002 and 2003, members of both parties got a good look at the intelligence we had and they came to the very same conclusions about what was going on," White House Spokesman Tony Snow said.

Eustis Chief: Iraq Post-War Plan Muzzled

By Stephanie Heinatz The Daily Press
Friday 08 September 2006
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, an early planner of the war, tells about challenges of invasion and rebuilding.
Fort Eustis - Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.
In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.
Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq.
Scheid, who is also the commander of Fort Eustis in Newport News, made his comments in an interview with the Daily Press. He retires in about three weeks.
Scheid doesn't go so far as calling for Rumsfeld to resign. He's listened as other retired generals have done so.
"Everybody has a right to their opinion," he said. "But what good did it do?"
Scheid's comments are further confirmation of the version of events reported in "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," the book by New York Times reporter Michael R. Gordon and retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor.
In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.
On Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "life just went to hell."
That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to "get ready to go to war."
A day or two later, Rumsfeld was "telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.
"Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan ... Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq."
Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, "My gosh, we're in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It's just going to be too much."
Planning was kept very hush-hush in those early days.
"There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet."
There was already an offensive plan in place for Iraq, Scheid said. And in the beginning, the planners were just expanding on it.
"Whether we were going to execute it, we had no idea," Scheid said.
Eventually other military agencies - like the transportation and Army materiel commands - had to get involved.
They couldn't just "keep planning this in the dark," Scheid said.
Planning continued to be a challenge.
"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."
Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.
Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.
"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.
"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."
Why did Rumsfeld think that? Scheid doesn't know.
"But think back to those times. We had done Bosnia. We said we were going into Bosnia and stop the fighting and come right out. And we stayed."
Was Rumsfeld right or wrong?
Scheid said he doesn't know that either.
"In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging."
Even if the people who laid out the initial war plans had fleshed out post-invasion missions, the fighting and insurgent attacks going on today would have been hard to predict, Scheid said.
"We really thought that after the collapse of the regime we were going to do all these humanitarian type things," he said. "We thought this would go pretty fast and we'd be able to get out of there. We really didn't anticipate them to continue to fight the way they did or come back the way they are.
"Now we're going more toward a civil war. We didn't see that coming."
While Scheid, a soldier since 1977, spoke candidly about the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he remains concerned about the American public's view of the troops.
He's bothered by the nationwide divide over the war and fearful that patriotism among citizens will continue to decline.
"We're really hurting right now," he said.

Torturing The Truth

By Dick Meyer CBS News Thursday 07 September 2006
"I've said to people we don't torture. And we don't."
That's what President Bush told Katie Couric yesterday.
That was a very odd thing to say on the very day his Pentagon repudiated interrogation "techniques" it had been using and embraced international standards for humane treatment of all detainees in military custody. These standards, by the way, will still not apply to detainees in CIA custody who can still be subjected to "techniques" - translation: torture.
The president also told Ms. Couric that one of the things he felt badly about from his tenure was Abu Ghraib. Now Abu Ghraib was where torture was photographed and then shown to the world. Similar torture was carried out, we learned, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
But, "I've said to people we don't torture. And we don't."
What is being tortured here is the truth.
The president's statement here is beyond doublespeak and above spin. It's untrue, it's egregious. The Pentagon's backhanded, long-delayed and uncourageous acknowledgment that torture was used also repudiated what the president has been telling citizens for years. We've been lied to and we are still being lied to. By the president.
Now, foes of President Bush are indignant that he can "get away with it." They blame a biased press, a manipulative regime and, I suppose, an electorate they see as ignorant.
The president's defenders also blame a biased press. They split hairs about what torture is - sleep deprivation is OK, but jumper cables aren't. They also argue that torture may be justified in some cases, though that is not really what the president himself has asserted.
I'm guessing that one reason that the president "gets away with it" is that many people do what the president's formal defenders do: make strong arguments themselves even though the president doesn't. If a voter sees a rationale for, say, "interrogation techniques," even though the president has never stated it, and in fact speaks dishonestly about it, that voter may still give the president the benefit of the doubt.
In truth, many people pragmatically and ethically believe that what anyone would call torture may be permissible if it has a certainty of preventing other loss of innocent life. This is an ancient, ongoing debate. It is not immoral to come out on the tough side. But the international community, through vehicles such as the Geneva Conventions, has long been on the other side.
The president has danced all around this. We do what's necessary, he says, but we don't torture. Right.
I can't see what the downside would be of a simple honest declaration now that the Pentagon is formally changing its policy. Something like: "Yes, in the wake of 9/11, military and intelligence agencies trying to protect our country, interrogated terrorists using methods that can only be called torture. We felt this was necessary to prevent the loss of innocent life, perhaps on a massive scale. This did involve a compromise with international standards and American values and we paid dearly for that. We are changing that policy, which we once felt was justified. But we reserve the right to do what is necessary to protect human life and certain U.S. agencies will not be covered by the new Pentagon policies."
I may not agree with that - but it is honest.
The administration, of course, is in the midst of yet again repackaging its entire justification for the war on terror and the war on Iraq. By invoking Hitler, Stalin and Nazism, they are trying to rev up their conservative base and somehow discredit the Democrats by implying they aren't worthy of taking on Adolf bin Laden.
This is a fool's errand. Voters already have a very modest opinion of the Democrats' national security credentials, and that will not change in this election cycle. Most voters also have settled views on the threat of Islamist terrorism.
What is unsettled for voters is their view of the president's and the administration's honesty and competence in combating what it calls the "great battle of the 21st century."
--------

"He Would Fire the Next Person That Said That"

By Kevin Drum
The Washington Monthly

Friday 08 September 2006

Today, via Orin Kerr, comes a remarkable interview with Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he says, Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

..."In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging."

In a way, this is old news. As much as it beggars the imagination, there's been plenty of evidence all along that Bush never took the idea of rebuilding Iraq seriously. The plan was to remove Saddam from power, claim victory, and get out.

However, this is the clearest evidence I've seen yet. The guy who was actually in charge of logistics has now directly confirmed that Rumsfeld not only didn't intend to rebuild Iraq in any serious way, but threatened to fire anyone who wasted time on the idea. Needless to say, he wouldn't have done this unless it reflected the wishes of the president.

And this also means that all of Bush's talk about democracy was nothing but hot air. If you're serious about planting democracy after a war, you don't plan to simply topple a government and then leave.

So: the lack of postwar planning wasn't merely the result of incompetence. It was deliberate policy. There was never any intention of rebuilding Iraq and there was never any intention of wasting time on democracy promotion. That was merely a post hoc explanation after we failed to find the promised WMD. Either that or BG Scheid is lying.

This is an astounding interview, all the more so for the apparently resigned tone that Scheid brings to it. It belongs on the front page of the New York Times, not the Hampton Roads Daily Press.

--------

POSTSCRIPT: An alternative explanation, based on Rumsfeld's admonition that "the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war," is that Rumsfeld and Bush were planning to stay but simply lied about it in order to build support for the war. However, based on the rest of the interview with Scheid, as well as the other evidence that there was no plan to stay and rebuild in any serious way, that explanation seems unlikely. The bulk of the evidence continues to suggest that democracy and rebuilding were simply not on Bush's radar.

You Wouldn't Catch Me Dead in Iraq

By Peter Laufer The Sunday Times UK Sunday 27 August 2006
Scores of American troops are deserting - even from the front line in Iraq. But where have they gone? And why isn't the US Army after them? Peter Laufer tracked down four of the deserters.
They are the US troops in Iraq to whom the American administration prefers not to draw attention. They are the deserters - those who have gone AWOL from their units and not returned, risking imprisonment and opprobrium.
When First Lieutenant Ehren Watada of the US Army, who faced a court martial in August, refused to go to Iraq on moral grounds, the newspapers in his home state of Hawaii were full of letters accusing him of "treason". He said he had concluded that the war is both morally wrong and a horrible breach of American law. His participation, he stated, would make him party to "war crimes". Watada is just one conscientious objector to a war that has polarised America, arguably more so than even the Vietnam war.
It is impossible to put a precise figure on the number of American troops who have left the army as a result of the US involvement in Iraq. The Pentagon says that a total of 40,000 troops have deserted their posts (not simply those serving in Iraq) since the year 2000. This includes many who went AWOL for family reasons. The Pentagon's spokesmen say that the overall number of deserters has actually gone down since operations began in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is no doubt that a steady trickle of deserters who object to the Iraq war have made it over the border and are now living in Canada. There they seek asylum, often with the help of Canadian anti-war groups. One Toronto lawyer, Jeffry House, has represented at least 20 deserters from Iraq in the Canadian courts; he is himself a conscientious objector, having refused to fight in the Vietnam war - along with 50,000 others, at the peak of the conflict. He estimates that 200 troops have already gone underground in Canada since the war in Iraq began.
These conscientious objectors are a brave group - their decisions will result in long-term life changes. To be labelled a deserter is no small burden. If convicted of desertion, they run the risk of a prison sentence - with hard labour. To choose exile can mean lifelong separation from family and friends, as even the most trivial encounter with the police in America - say, over a traffic offence - could lead to jail.
Many of the deserters are not pacifists, against war per se, but they view the Iraq war as wrong. First Lt Watada, for instance, said he would face prison rather than serve in Iraq, though he was prepared to pack his bags for Afghanistan to fight in a war that he considered just. They don't want to face the military courts, which is why they have decided to flee to Canada. A generation ago, Canada welcomed Vietnam-war draft dodgers and deserters. Today, the political climate is different and the score or so of US deserters who are now north of the border are applying for refugee status. So far, the Canadian government is saying no, so cases rejected for refugee status are going to appeal in the federal courts.
But there is no guarantee that these exiles will ultimately find safe haven in Canada. If the federal courts rule against the soldiers and they then exhaust all further judicial possibilities, they may be deported back to the United States - and that may not be what the Americans want. Their presence in the US will in itself represent yet another public-relations headache for the Bush administration.
Darrell Anderson
First Armored Division, 2-3 Field Artillery, at Giessen, Germany. Age: 24
Darrell Anderson joined the US Army just before the Iraq war started.
"I needed health care, money to go to college, and I needed to take care of my daughter. The military was the only way I could do it," he tells me. As we chat, basking in the sun on a peaceful Toronto street, he fiddles with his pocket watch, which has a Canadian flag on its face. He's wearing a peace-symbol necklace.
After fighting for seven months in Iraq, he came home bloodied from combat, with a Purple Heart that proved his sacrifice - and seriously opened his eyes. "When I joined, I wanted to fight," he says. "I wanted to see combat. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save people. I wanted to protect my country." But soon after he arrived in Iraq, he tells me, he realised that the Iraqis did not want him there, and he heard harsh tales that surprised and distressed him.
"Soldiers were describing to me how they had beaten prisoners to death," he says. "There were three guys and one said, 'I kicked him from this side of the head while the other guy kicked him in the head and the other guy punched him, and he just died.' People I knew. They were boasting about it, about how they had beaten people to death." He says it again: "Boasting about how they had beaten people to death. They are trained killers now. Their friends had died in Iraq. So they weren't the people they were before they went there."
Anderson says that even the small talk was difficult to tolerate. "I hate Iraqis," he quotes his peers as saying. "I hate these damn Muslims." At first he was puzzled by such talk. "After a while I started to understand. I started to feel the hatred myself. My friends were dying. What am I here for? We went to fight for our country; now we're just fighting to stay alive." In addition to taking shrapnel from a roadside bomb - the injury that earned him the Purple Heart - Anderson says he often found himself in firefights. But it was work at a checkpoint that made him seriously question his role. He was guarding the "backside" of a street checkpoint in Baghdad, he says. If a car passed a certain point without stopping, the guards were supposed to open fire.
"A car comes through and it stops in front of my position. Sparks are coming from the car from bad brakes. All the soldiers are yelling. It's in my vicinity, so it's my responsibility. I didn't fire. A superior goes, 'Why didn't you fire? You were supposed to fire.' I said, 'It was a family!' At this time it had stopped. You could see the children in the back seat. I said, 'I did the right thing.' He's like, 'No, you didn't. It's procedure to fire. If you don't do it next time, you're punished.'"
Anderson shakes his head at the memory. "I'm already not agreeing with this war. I'm not going to kill innocent people. I can't kill kids. That's not the way I was raised." He says he started to look around at the ruined cityscape and the injured Iraqis, and slowly began to understand the Iraqi response. "If someone did this to my street, I would pick up a weapon and fight. I can't kill these people. They're not terrorists. They're 14-year-old boys, they're old men. We're occupying the streets. We raid houses. We grab people. We send them off to Abu Ghraib, where they're tortured. These are innocent people. We stop cars. We hinder everyday life. If I did this in the States, I'd be thrown in prison."
Birds are singing sweetly as he speaks, a stark contrast to his descriptions of atrocities in Iraq. "I didn't shoot anybody when I was in Baghdad. We went down to Najaf with howitzers. We shot rounds in Najaf and we killed hundreds of people. I did kill hundreds of people, but not directly, hand-to-hand."
Anderson went home for Christmas, convinced he would be sent back to the war. He knew he would not be able to live with himself if he returned to Iraq, armed with his first-hand knowledge of what was occurring there day after day. He decided he could no longer participate, and his parents - already opposed to the war -supported his decision. Canada seemed like the best option. After Christmas 2004, he drove from Kentucky to Toronto.
But he says he has had second thoughts about his exile. Not that he is worried much about deportation: he has recently married a Canadian woman and that will probably guarantee him permanent residency. But he plans to return to the US this autumn, and expects to be arrested when he presents himself to authorities at the border. "The war's still going on," he told me.
"If I go back, maybe I can still make a difference. My fight is with the American government."
It's not only anti-war work that's motivating him to go home; he's thinking about his future. "Dealing with all the nightmares and the post-traumatic stress, I need support from my family."
Anderson expects to be convicted of desertion, and he says he will use his trial and prison time to continue to protest against the war. He imagines that just the sight of him in a dress uniform covered with the medals he was awarded fighting in Iraq will make a powerful statement. "I can't work every day and act like everything is okay," he says about his life in Toronto. "This war is beating me down. I haven't had a dream that wasn't a nightmare since I came to Canada. It eats away at me to try and act like everything's okay when it's not." Not that he feels his time in Canada was a waste. "There was no way I could have gone to prison at the time: I would have killed myself. I was way too messed up in the head to even think of sitting in a prison cell. I owe a lot to Canada. It has saved my life. When I came back and was talking about the war, Americans called me a traitor. Canadians helped me when I was at my lowest point."
Joshua Key
43rd Company of Combat Engineers, at Fort Carson, Colorado. Age: 28
We was going along the Euphrates river," says Joshua Key, detailing a recurring nightmare that features a scene he stumbled into shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. "It's a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies. The heads laying over here and the bodies over there and US troops in between them. I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What's caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?' We get out and somebody was screaming, 'We f***ing lost it here!' I'm thinking, 'Oh yes, somebody definitely lost it here.'" Key says he was ordered to look for evidence of a firefight, for something to explain what had happened to the beheaded Iraqis. "I look around just for a few seconds and I don't see anything."
Then he witnessed the sight that still triggers the nightmares. "I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like soccer balls. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and thought, 'I can't be no part of this. This is crazy. I came here to fight and be prepared for war, but this is outrageous.'"
He's convinced that there was no firefight.
"A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there was any shells. There was never no shells." He still cannot get the scene out of his mind: "You just see heads everywhere. You wake up, you'll just be sitting there, like you're in a foxhole. I can still see Iraq just as clearly as it was the day I was there. You'll just be on the side of a little river running through the city, trash piled up, filled with dead. I don't sleep that much, you might say." His wife, Brandi, nods in agreement, and says that he cries in his sleep.
We're sitting on the back porch of the Toronto house where Key and his wife and their four small children have been living in exile since Key deserted to Canada. They've settled in a rent-free basement apartment, courtesy of a landlord sympathetic to their plight. Joshua smokes one cigarette after another and drinks coffee while we talk. There's a scraggly beard on his still-boyish face; his eyes look weary.
Key rejects the American government line that the Iraqis fighting the occupation are terrorists. "I'm thinking, 'What the hell?' I mean, that's not a terrorist. That's the man's home. That's his son, that's the father, that's the mother, that's the sister. Houses are destroyed. Husbands are detained, and wives don't even know where they're at. I mean, them are pissed-off people, and they have a reason to be. I would never wish this upon myself or my family, so why would I wish it upon them?"
On security duty in the Iraqi streets, Key found himself talking to the locals. He was surprised by how many spoke English, and he was frustrated by the military regulations that forbade him to accept dinner invitations in their homes. "I'm not your perfect killing machine," he admits. "That's where I broke the rules. I broke the rules by having a conscience." And the more time he spent in Iraq, the more his conscience developed. "I was trained to be a total killer. I was trained in booby traps, explosives, landmines." He pauses. "Hell, if you want to get technical about it, I was made to be an American terrorist. I was trained in everything that a terrorist is trained to do." In case I might have missed his point, he says it again. "I mean terrorist." Deserting seemed the only viable alternative, Key says. He did it, he insists, because he was lied to "by my president". Iraq - it was obvious to him - was no threat to the US.
Key feels that some of his unit were trigger-happy. He recalls another incident that haunts him. He was in an armoured personnel carrier when an Iraqi man in a truck cut them off, making a wrong turn. One of his squad started firing at the truck. "The first shot, the truck sort of started slowing down," Key recounts. "And then he shot the next shot, and when he shot that next shot, it, you know, exploded." Key watched the truck turn to debris. "It was very strange. He was just going along and because he tried to cut in front of us... No kind of combat reasons or anything of such..."
Key seems still in shock at the utter senselessness of it all. "Why did it happen and what was the cause for it? When I asked that question, I was told, basically, 'You didn't see anything, you know?' Nobody asked no questions." Assigned to raid houses, Key was soon appalled by the job. "I mean, yeah, they're screaming and hollering out their lungs. It's traumatic on both parts because you've got somebody yelling at you, which might be a woman. You're yelling back at her, telling her to get on the ground or get out of the house. She don't know what you're saying and vice versa. It got to me. We're the ones sending their husbands or their children off, and when you do that, it gets even more traumatic because then they're distraught. Of course, you can't comfort them because you don't know what to say."
While the residents are restrained, the search progresses. "Oh, you completely destroy the home - completely destroy it," he says. "If there's like cabinets or something that's locked, you kick them in. The soldiers take what they want. Completely ransack it." He estimates that he participated in about 100 raids. "I never found anything in a home. You might find one AK-47, but that's for personal use. But I never once found the big caches of weapons they supposed were there. I never once found members of the Ba'ath party, terrorists, insurgents. We never found any of that."
A soldier's life was never Joshua Key's dream. He was living in Guthrie, Oklahoma, just looking for a decent job. "We had two kids at the time and my third boy was on the way," he says. "There's no work there. There wasn't going to be a future. Of course you can get a job working at McDonald's, but that wasn't going to pay the bills." The local army-recruiting station beckoned. Shortly after he finished basic training, he was en route to the war zone. After eight months of fighting, he received two weeks' leave back in the US. At the end of that, he was due for another Iraq tour.
He didn't report for duty. Key and his wife packed up, took their children and ran, with the intention of getting as far from his base in familiar Colorado as possible. The family ran out of money in Philadelphia, and Key found work as a welder. They lived an underground lifestyle for over a year, frequently checking out of one hotel and into another, worried that if they stayed too long at one place they would attract attention. "I was paranoid," Key says, and he contemplated deserting to Canada.
The research was easy. He went online and searched for "deserter needs help to go AWOL". Up popped details about others who had escaped across the border. He and Brandi decided to opt for a new life as Canadians. George W Bush should be the one to go to prison, says Key.
"On the day he goes to prison, I'll go sit in prison with him. Let's go. I'll face it for that music. But that ain't never going to happen," he laughs.
Ryan Johnson
211th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Barstow, California. Age: 22
Twenty-two-year-old Ryan Johnson meets me at his Catholic hostel in Toronto wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans and black running shoes. When Ryan went AWOL in January 2005, he simply went home to Visalia, California. "It was very stressful," he says. "I lived only four hours away from my home base. I figured they could come get me at any time. But they never came by. They never came looking for me. They sent some letters - that's all they did." The military doesn't devote significant manpower to chasing AWOL soldiers and deserters, other than issuing a federal arrest warrant. Those who get caught are usually arrested for something unrelated, their AWOL status revealed when local police enter their names into the National Crime Information Center database - a routine post-arrest procedure throughout the United States.
Johnson moved to Canada because he was afraid that if he applied for a job, a background check would cause him to be arrested and give him a criminal record that would make it even more difficult for him to find work in the future. Voluntarily turning himself in to the US Army would not have improved his options, either.
"I had two choices: go to Iraq and have my life messed up, or go to jail and have my life messed up. So I came here to try this out."
Back at his base in the southern California desert, Johnson had listened hard to the stories told by soldiers returning from the war.
"I didn't want to be a part of that," he says. I remind him that, unlike in the Vietnam era, there was no draft when he became eligible to join the army. He went down to the Visalia recruiting office and signed up. Did he really not know then that the army was in the business of killing people? "That's true, yeah, they are," he acknowledges. "But what I didn't understand is how traumatising it was to actually kill somebody or watch one of your friends get killed. I've never seen anyone die.
"When I joined," he says, "I joined because I was poor." He says that jobs were hard to come by in Visalia and he lacked the funds for college. The sign in the strip mall outside the recruiting office beckoned, despite the fact that war was already burning up the Iraqi desert and sending GIs home dead.
"I talked to the recruiters," says Johnson.
"I said, 'What are the chances of me going to Iraq?' They said, 'Depends on what job you get.' So I said, 'What jobs could I get that wouldn't have me go to Iraq?' And they named jobs. I picked one of those and they said that I probably wouldn't go to Iraq."
Johnson was too unsophisticated to ask probing questions at the army recruiting office, and he didn't question many of the answers he did receive. "I was 20 years old," he says defensively. "I thought we were rebuilding in Iraq. I thought we were doing good things. But we're blowing up mosques. We're blowing up museums, people's homes, all the culture. I mean, I didn't even realise Iraq was Mesopotamia, you know? There's all this culture and everything in Iraq. I like to think of myself as pretty well educated for someone that didn't even graduate high school, but I've never really known anything about history or other cultures.
"The soldiers that are going to Iraq, most of them aren't patriotic," he says. "They aren't going to Iraq because our flag has red, white and blue on it. They're not going because they think that Iraq is posing a threat to us. Most of us are going because we're ordered to and our buddies are going. That's one of the reasons that I was going to go - because my buddies are over there."
He is immediately wistful when asked how he feels about being safe in peaceful Toronto while those buddies are fighting and dying in the desert: "I check the casualties list every day. Every day I go on the internet and I check the casualties list to see if my friends are on there. And as of yet," he pauses, "seven people from my unit have died, and I knew four of them."
Johnson is unwilling to consider a return to America and time in prison. "It seems absolutely insane," he says. "They'll put someone in jail for five years for not wanting to kill somebody. I'm trying to avoid killing people. I know if I went to Iraq I would kill somebody. If I got put on patrol I would probably shoot somebody, because I would know that it's them or me, you know? And they feel the same way. If I don't kill these guys, they're going to kill me."
Johnson is hoping to feel at home in Canada. His introduction to the new country when he drove across the border was unexpectedly welcoming. He tried to give his ID to the border guard, but she was not interested in checking it. She just said: "'Welcome to Canada.' Yeah, that's what she said. She said, 'Welcome to Canada.' And I said, 'Thank you!' and then we crossed the border and my wife, Jennifer, screamed."
However, Johnson is now appealing, as his initial request for refugee status in Canada has been rejected by the Canadian authorities.
Ivan Brobeck
2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Age: 21
Aged 21, former Lance Corporal Ivan Brobeck has an inviting smile. We meet in a park near his new home in Toronto. "I knew I couldn't take it any more," he says of his decision to desert to Canada. "I just needed to get away, because my unit was scheduled to go back to Iraq for a second time and I couldn't take any more."
Brobeck had no problem staying in the military, but he decided that he was not accepting orders to return to Iraq, and desertion seemed his only alternative. He spent much of 2004 on duty in Iraq. He fought in Falluja, and lost friends to roadside bombs "You tend to be very angry over there, because you're fighting for something you don't believe in, and your friends are dying," he tells me.
His war stories feel out of place in the peaceful, upmarket Toronto neighbourhood where we are talking. During battles, he says he operated "on autopilot", fighting for survival.
"I started thinking about what was wrong while I was over there, but it didn't really get to me until the end of my stay in Iraq - and definitely once I was back home."
Back at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, Brobeck says he began to consider "the totally bad stuff that shouldn't have happened" during his watch. "I have seen the beating of innocent prisoners," he says. "I remember hearing something get thrown off the back of a seven-ton truck. The bed of a seven-ton is probably something like 7 or 8ft high. They threw a detainee off the back, his hands tied behind his back and a sandbag over his head, so he couldn't brace for the impact. I remember he started convulsing after he hit the ground and we thought he was snoring. We took the bag off his head and his eyes were swollen shut and his nose was plugged with blood and he could barely even breathe."
In addition to the abuse of prisoners, the regularity with which civilians were killed at checkpoints confounded the young marine. "My friends have been ones who've done that, and after the event it's always, 'Oh, so and so is a little down today - he killed a guy in front of his kids.' Or, 'He killed a couple of kids.' These marines that had to do that were my friends, who I talked to every day. It's hard knowing that your best friend had to kill innocent people."
Brobeck started to develop sympathy for the enemy. "A lot of people that shoot back at us aren't bad people. They're people who had their wives killed or their sons killed and they're just trying to get retribution, get revenge and kill the person who killed their son. They're just innocent people who lost a whole lot and don't have anything else to do."
Brobeck was a marine for a year before being deployed to Iraq. "I always heard all these great things that the US military have done throughout history, like great battles that they've won. Out of all the forces I knew, the marines were the toughest, most hard core. I wanted to do that. I was willing to risk my life for an actual cause," he muses, "if there was one."
What would be a cause worth dying for? "A good cause" is his answer. "But this war doesn't benefit anyone. It doesn't benefit Americans, it doesn't even benefit Iraq. This is not something that anyone should fight and die for. I was only 17 when I signed my contract, and my whole childhood, all I did was play video games and sports. I didn't pay attention to the news. That stuff was boring to me. But I know first-hand now."
Last July his unit shipped out without him. "The day I decided to actually leave was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I had wanted to for so long, I just couldn't bring myself to actually do it, because going AWOL is definitely a huge decision, and it's like throwing away a lot of your life. Plus, I didn't know what I was going to do if I went AWOL."
The night before leaving, Brobeck confided his intentions to another marine. "He said, 'You've been to Iraq; I haven't. You have your reasons for going AWOL and I'm not going to stop you.'" The departure from the North Carolina base was easy.
"I walked to a bus station and stayed at a hotel that night. The only way I could get home was by bus, and the station was closed. When the Greyhound station opened, I got my ticket and left for Virginia. I was nervous because reveille, the time we wake up, was at 5.30, and they would have definitely noticed I was missing. I thought they would have checked the Greyhound station, the only one near the base. They didn't, which was good. I didn't go home to my mom, because I was worried about police being there. I stayed with a friend."
Twenty-eight days after he went AWOL, Brobeck headed for Canada. He discovered the website maintained by the War Resisters Support Campaign, a group of Canadians organising aid for American deserters, and learnt that there would be help from them were he to flee north to Toronto.
He called his mother and together they drove across the Niagara Falls crossing point.
"She doesn't like the fact that I'm away in Canada and can't come back to see her," he says, "but it's better than me going back to Iraq for a second time."
Exile in Canada feels good for Brobeck. "Life feels for me, even if I wasn't AWOL, freer up here than it would in America. Everyone is so polite in Canada, friendly." In the year since he crossed the border, he has met and married his wife, Lisa. His application for refugee status has been denied, but he has hopes of winning his appeal.
"The only thing I left behind was my family and my friends," he says. "So that's the only thing I'm going to miss about America - the people.
"The US used to be something you could say you were proud of," he adds. "You go to another country now and say that you're an American, you probably won't get a lot of happy faces or open arms, because of the man in charge. It's amazing what one person can do. The leadership totally screwed up any respect we had." His rejection of US policy in Iraq is making him question his sense of national identity. "In my heart I'm not American... if it means I have to conform to what they stand for," he says about the Bush administration. "I'm not American because America has lost touch with what they were. The founding fathers would definitely be pissed off if they found out what America's become."
Mission Rejected, by Peter Laufer, is published in the US by Chelsea Green, and will be published in the UK in January 2007 by John Blake
The Britons Who Are Saying No
It's not just Americans: hundreds of our own troops have 'retreated' from Iraq. Philip Jacobson reports
Over 2,000 members of Britain's armed forces have gone long-term AWOL since the war in Iraq started, and most are still missing. Before the fighting began, about 375 absconders a year were at large for any length of time, and were dismissed; that figure rose to 720 last year. About 740 men are thought to be on the run still, but have not yet been disciplined.
While the MoD denies that this trend reflects growing opposition to the war, lawyers specialising in court martials report a continuing increase in requests for advice from personnel desperate to avoid being posted to Iraq. Although the overall number of AWOL cases has been fairly stable for a few years (about 2,500 annually), there is growing concern in the military about the "Iraq factor". Before, most absconders were AWOL for a relatively short time, typically owing to family or financial problems, or bullying, and either went back to their units voluntarily or were arrested quickly. Most were disciplined by their commanding officers; punishments ranged from demotion to "jankers", a spell in a military jail.
But it seems that a growing number are ready to risk a charge of desertion - a far more serious offence than going AWOL, with penalties to match. According to Gilbert Blades, an expert on military law, the MoD is playing down the true extent of the problem. "It is absolutely clear to me," he says, "that the crucial factor in driving up AWOL levels has been what more and more service people consider to be an illegal conflict." As Blades sees it, the tightening of the legal definition of desertion in new legislation going through parliament is intended to deter potential absconders. Under the new Armed Forces Bill, people refusing active-service duty in a foreign country could be jailed for life. "It seems obvious this is a direct response to the situation that has developed as the war has intensified," he says.
Two cases this year have highlighted the issue of morally motivated "refuseniks" in the forces. Ben Griffin, an SAS soldier stationed in Baghdad, told his commanding officer that he was no longer willing to fight alongside "gung-ho and trigger-happy" US troops. Griffin fully expected his eight-year career to end in a court martial and imprisonment, but he was allowed to leave and was given a glowing testimonial to his "strength of character". Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, an RAF doctor, received eight months in prison for rejecting orders to report for a third tour of duty in Basra on the grounds that the occupation was illegal. He was later freed, but spent the rest of his sentence under house arrest.
An MoD spokeswoman told The Sunday Times Magazine that claims that the level of desertions was rocketing were untrue. "There is a good deal of confusion about this, because people often don't understand the distinction between deserting and going absent without leave. Only 21 cases of desertion have been recorded over the past five years, and just one person has been convicted of that offence since 1989." She also said criticism of the new legislation was "misguided and sometimes malicious". Under the present military legal system, she explained, each arm of the forces administers its own discipline. This no longer reflects an era in which combined operations are becoming common. "It makes sense in the circumstances to have a single law addressing matters of military discipline for all service personnel." But Blades argues that the clause providing for life sentences in the event of refusal to serve in a foreign combat zone "was driven through solely by the defence establishment to provide a drastic legal remedy to the problem of conscientious objection". It remains to be seen whether the courts, if pushed, will hand down such a stiff sentence.