Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Senate Stalls on Iraq

By Matt Renner t r u t h o u t | Report Wednesday 28 February 2007

A weekend of confusion among Democratic senators over possible action on Iraq was capped off by an announcement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada that the Senate would wait on any Iraq-related legislation.

"Iraq is going to be there ... it's just a question of when we get back to it," Reid told the Associated Press, citing action on a national security bill as a higher priority.

Senator Reid is waiting to attempt to begin debate on a bill that would have begun initial troop withdrawals within 120 days of enactment, with the goal of withdrawing almost all combat troops by March 2008.

Sunday, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), declared that he, along with the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden (D-Del.), would pursue a change in the 2002 Congressional Authorization of Force against Iraq.

On NBC's "Meet The Press," Levin outlined a Democratic attempt to force a scale-back of the US military involvement in Iraq. The senator believes that by altering the law that Congress passed to give President Bush authority to invade Iraq, Democrats could change the mission in Iraq and limit President Bush's ability to escalate the war.

"Hopefully, we're going to come up with a resolution which ... would modify that ... earlier resolution to a more limited purpose," Levin Said. The goal would be to limit the US involvement in Iraq to training Iraqi forces and hunting al-Qaeda operatives who infiltrated the country after the invasion. Democrats claim that this could be accomplished by altering the outdated Authorization of Force against Iraq to reflect the current situation.

Levin said that a change in the Authorization of Force could push the Bush administration into a "constitutional battle" with Congress because members of the Bush administration have suggested that attempts to curtail the president's war powers would simply be ignored.

Critics of this tactic describe it as a worthless public relations stunt: a politically guarded maneuver meant to appease the growing antiwar movement without taking any real political risks.

Congress tried a similar tactic to end the war in Vietnam. In 1970, President Nixon ignored the repeal of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress and continued the war in defiance.

University of Illinois Law Professor Francis Boyle described this Democratic maneuver as an attempt to act and sound like the Senate is taking action, without putting their political futures in jeopardy. "The Senate has two options to end this war: cut funding or impeach Bush and Cheney," Boyle said. Boyle also pointed to the precedent set by Nixon during Vietnam. "Revoking the [Iraq] authorization would do nothing. Senator Biden knows this, he is a lawyer, he was around back then [referring to the Vietnam era]." According to Boyle, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon's insolence was not a violation of the law.

While questioning the effectiveness of their strategy, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dared the Democrats to attempt to cut funding for the war. McConnell pointed out the futility of the Democratic effort: "altering the original use of force authorization could best be described as trying to unring a bell." McConnell continued, "The truth of the matter is there's really only ... one way to end the war, if that's what our Democratic friends want to do. That is to cut off the funding for the war."

Over the weekend, Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Levin made statements that effectively assured that they are not going to attempt to cut funding for the war in Iraq, as Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) had proposed earlier. Because the Senate Democrats cling to a razor-thin one vote majority, the threat of Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) switching sides and caucusing with Republicans could hamper any attempt to cut funding. Lieberman told The New Yorker that a move by Democrats to cut funding for the Iraq occupation would be "very hurtful," and that he'd be "deeply affected by it."

One factor in Reid's decision to hold off on a Senate Iraq debate may be the lack of Republican support for binding action on Iraq. He would need at least ten Republicans to cross over and support a debate that might further weaken a president whose war policies they have endorsed since 2002. A Republican filibuster stalled an attempt to consider a nonbinding resolution expressing disapproval of the president's escalation plan on February 17th. Senator Lieberman was the only member of the Democratic caucus to vote for the filibuster.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Baghdad Sees Resurgence of Bomb, Mortar Attack Deaths

By Richard Mauer McClatchy Newspapers Monday 26 February 2007

Baghdad, Iraq - Nearly two weeks into the newest Baghdad security plan, the daily count of murder victims dumped on the city's streets has declined significantly, a likely sign that Shiite Muslim militia groups aligned with the Iraqi government have reined in their members or sent them out of the capital.

But deaths from bombings and mortar attacks, after an initial decline, have returned to the levels of the previous two months, suggesting that the plan's initial measures have had little impact on the Sunni insurgent groups believed to be responsible for most of that violence.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have released only limited information about what steps they've taken to secure the city since the plan's official kickoff on Feb. 15. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told President Bush last week that the plan, dubbed Operation Enforcing the Law, so far had been a "dazzling success." U.S. officials have been more cautious, saying that it may be months before the plan can be labeled a success or a failure.

Statistics compiled from official daily reports of the Interior Ministry and other Iraqi government sources, as well as interviews in 20 Baghdad neighborhoods about the plan's initial measures, however, show that some early judgments are possible about the plan's effectiveness. With most members of Congress expressing skepticism about the plan's prospects for success, such information could prove useful in the debate over Bush's plan to commit a total of 17,500 additional troops to the plan in the coming months.

From Dec. 1, 2006, through Feb. 14, the number of people killed in public places from violent attacks averaged 14.8 a day. From Feb. 15 through Monday, the number declined, but just barely, to 13.8. Car bombs were up slightly, from an average of 1.2 a day to 1.6, while roadside bombs were identical at 1 per day.

Injuries, on average, rose from 40.4 a day to 52.8 since the start of the plan, while bodies dumped by death squads declined from 22.8 a day to 14.6.

The increase in car bombs is particularly troubling. Members of Shiite militias often have cited Sunni car bombings as the driving force for their activities, which include targeting Sunnis for kidnapping and execution. On Sunday, the government announced new measures to stop car bombs, including prohibitions against parking or standing along major streets.

But American officials say such steps could force insurgents to turn to suicide bombers on foot, as they did on Sunday when a woman detonated herself at the predominately Shiite Mustansiriya University, killing nearly 50 people.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the coalition's military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters last week that 2,700 additional American troops have arrived in the capital and that "elements" of three Iraqi brigades also have been deployed - part of an Iraqi pledge to increase by about 7,700 the number of Iraqi soldiers patrolling Baghdad. The rest of the 17,500 U.S. troops are to be in place by May.

Official have said that 14 joint security stations, with bunks intended to house U.S. and Iraqi troops, have been set up in neighborhoods. As many as 16 more are planned.

But what those troops are doing or how many Iraqi soldiers are on the streets is unknown. U.S. officials blame the failure of earlier security efforts in Baghdad on the inability of Iraqi officials to deliver the number of soldiers and policemen promised. Caldwell has declined to provide specifics on the number of Iraqi troops deployed so far.

In the first week of the plan, the U.S. government reported, U.S. and Iraqi security forces mounted 20,000 patrols, twice the number in the previous week. By the second week, that number had grown to 32,000 patrols, with 63 weapons caches seized and 167 suspected terrorists detained.

But in the neighborhoods, the situation is decidedly mixed. Telephone interviews with more than 25 Baghdad residents in 20 of the city's districts showed that while some saw increased coalition activity, others had yet to see any change in the number of soldiers or police.

"The situation in Ghazaliya is really better since the start of the security plan because the existence of the different security forces - Iraqi and American," said Saif Ahmed, 35, a Sunni, describing a neighborhood in northwest Baghdad that's sharply divided along sectarian lines. "We used to hear shooting and mortars launching or falling, but not any more. There are no more insurgent groups, and no clashes happen. I could see the market restarted, but they still finish their work before sunset."

Zuhair Abdul Rahman, a 36-year-old taxi driver from the mixed Jihad section of southwest Baghdad, also reported hopeful signs.

"I saw today more than two families who came back to the neighborhood. The bakery, which was closed for more than six months, reopened in the last two days," Rahman said.

He said Iraqi police officers had moved into the area after snipers firing across sectarian dividing lines near his home killed two on each side. "I think the place is getting better and better," Rahman said.

But other neighborhoods have seen little change. In Maalef, a formerly mixed neighborhood in southwest Baghdad that's now dominated by Sunnis, a 26-year-old Shiite woman who asked not to be named said her situation remains dire.

"Shiite families can't leave their homes - they might be killed by armed groups," she said. "The armed groups challenge Shiite families to face them and fight, saying, 'Come, bastard Shiite, and fight us if you are brave enough.' There is no security plan in there yet."

Ali Hayder, 67, a retired government worker living in the mixed Dakhiliya section of southeast Baghdad, said security forces are present only at well-established checkpoints.

"Iraqi forces, army or police, hardly ever frequent the area," Hayder said. "Nor has anything changed since the new security plan - no American convoys, nor any strangers."

The U.S. military has described two major operations as the centerpieces of the plan's first 10 days. One, Operation Polar Iron, was targeting primarily Sunni areas of southwest Baghdad. The other, Operation Arrow Strike IV, was at work in the northeast Shiite sections of Shaab and Ur.

On Monday, no car bombs were reported in Baghdad, but presumed Sunni insurgents were able to detonate an improvised explosive device that injured Iraq's Shiite vice president, Adel Abdul Mahdi, and killed five workers at the government building where he was attending a meeting. Mahdi's injuries were light, and he returned to work.

The decline in dumped bodies is largely thought to be the result of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's decision to send his Mahdi Army forces underground or out of the city. Sadr hasn't been seen in a month, and American officials have said he's in Iran.

But a Sadr statement released over the weekend openly criticized the plan's inability so far to stop the car bombings, and it raised, at least implicitly, the threat that Shiite militias would become active again to prevent such attacks.

"Here we are watching car bombs continue to explode to harvest thousands of innocent lives from our beloved people in the middle of a security plan controlled by an occupier," news accounts quoted the statements as saying.

Caldwell told reporters last week that he believes the current plan will succeed where others have failed.

"One key difference between (the current plan) and previous iterations of the Baghdad security plan is that this time we intend to build Iraqi institutions and invest in neighborhoods, even as we conduct security operations," he said.

But interviews indicate that that portion of the plan remains vague, with few signs of any concrete steps to deliver services to any of the capital's neighborhoods.

Pentagon Whistle-Blower on the Coming War With Iran

Tuesday 27 February 2007 Transcript:

James Harris: This is TruthDig. James Harris sitting down with Josh Scheer, and on the phone we have a special guest. She is a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, formerly working for the Pentagon, The National Security Agency. Needless to say, she knows a lot about intel and a lot about what took place and what went on before we went into Iraq and what went on with that intel. Many questions have been asked in recent weeks, obviously in recent years about what we knew, what was fabricated, what was made up. On the phone we have somebody who has been vociferous in her effort to out the wrongdoings of people like Douglas Feith and people like Donald Rumsfeld. So, Karen Kwiatkowski, welcome to TruthDig.

Karen Kwiatkowski: Thanks for having me.

James Harris: It's our pleasure. I want to start, not talking about Douglas Feith, but I want to get your opinion about Iraq. We know that British troops and Tony Blair have decided that they're out. We've seen the commitment of other nations drop by 17 countries and our biggest partner, England, is now out. Why do you think they're out and Bush is still in? Well we know why Bush is still in. Why now?

Karen Kwiatkowski: It is towards the end of Tony Blair's long, long term of duty there as the Prime Minister. And the other thing is, the British very much oppose, in spite of the fact that there are some Murdoch newspapers in Great Britain, some conservative papers, pseudo conservative I should say, not truly conservative. Truly conservatives, true conservatives have opposed this venture form the beginning. But in spite of the small, loud pro-war faction in London, most people in Britain recognize this for what it is. They have some experience in this kind of thing with, both in Middle East, particularly in Iraq years ago when they left in dishonor. LAUGHS Another time when they tried to occupy Baghdad, years and years ago, and also their experience with terrorism and movements of independents or what have you with Ireland, much more recent memory for many of the people in Great Britain. I don't think Britain's economy can afford it. Certainly they see the writing on the all, why get, why not get out now while George Bush is still there than be stuck with, stuck holding the bag when a Democratic president takes over and pulls the troops out abruptly in 2008, 2009. So I think there's many reasons why they're doing it. Some people say it is, it is because of Tony Blair's concern over his legacy. If he doesn't bring the troops home, his legacy will be that he left Britain in a quagmire. They are in a quagmire now and maybe he doesn't want to leave office with that being on his record. Mainly it's the right thing to do, the people of Britain want those troops home. And I guess their government is listening. Unlike ours.

James Harris: The highly speculative people have said they're out because we're going into Iran. You might've read the news…

Karen Kwiatkowski: Well yeah, I don't… I had not seen that connection made, but I certainly am alarmed at the daily signs that indeed this country is getting ready to instigate an attack on Iran. All the signs are there, the suggestions that Iranian bombs are killing American soldiers, that's not true, but it's certainly been made in, I think every American newspaper, the suggestion that Iran is somehow killing Americans. The suggestion that Iran has nuclear weapons, is imminently close to nuclear weapons. That is not true but that's been, those claims are made, even by this Administration. The idea that we have two carrier battle groups currently in the region and in fact I just saw today, Admiral Walsh, one of the big guys in the Navy said that we're very concerned about what Iran is doing even more so than Al Qaeda. So there, all the signs are there that we are being, we're going to wake up one morning soon, very soon, and we will be at war with Iran. We will have bombed them in some sort of shock and awe campaign destroying many lives and setting back US relations even further than we've already done it with Iraq.

Josh I want to continue on Iran. You spent obviously many years in the military and you talk in those kind of terms that many people maybe not know about. Can we not just politically, and not just in the region, but can we support another war in another country? Right now we're in Afghanistan, we're in Iraq. Can we feasibly actually go into Iran, or is this going to be a shock and awe campaign?

Karen Kwiatkowski: You know, I think the, one of the big reasons that Bush and Cheney think they can do Iran is that they believe, what they're hearing from the Air Force and the Navy, two of the three main branches of our military, the two that have been left out of the glory of Iraq, you see. And those guys want a piece of the action, and so they're advertising to the Administration and publicly, I mean you can read it for yourself, the Air Force and the Navy have targets they believe they can overwhelmingly hit their targets, deep penetration, weapons, possibly nuclear weapons, I mean, nothing is off the table as Dick Cheney is off the table, Dick Cheney says “nothing is off the table.” And the delivery of these weapons, whether they're conventional or nuclear will be naval and Air Force. They'll be Navy from the sea and Air Force form long range bombers and some of the bases that we have around the… so I don't think, certainly, I don't know, I'm not in the Army, wasn't in the Army, I was in the Air Force, I don't think the Army could support any type of invasion of Iran and they wouldn't' want to. I'm sure that they've, they've had enough with Iraq and our reserves are in terrible condition. We've got huge problems in the Army and in the Reserve system. So I don't think there's any intention to go into Iran, but simply to destroy it and to create havoc and disruption and humanitarian crisis and topple perhaps the government of [Ahmadinejad]. We want to topple that government. Yeah, we'll do it with bombs from a distance. I don't know if you call that shock and awe, we've been advertising it for a long, long time. It will not be a surprise to the Iranians if we do it.

James Harris: That was your former boss, the shock and awe campaign. I'm still shocked and I'm awed.

Karen Kwiatkowski: [laughs] He shocked and awed all of us.

James Harris: As a means of understanding the level of deceit that you claim took place and I agree took place before the war. Because it, the things that are going on in and around Iran sound a lot like the things that went on in 2002…

Karen Kwiatkowski: Sure do.

James Harris: And I always note Scott Ritter, because I spoke to him, and I couldn't believe that we didn't take the advice of people like him that were saying that there's nothing there, there's nothing. Can you describe for us a typical day, if we went in around March, we're approaching that anniversary, we went in around March of ‘03. What was it like in The Pentagon?

Karen Kwiatkowski: Well, I worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and up until mid February I was in Near East South Asia, which is the office that owns the Office of Special Plans, they were our sister office. And so Iraq is one of the areas. And there's a great degree of excitement, there's a, we didn't know when we would invade Iraq, and many people thought it would be in February, late February, early March and it actually was like I think march 23 is when we actually conducted that attack on Baghdad and that kind of thing. Most people in the Pentagon, there's 23,000 people worked in the Pentagon. Most of those people were as in the dark as any of the Americans. They believed what they read in the papers, and what they read in the papers, particularly The New York Times and The Washington Post had been, for the most part, planted by The Administration. We know this now, the whole Congress knows this now, they've had a number of hearings publicly faltered, I think even the DODIG just recently faltered, Doug Feith and his whole organization for planting and mis-, providing misleading stories, many of which were later leaked on purpose to the press. A friendly press, of course, Judith Miller was not, was not hostile to the intentions of this administration. They wanted to go into Iraq, and they intended to go into Iraq. We did go into Iraq, and all that was really needed was to bring onboard the American people, and to bring onboard the Congress. But not necessarily to declare war. Congress has never been asked to declare war on Iraq. And they won't be asked to declare war on Iran even though we will conduct that war. These guys had an agenda. In fact, one of the things that I did learn as a result of having my eyes opened in that final tour in the Pentagon is that neo-conservatives, their foreign policy is very activist, you could say that's a nice way to say it, very activist, it's very oriented towards the Untied States as a benevolent dictator, a benevolent guiding hand for the world, particularly the Middle East. And it's very much a pro-Israel policy, and it's a policy that says, we should be able to do whatever we want to do, if we see it in our interest. Now, Americans don't see any value, most Americans, 75 percent of Americans want the troops home now. They don't see any value to having our troops in Iraq. They didn't see any value in that in 2002. But, they had a story sold to them, which was of course that Saddam Hussein somehow was involved with 9/11, had WMDs, and was a serious threat, an imminent threat, a grave threat to the United States.

James Harris: For those people that think somehow that government officials, even though you work for the government, were complicit in this effort to move into Iraq. I want you to be clear, as a worker there, you were doing what you thought was right at the time. Is that a safe thing to say?

Karen Kwiatkowski: We were doing, I'll tell ya, there's two parts of how the story is sold, how the propaganda was put forth on the American people, and how it's been put forth on them today in terms of Iran. You have political appointees in every government agency, and they switch out every time you get a new president, and that's totally normal. Usually those, the numbers increase after every president, they always get a few more. So Bush was no different. He brought in a number of political appointees: Doug Feith, certainly Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. But also a number of political appointees at what you would call a lower level, like my level - Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel level. And they're not military officers, they're civilians. And they're brought in, and this is where the propaganda was kind of put together, this is where the so-called alternative intelligence assessments were put together by the civilian appointees of the Bush Administration. Most of which, in fact, probably all of the Pentagon shared a neo-conservative world vision, which has a particular role for us, and that included the topping of Saddam Hussein, and it includes the toppling of the leadership in Tehran. These guys are the ones doing it, they're doing it. They're putting all the propaganda, they're spreading stories, planting stuff in the media. They're doing that to people in The Pentagon, the civil, the Civil Service core in The Pentagon, which is about half of them, and the other half which are uniformed military officers serving anywhere from three to four, five years, sometimes tours in The Pentagon. We're looking at regular intel, we're looking at the stuff the CIA and the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency produces. And that stuff never said, that stuff never said Saddam Hussein had WMDs, had a delivery system, was a threat to the United States. It never said that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 or that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda. That intelligence never said that.

James Harris: Did they tell you to shut up?

Karen Kwiatkowski: Absolutely! [Laughs] That's a funny thing, and of course, here's how it worked. Once the Office of Special Plans was set u formally, now they were informally set up prior to the fall of 2002, but formally they became an office with office space and that whole bit. And the first act to follow that setup of the Office of Special Plans, we had a staff meeting, and our boss, Bill Ludy, who was the boss of Special Plans technically, not in reality but on paper. And he announced to us that from now on, action officers, staff officers such as myself and all my peers, at least in that office, and I presume this went all the way through the rest of policy, but we were told that when we needed to fill in data, putting it in papers that we would send up, doing our job, as we did our daily job, we were no longer to look at CIA and DIA intelligence, we were simply to call the Office of Special Plans and they would send down to us talking points, which we would incorporate verbatim no deletions, no additions, no modifications into every paper that we did. And of course, that was very unusual and all the action officers are looking at each other like, well that's interesting. We're not to look at the intelligence any more, we're simply to go to this group of political appointees and they will provide to us word for word what we should say about Iraq, about WMD and about terrorism. And this is exactly what our orders were. And there were people [Laughs] a couple of people, and I have to say, I was not one of these people who said, “you know, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna do that because there's something I don't like about it, it's incorrect in some way.” And they experimented with sending up papers that did not follow those instructions, and those papers were 100 percent of the time returned back for correction. So we weren't allowed to put out anything except what Office of Special Plans was producing for us. And that was only partially based on intelligence, and partially based on a political agenda. So this is how they did it. And I'll tell you what, civil servants and military people, we follow orders, okay. And we buy into it. And we don't suspect that our leaders are nefarious, we don't suspect that. They, they quite frankly have to go a long way to prove to us that they are nefarious. That's how it worked, and I imagine it's working much the same way there in terms of Iran.

James Harris: Obviously you've been in the military for quite a while. Has this every happened to your knowledge in any other Pentagon, where a political appointees have the power to just control the…

Karen Kwiatkowski: Sure, well sure, Vietnam is filled with examples. And Daniel Ellsberg's information and his Pentagon paper that he released factual information that contradicted what political appointees at the top of the Pentagon were saying to Congress and saying to the American people. Yeah, this is typical of how it works. Now, having said that, most people who serve and wear the uniform or give a career of service to the military, whether civilian, civil service or military, we don't think that our bosses will do that. We don't think that our military will do that. But in fact history is full of examples of bald-faced lies being told to sell particular agendas. Often times those agendas include war making, certainly in Vietnam they did, under LBJ and a few other presidents. Look at the thing that Reagan did. I mean, I actually don't dislike Reagan, he deployed very few troops overseas, but when he went in to that little island down there… what is the name of that island that he invaded, Grenada. [Laughs] Remember that? Remember the Invasion of Grenada.

JOSHUA SCHEER:Joshua Scheer: All eight hours?

James Harris: It was a short one.

Karen Kwiatkowski: I mean, God, shortly thereafter, come to find out, well actually, some of the stuff they said about the threat and the Cubans and all that wasn't really true. So politicians and their politically appointed military leaders will lie, historically do lie when it has to do with making war, particularly making a war that they want. And what has happened in the Bush Administration is the war that they want was Iraq. And the war that they want is Iran, and the war that they want is Syria, okay? That's the war they want. They don't want Vietnam. I don't know why, they don't want Vietnam, they want these places, this is what the neo-conservatives are particularly interested in. So we have war. And they make up stories and we're seeing the exact same thing in terms of Iran, which is quite alarming because it seems as if we can't stop this, we can't prevent this.

Josh: You were talking about these political appointees and pushing us into war. Why haven't people like Paul Wolfowitz, I mean these guys seem to feather their own nests.

Karen Kwiatkowski: [Laughs] That's an understatement.

Josh: They lead us into war, Mark Zell, Doug Feith's partner was in bed with Chalabi. It falls apart and then it seems that these guys disappear into the woodwork. What happens?

Karen Kwiatkowski: Well, a big part of what happens is these guys have top cover, the names of the top cover are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. These guys like what Wolfowitz has done. And here's the other thing. While we as American citizens do not like being lied to, particularly being lied to into a stupid quagmire that makes no sense. We don't' like being lied to. Congress doesn't like being lied to. However, many in Congress, and certainly in this administration agree, and this is Democrats and Republicans, like the idea that we have gone into Iraq, we have built four mega bases, they are complete. Most of the money we gave to Halliburton was for construction and completion of these bases. We have probably, of the 150,000, 160,000 troops we have in Iraq probably 110,000 of those folks are associated with one of those four mega bases. Safely ensconced behind acres and acres of concrete. To operate there indefinitely, no matter what happens in Baghdad, no matter who takes over, no matter if the country splits into three pieces or it stays one. No matter what happens, we have those mega bases, and there's many in Congress and certainly in this administration, Republican and Democrat alike that really like that. Part of the reason I think that we went into Iraq was to reestablish a stronger foothold than we had in Saudi Arabia, but also a more economical, a more flexible, in terms of who we want to hit. If you want to hit Syria, can you do it from Iraq? Of course you can. And now you can do it from bases that will support any type of airplane you want, any number of troops in barracks. I mean we can do things from Iraq. And this is what they wanted. So, yeah, we don't like being lied to. But quite frankly, many people in the Congress, and certainly this administration, when they call Iraq a success, they mean it, and this is why.

We're in Iraq to stay. And can we strike Iran from Iraq? Well, I don't know if we'll do that next week, but we can.

James Harris: We're there to stay in the sense that even, let's say somebody takes office in await, do you think that we're gonna be occupying those bases still?

Karen Kwiatkowski: Absolutely! And we don't even have status of forcive agreements with any legitimate government in Iraq to support those bases. They are illegal bases, okay. But yes, they're gonna stay, absolutely, they're gonna stay. And I'll tell you, there are guys that have been with this administration for awhile, people, in fact one of the guys was an Air Force General that was involved with the Kurds ten years ago, he's retired now, but he was actually the guy, his name escapes me for the moment, but he was Jerry Bremer's predecessor (Jay Garner?) for a short period of time. And he was fired, and Bremer came in and took over in Baghdad as part of the reconstruction phase. This is in the Spring of 2003. And this guy gave an interview in Government Exec Magazine, February 2004, he said “we will be in Iraq, and the American people need to get with this program, we will be in Iraq like we were in the Philippines for anywhere from 20 to 30 more years. That's the time frame that we're looking at. And that is the life span of the bases that we've constructed there. Yeah, we are not leaving these bases, and a Democratic president, I don't care who they are, will keep those basses there. They will justify them and they will use them and we love that. We love it. So it's not about what the American people think is right or wrong, it's not about if we got lied to, what matters is, they did what they wanted to do, and as bush says, and as Cheney says, “it's quite the success.” And this is very frightening. Because none of this has ever been admitted to the American people, it's only been hinted at by people that know. And of course the facts speak for themself. The facts are, we are in Iraq, we have the finest military installations in the world, the newest military installations in the world, and we're not leaving them. We're not turning them over to a Shiite government, we're not turning them over to a Sunni government, we're not turning them over to a Kurdish government. We're not doing that. They are American bases. We've got our flag there. And this is kind of the way they used to do things, I guess back in the Middle Ages. Maybe the Dark Ages. A king decided he wanted to go do something, he went and did it. And this is George Bush. We call him an elected president. I mean, he's operating much as kings have operated in the past.

James Harris: You called him “the war pimp” in your essay. “He's behaving,” as you put it, “a lot like a pimp would treat a prostitute, ‘you do like I tell you to do.'”

Karen Kwiatkowski: that's right, and over the money. “Get back to work.” We're using these, we use these bases, we use these people, the country, it matters not one whit to us.

James Harris: With all we see in the news on a daily basis, is there any reason to hope? Every day I lose more and more sleep, about soldiers who are dying. You're talking about being there another 30 years. How many more soldiers are going to be injured and killed? How much more money is this war going to cost?

Karen Kwiatkowski: Well the money, yeah, sure, the money's a problem. The number of soldiers being killed will probably actually reduce in many ways because we will withdraw to our bases and we will not interface with Iraqis who hate us. This idea of what they're doing right now, this so called three-block program, let's meet more Iraqis so they'll like us, that's totally for show. The more Iraqis meet us, the more they hate us. So I actually do think though, over time, fewer Americans will die, and look how easily, look how easily this country has accepted the loss of those 3,200 soldiers that have died. I think something like 90 women, maybe more have died, mothers [Laughs] mothers of children. They've died, and America has eaten it up, we have not complained one bit. They're spread out over 50 states, hey, it's no big deal. So I think we can certainly, as a country, accommodate future deaths and I think the death rate will drop. The problem is, it's immoral, it's illegal, it engenders hatred for Americans, contempt for Americans. It makes every American in the world a target for terrorism. It's just plain wrong, it's unconstitutional. I mean, there's a lot of problems with it. Dead Americans, unfortunately doesn't seem to be the problem for most of us, which is a shame. We don't like looking at ugly people, I will say that. And we're seeing a lot of folks come back pretty deformed, mentally and even more obviously physically, deformed from their experiences in Iraq. And I think that could, that might give, I hate to say give hope, but realize the real moral price that we're paying for this, that that can help. But quite frankly, I have no hope of us leaving Iraq. I think the intention was for us to put bases there, to stay there, operate militarily from there. And I think that's what we're going to do, Democrat, Republican, Independent, I can't imagine anybody but Ron Paul, if you elect Ron Paul as president, those bases will be closed down. Otherwise…

James Harris: Or Dennis Kucinich.

Karen Kwiatkowski: Or Kucinich, there you go, Kucinich would do it too. So these are the guys we are able to elect, but chances are, I hate to say, the machine is not behind these men. So yeah, we got a problem. Now is there anything optimistic? Yeah. I'm a God fearing Christian. God has the power. How He might express that, I don't know. But yeah, can the average American do anything about it? I'm just not, I'm pretty not very, I'm not optimistic, I'm pessimistic that any single American can do much to prevent what seems to be going to happen here, attacking Iran and also this terrible thing we've done to Iraq which I think will continue to go on for many years. It will fester, fester for many years.

James Harris: I'm one that believes the price of terrorism, I'm interested to get your perspective on this as one who watched us engage on this terrorist enemy, an enemy like we'd never seen before, at least from a military standpoint. I look at terrorism, and I see it tearing us apart. And in a lot of ways I look at it and say, we've already lost this war because we now have a president who's bending the Constitution. We're looking over our shoulders. We question our whereabouts. This whole thing that went on in Boston with the advertisement, “is it a bomb?” There's always that question. Perhaps the goal of Osama, perhaps the goal of these people was to make us afraid, and they've succeeded at that. My question to you is, in your mind, what is the true price of terrorism been for you?

Karen Kwiatkowski: The military has been broken in most respects into the extent that it worked, it worked because it's a mercenary force. We were so contracted out, we hired people that are beyond the law, that are not accountable to rules of war. And that's how we function. So the whole military system, the idea of a defensive force, forget it, that's done with. Constitution has been hurt by many presidents, but this president has done huge damage to understanding of the Constitution, its idea that it should restrain presidential power, that we should be conservative, small “c” conservative when we go out and engage in these adventures, the Congress has the right to declare war, we've ignored that for many decades. Just continued down that path. Te idea that the Bill of Rights is an option, the Bill of Rights is a set of suggestions has become almost mainstream belief. And this is terrible, this is a terrible thing. But I don't think Osama Bin Laden did that. Terrorism is, obviously it has a political intent, but terrorism almost always, in fact I think in every case, when the political solutions are offered, when the politics change, when the people themselves change, terrorism stops. Terrorism to the extent that it is a crime, should've been treated like a crime, but instead we made it a war. Well there is no war with terror, terrorism is a tactic, you don't make war against a tactic. So yeah, a lot of things have happened, I don't think Osama had much to do with it, quite frankly, I think this administration, many of the people in Washington are quite comfortable with reduced freedoms for America and this is a good way to get those reduced freedoms, to basically break down and deconstruct the Bill of Rights and say, “well we didn't mean that, we didn't mean this.” It's a problem. Our country has changed, and I think what people have to do now is kind of stand up and separate themselves from a government to the extent that they don't agree with it and prepare themselves for real battle. Because we are gonna need to stand up very, I can use the word “vociferously,” I think that's what we have to do, cause our own country is at risk, but not from terror, not from buildings being knocked down, that's not what our country is at risk from, it's at risk from our politics, from our abandonment of the Constitution, our devaluing of the Bill of Rights. We've lost our freedom. Osama probably couldn't have dreamed that George Bush would help him out so much. I don't think even that was his intention, I don't think Osama could care less about our freedom, Osama's issues have to do with Islam and the Holy land, Saudi Arabia, his issues are much more narrow than anything that he's so called achieved. And I think George Bush has achieved this in a very weak and LAUGHS debased Congress has achieved this for this country. And so, it's a big problem. I'm quite depressed about it. I don't really have a solution or a remedy. I think we just need to wake up and see what's being done, and then we need to decide if we want to be a part of it. It's like that old thing, I'm not a child of the 60s, but you're either working to fix the problem or you are the problem.

James Harris: Why have the neo-cons been allowed, they're not, to me, they don't seem like the Republicans that I grew up with.

Karen Kwiatkowski: No, no, they're not. And if you look at the history of neo-conservatism, it really traces its roots, well back to Trotsky, but if you go more recent, back to who was the guy, Senator from Boeing (Henry Jackson) they used to call him… big Democratic, 30 year Senator out of Washington State. And Richard Perle was on his staff, Wolfowitz I think was inspired by him. And he was a Democrat during the Cold War. And he was a pro, or I should say strongly anti-Communist democrat, kind of a strong defense democrat. And these guys migrated, particularly after Jimmy Carter, because Jimmy Carter, remember, what was he doing, he was trying to make peace. Remember that, somebody got a Peace Prize out of it, I don't know what it was, some kind of approach between Arabs and Israelis, and Carter was part of that. And that alienated a great many of these folks who now we know as neo-conservatives because they have two things that they care about, one is strong defense, for whatever reason they like that, an activist foreign policy, and pro-Israel, no questions asked policy. So many of these conservative, pro-defense democrats, anti-Communist democrats abandoned the democratic party at the time of Jimmy Carter, particularly after the time of Jimmy Carter and his summit working on Middle East peace. And they came over to eth Republican party, and of course they came over with a great deal of money and a great deal of political influence and a great deal of voters. So now they're in the Republican party, and absolutely, this happened, late 1970s. so it is not, these are not the Republicans that we grew up thinking about, but they are in the Republican party now. Of course the Republican party now isn't anything like what I thought it was, it's certainly no Goldwater party, it's a party of big spending, it's a party of corruption. What do you want me to say? They love big government, they haven't seen a big government plan they didn't write.

James Harris: Henry “Scoop” Jackson was the guy you were looking for. As we continue to search for the truth, and that's pretty much the motto of TruthDig, we don't believe we have the answer, but we believe that we should at least be looking for the answers. So as we approach that truth around the issues that take place in Iraq and perhaps Iran, we think you might be a good friend to have close to the TruthDig family so we'd like to check in from time to time.

Karen Kwiatkowski: Sure, I'd be delighted, it's great fun talking. And hopefully maybe in a couple of months some of these negative things I think are going to happen, maybe they won't happen.

James Harris: Maybe we'll all be proven wrong… whatever the case…

Josh: I'm praying for it.

James Harris: We're both praying, even though Josh is not a religious man.

Josh: Excuse me, I am a religious man.

Karen Kwiatkowski: Maybe we're in a foxhole together. You know what they say, there are no atheists in a foxhole, and I think in political sense, many true conservatives and classical liberals, people that love freedom, unlike George Bush, people that really love freedom, we are in a foxhole. We are threatened. And so we gotta call on every possible help we can get.

Josh: I believe in God, I don't believe in big religion, just like I don't believe in big government.

James Harris: There you go, we're in a foxhole, so we're on the same team.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Senate won't vote on objection to troop buildup

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Senate Democrats failed to garner the 60 votes they needed to consider a nonbinding resolution opposing President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

The vote was 56-34, with seven Republicans crossing the aisle to vote with senators who oppose the troop buildup.

The measure was identical to a nonbinding resolution the House passed Friday denouncing the plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq.

"We are policing a civil war in Iraq," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, said before the vote. "American troops should not be in the middle of that war."

He added, "The president's escalation is misguided, to put it kindly." (Watch senators spar over the vote )

The Saturday vote was a procedural decision on whether the Senate should move on to a final vote on a resolution that expresses opposition to Bush's plan.

Republicans pushed for an amendment by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire, that would address funding of the war, which they said would make the vote meaningful.

"This nonbinding resolution, as a practical matter, doesn't do anything, but was designed to try to disapprove of the new mission," Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said after the vote. "Our view is you cannot discuss the new mission in Iraq without discussing funding for the troops."

McConnell said the Senate should have considered another resolution, put forward by Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, which includes benchmarks to measure Iraqi progress toward security goals.

In a written statement after the vote, White House press secretary Tony Snow urged Congress to approve Bush's funding request for the military.

"It would enable the world's most capable military force to remain the most advanced in terms of training, equipment, doctrine and -- most importantly -- the quality of the men and women who serve," Snow said.

Graham said politics made Democrats afraid to allow a vote on funding the war.

"If you did have this vote, the left -- the radical left -- would eat every Democratic hopeful for president alive," Graham said. "That's why we're not having this vote. The hard left wants out of this war yesterday."

Senate Republicans succeeded earlier this month in blocking a vote on a similar resolution. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada urged Senate Republicans to drop their procedural moves.

In the House, 17 Republicans joined Democrats on Friday in passing the two-sentence resolution. It expresses support for U.S. troops in Iraq but states that Congress "disapproves" of Bush's troop increase. (Full story)

On February 5, all but two GOP senators voted to block debate on the similar resolution. Saturday's vote saw five more GOP senators join the Democrats. (Full story)

They were Sens. John Warner of Virginia, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

"We support the president on the diplomatic aspects of his plan. We support the president on the economic aspects of his plan," Warner said.

"We only disagree with one portion of it: Mr. President, do you need 21,500 additional men and women of the armed forces in this conflict?" Warner said.

Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, backed the chance to vote on the resolution.

"If we believe plunging into Baghdad neighborhoods with more American troops will not increase chances of success, we are duty-bound to say so," Levin said.

GOP insisted on 'measure of fairness'
Republican leaders insisted that members get a chance to vote on two GOP alternatives, and that the process be conducted under rules that called for 60 votes to pass.

Republican critics have claimed that passing the resolution could lead to a cutoff in funding for the troops.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said before the vote that Republicans would insist on "a measure of fairness," allowing them to offer alternative resolutions -- including one stating the Senate won't cut off money for troops in the field.

"If we have only one alternative, it will involve a vote on funding the troops," McConnell said. (View Iraq proposals introduced in the Senate)

Published polls indicate a solid majority of the U.S. public opposes the Bush plan, and Democrats said the November election victories that put them in control of Congress show Americans want to wind down the nearly four-year-old war.

Bush challenges Congress not to cut funding
Bush noted Thursday that the Senate recently confirmed the promotion of Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, even as members criticized the strategy he was installed to pursue.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Saturday on her way to meet with Middle East leaders. She told troops there that despite the political debate, their efforts are appreciated back home. (Full story)

Though the president said lawmakers "have every right to express their opinion," he demanded they support an upcoming spending bill that would commit nearly $100 billion more to the war effort. (Watch Bush challenge Congress not to cut war funding )

"Our men and women in uniform are counting on their elected leaders to provide them with the support they need to accomplish their mission," Bush said.

Reid: Iraq war 'worst foreign policy mistake' in U.S. history

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After months of heated rhetoric slamming President Bush's Iraq policy, the Senate's top Democrat moved into new terrain by declaring the Iraq war a worse blunder than Vietnam.

"This war is a serious situation. It involves the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

"So we should take everything seriously. We find ourselves in a very deep hole and we need to find a way to dig out of it."

Asked whether he considers it a worse blunder than Vietnam, Reid responded, "Yes."

Comparisons to Vietnam are nothing new, but a "worse than" designation from a top lawmaker is.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who has been one of the war's most outspoken critics, told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in January that President Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq "represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."

Reid's statement, in an interview recorded Saturday, came after he and fellow Democrats failed to force a vote on a nonbinding resolution condemning Bush's plan. They could not win enough Republican support to make the vote happen. (Full story)

The House, meanwhile, easily passed the resolution Friday.

White House spokesman Tony Snow told CNN he disagrees with Reid's characterization.

"In point of fact, it was important to get Saddam Hussein out of power," Snow told "Late Edition."

"Yeah, the war is tough. But the solution is not to get out. It is to provide the kinds of resources and reinforcements our forces need to get the job done, and at the same time say to the Iraqis, 'You guys gotta step up.'"

Democratic leaders have said they will make sure the troops currently in Iraq get the equipment they need.

In speeches leading up to November's midterm elections, President Bush argued against sending more troops to Iraq.

The elections gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress.

The president says the additional troops would be part of a new strategy aimed at bringing security to Baghdad, where scores of people are killed each week in bombings, executions and other violence.

It was not immediately clear how many Democrats share Reid's view.

"I believe it's one of the worst blunders, certainly is," New Mexico's Democratic Governor Bill Richardson told "Late Edition." "And the focus now should be on how we can get our troops out and leave Iraq with a chance for sustainability in the future."

He then added, "But I do agree with that because our obsession with Iraq has cost us enormous amounts of prestige ... around the world. But also the fact that we haven't focused on the real challenges facing this country: international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, North Korea, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian issue."

Richardson is considering a presidential run in 2008.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Murtha wants to block Iraq 'surge'

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- U.S. Rep. John Murtha said Thursday he would try to use congressional fiscal power to derail the new "surge" strategy in Iraq.

In an exclusive interview published Thursday on the Web site www.movecongress.org, Rep. Murtha. D-Penn., chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense of the U.S. House of Representatives, said he wanted to use the Supplemental Appropriations bill before his committee to prevent the 'surge' of additional U.S. troops into Iraq.

Murtha told MoveOnCongress.org he wanted to set up a new series of conditions governing the sending of American soldiers to Iraq. He said the U.S. forces first had to be approved as "fully combat ready" with sufficient training and equipment. He wanted to cap all tours of duty at a maximum of one year with a guaranteed full year at home between tours of duty in Iraq. And he said he was determined to end the controversial "stop-loss" system under which U.S. serving troops had their time of service compulsorily extended.

Murtha said his committee was also looking at the possibility of preparing legislation to ban any U.S. attack against Iran without express congressional approval and to ban the building of any permanent bases for U.S. forces in Iraq. He said they might also prepare legislation to shut down the controversial U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; to physically demolish Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and to slash the number of private security contractors operating there.

"A non-binding resolution is useless and counter-productive if not followed by strong binding congressional action. We are launching an effort to convince Members of Congress to back up their words with action upon their return to Washington," Murtha said in the interview.

Auditors: Billions Squandered in Iraq

By Hope Yen The Associated Press Thursday 15 February 2007

About $10 billion has been squandered by the U.S. government on Iraq reconstruction aid because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses, and federal investigators warned Thursday that significantly more taxpayer money is at risk.

The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done.

More than one in six dollars charged by U.S. contractors were questionable or unsupported, nearly triple the amount of waste the Government Accountability Office estimated last fall.

"There is no accountability," said David M. Walker, who heads the auditing arm of Congress. "Organizations charged with overseeing contracts are not held accountable. Contractors are not held accountable. The individuals responsible are not held accountable."

"People should be rewarded when they do a good job. But when things don't go right, there have to be consequences," he said.

Also testifying Thursday were Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, and William H. Reed, director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

The appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee came as Congress prepares for a showdown with President Bush next month over his budget request of nearly $100 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So far, the Bush administration has spent more than $350 billion on the Iraq war and reconstruction effort.

The Army, which handles most of the Iraq contracting, said Thursday it had not reviewed the latest contract figures.

"The U.S. Army, along with the Departments of Defense and State, continue to help thousands of Iraqis daily with reconstruction projects to provide them with better lives," said spokeswoman Mary Ann Hodges. "We look forward to examining its findings and applying some of its recommendations in the future."

Senate Democrats said recently cited cases of waste were "outrageous rip-offs of the American taxpayer" and introduced legislation Thursday to stiffen punishment for war profiteers and cut down on cronyism in contracting.

According to their testimony, the investigators:

Found overpricing and waste in Iraq contracts amounting to $4.9 billion since the Defense Contract Audit Agency began its work in 2003. Some of that money has been recovered. An additional $5.1 billion in expenses were charged without proper documentation.

Pointed to growing Iraqi sectarian violence as a significant factor behind bloated U.S. contracting bills. Iraqi officials, they said, must begin to take primary responsibility for reconstruction efforts. That is an uncertain goal, given the widespread corruption in Iraq and the local government's inability to fund projects.

Urged the Pentagon to reconsider its growing reliance on outside contractors in wars and reconstruction efforts. Layers of subcontractors, poor documentation and lack of strong contract management are rampant and promote waste even after the GAO first warned of problems 15 years ago.
Walker complained that GAO investigators have difficulty getting basic detail about reconstruction contracts such as expenses and subcontractors involved because many Pentagon divisions fail to consistently track or fully report them.

"It's absolutely essential if Congress wants to make an informed decision on authorizations and appropriations that we get this information," he said. "We're talking about billions of dollars and thousands of American lives at stake."

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the committee chairman, has pledged scores of investigations of fraud, waste and abuse - with subpoenas if necessary - on the administration's watch.

Of the $10 billion in overpriced contracts or undocumented costs, more than $2.7 billion were charged by Halliburton Co., the oil-field services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Noting that auditors still have $300 billion of Iraq spending to review, Waxman said the total amount of waste, fraud and abuse "could be astronomical."

"It's no wonder that taxpayers all across our country are fed up and demanding that we bring real oversight to the 'anything goes' world of Iraq reconstruction," he said.

Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the top Republican on the panel, pointed to ongoing, "systemic" problems in Iraq contracting. "This much is clear: Poor security, an arcane, ill-suited management structure, and frequent management changes have produced a succession of troubled acquisitions," Davis said.

Iraq Troop Boost Erodes Readiness, General Says

By Ann Scott Tyson The Washington Post Friday 16 February 2007

Outgoing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said yesterday that the increase of 17,500 Army combat troops in Iraq represents only the "tip of the iceberg" and will potentially require thousands of additional support troops and trainers, as well as equipment - further eroding the Army's readiness to respond to other world contingencies.

Although final decisions on deployments have not been made, Schoomaker said, U.S. commanders in Iraq have requested an additional 2,500 soldiers to serve as embedded trainers for Iraqi forces, and 5,000 to 6,000 additional soldiers could be needed to provide logistical and other support to the five Army combat brigades flowing into Baghdad.

"We are having to go to some extraordinary measures to ensure we can respond," he said, but he added that even then he could not guarantee the combat units would receive all the translators, civil affairs soldiers and other support troops they request. "We are continuing today to get requests for forces that continue to stress us."

Schoomaker, in one of his last congressional testimonies as Army chief, also made it clear that he had raised concerns in advance about President Bush's plan to increase troops in Iraq because it would further deplete Army units at home.

"We laid out ... exactly what the risks are in terms of other contingencies ... to include my concerns about the lack of adequate dwell time," he said, referring to the fact that active-duty soldiers now spend only about a year at home between 12-month war zone rotations.

Schoomaker noted that Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was "obligated to present any dissenting opinions and he did that, as did we," in discussions on the troop increase with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the president. Still, Schoomaker added that "our mission now is to support the commander in chief."

Virtually all of the U.S.-based Army combat brigades are rated as unready to deploy, Army officials say, and to meet the immediate needs in Iraq and Afghanistan they are finding it necessary to transfer personnel and gear to those units now first in line to deploy.

"I am not satisfied with the readiness of our non-deployed forces," Schoomaker told the Senate Armed Services Committee, noting that the increased demands in Iraq and Afghanistan "aggravate that" and increase his concern. "We are in a dangerous period," said Schoomaker, adding that he recently met with his Chinese counterpart, who made it clear that China is scrutinizing U.S. capabilities.

The Marine Corps commandant, Gen. James T. Conway, said in the same hearing that his chief concern is that Marines are not training for other types of conflicts beyond the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan - such as conventional ground wars. "My largest concern has to do with training," he said. "We're not doing amphibious training, we're not doing mountain training," as well as some large-scale exercises, he said.

About 40 percent of Army and Marine Corps equipment is now in Iraq or Afghanistan or undergoing repair or maintenance. To outfit the additional forces for Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is drawing gear from prepositioned stocks of armored Humvees, tanks and other major equipment that would not then be available for another conflict, Conway said.

Schoomaker stressed the ongoing need for funding to repair, replace and upgrade Army equipment, criticizing funding shortfalls in 2005 and 2006 that forced layoffs and slowdowns in production at Army repair depots.

Even if the United States were to carry out a significant troop reduction in Iraq, Schoomaker said he would advise going ahead with the Army's plan for a permanent increase of 65,000 active-duty soldiers by 2013. "The Army's too small for the century we're in," he said.

Reid Sets Saturday Cloture Vote Amid GOP Criticism

Reid Sets Saturday Cloture Vote Amid GOP Criticism
By Erin P. Billings
Roll Call

Thursday 15 February 2007

Senate Democratic leaders on Thursday committed to stay in session through Saturday and perhaps into next week to debate President Bush's proposed troop surge in Iraq, saying they were calling the bluff of GOP moderates who were demanding the Senate sidestep the upcoming recess to consider the issue.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced he would file a procedural motion Thursday afternoon to allow for a vote on Saturday on whether to move forward on debating the Iraq surge policy, which has been stalled in the Senate for nearly two weeks. Reid said the vote will put all Senators on record over whether they support or oppose Bush's proposal to increase the troop presence in the region by 21,500.

"We demand an up-or-down vote on the resolution the House is debating as we speak," Reid said. Reid has notified Senate offices to expect a 2 p.m. vote saturday.

By Thursday afternoon, Democrats and Republicans remained at an impasse over whether they could avoid the Saturday showdown and come up with a bipartisan agreement to debate the troop increase in Iraq. GOP Senate leaders pushed back against Reid's threat, saying they are unwilling to move forward on his terms.

Rather, the Republican leadership continued to dig in with their demand that Democrats allow them to offer a vote on a competing GOP proposal. They called Reid's move wrong on timing, substance and process.

"I've repeatedly said since we've been involved in the skirmish on this issue that we would insist on having a vote on funding the troops," insisted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) called Reid's latest maneuver "totally unnecessary" and predicted the Saturday vote to press ahead with the House version of the Iraq legislation would fail.

"We could have worked this out in a fair way," Lott said.

The House is on the cusp of approving a narrowly worded resolution Friday opposing the president's plan while supporting the U.S. forces fighting in the conflict. The nonbinding legislation is expected to capture the support of the majority Democrats and a share of Republicans.

Reid said the Democrats are pressing ahead for a cloture vote on Saturday, a move that requires the support of 60 Senators, to allow Senators to debate the House version. The Majority Leader said he was moving ahead after several moderate Republicans said they wanted to postpone the first Congressional recess of the 110th Congress to debate the issue.

"This will be there chance - those that are bugging us for a vote - will have their chance on Saturday," said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

"We are calling their bluff - we are staying here," added Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

If cloture is invoked Saturday, Reid said the Senate will move ahead with the bill either on Sunday or Monday. Reid said Republicans will be forced to consider the House language, but can offer their own versions as amendments to other upcoming bills slated for Senate consideration.

The move could be problematic for Reid on a weekend where several of his own Caucus members are set to hit the 2008 presidential campaign trail. Reid, however, said he wasn't deterred by prospective absences.

"We've noticed everyone," Reid said. "We hope everyone will be here."

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Congress Has No Choice but to Act on Iraq

By Reps. Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters Thursday 15 February 2007

As leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Out of Iraq Caucus, we are proud that the House has begun to take up the moral dilemma of our times - our continued military occupation of Iraq. Congress finally will have the opportunity to express its disapproval of President Bush's escalation plan, a flawed strategy piled on a 4-year-old failed policy.

By deepening our engagement, escalation will further stoke the fires of civil war in Iraq while increasing the cost to Americans in lives, limbs and treasure.

The political battle lines are clear: On one side we have a bipartisan Congressional majority, roughly two-thirds of the American people, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Iraq Study Group and former military leaders such as Colin Powell. On the other: an unpopular, lame-duck president; too many Congressional Republicans; and the editors of The Weekly Standard - all of whom are willing to accept more American casualties in the name of a policy that is making us less secure and damages our standing in the world.

Last month, in announcing his decision to raise the ante in Iraq, the president announced that "America's commitment is not open-ended." So we hold out hope that Friday's vote of no confidence will compel him to re-evaluate his Iraq policy and heed the calls of the American people. But if not, Congress must be prepared to go beyond nonbinding resolutions. We will not be content with a statement of disapproval that is limited to the escalation gambit. Continuing the current policy is unacceptable, as is escalating the war. Maintaining more than 130,000 brave Americans in Iraq as it plunges deeper into chaos and mayhem is simply unconscionable. If the president will not take steps to end this war, Congress must take responsible action.

Contrary to Republican claims that Democrats have no alternative plan for Iraq, there are in fact several on the table. Our own comprehensive bill, the Bring Our Troops Home and Sovereignty of Iraq Restoration Act, would complete a fully funded military withdrawal from Iraq within six months while ensuring that our troops and contractors leave safely and accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces.

In addition, our bill would remove the specter of an endless occupation by preventing the establishment of permanent military bases and reiterate our commitment, at the invitation of the Iraqi government, to working with the international community to assist Iraq in its reconstruction and reconciliation efforts. We also would stand ready, if asked by the Iraqis, to participate in an international stabilization force. Our bill also ensures health benefits for all of our military personnel.

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) has indicated that he will hold hearings on various legislative proposals on Iraq, including our bill, next month. The nation certainly will benefit from a robust debate on alternatives to the president's failed stay-the-course policy.

It has been a long road from marginalization to the mainstream for those of us who oppose this war and always have. While the temptation of an extended "we told you so" is there, it is suffice to say that the anti-war position turned out to be the correct one. We are focused solely on bringing our troops home.

If the president doesn't change course, if he persists in his contempt for the electoral verdict rendered in November, then this week's resolution will be just the beginning. A bloody military entanglement that does not enjoy popular support is ultimately unsustainable, and Congress would be derelict if it did not assert its legitimate war powers as a coequal branch of government. Using our authority to challenge and even forestall the Iraq occupation is not only constitutionally appropriate; it is a moral imperative.

Reps. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) co-chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) chairs the Out of Iraq Caucus.

12 Republicans Break Ranks on Iraq Resolution

By Jeff Zeleny The New York Times Thursday 15 February 2007

Washington - A dozen Republicans arrived in the House chamber on Wednesday to set aside their party allegiances and lend their names to a resolution intended to rebuke President Bush for his Iraq policy.

Representative Howard Coble of North Carolina said that Iraqis had their chance at freedom, but chose civil war. Representative Steven C. LaTourette of Ohio argued that troop buildup was a tactic that had already failed. And Representative John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee suggested that military contractors had profited mightily at the expense of the American treasury.

As they spoke in the capital on the second day of an extensive debate over the Iraq war, Mr. Bush called a White House news conference to defend his plan to send more troops to Baghdad. He said that there would be more violence, but that the plan would provide breathing space to the Iraqi government as it worked to stabilize the country.

"They have every right to express their opinion," Mr. Bush said of the debate in Congress. Yet he warned lawmakers against taking additional steps to limit war financing when they considered his military budget request next month, saying, "They need to fund our troops."

Democratic leaders, even as they condemn the president's Iraq strategy, have vowed not to cut financing for the troops already in Iraq. But pressure is increasing inside the party for more scrutiny on war spending when the administration's military budget request is considered by Congress next month.

The proceedings on Capitol Hill foreshadowed challenges to come in both parties as Republicans seek to persuade fiscal conservatives to invest more money in the war and as Democrats determine whether they intend to take a stand to limit financing of the war.

"I insist that we do not maintain an eternal presence in Iraq," Mr. Coble said, "if for no other reason than the cost to taxpayers, which has been astronomically unbelievable."

Congressional debate this week is largely revolving around a resolution intended to express support for troops and oppose the president's plan to expand the military operation in Iraq. Even though most Republicans oppose the proposal, the testimony from a handful of Republicans on Wednesday suggested that the deliberations were no longer unfolding along partisan lines.

Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina opened the debate on Wednesday by reading a newspaper clipping from before Mr. Bush was elected. It was 1999, and the topic was a Congressional debate over military escalation in Bosnia, which Republicans sought to quash by sending a nonbinding resolution to President Clinton.

Holding a sheet of paper, Mr. Jones quoted Karen Hughes, a chief adviser to Mr. Bush, who declared, "If we're going to commit more troops, we want to be sure they have a clear exit strategy." The message, Mr. Jones argued, could apply to the current Iraq debate.

For a time on Wednesday, an unusual scene played out on the House floor, with some Republicans coming forward one by one to speak against the Iraq policy while fellow party members argued against them.

"We need to tell all these defense contractors that the time for this Iraqi gravy train, with their obscene profits, is over," said Mr. Duncan, the congressman from Tennessee. "It is certainly no criticism of our troops to say that this was a very unnecessary war. This war went against every conservative position I have ever known."

Representative Ric Keller, a Florida Republican who said he was simply passing along common-sense advice from his constituents, compared the Iraqi government to an ungrateful next-door neighbor.

"Imagine your next-door neighbor refuses to mow his lawn and the weeds are all the way up to his waist, so you decide you're going to mow his lawn for him every single week," Mr. Keller said. "The neighbor never says thank you, he hates you and sometimes he takes out a gun and shoots you. Under these circumstances, do you keep mowing his lawn for ever?

"Do you send even more of your family members over to mow his lawn?" he added. "Or do you say to that neighbor, you better step it up and mow your own lawn or there's going to be serious consequences for you."

A majority of House Republicans have assertively defended the administration during the Iraq debate, accusing their Democratic rivals of being a weak link in the fight against terrorism. Those accusations seemed to soften a bit on Wednesday, when suddenly the person on the other side of the argument was another Republican.

Representative Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican, said she opposed the troop increase in Iraq but declined to support the resolution. She infuriated Democrats when she hinted that their party was considering plans to limit war financing.

"What about the five brigades of young Americans who are now preparing their families and packing their gear to deploy?" Ms. Wilson said. "What about them? What are you saying to them? Will we buy body armor for them? Will we have armored Humvees for them?"

Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic majority leader, rushed to the House chamber and delivered a sharp rebuttal to Ms. Wilson. "If the commander in chief has sent them there, we will support them," he said.

The House is scheduled to conclude the debate Friday. The Senate intends to consider a similar resolution when it returns from next week's Congressional recess. Republican Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine urged Senate leaders late Wednesday to cancel the recess so the Iraq debate could proceed.

Earlier this month, when the Senate had intended to take up an Iraq resolution, a procedural and political stalemate stymied debate. As deliberations stretched on into the night, the themes of the debate carried a familiar ring as each member of Congress was given at least five minutes to speak. Nearly every Democratic speaker rose to assail Mr. Bush, while Republicans came to his aid. Even Mr. Coble, who delivered one of the day's most stinging assessments of the administration's Iraq policy, said he liked Mr. Bush.

"Some Americans - and some in this body - oppose the Iraqi operation because they dislike President Bush," Mr. Coble said. "I, however, do not march to that drum. I am personally very high on President Bush, but on the matter of troop escalation, I am not in agreement."

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

House Begins Debate on War

By Jonathan Weisman The Washington Post Wednesday 14 February 2007

The House plunged into a heated, partisan debate yesterday on President Bush's war policy, with Democrats challenging lawmakers to take a stand against the deployment of more troops to Iraq while Republicans accused their political foes of emboldening the enemy with their symbolic resolution.

Democrats won control of Congress last fall in a political backlash against Bush's Iraq policy, and yesterday they decried a war they said was illegitimately launched and has been badly managed, with devastating consequences. They were helped by three newly elected Democratic lawmakers who were propelled into politics by their military experience in Iraq.

"We stand together to tell this administration that we are against the escalation, and to say with one voice that Congress will no longer be a blank check to the president's failed policies," said freshman Rep. Patrick J. Murphy (D-Pa.), who was a captain with the 82nd Airborne Division in Baghdad. "The president's plan to send more of our best and bravest to die refereeing a civil war in Iraq is wrong."

Republicans focused on loftier themes, warning darkly about ceding Iraq to Islamic radicals who are bent on destroying not only the Middle East but also the American way of life. "We are engaged in a global war now for our very way of life," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). "And every drop of blood that's been spilled in defense of liberty and freedom from the American Revolution to this very moment is for nothing if we're unwilling to stand up and fight this threat."

Scores of Democratic and Republican lawmakers took to the floor on the first of what is likely to be three days of intense debate on a tightly worded resolution opposing Bush's decision to deploy more than 20,000 additional U.S. combat troops to Iraq.

The resolution affirms Congress's support for "the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq" before breaking with the president's new strategy.

The debate is expected to extend late into the night today and tomorrow before culminating in a House vote Friday. It is not the first extended House debate on the war, but it is the first since the invasion of Iraq nearly four years ago that is likely to conclude with a vote against the president.

"In a few days and in fewer than 100 words, we will take our country in a new direction on Iraq," pledged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "Friday's vote will signal whether the House has heard the American people: No more blank checks for President Bush on Iraq."

The House debate unfolded in an orderly, dignified fashion, in stark contrast to last week's tumult in the Senate, where Republicans blocked even a debate on the war resolution. Under House rules that heavily favor the majority, Democrats set the terms of the debate and even denied Republicans the opportunity to introduce an alternative measure. By the end of the week, only the Democratic resolution will come to a vote in the House, despite party leaders' pledges last week to give Republicans at least one vote.

The Democratic resolution is not binding on the administration, and both sides of the debate agreed that the real fight will come next month, when Democrats are to move to attach to a $100 billion war spending bill binding language that would limit future deployments to Iraq and begin to bring troops home.

Still, passage of the resolution this week would be a stinging repudiation of Bush's strategy to try to put down sectarian violence in Baghdad by bolstering troop levels, and Republicans struggled to discredit the importance of the measure.

Boehner denounced it "a political charade lacking both the seriousness and the gravity of the issue that it's meant to represent," even as he called the resolution "the first step toward abandoning Iraq."

House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (Fla.) decried "a rather toothless 97 words" that "does nothing to help win the war" and "doesn't do anything to help stop it, either." Yet minutes later, he warned that its passage "puts us one day closer to handing militant Islamists a safe haven the size of California."

In a formal letter to GOP colleagues, Reps. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.) and John Shadegg (Ariz.) encouraged lawmakers to avoid discussing the resolution and focus instead on a wider war against Islamic radicals.

"This debate should not be about the surge or its details," they wrote. "This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made, or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose."

Democrats, torn between their liberal wing wanting binding action to stop the war and their more cautious conservatives, were no less conflicted. Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (Calif.) promised that passage of the resolution would be only a first step toward ending what he called "this nightmare." But he also put Friday's vote in the starkest possible terms.

"This simple resolution will establish the first marker," Lantos said. "Those who want to draw down the U.S. presence will be on one side of that marker. Those who want to take further steps into the quagmire will be on the other."

Democratic leaders showcased the three veterans of the Iraq war in a bid to enhance the credibility of their case. Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) brought to the debate the credentials of a retired admiral who commanded an aircraft-carrier battle group in Iraq. He condemned "the continuing use of our national treasure in what is an inconclusive, open-ended involvement within a country where the long-term benefits do not match what we need to reap."

Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) fretted over the National Guardsmen he taught in high school and then trained for deployment to the war.

Said Murphy: "We often hear from our colleagues on the other side that the only way to support the troops is to blindly support the president. I ask anyone to look at Admiral Joe Sestak, a man who was responsible for the safety and security of 15,000 sailors and Marines, and tell him that he does not support the troops. I ask anyone to look at Sergeant Major Tim Walz - a man who served his country for 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard as a noncommissioned officer, the backbone of our Army - and tell him he does not support our troops."

"We are the troops," he concluded, "and we oppose the president's escalation of troops."

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq

By Chris Floyd t r u t h o u t | UK Correspondent Tuesday 13 February 2007

Paint It Black

Imagine a city torn by sectarian strife. Competing death squads roam the streets; terrorists stage horrific attacks. Local authority is distrusted and weak; local populations protect the extremists in their midst, out of loyalty or fear. A bristling military occupation exacerbates tensions at every turn, while offering prime targets for bombs and snipers. And behind the scenes, in a shadow world of double-cross and double-bluff, covert units of the occupying power run agents on both sides of the civil war, countenancing - and sometimes directing - assassinations, terrorist strikes, torture sessions, and ethnic cleansing.

Is this a portrait of Belfast during "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland? Or a picture of Baghdad today? It is both; and in both cases, one of Britain's most secret - and most criminally compromised - military units has plied its trade in the darkness, "turning" and controlling terrorist killers in a dangerous bid to wring actionable intelligence from blood and betrayal. And America's covert soldiers are right there with them, working side-by-side with their British comrades in the aptly named "Task Force Black," the UK's Sunday Telegraph reports.

Last week, the right-wing, pro-war paper published an early valentine to the "Joint Support Group," the covert unit whose bland name belies its dramatic role at the center of the Anglo-American "dirty war" in Iraq. In gushing, lavish, uncritical prose that could have been (and perhaps was) scripted by the unit itself, the Telegraph lauded the team of secret warriors as "one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror," running "dozens of Iraqi double-agents," including "members of terrorist groups."

What the story fails to mention is the fact that in its Ulster incarnation, the JSG - then known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) - actively colluded in the murder of at least 15 civilians by Loyalist deaths squads, and an untold number of victims were killed, maimed, and tortured by the many Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What's more, the man who commanded the FRU during the height of its depredations - Lt. Col. Gordon Kerr - is in Baghdad now, heading the hugger-mugger Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), a large counter-terrorism force made up of unnamed "existing assets" from the glory days in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

This despite the fact that a 10-year, $100 million investigation by Britain's top police officer, Lord Stevens, confirmed in 2003 that the Kerr-led FRU "sanctioned killings" through "institutionalized collusion" with both Protestant and Catholic militias during the 1980s and 1990s. Stevens sent dossiers of evidence against Kerr and 20 other security apparatchiks to the Blair government's Director of Public Prosecutions, in the expectation that the fiery Scotsman and the others would be put on trial.

But instead prosecuting Kerr, Blair promoted him: first to a plum assignment as British military attaché in Beijing - effectively the number two man in all of UK military intelligence, as Scotland's Sunday Herald notes, then, with the SRR posting to Baghdad, where Kerr and his former FRU mates now apply the "methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles," as the Telegraph breathlessly relates.

The Telegraph puff piece is naturally coy about revealing these methods, beyond the fact that, as in Ireland, the JSG uses "a variety of inducements ranging from blackmail to bribes" to turn Iraqi terrorists into Coalition agents. So, to get a better idea of the techniques employed by the group in Baghdad, we must return to those "mean streets of Ulster" and the unit's reign of terror and collusion there, which has been thoroughly documented not only by the exhaustive Stevens inquiries, but also in a remarkable series of investigative reports by the Sunday Herald's Neil Mackay, and in extensive stories by the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and others.

We will also see how the operations of the JSG and "Task Force Black" dovetail with U.S. efforts to apply the lessons of its own dirty wars - such as the "Salvador Option" - to Iraq, as well as long-running Bush Administration initiatives to arm and fund "friendly" militias while infiltrating terrorist groups in order to "provoke them into action." It is indeed a picture painted in black, a glimpse at the dark muck that lies beneath the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and civilization forever issuing from the lips of the war leaders.

Whacking for the Peelers

Gregory Burns had a problem. He was one of Gordon Kerr's FRU informers planted deep inside the IRA, along with two of his friends, Johnny Dignam and Aidan Starrs. But as Mackay noted in a February 2003 story, the already-partnered Burns had acquired a girlfriend on the side, Margaret Perry, 26, a "civilian" Catholic with no paramilitary ties. Forbidden fruit is sweet, of course - but pillow talk is dangerous for an inside man. "Burns didn't keep his mouth shut and [Perry] found out he was working for British intelligence," an FRU officer told Mackay. "He tried to convince her he was a double-agent the IRA had planted in the [British] army - but she didn't buy it."

Burns called his FRU handlers and asked to come in from the cold. He'd been compromised, he said, and now he and his friends needed to get out, with new identities, relocation, good jobs - the usual payoff for trusted agents when the jig was up. But Kerr refused: "He said [Burns] should silence Perry," the FRU man told Mackay. Burns, panicking at thought of the IRA's horrific retributions against informers, insisted: he would have to kill the woman if they didn't bring him in, he told Kerr. Again Kerr refused.

And so Burns arranged a meeting with his lover, to "talk over" the situation. His friends, Aidan and Johnny, volunteered to drive her there: "On the way, they pulled into a forest, beat her to death and buried her in a shallow grave," Mackay notes. Two years later, when her body was found, the IRA put two and two together - and slowly tortured Burns and his two friends to death, after first extracting copious amounts of information about British intelligence operations in Ireland.

"In Kerr's eyes, Burns just wasn't important enough to resettle," the FRU source told the Sunday Herald. "So we ended up with four unnecessary deaths and the compromising of British army intelligence officers, which ultimately put soldiers' lives at risk. To Kerr, it was always a matter of the ends justifying the means."

Then again, Kerr could well afford to sacrifice a few informers here and there to the wrath of the IRA's dreaded "security unit" - because his own, prize double agent was the head of that security unit. Codenamed "Stakeknife," Kerr's man presided over, and sometimes administered, the grisly torture-murders of up to 50 men during his tenure in the IRA's upper ranks. The victims included other British double agents who were sacrificed in order to protect Stakeknife's cover, as the Guardian and many other UK papers reported when the agent's work was revealed in 2003. ("Stakeknife" was later identified in the press as Alfredo Scappaticci - an Irishman despite the Italian name, although he continues to deny the charge.)

The FRU also "knowingly allowed soldiers, [police] officers and civilians to die at the hands of IRA bombers in order to protect republican double agents," the Sunday Herald's investigations found. As Mackay reports: "FRU sources said around seven police and army personnel died as a result of military intelligence allowing IRA bombs to be placed during Kerr's time in command of the FRU. They estimate that three civilians also died this way, with casualties in the hundreds."

But some of the worst excesses came from the FRU's handling of operatives on the other side, in the fiercely pro-British Protestant militia the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). Here, among the Loyalists, Kerr's top double agent was Brian Nelson, who became head of intelligence for the UDA. As John Ware put it in the Guardian: "Kerr regarded Nelson as his jewel in the crown ... For the next three years [from 1987], Nelson colluded with murder gangs to shoot IRA suspects. Month after month, armed and masked men crashed into homes. Sometimes they got the wrong address or shot the wrong person."

A wrong person like Gerald Slane, a 27-year-old Belfast man shot down in front of his three children. A gun had been found dumped on his property; this, and his Catholicism, was enough to get him assassinated at the order of Kerr's man Nelson. Afterwards, it was found that Slane had no IRA connections.

Another "wrong person" killed by the FRU's agents was the Belfast attorney Pat Finucane, who was shot 14 times in front of his wife and children. Finucane was a civil rights activist who had defended both Catholics and Protestants, but was considered an IRA sympathizer by Loyalists - and a thorn in the side by British authorities. He was killed at Nelson's order by a fellow FRU informer in the UDA, Ken Barrett, who was convicted of the murder but freed last year as part of an amnesty program in the Northern Ireland peace process. Barrett was unapologetic about his FRU "wetwork" on Finucane. "The peelers [authorities] wanted him whacked," he told a BBC documentary team after his release. "We whacked him and that is the end of the story."

Kerr gave Nelson packages of intelligence files to help facilitate the assassination of UDA targets, including at least four "civilians" with no IRA ties, the Stevens inquiry found. The FRU also obtained "restriction orders" from other British security and military units in Northern Ireland, whereby they would pull their forces from an area when Kerr's UDA agents were going to make a hit there, allowing the killers to get in and get out without hindrance, investigator Nick Davies reports.

Yet the FRU was wary of sharing its own intelligence with other security services - which was the ostensible reason for running the double-agents in the first place. Instead, Kerr engaged in fierce turf wars with other agencies, while "stovepiping" much of his intelligence to the top circles of the UK government, including the cabinet-level Intelligence Committee chaired by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, when Nelson was finally exposed and brought to trial on five counts of conspiracy to commit murder, Kerr testified in his behalf, noting for the court that Nelson's intelligence "product and his reporting was passed through the intelligence community and at a high level, and from that point of view he has to be considered a very important agent."

As one FRU man told Mackay: "Under Kerr's command...the mindset was one of 'the right people would be allowed to live and wrong people should die.'"

This is the "mindset" now operating in the heart of the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the JSG is carrying out - as we are told in glowing terms - precisely the same mission it had in Ulster. a unit which has allowed its agents to torture, murder and commit acts of terrorism, including actions that killed local civilians and the soldiers and intelligence operatives of their own country.

The White House Green Light

Of course, Kerr and his Baghdad black-op crew are not alone in the double-dealing world of Iraqi counterinsurgency. The Pentagon's ever-expanding secret armies are deeply enmeshed in such efforts as well. As Sy Hersh has reported ("The Coming Wars," New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005), after his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret presidential directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually unrestricted covert operations, including a reprise of the American-backed, American-trained death squads employed by authoritarian regimes in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration, where so many of the Bush faction cut their teeth.

"Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" a former high-level intelligence official said to Hersh. "We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A Pentagon insider added: "We're going to be riding with the bad boys." Another role model for the expanded dirty war cited by Pentagon sources, said Hersh, was Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups to confuse and discredit the insurgency, and killed thousands of innocent civilians in quashing the uprising.

Bush's formal greenlighting of the death-squad option built upon an already securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the world into a "global free-fire zone" for covert operatives, as one top Pentagon official told Hersh. For example, in November 2002 a Pentagon plan to infiltrate terrorist groups and "stimulate" them into action was uncovered by William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the "Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group," was described in the Pentagon documents as "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that brings "together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception."

Later, in August 2004, then deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz appeared before Congress to ask for $500 million to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" to serve as U.S. proxies for "counter-insurgency and "counterterrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" and hot spots around the world, Agence France Presse (and virtually no one else) reported at the time. These hired paramilitaries were to be employed in what Wolfowitz called an "arc of crisis" that just happened to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.

By then, the Bush Administration had already begun laying the groundwork for an expanded covert war in the hot spot of Iraq. In November 2003, it created a "commando squad" drawn from the sectarian militias of five major Iraqi factions, as the Washington Post reported that year. Armed, funded and trained by the American occupation forces, and supplied with a "state-of-the-art command, control and communications center" from the Pentagon, the new Iraqi commandos were loosed on the then-nascent Iraqi insurgency - despite the very prescient fears of some U.S. officials "that various Sunni or Shiite factions could eventually use the service to secretly undermine their political competitors," as the Post noted.

And indeed, in early 2005 - not long after Bush's directives loosed the "Salvador Option" on Iraq - the tide of death-squad activity began its long and bloody rise to the tsunami-like levels we see today. Ironically, the first big spike of mass torture-murders, chiefly in Sunni areas at the time, coincided with "Operation Lightning," a much ballyhooed effort by American and Iraqi forces to "secure" Baghdad. The operation featured a mass influx of extra troops into the capital; dividing the city into manageable sectors, then working through them one by one; imposing hundreds of checkpoints to lock down all insurgent movements; and establishing a 24-hour presence of security and military forces in troubled neighborhoods, the Associated Press reported in May 2005. In other words, it was almost exactly the same plan now being offered as Bush's "New Way Forward," the controversial "surge."

But the "Lightning" fizzled in a matter of weeks, and the death squads grew even bolder. Brazen daylight raids by "men dressed in uniforms" of Iraqi police or Iraqi commandos or other Iraqi security agencies swept up dozens of victims at a time. For months, U.S. "advisers" to Iraqi security agencies - including veterans of the original "Salvador Option" - insisted that these were Sunni insurgents in stolen threads, although many of the victims were Sunni civilians. Later, the line was changed: the chief culprits were now "rogue elements" of the various sectarian militias that had "infiltrated" Iraq's institutions.

But as investigative reporter Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed examination of information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities then attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA agents. As Fuller puts it: "If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior, you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever a U.S. colonel enters the room." And perhaps a British lieutenant colonel as well

With the Anglo-American coalition so deeply embedded in dirty war - infiltrating terrorist groups, "stimulating" them into action," protecting "crown jewel" double-agents no matter what the cost, "riding with the bad boys," greenlighting the "Salvador Option" - it is simply impossible to determine the genuine origin of almost any particular terrorist outrage or death squad atrocity in Iraq. All of these operations take place in the shadow world, where terrorists are sometimes government operatives and vice versa, and where security agencies and terrorist groups interpenetrate in murky thickets of collusion and duplicity. This moral chaos leaves "a kind of blot/to mark the full-fraught man and best indued/With some suspicion," as Shakespeare's Henry V says.

What's more, the "intelligence" churned out by this system is inevitably tainted by the self-interest, mixed motives, fear and criminality of those who provide it. The ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen in the ever-increasing, many-sided civil war that is tearing Iraq apart. If these covert operations really are intended to quell the violence, they clearly have had the opposite effect. If they have some other intention, the pious defenders of civilization - who approve these activities with promotions, green lights and unlimited budgets - aren't telling.

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