The Little Brush Popper is addressing the nation on immigration right now — I can hear his clipped and simplistic sound-bites coming at me in a dull monotone as I write. Applause is limited, hardly thunderous … harder to find those enthused zealots than it used to be.
Confirming the “give him an inch and he’ll take everything including your first born” prophecy, Dubby is set to reactivate 13,000 National Guard troops and get ‘em into the sandpit, double quick. I should mention that a high percentage of these folks are coming home to no jobs and financial ruin, despite laws written to protect them. And the Big Question remains … who will be left to protect the US of A. [I've had it with the word "homeland" ... entirely too Germanic to suit me. It's got that Vaterland feel.]
The clear picture of the civil war has begun to emerge from behind the GOP smoke — McCain has about slit his own political throat with Sunny Jim rhetoric and pictures in his flack jacket, surrounded by troops and helicopters as he attempts to buy a rug in the Baghdad marketplace. Bush has run out of creative ways to turn the conversation from the fact that he intends to keep us in Iraq until the camels come home; long ago Democracy Now confirmed that 14 bases are strategically located to protect the oil fields, and five of the military bases are “state of the art” designed for “long-term” occupation of Iraq. This is about control of oil — this is about Empericism. This is NeoCon madness, Dubby-style. This is a no brain’er.
“The strongest evidence that oil was a prime motive was the behavior of the American troops in Baghdad after they entered the city on April 9, 2003. They very effectively protected the headquarters of Iraq’s Ministry of Oil but were indifferent to looters who spent two days ransacking the National museum of its priceless antiquities and burning the National Archives and the city’s famed Quranic Library. The same thing happened to the National Museum in Mosul. While the marines defaced some of the world’s most ancient walls at the site of the Sumerian city of Ur, near Nasiriya, the army was already building a permanent garrison at the adjacent Tallil Air base to protect the southern oil fields.”
~ Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows Of Empire
Review the facts, listen to those who actually KNOW the Islamic mind rather than those who either don’t care or can’t comprehend any thinking unlike their own — even Henry Kissinger says there’s no military win available in Iraq. And “politics” have not even begun, there … they won’t, not until after American boots are gone from the lands of the Prophet. If Bush has his way … that will be never.
The absurdity of discussing this in terms of “patriotism” or “supporting the troops” as we mull the end of funding this debacle irks me … this nation needs to wake up and follow the blood trail to the smell of profit in the morning!
Below — a serious blast of criticism in a new book by Allawi — the Shiia protests [Shiia = Iran] — the results of the surge, and double the American deaths — how the detentions are pumping out new insurgents — how we’re sending in cripples and injured troops, just to get “numbers” — how the graft and cronyism works. Last piece is a ‘bonus read” — a “Shallowthroat” article; this ongoing character is supposedly a government Pub insider, sending out encouragements and warnings to those who would take down the Bushies.
Jude
Insider: Missteps Soured Iraqis on U.S.
Charles J. Hanley, AP
April 8, 2007
NEW YORK — In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country _ a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”
“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.
Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq’s trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.
The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country’s four-year ordeal. It’s an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word “ignorance” crops up repeatedly.
First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq’s realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,” he writes.
What followed was the “rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance” of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:
_ The Americans disbanded Iraq’s army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.
_ Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein’s Baath party - from government, school faculties and elsewhere - left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.
_ An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq’s many state-owned enterprises.
_ The CPA’s focus on private enterprise allowed the “commercial gangs” of Saddam’s day to monopolize business.
_ Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.
_ The CPA perpetuated Saddam’s fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.
In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington’s “micromanagement.”
Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.
On U.S. reconstruction failures _ in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington’s own auditors - Allawi writes that the Americans’ “insipid retelling of `success’ stories” merely hid “the huge black hole that lay underneath.”
For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq’s explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.
The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq’s “new order,” including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done.
As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, “America’s only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise.”
Iraqi Shiites unite in protest against US ‘occupation’
RAW STORY
Monday April 9, 2007
Hundreds of thousands of Shiites burned and trampled on US flags on Monday as they gathered in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf for an anti-American rally called by firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Large crowds of men, women and children holding Iraqi flags and anti-US banners massed in Najaf and the nearby twin city of Kufa to protest against what they said was an American occupation of Iraq.
The rally is seen as a show of strength for the cleric, who has not been seen for more than two months, since the launch of a security crackdown in Baghdad aimed largely at reining in his militiamen accused of killing Sunni Arabs.
The US military has said he is in Iran but his aides deny the claims.
In the capital Baghdad, where four years ago on Monday a giant bronze statue of Saddam was torn down, dramatically symbolizing the fall of his regime, security was tight.
A 24-hour vehicle curfew was in place and all Baghdad’s key roads and bridges were deserted as people remained indoors for fear of attacks.
Jubilant Baghdadis who welcomed the invading US troops on April 9, 2003 now blame the rampant bloodshed and chaos on what even some of the country’s
most senior leaders brand an unwanted US-led “occupation.”
The Shiite demonstrators are marching from Kufa to Najaf’s central Sadrain Square, where top aides of Sadr — who is regarded by the Americans as the most dangerous threat to stability in Iraq — are expected to address the crowds.
Hundreds of banners saying “Down with Bush, Down with America” could be seen in the crowd as Iraqi police and army soldiers guarded key checkpoints in and around Najaf and Kufa.
Many in the crowds were seen burning US flags and some were trampling on and striking US and Israeli flags painted on the ground with their shoes, an act considered one of the worst insults in Arab culture.
Some Sunni religious groups were also seen participating in the rally.
It was not known whether Sadr himself would address the crowds.
The cleric, who launched two bloody rebellions against US forces in 2004, is known for his anti-US stance and has emerged as a powerful force in the present Shiite-led Iraqi government.
His political bloc has 32 lawmakers in the 275-member parliament and six cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s embattled government.
On Sunday, he reiterated his call to unite against the Americans and end fighting between his militiamen and security forces in the central city of Diwaniyah.
“He appeals to the Iraqi army and the Mahdi militia not to fall into America’s trap by fighting in Diwaniyah,” said a statement stamped and issued by the cleric’s Najaf office on his behalf.
US and Iraqi soldiers have been clashing with Sadr’s militiamen in Diwaniyah since Friday.
Calling for unity against US troops, Sadr urged local forces not to support the “occupier because it is your enemy.”
“Iraq has had enough bloodshed. The occupation forces led by the biggest evil, America, is working to sow dissent either directly or through its agents.”
On April 9, 2003, US Marines pulled down the giant statue of Saddam by a rope around the neck, in a premonition of his hanging in December for crimes against humanity.
But gone are the euphoric cheers of “Good, Good, Bush” praising US President George W. Bush for ousting the regime. Angry chants of “Down with Bush” are a frequent background to brutal Shiite and Sunni sectarian strife.
About 80,000 US and Iraqi troops are now patrolling the capital’s streets where, although the daily execution-style killings are reported to be falling, high-profile car bombings remain a headache for security forces.
Since the invasion of March 20, 2003, tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in insurgent attacks and sectarian violence.
The four years have also been brutal for the US forces in Iraq.
On Monday, the military reported the deaths of six more soldiers in a series of attacks, taking its toll for the month alone to 27 and 3,275 since the invasion, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
The following video compilation has clips from The Associated Press, CNN and BBC [open for link.]
Patterns of War Shift in Iraq Amid Buildup of U.S. Force
ALISSA J. RUBIN and EDWARD WONG, NYT
April 9, 2007
BAGHDAD, April 8 — Nearly two months into the new security push in Baghdad, there has been some success in reducing the number of death squad victims found crumpled in the streets each day.
And while the overall death rates for all of Iraq have not dropped significantly, largely because of devastating suicide bombings, a few parts of the capital have become calmer as some death squads have decided to lie low.
But there is little sign that the Baghdad push is accomplishing its main purpose: to create an island of stability in which Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds can try to figure out how to run the country together. There has been no visible move toward compromise on the main dividing issues, like regional autonomy and more power sharing between Shiites and Sunnis.
For American troops, Baghdad has become a deadlier battleground as they have poured into the capital to confront Sunni and Shiite militias on their home streets. The rate of American deaths in the city over the first seven weeks of the security plan has nearly doubled from the previous period, though it has stayed roughly the same over all, decreasing in other parts of the country as troops have focused on the capital.
American commanders say it will be months before they can draw conclusions about the campaign to secure Baghdad, and just more than half of the so-called surge of nearly 30,000 additional troops into the country have arrived. But at the same time, political pressure in the United States for quick results and a firm troop pullout date has become more intense than ever.
This snapshot of the early weeks of the operation, which officially began on Feb. 14, is drawn from American and Iraqi casualty data and interviews with military commanders and government officials.
Already in that time, the military and political reality has shifted from what American planners faced when they prepared the Baghdad operation, continuing a pattern of rapid change that has become painfully familiar since the 2003 invasion.
In the northern and western provinces where they hold sway, and even in parts of Baghdad, Sunni Arab insurgents have sharpened their tactics, using more suicide car and vest bombs and carrying out successive chlorine gas attacks.
Even as officials have sought to dampen the insurgency by trying to deal with Sunni Arab factions, those groups have become increasingly fractured. There are now at least a dozen major Sunni insurgent groups — many fighting other Sunnis as well as the Americans and the Shiite-led government. A deal made with any one or two would be unlikely to be acceptable to the others.
While Shiite militias appear to have quieted in Baghdad so far, elements of them have been fighting pitched battles outside the city, sometimes against one another, sometimes against Sunni Arabs. They are pushing Sunnis out of their homes and attacking their mosques.
And in a new tactic, both Shiite and Sunni militants have been burning down homes and shops in the provinces in recent months.
One American private in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, who was working the overnight shift at a new garrison in western Baghdad, described the Americans’ fight this way: “The insurgents, they see what we’re doing and we see what they’re doing. Then we get ahead, then they figure out what we’ve done and they get ahead.
“It’s like a game of cat and mouse. It’s just a really, really smart mouse.”
A Shift in Deaths
The incoming five brigades as part of the new security plan will bring the total number of American troops in Iraq to about 173,000 when it is complete, more than at any time since the war began.
Many of the new troops are joining long-term garrisons along with Iraqi forces in particularly violent neighborhoods of Baghdad, keeping up frequent patrols and trying to strengthen relations with Iraqis by meeting with local leaders and residents.
That has put the Americans in the middle of sectarian battlegrounds, and their death rate in the city has nearly doubled. The number of Americans killed in combat or other violence rose to 53 in Baghdad in the first seven weeks of the push, from Feb. 14 to April 2. That is up from 29 in the seven weeks before then.
Diyala Province, just northeast of Baghdad, has also been a trouble spot, bitterly contested by Sunni and Shiite militants. The United States military added a battalion in the province, and the fighting has been fierce, with 15 Americans killed there in the seven weeks starting on Feb. 14. The total from the seven weeks before then was 10.
At the same time, though, the rate of American deaths throughout the country has stayed about the same, with 116 killed in hostile incidents, up from 113 in the prior seven weeks.
As the focus has intensified on Baghdad, deaths have fallen in some outlying areas — even in Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni rebellion where American marines have long faced intense violence. In the seven weeks after the start of the Baghdad operation, 31 Americans were killed in Anbar, down from 46 in the seven weeks beforehand.
While it is difficult to point to any one reason, in recent months Anbar has been at the center of a fissure in the insurgency between tribes who support the terrorist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and tribes who reject it because it is seen as inviting foreign fighters.
Roadside bombs were by far the most common means of killing Americans. Deaths in Baghdad and Diyala from such explosions more than doubled. In Baghdad, 83 percent of troop deaths since the plan began have been caused by roadside bombs. In Diyala, all but one of the 15 soldiers who died in the seven-week period were killed by roadside bombs. Just four were killed by the bombs in the preceding seven weeks there.
Violence Against Civilians
The Iraqi government and the American military refuse to release overall civilian casualty numbers; both give numbers only for a few categories of deaths, making it difficult to get an overall picture. One of the last official reports on civilian casualties came in January from the United Nations, which, citing morgue and hospital statistics, said at least 34,452 Iraqis were killed last year, or an average of nearly 100 per day.
Over the past seven weeks, American commanders say that the security push has had some success so far in cutting down the number of sectarian execution-style killings — tracked by counting the number of bodies found with gunshot or knife wounds. Military officials say that such killings have dropped 26 percent nationwide and even more in Baghdad.
But other kinds of attacks, like car bombings, have kept the overall civilian death rate high, and in recent days there are anecdotal reports that sectarian executions may be on the rise again.
“We’ve not seen the overall same significant amount of decline in the overall number of casualties” as in execution killings, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, spokesman for the American military command, said in a news conference last week.
The American military believes that much of the drop in executions has come because of decreased activity by Shiite militias and death squads, especially the powerful Mahdi Army militia that claims allegiance to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Many militia leaders have been detained in raids by the American military, according to the Iraqi government, and despite some major car bomb attacks on Shiite areas, the militias appear to have decided to refrain from carrying out revenge killings.
“The cycle of violence is not as predictable,” a senior American military official said. “Iraqi people are showing restraint, and the ability of death squads to retaliate is being circumscribed.”
However, it appears that not all Shiite cells, Mahdi Army or otherwise, are so patient. American soldiers in sections of western Baghdad, as well as Sunni Arabs living there and in Sunni enclaves south of Baghdad in Babil Province, are reporting that sectarian killings and threats against Sunni Arab families have begun to rise again, after a brief hiatus at the start of the security plan.
“There’s been spray paint on walls: ‘Get out or you’ll pay with your blood,’ ” said Capt. Benjamin Morales, 28, commander of a company of the 82nd Airborne that oversees a Shiite-dominated section of western Baghdad. There were eight Sunni households in the area at the start of March; three had left by its end.
The Iraqi government has been encouraging displaced families to return to their abandoned homes and offering $200 as an incentive. The government said that 2,000 families had returned by mid-March, but there is no way to verify the numbers.
In Fadhil, a Sunni enclave in eastern Baghdad surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods, residents say Shiite militias have been attacking with mortar shells and sniper fire. They accuse the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces of taking part, which Iraqi military officials deny.
“The situation was quiet when the militias left the country, but when they came back, the tension returned,” said Wamid Salah Hameed, a community leader in Fadhil. “The military is attacking us and firing at the neighborhood randomly. There is a sectarian feeling among the soldiers in the army.”
Meanwhile, Shiite militias have burned shops in a Sunni enclave of Babil Province, and Sunni militias burned Sunni and Shiite homes in Diyala last month.
Sunni militias have been active in Baghdad, too. The number of bodies of their presumed victims that turn up, tortured and shot, appears to have declined, but not halted, in recent weeks. In the past three weeks in some mostly Sunni neighborhoods of western Baghdad, Shiites bringing supplies to displaced families — even displaced Sunni families — have been kidnapped and killed, their bodies left in corner lots.
“We used to see sometimes eight bodies a day,” said Sgt. Michael Brosch, of the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry. “Sometimes they were all beheaded. Then right at the beginning of the security plan, we didn’t see any. Now we’re seeing them again.”
At the same time, deaths and injuries nationwide from vehicle bombs, which are typically associated with Sunni insurgents, particularly Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, have continued at a rapid pace.
January and February were particularly bad months for car bombing deaths; nearly 1,100 were killed in February alone. That number dropped to 783 in March, still high compared with months earlier in the war, according to an American military official. But the overall number of bombings actually increased: there were 108 car bombs that either detonated or were disarmed in March, a record for the war.
Outside of Baghdad, several huge bombings have been responsible for many of the deaths. The worst, last month in Tal Afar, killed 152.
In Anbar, at least six bombings involved a terrifying new weapon: truck bombs that spread chlorine gas, burning victims’ lungs and skin. The deadliest of those attacks, in Ramadi on Friday, killed at least 30 people.
A Fractured Government
Most American and Iraqi officials say that the key to Iraq’s security is a political agreement that gives Sunni Arabs more power in the government. But the near-term prognosis for that looks grim, as the calm necessary to negotiate such a deal remains elusive.
Some Shiite leaders have publicly said they are prepared to reconcile with the minority Sunnis, who generally prospered under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government. But the Shiites are still loath to give Sunnis any additional power and risk returning to the oppressed status they held for centuries.
Meanwhile, the Kurds in the north are pushing policies that will maximize the powers of their autonomous region, including trying to get control of the ethnically mixed oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
The Sunni Arabs seek several changes in the government’s structure. They want Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a conservative Shiite, to make good on his promise to replace ineffective or corrupt ministers. Mr. Maliki promised the shake-up months ago, but the proposal now appears moribund.
The Sunni Arabs also want the Constitution amended to bring power back to Baghdad and reduce the chance that areas in the oil-rich, Shiite-dominated south will follow the model of Kurdistan and create an autonomous state.
In addition, the Sunni Arabs continue to push for a rollback of purges of Sunni Arabs from government that began after the Shiites came to power in national elections.
But to stop the violence, the ruling Shiites must deal with Sunnis outside the government, in the factionalized insurgency, who can offer few guarantees on any promises to stop bombings against Shiites.
“We talk to people who say they represent the insurgents and they all say the same thing: ‘We oppose the occupation, but we don’t believe in killing civilians, in killing women and children,’ ” a senior adviser to Mr. Maliki said. “But our people are dying in bombs every day. Who is killing them?”
Reporting was contributed by Kirk Semple, Hosham Hussein and Khalid al-Ansary in Baghdad, and Andrew W. Lehren and Archie Tse in New York.
Insurgents transform US military jails into ‘terror training camps’
James Hider in Baghdad, Times UK
April 7, 2007
America’s high-security prisons in Iraq have become “terrorist academies” for the most dangerous militant groups, according to former inmates and Iraqi government officials.
Inmates are left largely to run their blocks, which are segregated on sectarian lines. The policy has created a closed world run by Iraq’s worst terrorists and militias, into which detainees with no links to insurgent groups are often thrown.
Inmates from Camp Cropper, the US prison at Baghdad airport, described to The Times seeing al-Qaeda terrorists club to death a man suspected of being an informer. Others dished out retribution with razor wire stolen from the fences.
Captain Phillip Valenti, a US officer responsible for prisons, said he knew of at least three cases of prisoners being murdered by inmates. “We are very concerned about insurgent efforts to recruit and convert detainees,” he said.
US officials said yesterday that they were investigating the suspicious death of another Camp Cropper inmate.
Saad Sultan, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry’s official for prisons, said: “It looks like a terrorist academy. There’s a huge number of these ’students’; they study how they can kill. And we protect them, feed them, give them medical care. The Americans have no solution to this problem.”
Vying factions often feed fake tips about their enemies to US forces, meaning just about anyone can end up in jail. While the US military is scrupulous about separating Sunnis from Shia, they pay less attention to keeping seasoned terrorists apart from people picked up in security sweeps.
Abu Tibeh and his colleagues — four Sunnis and four Shia — were arrested in November when someone told a US patrol that the party offices they were guarding were being used by a death squad. In fact, the party was a moderate secular faction with close ties to the US.
At Camp Cropper they were put in halls of about 85 inmates. The Sunni section was controlled by an imam from an al-Qaeda-affiliated group. The Shia hall was under the authority of a sheikh from al-Mahdi Army, a fundamentalist militia notorious for its death squads.
“I was terrified,” said Abu Tibeh, a balding, podgy Sunni in his mid-thirties. “It was psychological warfare.” His colleague Abu Usama — not their real names — also in the Sunni camp, was so horrified that he suffered a minor heart attack.
Every day Abu Hamza, the al-Qaeda cleric who was in his early twenties, would lecture on the evils of the Government and the need for resistance. To their dismay, the new inmates’ own party was often the target of these rants, forcing them to keep their identities secret. They slept in shifts, with two standing guard.
One night, Abu Usama recalled, a group of al-Qaeda enforcers, their faces masked by towels, murdered an inmate. “Six of them came, two guarding the door and four to kill him. One of them hit him on the head with a sock filled with rocks. They beat him to death.”
The leader of the assassins told the cowering prisoners that the man had been an informer, although merely being seen talking to a US guard could count, said Abu Usama. Another suspected informer was clubbed to death in the latrines, he said.
When a new inmate arrived, the takfiris, or Sunni fundamentalists, would move in quickly to recruit him. Abu Usama listened politely to one recruiter — a youth half his age — then tried to avoid him.
In the Shia camp, their comrade Abu Mustafa, a lean 31-year-old, was faring only slightly better. The imam there was Sayyid Adnan al-Enabi, an al-Mahdi Army commander who ordered the men to join prayer sessions and lectures.
Abu Mustafa refused. “No one should force your religion,” he explained this week. In revenge, the al-Mahdi inmates told the US guards that he was planning to escape. The Americans put him in a metal punishment box 6ft by 4ft ( 1.9m by 1.2m) known as “the coffin”, and kept him there for days.
Both men were freed when the leader of their party intervened with the US military.
Army deployed seriously injured troops
Soldiers on crutches and canes were sent to a main desert camp used for Iraq training. Military experts say the Army was pumping up manpower statistics to show a brigade was battle ready.
Mark Benjamin, Salon
3/26/07
[Note: Saturdays post about Bush's lukewarm reception at Ft. Irwin is explained below.]
WASHINGTON — Last November, Army Spc. Edgar Hernandez, a communications specialist with a unit of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, had surgery on an ankle he had injured during physical training. After the surgery, doctors put his leg in a cast, and he was supposed to start physical therapy when that cast came off six weeks later.
But two days after his cast was removed, Army commanders decided it was more important to send him to a training site in a remote desert rather than let him stay at Fort Benning, Ga., to rehabilitate. In January, Hernandez was shipped to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., where his unit, the 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, was conducting a month of training in anticipation of leaving for Iraq in March.
Hernandez says he was in no shape to train for war so soon after his injury. “I could not walk,” he told Salon in an interview. He said he was amazed when he learned he was being sent to California. “Did they not realize that I’m hurt and I needed this physical therapy?” he remembered thinking. “I was told by my doctor and my physical therapist that this was crazy.”
Hernandez had served two tours in Iraq, where he helped maintain communications gear in the unit’s armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles. But he could not participate in war maneuvers conducted on a 1,000-square-mile mock battlefield located in the harsh Mojave Desert. Instead, when he got to California, he was led to a large tent where he would be housed. He was shocked by what he saw inside: There were dozens of other hurt soldiers. Some were on crutches, and others had arms in slings. Some had debilitating back injuries. And nearby was another tent, housing female soldiers with health issues ranging from injuries to pregnancy.
Hernandez is one of a dozen soldiers who stayed for weeks in those tents who were interviewed for this report, some of whose medical records were also reviewed by Salon. All of the soldiers said they had no business being sent to Fort Irwin given their physical condition. In some cases, soldiers were sent there even though their injuries were so severe that doctors had previously recommended they should be considered for medical retirement from the Army.
Military experts say they suspect that the deployment to Fort Irwin of injured soldiers was an effort to pump up manpower statistics used to show the readiness of Army units. With the military increasingly strained after four years of war, Army readiness has become a critical part of the debate over Iraq. Some congressional Democrats have considered plans to limit the White House’s ability to deploy more troops unless the Pentagon can certify that units headed into the fray are fully equipped and fully manned.
Salon recently uncovered another troubling development in the Army’s efforts to shore up troop levels, reporting earlier this month that soldiers from the 3rd Brigade had serious health problems that the soldiers claimed were summarily downgraded by military doctors at Fort Benning in February, apparently so that the Army could send them to Iraq. Some of those soldiers were among the group sent to Fort Irwin to train in January.
After arriving at Fort Irwin, many of the injured soldiers did not train. “They had all of us living in a big tent,” confirmed Spc. Lincoln Smith, who spent the month there along with Hernandez and others. Smith is an Army truck driver, but because of his health issues, which include sleep apnea (a breathing ailment) and narcolepsy, Smith is currently barred from driving military vehicles. “I couldn’t go out and do the training,” Smith said about his time in California. His records list his problems as “permanent” and recommend that he be considered for retirement from the Army because of his health.
Another soldier with nearly 20 years in the Army was sent to Fort Irwin, ostensibly to prepare for deployment to Iraq, even though she suffers from back problems and has psychiatric issues. Doctors wrote “unable to deploy overseas” on her medical records.
It is unclear exactly how many soldiers with health issues were sent to the California desert. None of the soldiers interviewed by Salon had done a head count, but all agreed that “dozens” would be a conservative estimate. An Army spokesman and public affairs officials for the 3rd Infantry Division did not return repeated calls and e-mails seeking further detail and an explanation of why injured troops were sent to Fort Irwin and housed in tents there during January.
The soldiers who were at Fort Irwin described a pitiful scene. “You had people out there with crutches and canes,” said an Army captain who was being considered for medical retirement himself because of serious back injuries sustained in a Humvee accident during a previous combat tour in Iraq. “Soldiers that apparently had no business being there were there,” another soldier wrote to Salon in an e-mail. “Pregnant females were sent to the National Training Center rotation” with the knowledge of Army leaders, she said.
One infantry sergeant with nearly 20 years in the Army who had already fought in Iraq broke his foot badly in a noncombat incident just before being sent to Fort Irwin. “I didn’t even get to put the cast on,” before going, he said with exasperation. He said doctors put something like an “open-toed soft shoe” on his foot and put him on a plane to California. “I’ve got the cast on now. I never even got a chance to see the [medical] specialist,” he claimed. The infantry sergeant said life in the desert was tough in his condition. “I was on Percocet. I couldn’t even concentrate. I hopped on a plane and hobbled around NTC on crutches,” he said. He added, “I saw people who were worse off than I am. I saw people with hurt backs and so on. I started to think, ‘Hey, I’m not so bad.’”
Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins was one of those soldiers at NTC with a hurt back, even though late last year, doctors recommended he be considered for medical retirement. Jenkins, 42, has a degenerative spine problem and a long scar down the back of his neck where doctors fused three of his vertebrae during surgery. He takes morphine for the pain in his neck and back.
“I slept on a damn metal cot for 26 days with serious back problems,” Jenkins told Salon. “It was an unpleasant experience,” he said, adding that his condition worsened while he was there. Hernandez, the communications specialist, said he reinjured his ankle at Fort Irwin, leaving him hobbling around in the sand and gravel for a month. When he returned to Fort Benning, Hernandez had to be put into another cast. (He is still in that cast now and hopes to start physical therapy when it comes off on March 26.)
“We could not train,” Jenkins said. “Why were we even there?”
Military experts point to the brigade’s readiness statistics, including “unit status reports” that carefully track personnel numbers and are sent up through the Army’s chain of command. “There are a number of factors used to establish whether a unit is mission-capable,” explained John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent organization that studies military and security issues. “One of them is the extent to which it is fully manned,” he said. Pike says he suspects the injured soldiers were camped out at Fort Irwin so that on paper, at least, “the unit would have a sufficient head count to be mission-capable.”
Lawrence Korb, who was an assistant secretary of defense for manpower during the Reagan administration and is now with the liberal Center for American Progress, says that the 3rd Brigade can show statistically that more troops trained in California simply because they were there. “Basically, they could say 90 percent went through Fort Irwin,” Korb said about the brigade.
But injured soldiers from the brigade were not just shuttled to California; some were sent on to Iraq. Earlier this month Salon reported that on Feb. 15, shortly after returning from Fort Irwin to Fort Benning, 75 injured soldiers from the 3rd Brigade lined up for screenings at the troop medical clinic. Some of the soldiers there that day described cursory meetings with a division surgeon — meetings designed to downgrade their health problems, the soldiers said, so that they could be deployed to the war zone. Records for some of those soldiers show doctors had previously concluded that those soldiers could not wear body armor because of serious skeletal and other injuries.
A military official knowledgeable about the training in California in January and the medical processing of the injured soldiers at Fort Benning in February told Salon that commanders were taking desperate actions to meet an accelerated deployment schedule dictated by President Bush’s so-called surge plan for securing Baghdad. “None of this would have happened if we had just slowed down a little bit,” the military official said. “A lot of people were under a lot of pressure at that time.”
In an interview for the Salon report earlier this month, Col. Wayne W. Grigsby Jr., the commander of the 3rd Brigade, did not dispute that injured troops were being deployed, but insisted they would be put in safe noncombat jobs once they were in Iraq.
Some of those soldiers have since been deployed, while others fought orders to go to Iraq. Jenkins, with the bad back, even appealed his case to the Army surgeon general. Three days after he was quoted in the Salon report, Jenkins received official word through his chain of command that he would not be going to Iraq. Smith, the soldier with sleep apnea and narcolepsy, who was also quoted in the Salon report, also had his deployment orders dropped by the Army in mid-March.
Jenkins said the disregard for soldiers’ health motivated him to speak out, despite his fears that as an active-duty soldier he could suffer reprisal from superiors. “I am a guy who has been in the Army for 21 years,” he said. “For me to speak about this — and risk everything — then there has got to be a problem. There has got to be an issue here.”
Pete Geren, the acting Army secretary, told a Senate panel on March 14 that the Army would investigate the injured soldiers’ claims that their medical records were modified at Fort Benning in February in order for them to be sent to Iraq. House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., has asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The Army inspector general has also launched a probe. It remains unclear if any of those probes will also look into injured soldiers’ being sent to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in January.
Experts say there is little doubt that military readiness has diminished with the strain of the Iraq war. But the Army says the problem is limited to units recuperating in the United States, and that by shifting around troops and equipment, brigades going to Iraq are in tip-top shape. “Today’s deployed soldiers are the best-trained, best-equipped and best-led we have ever sent into combat,” Army vice chief of staff Gen. Richard Cody told a House Armed Services Committee panel March 13. “However, we’ve done this — after five years of combat — we’ve done this at the expense of our non-deployed forces,” he admitted. “We do have shortages with the non-deployed forces.” The New York Times reported on March 20 that of the 20 Army brigades not currently deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, only one has enough equipment or soldiers to be sent quickly into combat.
Indeed, there are indications that the problems go beyond Fort Benning. When Skelton, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote to the GAO asking for an investigation into the deployment of injured troops to Iraq, he added in that letter that “the committee has received a number of phone calls and letters from concerned service members and their families, including similar allegations that injured and wounded service members are being deployed into combat despite their injuries.”
“My back was broken while I was in the military, I now have a ruptured/bulging discs in my lumbar spine,” one distressed soldier wrote to Salon in an e-mail earlier this month. She said she had been in the process of a medical review that would end her service in the Army. But upon her return from the National Training Center in California, she claimed, doctors at Fort Benning “changed my profile and made me deployable.” She pleaded for help in bringing attention to her case, after frantically seeking help through military and congressional channels.
“If anyone has the ability to help … PLEASE do so,” she wrote. “I am heading to Kuwait tomorrow where I will then go to Baghdad with my unit.”
Marking Up The Reconstruction: DynCorp’s Partner in Iraqi Police Training
David Phinney
Apr 9 2007
One day, not so long ago, the US State Department handpicked Texas-based DynCorp for an $800-million contract to train over 100,000 Iraqi police officers, a top-priority project of the Bush administration’s effort to stabilize the war-torn country and strengthen the fragile civilian government there. But State Department wanted a contractor with strong ties in Iraq, so DynCorp obligingly teamed up in 2004 with a company known as Corporate Bank Financial Service, a Washington-based business better known as The Sandi Group.
It seemed to have the makings of a winning partnership. DynCorp had a track record for building police forces in Haiti, Bosnia and other trouble spots around the Globe for the State Department since the early 1990s, so it easily won the contract with little competition and supplied 700 or so trainers largely recruited from police departments in the United States and other coalition allies.
The Sandi Group, run by Rubar Sandi, an Iraqi who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, would perform the logistics, provide security, hire interpreters, and perform other services as required. The 54-year-old Sandi, a member of a wealthy Kurdish family, had the well-established political and social connections in Iraq. Those connections and his entrepreneurial know-how served Sandi very well, not only in Iraq, but at the State Department where he had been an influential advisor to the “Future of Iraq Project”, a pre-war planning effort.
After the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Sandi immediately opened shop in Iraq where he took control of major Baghdad hotels, a newspaper, and several banks. The one-time Kurdish resistance fighter also recruited an armed private security force with a payroll of 7,500, laid plans for establishing an Iraqi airline, and positioned himself for US-administered contracts in the reconstruction effort. Those contracts included dozens with DynCorp for construction projects, leases on posh hotels, security, logistics and other support services as needed.
“Could You Determine Any Value Added?”
All the while, The Sandi Group kept a low profile in Washington until its affiliate, Corporate Bank, was singled out in a February 7 Congressional hearing for its controversial handling of a multimillion-dollar DynCorp contract to build an Iraqi police training camp in Baghdad near parade grounds of Adnan Palace, a once luxurious domed castle used by Saddam Hussein’s family.
Two weeks after receiving the $55.1-million DynCorp contract in August 15, 2004, Sandi’s Corporate Bank hired an Italian company, Cogim SpA, for $47.1 million to do all the work in the contract, which included providing 1,048 living trailers and building an Olympic-sized swimming pool. On paper, the deal had the look of an effortless $8-million profit for Sandi at the US taxpayers expense — just for being the middleman and flipping the contract to Cogim.
A skeptical Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., laid out the arrangement before the crowded House congressional hearing teeming with scribbling reporters and TV cameras.
“The problem is the tiering of all these contracts. You have a general contractor, a subcontractor and a sub-subcontractor and a sub-sub-sub contractor,” Lynch noted to witness Stuart Bowen, the leading investigator of the US-funded reconstruction efforts in Iraq.
Chances are there could be plenty of sub-sub-sub-subs in the final mix, but Lynch was especially keen on Corporate Bank’s $8 million handling fee. His eyes widened with the puzzled look of a straight man setting up the punch line: “I just want to understand, is that right?”
Bowen didn’t crack a smile. Sitting with hands calmly folded on the witness desk during his testimony before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, the special inspector general for Iraq Reconstruction cascaded into what is now a familiar, but still opaque, explanation for deciphering the contracting chaos in Iraq. The mess squandered $10 billion in taxpayer money through sloppy bookkeeping, job delays, bloated expenses and work that was paid for, but never performed.
“Quality assurance,” Bowen said, “expects that the contractor execute a quality control program over his subcontractors and the lack of visibility by the operational overseer of the government doing the program results in the loss of visibility and cost control.”
(Translation: The government tossed cost control and job performance issues to DynCorp. The government didn’t have a clue to what was going on except for what it learned from DynCorp.)
Lynch reframed his question about the $8 million flip: “Could you determine any value added?”
“No we didn’t,” Bowen said, but stopped short of singling out a possible bad guy.
Someone using the screen name “Nancy Pelosi” instantly uploaded the C-SPAN video of Bowen’s testimony on to youtube.com, but Lynch may have had his curiosity more satisfied by catching a short cab ride to The Sandi Group’s elegant office just 1 ½ miles away on Connecticut Avenue in the fashionable DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC.
After passing a wall-sized collage of folded dollar bills portraying an American flag near the front door, Lynch may have found a digital trail littered with dozens of contracts and agreements of Sandi’s work for Dyncorp with apparently even larger paper profits.
‘Corporate Stuff’: Cash Margins and Profit
According to Adnan Palace agreements leaked out on the Internet more than a year ago, Sandi indeed planned to make $8 million on the Adnan Palace while giving the work to Cogim. That was the charge to DynCorp an — 11 percent for general administration costs, known as G&A, and 6 percent profit for an exact total of just over $8 million. The contracts between DynCorp and Corporate Bank and Corporate Bank and Cogim read almost exactly the same. An administrative assistant sitting at a computer could have easily employed a copy-and-paste approach and just replaced a few words with “Cogim.”
Tim Crawley, who left DynCorp as vice president of contracting last June to join The Sandi Group as executive vice president and general manager of The Sandi Group, defends the standard G&A and profit included in the contract as an industry standard. The G&A reimburses the back office administration; it keeps the office lights on, pays for health insurance, payroll systems, legal advice, business development, “thought processes” and operational “guidance.”
“There’s a lot of confusion about this,” he said. “It pays for the corporate stuff.”
Meanwhile, the profit is, well, profit. “Six percent is pretty low, especially in Iraq,” he said, before concluding his interview at The Sandi Group’s office. “There was a large cash outlay and it took 90 days from the first notice to proceed to the time of reimbursement.”
Crawley did not comment on a dozen other draft contracts, represented by sources the actual ones. Agreements that reflect a business practice that Sandi may have repeated again and again when tasked with building almost 30 police camps and providing other services to DynCorp. By all appearances, those agreements could have left Sandi with a hefty cash margin sometimes reaching 50 percent or more above the sum that DynCorp agreed to pay.
Here’s how those agreements apparently worked: Sandi’s Corporate Bank would first sign task orders with DynCorp, include charges for profit and administration costs, and then pass them off to a handful of construction companies from Baghdad, Jordan, Turkey and Italy for much less money. The contracts read very much the same as those between DynCorp and Corporate Bank except for an opening paragraph. Sandi supplied the “guidance” while the subcontractor would “direct the project.”
And so, according to the draft agreements, when DynCorp hired Sandi’s Corporate Bank in October 2004 to build a regional camp with 24 living trailers at Ad Diwaniyah, Corporate Bank billed $1,194,197. One month later, Corporate Bank then hired the Hozan General Construction Company of Baghdad for $605,000 to do the work. Similarly, DynCorp agreed to pay $833,680 for a 16-trailer camp at Al Kut. Corporate Bank then hired Hozan for $388,000. In Karbala, DynCorp agreed to pay $809,520. Corporate Bank turned to Hozan for $388,000. In effect, one dollar of reconstruction money became $50 cents…with the final subs hiring subs to do the work. But it would appear that the first contractor in line gets the lion share of profit and benefit. If this tiny shaft of light into the world of reconstruction is typical then it would be American corporations, not Iraqis who are the major beneficiaries of America’s largesse.
The Sandi Group and DynCorp both chose not to repeated inquiries about the amounts being charged for the camp building, nor did representatives comment on whether or not the companies viewed the charges as “fair and reasonable,” an industry standard in government contracting laid out in sometimes ambiguous federal procurement regulations.
Once DynCorp paid Corporate Bank for its services, it would then charge the State Department – with another 4 percent to 6 percent markup for handling and management.
Louis Brown, who ran Sandi’s Iraq operation until autumn 2005 but is now vice president of special projects, took over where Crawley left off in discussing the arrangement. He explained that Sandi’s extra padding was necessary because the subcontractors hired by Corporate Bank would regularly fail to perform as Sandi had hoped. “The government wanted DynCorp to build product as if it were in the United States,” he said. “We couldn’t just go out to Home Depot.”
But there is no lack of sand in Iraq. And DynCorp requested Sandi to provide filled burlap sandbags or a “reasonable substitute” to fortify most of its police camps, including a 17-trailer installation in the town of Najaf, a hotbed of Shiite insurgency and bombings and the site of one of Islam’s holiest shrines. Sandi determined that 24,990 sandbags were needed at $1.89 a piece, according to a December 23, 2004 agreement.
DynCorp agreed to pay $67,397 for the work. The tab included, among other things, a $10,050 charge for an onsite project manager to guide the sandbagging with the proviso: “The contractor shall have a superintendent on site at all times during the course of work.”
Sandi then hired an Iraqi company, Al-Kahirat, to do the work. The $23,000 contract with Al-Kahirat reads very much the same as the one DynCorp agreed to, including the requirement that Al-Kahirat “shall have a superintendent on site at all times during the course of work.”
Why did Sandi plan on paying itself more than $44,000 while hiring Al-Kahirat for $23,000 to perform the actual work? To cover unforeseen contingencies, Brown explains. At Najaf, the sandbags turned out to be useless, he said. The job had to be redone. But that was after contracts had been written.
Sandi itemized the exact same sandbagging fee at other camps it built for DynCorp.
“They Liked Staying There While Throwing Darts and Drinking Beer.”
The threat of roadside bombs and insurgency threats also frequently delayed projects, said Brown, a towering man who once worked as a security adviser to high-level government officials and celebrities such as James Brown, Janet Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson before joining Sandi in Iraq.
Jobs scheduled to be completed in 45 days could drag out to 155 days, Brown recalls, and Sandi provided security details at its own expense to travel with subcontractors and convoys carrying materials to work sites located at US military camps. One American security supervisor for low-paid Iraqi guards could cost $450 to $700 a run, Brown said.
For all of its Iraq contracts, which include a variety of work ranging from perimeter security of hotels operated by Sandi to the guarding of U.S. government agencies and contractors to intelligence gathering, Sandi’s security force, which has numbered as many as 7,500, has paid a heavy price. The company has suffered 186 casualties, including one American. The US Department of Labor recently fined Sandi $40,000 for not reporting the deaths as part of a US-required insurance program known as the Defense Base Act, Brown acknowledged.
The most savage deaths occurred in December 2004 when eight Iraqi security guards were executed after being kidnapped west of Baghdad. The event cast a chill of fear among Sandi’s subcontractors.
Any news of a bomb or mortar attack around Baghdad put the subcontractors on edge. Workers with the Italian firm, Cogim, refused to leave their villa, according to Donald Vance, a Navy veteran from Chicago who worked as a Sandi security supervisor in 2004 and 2005. “They would tell us we couldn’t make them go out even for a 30-minute ride,” Vance said. “I would be at meetings and just sit back and laugh. They were afraid of being kidnapped.”
Sandi provided subcontractors with the best body armor and factory armored GMC sports utility vehicles available. Vance assured them they would be safe, but the Cogim team frequently wouldn’t budge. “They had everything they needed in their villa,” Vance claimed. “They liked staying there while throwing darts and drinking beer.”
Even worse, at some of the project sites, supervisors were nowhere to be found and workers for the subcontractors preferred spending time enjoying the stores, food courts, recreational facilities and other amenities at the military camps.
“I remember going to Camp Victory and there was no equipment or staff on the project site,” Vance said. “We would take a Sandi supervisor out and he would blow a gasket. People weren’t working. It was 130 degree heat. Everyone preferred jumping into the pool.”
Cogim declined to comment on its work for Corporate Bank in Iraq. In 2005 several top executives with Cogim were investigated and charged for bribes paid to UN officials on deals to provide prefabricated building to peacekeeping missions unrelated to Iraq. Cogim’s name no longer appears on the U.N. vendors’ list as an approved supplier. The relationship beween DynCorp, Corporate Bank and Cogim is also featured in a SIGIR report06_029.pdf
‘All Bad’
Brian Evancho, a 14-year Marine veteran from western New York who worked in aviation quality assurance, had a job as a Sandi project supervisor in Iraq for seven months after working other Iraq projects with the US Army Corps of Engineers. A few of Sandi’s camps worked out well. Others had serious problems, Evancho recalled during an interview last year before returning to Iraq for another contractor.
Iraqi police camps in Bakubah, Victory, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Najaf “were all bad,” he said. “Sandi was overcharging and didn’t perform. I’d say half of the reason for the nonperformance by the sub-contractors was because they didn’t get paid so they didn’t show up for work.”
One project at Camp Diamond Back in the northern Iraq town of Mosul apparently ran through three subcontractors before it was finished. DynCorp apparently agreed to pay $2,157,823 for a camp that included 52 living containers and support structures along with 85,000 sandbags itemized at $160,650.
“Mosul should have cost $600,000 to build,” Evancho said, suggesting that such a sum would include a “reasonable profit” of 28 percent.
The camp took a year to finish and when a State Department representative looked the place over, “he was laughing.” Evancho said that the air conditioning didn’t work, the furniture was “corrugated garbage” from China, and the mattresses were made of foam so thin that they “wouldn’t last two weeks” if an adult slept on them.
As far as the Adnan Palace police camp is concerned, the State Department dropped the project after spending $43.8 million for the uncompleted camp. But while that project was planned right under the nose of government contract officers, the dozens of camps DynCorp built with Sandi in Iraq didn’t come close to that degree of government “visibility” or scrutiny.
Of the seven major regional training camps costing a total of $17.9 million, none were visited by the State Department. The government contracting officer who authorized the spending on the projects told Bowen’s investigators that he “never visited the sites” because of security concerns and that he relied on reports from others regarding the status of the camps.
The inspector general’s investigators intend to visit the other police camps sometime in the future, says the report. Perhaps the visibility will be better.
Meanwhile, DynCorp and Sandi parted ways last August. The two will no longer be pursuing further construction projects together, said DynCorp’s spokesman, Greg Lagana. “The company reviewed its strategic partnerships and it was determined the company could perform the work on its own.”
David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS.
“Shallow Throat”: Playing Chicken on the Big Stage
Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
Apr 4 2007
I thought “Shallow Throat” would be positively giddy, given how the Administration’s disastrous war policies and ongoing scandals are painting CheneyBush into a tighter and tighter political corner.
But the high-ranking GOP mole inside the corridors of federal power looked anything but exultant as we walked at fast pace around the track at a local Virginia park.
“What’s going on?” I asked ST, who was wearing a new wig and large dark shades. “Gonzales’ days are waning at DOJ, the number two guy at Interior is heading for the clink, the public overwhelmingly has turned against the war in Iraq, Libby was convicted for the lies he told about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the Abramoff corruption story continues giving, etc. etc. Am I missing something here? Where’s the negative in all this?”
Per usual, Shallow Throat looked at me like I was a dummy. “Sure, the Bush bunker crew are cornered and hassled and in potential legal trouble. But you ‘progressives’ don’t see what’s really going on. The Bush cabal still, and for nearly two years more will, control the Defense and Justice Departments and much of the court structure, including the Supreme Court. The damage they can do is humongous.
“But they’re wild-eyed in their rush to escape possible criminal indictments or impeachment. The Bush approval numbers are so low, everything looks up to them. They’re in so much trouble, they feel they have nothing to lose. Cornered, wounded animals are always at their most dangerous, since threatening and attacking is about all they have left to save themselves. And that’s what they’re doing now.”
ROVE: THE ATTACK MEISTER
“But they’re on the defensive,” I countered. “They are increasingly dysfunctional in the White House these days.”
“That’s what I mean,” Shallow Throat roared. “After six years, you still forget that Karl Rove always attacks when they’re most vulnerable, usually aimed at the perceived strengths of his opponents.
“I’ll get to how this translates to Iraq and Iran in a moment. But for now, let’s just talk about the U.S. Attorneys scandal.
“So follow this out. The Democrats have been gaining political traction by pointing out the election fraud that took place in 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006: easily manipulated computer-voting machines, inflated tallies, ballots gone missing, GOP-friendly corporations counting the votes, hundreds of thousands of minority voters stricken from the rolls, key states’ returns altered, etc. etc. So Rove is seeming to grab the same issue. That’s partially what the U.S. Attorneys scandal is all about: claiming that these U.S. Attorneys were forced out because they weren’t moving on ‘vote fraud’ charges. They–”
“Hang on,” I interrupted. “I’m confused here. How does the Administration’s ‘vote fraud’ issue differ from the Democrats’ ‘election fraud’ issue?”
THE KEY IS THE 2008 ELECTION
“Don’t go for the spin moves, Bernie, stay focused on the ball,” said Shallow Throat. “The term ‘vote fraud,’ which would seem to be aimed at alleged electoral hanky-panky, for Rove&Co. really refers to creating electoral conditions that favor Republicans and diminish Democrat turnout. GOP operatives claim that huge hordes of ineligible individuals (mainly poor and minorities) cheat in order to vote, and their aim is to make it harder for those groups, who tend to vote Democratic, to cast their ballots. Rove wants U.S. attorneys to start bringing cases against Democrat voter-registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns, so that by November 2008, the GOP will have a leg up in key states and districts.
“And, per usual when you’re dealing with Rove-initiated dirty tricks, it doesn’t matter that there is little or no truth to the ‘vote-fraud’ charges. You indict somebody, you make it sound like the Democrats are engaged in massive illegal actions, you pound that big-lie technique for months leading up to the election — and, voila!, the Dems are tied up in court cases and many voters who might otherwise vote Democrat start backing away from them and/or Democrat leaders have to divert their funds and energies away from their usual campaigns.
“Take a good look at which U.S. Attorneys were fired. In the main, they come from key, toss-up states for the 2008 election.”
“Let me get this straight,” I averred. “You’re saying that for two years at least, the Bush Administration, realizing their potential electoral and criminal vulnerabilities, have been working on ways to protect themselves in the legal system and that the firing of the U.S. Attorneys and replacing them with ‘loyal Bushies’ (to use the term in an email to Rove) was a key part of the strategy?”
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE ROT
“You finally got it. Wake up and smell the rot, my friend. They’ve packed the appelate courts, and the Supreme Court, with their own ideologically-friendly judges. And, by removing U.S. Attorneys who won’t question the Bush party line they accomplish at least two things: 1. provide a clear warning to other U.S. Attorneys they’ve left in place to bedevil the Democrats and lay off Republican miscreants or go look elsewhere for employment, and 2. put their brand of U.S. Attorneys in position in key states that could well determine the 2008 winner, thus affecting Democrat turnout and the issue of potential presidential pardons.
“The way you tell it,” I responded, “you make the whole thing sound so sordid and partisan. Isn’t it possible that the conspiracy tale you’re weaving is way overdrawn? And, by the way, you promised you’d talk about Iraq along the way here.”
“Will do. But the point here is that you don’t know these guys the way I do,” Shallow Throat said. “I work with them every day and can confirm that they care about nothing but hanging on to their own power, and how they can use it for their own personal, financial or ideological ends.
“Look at how they totally FUBARed Iraq, using it as a corporate money-drain, putting inexperienced and incompetent political hacks into positions of great power in the Occupation regime. Look at how, in violation of the Hatch Act, they used the General Services Administration to aid Republican Party candidates. Look at how, so that they wouldn’t have to turn over White House phone and email records to the investigating Democrat committees, they’ve been using the Republican National Committee email address and their personal Blackberries.
“In short, the situation is actually much worse than appears on the surface. We’re talking about a de facto criminal enterprise here, a political mob approach to governance. And nothing will change at the top until we get Cheney and Bush and Rove and the rest of the White House bunker crew out of there and, one can hope, into prison suits so that the next administration, Republican or Democrat, will never try anything like that again.”
PURGING TO DISASTER IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
“So, the obvious question,” I said: “Is Gonzales political road kill? Is he out of there?”
“They are resisting pushing him out with all their might,” said Shallow Throat. “He’s the ultimate insider, and knows where all the bodies are buried, so to speak. They’re trying to protect him — and thus themselves — by tossing his subordinates overboard as sacrificial lambs, whoever it takes to stanch the hemorraging.
“But, if the purging scandal of the U.S. Attorneys gets really desperate, Gonzo will go, keep his mouth shut, take the rap, get sentenced, and get pardoned.”
“SURGING” TO DISASTER IN IRAQ & IRAN
“Can we finally get to the Middle East now? You suggested earlier that the CheneyBush Administration was flailing about dangerously in international adventures there that are tied in to their political survival strategy as well. Can you say more about that?”
“Surely you see what’s going on. Internationally, the Administration escalates the war in Iraq, and is preparing to attack Iran. All this while the Democrats pass timid resolutions about bringing the troops home, with no real teeth to them, the effect of which is to keep those soldiers there another year or more. The Dems win symbolic victories, but the war expands in Iraq and is about to expand all over the Middle East with imminent U.S./Israel moves on Iran.”
“But the Dems have passed bills that could cut off funds for the Iraq war,” I said. “That action has teeth to it. What about that?”
“We shall see what bill finally emerges from the Senate and House conference. My guess is that a lot of those teeth will go missing in the process, as the Dems don’t want to be blamed for ‘not supporting the troops’ sent to Iraq for the ’surge’. And, after removing mention of Iran from their funding bill, they have yet to address the pending Iran attack at all.”
PIN THE TAIL ON THE DONKEYS
“The saddest aspect of that ’surge’ policy in Iraq,” Shallow Throat continued, “is that those in the inner White House circle are fully aware that it probably won’t work. But the underlying motivation is to postpone the inevitable until after the November 2008 election. If there’s going to be a defeat, it will not be on this administration’s watch. If the Democrats win in 2008, let them clean up our mess and take the blame for the defeat — that’s the general idea.
“Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld placed all their chips on Iraq, conquering and then supposedly converting that pivot-country to a demonstration-model for the rest of the oil-rich Middle East. They’ve got huge personal and political investments in their plan not failing, so they continue dreaming and fantasizing that they can stay there for a good number of years and emerge with something they can call a ‘victory.’ But, deep down, they realize they’ve messed it up real bad. So now it’s blame time: pin the defeat-tail on the donkeys (the Democrats), Iraqis, the Iranians, anybody but themselves.
“The problem is, of course, that the American people have awakened from their political slumber, as they demonstrated in the election of November 2006, and have awarded responsibility for the Iraq disaster right where it belongs: on the CheneyBush Administration and their GOP lackeys in the Congress.”
THE CRAZINESS OF ATTACKING IRAN
“And what about attacking Iran?,” I asked. “Surely the Administration is not that lunatic.”
“Well, you and I thought much the same before Bush launched ’shock&awe’ in 2003, didn’t we? The U.S. and Israel and Brits are trying to provoke the Iranians into some sort of inflammatory military action, so that they can respond with overwhelming firepower. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the Brits deliberately sent their sailors into Iranian waters in order to create an eventual causus belli. The Iranians, horribile dictu, seem to have taken the bait and are behaving as if they’re hell-bent on provoking the U.S., E.U., U.N., Brits, Israelis, everyone into taking extreme sanction action against them, and likely military action as well. The U.S. response would probably be an intense bombing campaign to set back Iran’s fledgling nuclear research and conventional arms-building programs for at least a decade or more. Some Russian military sources have even supplied a date for the coming attack: around April 6th.
“Giant games of chicken are being played out here. The U.S. is guessing that the Iranians will back off to avoid having their country’s military/industrial infrastructure destroyed. The Iranians are betting that the U.S., its military stretched so thin in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere around the globe, won’t dare attack it or, if those bombing raids come, won’t be supported by America’s usual allies.
“Either way, if the U.S. attacks, Iran becomes a popular martyr in the Greater Middle East, the one nation that stood up to the big American bully and its one ally in the region, Israel. And there may be immense ramifications inside Iraq as well: the majority Shia population could well rise up en masse against the American occupiers to help defend Shia Iran.
“Yes, you would think that not even the CheneyBush Administration would be crazy enough to launch yet another war, when Afghanistan is re-exploding and Iraq is an ongoing disaster. But Bush probably would go for it, hoping that the American public would rally behind the ‘commander-in-chief’ during ‘wartime,’ giving him enough political wiggle room to avoid the impeachment noose dangling over his head.
“It’s going to be an extremely tense and interesting next few months. I’ll see you down the line and let you know what it feels like from the inside of this Administration. Right now, it’s just scary.”
And with that, Shallow Throat jogged around the track and out the exit on the other side. I had to sit down, my knees were wobbling so much.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, who has had numerous conversations with “Shallow Throat” ( www.crisispapers.org/weinerpubs.htm#shallow) over the past five years, has taught at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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April 9th, 2007