That would be US — arming both sides of the Iraqi conflict, embracing those who will eventually fight us like we did Osama in Afghanistan, Saddam in the early years — and cooperating on covert levels with monsters. Here are two reads that prove how fair and balanced we are, in that supremely dark and cynical manner we adopted during the Cold War. This is certainly not the first time we’ve played one side against another, armed an “enemy,” or gotten into bed with thugs — but this time, it’s Bush doing it; which should tell any thinking person that these projects will backfire, go combust, and create the maximum amount of mayhem possible. That’s his trademark in the world — the Little Prince of Chaos.
Just in case you thought all that “democracy” talk was a real goal … or that the Cabal wasn’t seeking global power just for the sheer joy of it — cozying up with the Sunni’s and Sudan, the reads.
Jude
U.S. Arming Sunnis in Iraq to Battle Old Qaeda Allies
JOHN F. BURNS and ALISSA J. RUBIN, New York Times
June 11, 2007
BAGHDAD — With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.
American commanders say they have successfully tested the strategy in Anbar Province west of Baghdad and have held talks with Sunni groups in at least four areas of central and north-central Iraq where the insurgency has been strong. In some cases, the American commanders say, the Sunni groups are suspected of involvement in past attacks on American troops or of having links to such groups. Some of these groups, they say, have been provided, usually through Iraqi military units allied with the Americans, with arms, ammunition, cash, fuel and supplies.
American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units.
Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.
But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans’ arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more than $15 billion in building up Iraq’s army and police force, whose manpower of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the Americans themselves.
American field commanders met this month in Baghdad with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, to discuss the conditions Sunni groups would have to meet to win American assistance. Senior officers who attended the meeting said that General Petraeus and the operational commander who is the second-ranking American officer here, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, gave cautious approval to field commanders to negotiate with Sunni groups in their areas.
One commander who attended the meeting said that despite the risks in arming groups that have until now fought against the Americans, the potential gains against Al Qaeda were too great to be missed. He said the strategy held out the prospect of finally driving a wedge between two wings of the Sunni insurgency that had previously worked in a devastating alliance — die-hard loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s formerly dominant Baath Party, and Islamic militants belonging to a constellation of groups linked to Al Qaeda.
Even if only partly successful, the officer said, the strategy could do as much or more to stabilize Iraq, and to speed American troops on their way home, as the increase in troops ordered by President Bush late last year, which has thrown nearly 30,000 additional American troops into the war but failed so far to fulfill the aim of bringing enhanced stability to Baghdad. An initial decline in sectarian killings in Baghdad in the first two months of the troop buildup has reversed, with growing numbers of bodies showing up each day in the capital. Suicide bombings have dipped in Baghdad but increased elsewhere, as Qaeda groups, confronted with great American troop numbers, have shifted their operations elsewhere.
The strategy of arming Sunni groups was first tested earlier this year in Anbar Province, the desert hinterland west of Baghdad, and attacks on American troops plunged after tribal sheiks, angered by Qaeda strikes that killed large numbers of Sunni civilians, recruited thousands of men to join government security forces and the tribal police. With Qaeda groups quitting the province for Sunni havens elsewhere, Anbar has lost its long-held reputation as the most dangerous place in Iraq for American troops.
Now, the Americans are testing the “Anbar model” across wide areas of Sunni-dominated Iraq. The areas include parts of Baghdad, notably the Sunni stronghold of Amiriya, a district that flanks the highway leading to Baghdad’s international airport; the area south of the capital in Babil province known as the Triangle of Death, site of an ambush in which four American soldiers were killed last month and three others abducted, one of whose bodies was found in the Euphrates; Diyala Province north and east of Baghdad, an area of lush palm groves and orchards which has replaced Anbar as Al Qaeda’s main sanctuary in Iraq; and Salahuddin Province, also north of Baghdad, the home area of Saddam Hussein.
Although the American engagement with the Sunni groups has brought some early successes against Al Qaeda, particularly in Anbar, many of the problems that hampered earlier American efforts to reach out to insurgents remain unchanged. American commanders say the Sunni groups they are negotiating with show few signs of wanting to work with the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. For their part, Shiite leaders are deeply suspicious of any American move to co-opt Sunni groups that are wedded to a return to Sunni political dominance.
With the agreement to arm some Sunni groups, the Americans also appear to have made a tacit recognition that earlier demands for the disarming of Shiite militia groups are politically unachievable for now given the refusal of powerful Shiite political parties to shed their armed wings. In effect, the Americans seem to have concluded that as long as the Shiites maintain their militias, Shiite leaders are in a poor position to protest the arming of Sunni groups whose activities will be under close American scrutiny.
But officials of Mr. Maliki’s government have placed strict limits on the Sunni groups they are willing to countenance as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda. One leading Shiite politician, Sheik Khalik al-Atiyah, the deputy Parliament speaker, said in a recent interview that he would rule out any discussion of an amnesty for Sunni Arab insurgents, even those who commit to fighting Al Qaeda. Similarly, many American commanders oppose rewarding Sunni Arab groups who have been responsible, even tangentially, for any of the more than 29,000 American casualties in the war, including more than 3,500 deaths. Equally daunting for American commanders is the risk that Sunni groups receiving American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government forces.
Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division and leader of an American task force fighting in a wide area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers immediately south of Baghdad, said at a briefing for reporters on Sunday that no American support would be given to any Sunni group that had attacked Americans. If the Americans negotiating with Sunni groups in his area had “specific information” that the group or any of its members had killed Americans, he said, “The negotiation is going to go like this: ‘You’re under arrest, and you’re going with me.’ I’m not going to go out and negotiate with folks who have American blood on their hands.”
One of the conditions set by the American commanders who met in Baghdad was that any group receiving weapons must submit its fighters for biometric tests that would include taking fingerprints and retinal scans. The American conditions, senior officers said, also include registering the serial numbers of all weapons, steps the Americans believe will help in tracing fighters who use the weapons in attacks against American or Iraqi troops. The fighters who have received American backing in the Amiriya district of Baghdad were required to undergo the tests, the officers said.
The requirement that no support be given to insurgent groups that have attacked Americans appeared to have been set aside or loosely enforced in negotiations with the Sunni groups elsewhere, including Amiriya, where American units that have supported Sunni groups fighting to oust Al Qaeda have told reporters they believe that the Sunni groups include insurgents who had fought the Americans. The Americans have bolstered Sunni groups in Amiriya by empowering them to detain suspected Qaeda fighters and approving ammunition supplies to Sunni fighters from Iraqi Army units.
In Anbar, there have been negotiations with factions from the 1920 Revolution Brigades, a Sunni insurgent group with strong Baathist links that has a history of attacking Americans. In Diyala, insurgents who have joined the Iraqi Army have told reporters that they switched sides after working for the 1920 group. And in an agreement announced by the American command on Sunday, 130 tribal sheiks in Salahuddin met in the provincial capital, Tikrit, to form police units that would “defend” against Al Qaeda.
General Lynch said American commanders would face hard decisions in choosing which groups to support. “This isn’t a black and white place,” he said. “There are good guys and bad guys and there are groups in between,” and separating them was a major challenge. He said some groups that had approached the Americans had made no secret of their enmity.
“They say, ‘We hate you because you are occupiers’ ” he said, ” ‘but we hate Al Qaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more.’ ” Sunni militants refer to Iraq’s Shiites as Persians, a reference to the strong links between Iraqi Shiites and the Shiites who predominate in Iran.
An Iraqi government official who was reached by telephone on Sunday said the government was uncomfortable with the American negotiations with the Sunni groups because they offered no guarantee that the militias would be loyal to anyone other than the American commander in their immediate area. “The government’s aim is to disarm and demobilize the militias in Iraq,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Mr. Maliki. “And we have enough militias in Iraq that we are struggling now to solve the problem. Why are we creating new ones?”
Despite such views, General Lynch said, the Americans believed that Sunni groups offering to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American and Iraqi forces met a basic condition for re-establishing stability in insurgent-hit areas: they had roots in the areas where they operated, and thus held out the prospect of building security from the ground up. He cited areas in Babil Province where there were “no security forces, zero, zilch,” and added: “When you’ve got people who say, ‘I want to protect my neighbors,’ we ought to jump like a duck on a june bug.” ++
Damien Cave and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting.
Sudan is secret partner of U.S.
Khartoum supplies information to the CIA on insurgents in Iraq
Greg Miller and Josh Meyer, the Baltimore Sun
June 11, 2007
Washington — Sudan has secretly worked with the CIA to spy on the insurgency in Iraq - an example of how the United States has continued to cooperate with the Sudanese regime even while condemning its role in the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Darfur.
President Bush has condemned the killings in Darfur as genocide and has imposed sanctions on Sudan’s government. But some critics say the administration has soft-pedaled the sanctions to preserve its extensive intelligence collaboration with Sudan.
The relationship underscores the complex realities of the post-Sept. 11 world, in which the United States has relied heavily on intelligence and military cooperation from countries, including Sudan and Uzbekistan, that are considered pariah states for their records on human rights.
“Intelligence cooperation takes place for a whole lot of reasons,” said a U.S. intelligence official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing intelligence assessments. “It’s not always between people who love each other deeply.”
Sudan has become increasingly valuable to the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks because the Sunni Arab nation is a crossroads for Islamic militants making their way to Iraq and Pakistan.
That steady flow of foreign fighters has provided cover for Sudan’s Mukhabarat intelligence service to insert spies into Iraq, officials said.
“If you’ve got jihadists traveling via Sudan to get into Iraq, there’s a pattern there in and of itself that would not raise suspicion,” said a former high-ranking CIA official familiar with Sudan’s cooperation with the agency. “It creates an opportunity to send Sudanese into that pipeline.”
As a result, Sudan’s spies have often been in better position than the CIA to gather information on al-Qaida’s presence in Iraq, as well as on the activities of other insurgent groups.
Blue eyes no use
“There’s not much that blond-haired, blue-eyed case officers from the United States can do in the entire Middle East, and there’s nothing they can do in Iraq,” said a second former CIA official familiar with Sudan’s cooperation. “Sudanese can go places we don’t go. They’re Arabs. They can wander around.”
The officials declined to say whether the Mukhabarat has sent its own intelligence officers into the country, citing concern over the protection of sources and methods. They said that Sudan has assembled a network of informants in Iraq providing intelligence on the insurgency. Some may have been recruited as they traveled through the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
The U.S.-Sudan relationship goes beyond Iraq. Sudan has helped the United States track the turmoil in Somalia, working to cultivate contacts with militias and Islamic courts in an effort to locate al-Qaida suspects hiding there. Sudan also has provided extensive cooperation in counter-terrorism operations, acting on U.S. requests to detain suspects as they pass through Khartoum.
Sudan gets a number of benefits in return. Its relationship with the CIA has given it an important back channel for communications with the U.S. government. The U.S. has also used this channel to lean on Sudan over the crisis in Darfur and for other issues.
And at a time when Sudan is being condemned in the international community, its counterterrorism work has won precious praise. The U.S. State Department recently issued a report calling Sudan a “strong partner in the war on terror.”
Some critics accuse the Bush administration of being soft on Sudan for fear of jeopardizing the cooperation on counterterrorism. John Prendergast, the former director of African affairs for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, called the latest sanctions announced by Bush last month “window dressing,” designed to appear tough while putting little real pressure on Sudan to halt government-linked Arab militias from killing members of African tribes in Darfur.
“One of the main glass ceilings on real significant action in response to the genocide in Darfur has been our growing relationship with authorities in Khartoum on counterterrorism,” said Prendergast, now with the International Crisis Group. “It is the single biggest contributor to why the gap between rhetoric and action is so large.”
Financial penalties
In an interview, Sudan’s ambassador to the United States, John Ukec Lueth Ukec, suggested that the sanctions could affect the country’s willingness to cooperate on intelligence matters. The steps announced by Bush include banning 31 businesses owned by the Sudanese government from access to the U.S. financial system.
The decision to impose financial penalties “was not a good idea,” Ukec said. “It diminishes our cooperation. And it makes those who are on the extreme side, who do not want cooperation with the United States, stronger.”
But White House and U.S. intelligence officials played down the prospect that the intelligence cooperation would suffer, saying that it is in both countries’ interests.
“The No. 1 consideration in imposing stiffer sanctions is that the Sudanese government hasn’t stopped the violence there and the people continue to suffer,” said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council. “We certainly expect the Sudanese to continue efforts against terrorism because it’s in their own interests, not just ours.”
Sudan has its own interests in following the insurgency because Sudanese extremists and foreign fighters who pass through the country are likely to return and become a potentially destabilizing presence.
Jihadi ‘way station’
Sudan’s lax controls on travel have made it what one official described as a “way station” for jihadists not only from North Africa, but also from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Gulf states.
Some former U.S. intelligence officials said that Sudan’s help in Iraq has been of limited value, in part because the country accounts for a small fraction of the foreign fighters, mainly at lower levels of the insurgency.
“There’s not going to be a Sudanese guy near the top of the al-Qaida in Iraq leadership,” said a former CIA official who operated in Baghdad. “They might have some fighters there but that’s just cannon fodder. They don’t have the trust and the ability to work their way up. The guys leading al-Qaida in Iraq are Iraqis, Jordanians and Saudis.”
But others said that Sudan’s contributions have been significant because Sudanese frequently occupy support positions throughout Arab society - including in the insurgency - giving them access to movements and supply chains.
“Every group needs weapons. Every group needs a meeting place,” said a another former high-ranking CIA official who oversaw intelligence collection in Iraq. “Sudanese could get involved in the support chain or smuggling channels from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”
A State Department official said Sudan had “provided critical information that has helped our counterterrorism efforts around the globe” but noted that there is an inherent conflict in the relationship.
‘Playing both ends’
“They have done things that have saved American lives,” the official said. “But the bottom line is that they are bombing their people out the wazoo in Darfur. Dealing with Sudan, it seems like they are always playing both ends against the middle.”
The CIA declined to discuss any cooperation with Sudan.
“The agency does not, as a rule, comment on relations with foreign intelligence organizations,” said a CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano.
Ukec, the Sudanese ambassador, said “the details of what we do in counterterrorism are not available for discussions.” But he noted that the U.S. State Department “has openly said we are involved in countering terrorism” and that the assistance that Sudan is providing “is not only in Sudan.”
In the mid-1990s, the CIA’s relationship with Sudan was severed. At the time, Sudan was providing safe harbor for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of al-Qaida. But the ties were re-established shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the CIA reopened its station in Khartoum.
Initially, the collaboration focused on information Sudan could provide about al-Qaida’s activities before bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan in 1996, including al-Qaida’s pursuit of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and its many business fronts and associates there.
Since then, Sudan has moved beyond sharing historical information on al-Qaida into taking part in ongoing counterterrorism operations, focusing on areas where its assistance is likely to be most appreciated.
“Iraq,” a U.S. intelligence official said, “is where the intelligence is going to have the most impact on Americans.”
In 2005, the CIA sent an executive jet to Sudan to fly the country’s intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington for meetings with officials at agency headquarters.
Gosh has not returned to Washington since, but a former official said “there are liaison visits every day” between the CIA and Sudan’s Mukhabarat. ++
Greg Miller and Josh Meyer write for the Los Angeles Times.
“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
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
June 12th, 2007
There are high rates of suicide among the deployed troops — we don’t hear about it in MSM, but if you know anyone serving in a war theatre, you know about it. And we’re beginning to get a reflection of what the returning troops will need — we’re unprepared for all that, of course, not only practically by psychically. By changing the qualifiers for military service, we’ll be seeing a much less stable vet returning from the pressure cooker of war — less bright, less motivated, less functional. That sounds harsh because it is … but that was the chance we took when we accepted recruits who had affiliations with gangs, low test scores and run-ins with the law. By any stretch of the imagination, do we think they’ll come home better citizens, more functional humans, than when they left?
The list of casualties on Sunday revealed a change, of sorts — the list, upwards of 30 dead last week, wasn’t primarily teens as is the usual count; it was 30-somethings. That means officers are dying, well-trained and experienced warriors — and that means that it’s gotten bigger and badder over there, that the raw recruits will go leaderless and depend on their own fear and flawed-instincts. Hear about that on the news, did you? Didn’t think so.
See — here’s the thing. The opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is disinterest, dismissal, disdain. Bush talks a good game about honoring our service people, but it’s just that … talk, and it’s cheap. The psychological ploy of “supporting the troops” used to pass Bush’s budget is absurd when faced with the disinterested contempt they receive from the administration. What we supported with that money was not troops — that money will find its way to weaponry, mercenaries, black op’s and profiteers … because the creative accounting of the Bushies make them brothers-in-arms with the Soprano’s.
And I’m tired unto despair of the media and the administration trying to put lipstick on this pig … it’s Hell in Iraq and growing more dangerous in Afghanistan. The sheer arrogance of NOT paying attention to what has become tragedy on so many fronts, and at our hands, will require a karmic payback even a child can see coming.
BushWarII fallout — the soldiers, the press. A collection that reflects what the flag-wavers don’t … won’t … hear. Suicide, PTSD, sexual assault … and the “collateral damage” we don’t pay any attention to, below.
Jude
US veterans ‘high suicide risk’
BBC
US war veterans are twice as likely to kill themselves as ordinary civilians, a study following 320,890 men found.
Researchers compared data between non-veterans and those who had served at some point between 1917 and 1994.
Men who were white, better educated and older than the other men appeared to be at higher risk, as did those with a physical or emotional disability.
Researchers say the findings emphasise the need for mental health care for those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, included men who had served in World War II, the Vietnam war, the Korean War and the Gulf war.
‘Inadequate screening’
It said the rate of suicide among men who had taken military service was 2.13 times higher than those who had never served in the armed forces.
War veterans were also twice as likely to use a firearm to kill themselves, it said.
Disabled veterans, or those who had experienced emotional or psychological trauma during their service were identified as the highest risk group.
Interestingly, overweight veterans were less likely to have killed themselves than those of normal weight, the study found.
Although the research did not include data from men returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, authors said the findings had strong implications for them.
Lead researcher Mark Kaplan, of Portland State University in Oregon, said doctors should “scrutinise veterans for signs of suicidal behaviour or thoughts and, if needed, they should intervene to make sure these patients do not have access to firearms”.
He said in general “there is inadequate mental health screening, and many of the doctors outside the VA (Veterans Affairs) system are not trained to deal with these sorts of problems and don’t have the time to treat them”.
Disability claims soar from Bush’s wars
More than 176,000 vets file
LISA HOFFMAN, Capital Hill Blue
June 12, 2007
Deep in a newly released 300-page report on the benefits system for the nation’s veterans lies a first look at the dimensions of the disabilities the Iraq- and Afghanistan- war injured are suffering.
Through March, more than 176,000 U.S. veterans of those ongoing conflicts had filed claims for disability compensation, according to a report released Thursday by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science.
Some of the most common conditions were tinnitus, or ear ringing (36,000 claims granted); back strain (33,000); problems with ankle motion (16,000) and post-traumatic stress disorder (16,000).
More than 550 troops have become amputees. Almost one-fourth of those suffered the loss of more than one limb. At least 1,100 “war on terror” vets have been treated for blindness or significant visual injuries.
The report also estimates that at least 300,000 U.S. veterans of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom ultimately will be added to the nation’s disability-compensation rolls, which currently number 2.7 million veterans receiving a total of $27 billion a year.
Troops Struggle With Finding Therapists
KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press
Jun 10, 07
WASHINGTON (AP) — Soldiers returning from war are finding it more difficult to get mental health treatment because military insurance is cutting payments to therapists, on top of already low reimbursement rates and a tangle of red tape.
Wait lists now extend for months to see a military doctor and it can takes weeks to find a private therapist willing to take on members of the military. The challenge appears great in rural areas, where many National Guard and Reserve troops and their families live.
To avoid the hassles of Tricare, the military health insurance program, one frustrated therapist opted to provide an hour of therapy time a week to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for free. Barbara Romberg, a clinical psychologist in the Washington, D.C., area, has started a group that encourages other therapists to do the same.
“They’re not going to pay me much in terms of my regular rate anyway,” Romberg said. “So I’m actually feeling positive that I’ve given, rather than feeling frustrated for what I’m going through to get payment.”
Joyce Lindsey, 46, of Troutdale, Ore., sought grief counseling after her husband died in Afghanistan last September. The therapist recommended by her physician would not take Tricare. Lindsey eventually found one on a provider list, but the process took two months.
“It was kind of frustrating,” Lindsey said. “I thought, ‘Am I ever going to find someone to take this?’”
Roughly one-third of returning soldiers seek out mental health counseling in their first year home. They are among the 9.1 million people covered by Tricare, a number that grew by more than 1 million since 2001.
Tricare’s psychological health benefit is “hindered by fragmented rules and policies, inadequate oversight and insufficient reimbursement,” the Defense Department’s mental health task force said last month after reviewing the military’s psychological care system.
The Tricare office that serves Fort Campbell, Ky., and Fort Bragg, N.C. - Army posts with heavy war deployments - told task force members that it routinely fields complaints about the difficulty in locating mental health specialists who accept Tricare.
“Unfortunately, in some of our communities … we are maxed out on the available providers,” said Lois Krysa, the office’s quality manager. “In other areas, the providers just are not willing to sign up to take Tricare assignment, and that is a problem.”
Tricare’s reimbursement rate is tied to Medicare’s, which pays less than civilian employer insurance. The rate for mental health care services fell by 6.4 percent this year as part of an adjustment in reimbursements to certain specialties.
Since 2004, Tricare has sped up payments to encourage more doctors to participate, said Austin Camacho, a Tricare spokesman. In some locations, such as Idaho and Alaska, the Defense Department has also raised rates to attract physicians, he said.
“We are working hard to overcome those challenges,” Camacho said.
Jack Wagoner is a retired military officer and psychologist and psychiatrist in private practice who also works for a Tricare contractor. He told defense mental health board members last December that in general, Tricare pays “considerably lower” than private health insurance plans.
According to data from Tricare’s Medical Benefits and Reimbursement System office, Tricare pays mental health providers as much or more than a corporate plan would pay a therapist for treating a patient - although in some cases it is lower.
There are different coverage plans within Tricare, and the amount paid to providers varies by plan, location, specialty and services performed.
Psychologists who treat active duty troops are paid 66 percent of what Tricare views as the customary rate. So a psychologist eligible for a customary rate of $120 per hour would be paid $79.20 for the hour by Tricare, even if the psychologist’s standard rate is $150 per hour.
Active duty troops use Tricare Prime, a managed-care option maintained by private contractors. Their mental health care is free. Guard and Reserve troops and their families frequently use Tricare Standard, a fee-for-service plan. They pay an annual deductible and 20 percent of the amount Tricare pays the therapist.
John Class, a retired Navy health care administrator who now advocates on health issues for the Military Officers Association of America, said Tricare Prime contractors insist that the lower reimbursement rates has made it tougher to maintain a network of providers.
“We are already starting to see the pinch,” Class said.
In a limited study by Tricare released earlier this year, about two out of three civilian psychiatrists in 20 states were willing to accept Tricare Standard clients among their new patients, the lowest acceptance rate for any specialty.
Any additional cuts in Tricare payouts could mean that “some really good psychologists who specialize in this treatment and are experienced will be seeing less of (military families),” said clinical psychologist Marion Frank, a widow who is president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Gold Star Wives of America, a support group for military widows.
In parts of Montana, some families drive two hours to see a physician of any kind that will take Tricare, said Dorrie Hagan, state family program director for the Montana National Guard.
“When you get away from a city of any size then you start struggling for providers, and they’ll tell you flat out it’s because of the rate of pay,” Hagan said.
We got it wrong, says former torturer
Tim Shipman, Sydney Morning Herald, AU
June 11, 2007
Washington — A FORMER US Army torturer has described the traumatic effects of American interrogation techniques in Iraq - on their victims and on the perpetrators themselves.
Tony Lagouranis said he conducted mock executions, forced men and boys into agonising stress positions, kept suspects awake for weeks on end, used dogs to terrify prisoners and subjected others to hypothermia.
But he said he was deeply scarred by the realisation that what he did had contributed to the plight of US forces in Iraq.
Mr Lagouranis, 37, said he suffered nightmares and anxiety attacks after returning to Chicago, where he works as a pub doorman.
Between January 2004 and January 2005, first at Abu Ghraib prison and then in Mosul, in northern Babil province, he tortured suspects, most of whom he said were innocent. He realised he had entered a moral dungeon when he found himself reading a Holocaust memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from the Nazis.
Mr Lagouranis told The Sunday Telegraph: “When I first got back I had a lot of anxiety. I had a personal crisis because I felt I had done immoral things and I didn’t see a way to cope with that.”
Disturbingly for the British military, which has distanced itself from the worst excesses of Abu Ghraib, Mr Lagouranis says the Americans learnt much of their uncompromising approach from British interrogators.
“We heard about interrogators in Northern Ireland who were successful. Some of our interrogators went on the British interrogation course, which was tough. People wanted to emulate that, but we went too far.”
Mr Lagouranis said he never beat a prisoner. “[But] these coercive techniques - isolation, dogs, sleep deprivation, stress positions, hypothermia - crossed a legal line because they violated the Geneva Conventions,” he said.
His story raises disturbing questions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques. British intelligence has used information supplied under torture in Uzbekistan, and the Government has been accused of turning a blind eye to suspects being abducted and sent to secret prisons where they could be tortured.
Mr Lagouranis, who has written a recently published book about his experiences, said these techniques were developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War because they are successful in breaking a person’s will and spirit. “That doesn’t mean they work in terms of extracting intelligence,” he said. “I didn’t get actionable intelligence using the harsher methods; I got it using manipulation and lying and by promising them things I didn’t deliver on.”
Mr Lagouranis is scathing about a system in which inexperienced young interrogators copied what they saw in Hollywood and on television programs such as 24, whose lead character Jack Bauer regularly uses torture on terrorists.
In the book, Fear Up Harsh - a term for intimidating a prisoner by shouting at him - he says torture has cost the US its moral authority in Iraq by detaining innocent people and treating them badly.
“I could blame [President George] Bush and [former defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, but I would always have to also blame myself,” he wrote.
The campaign group Human Rights Watch and two of Mr Lagouranis’s fellow interrogators confirmed details of his account.
The Silence Of The Bombs
Norman Solomon
June 12, 2007
Three years have passed since most Americans came to the conclusion that the Iraq war was a “mistake.” Reporting the results of a Gallup poll in June 2004, USA Today declared: “It is the first time since Vietnam that a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a mistake.” And public opinion continued to move in an antiwar direction. But such trends easily coexist with a war effort becoming even more horrific.
In Washington, over the past 25 years, top masters of war have preened themselves in the glow of victory after military triumphs in Grenada, Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. During that time, with the exception of the current war in Iraq, the Pentagon’s major aggressive ventures have been cast in a light of virtue rewarded—in sync with the implicit belief that American might makes right.
“The problem after a war is with the victor,” longtime peace activist A. J. Muste observed several decades ago. “He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay.”
The present situation has a different twist along the same lines. The Iraq war drags on, the United States is certainly not the victor—and the U.S. president, a fervent believer in war and violence, still has a lot to prove.
Faith that American might makes right is apt to be especially devout among those who command the world’s most powerful military—and have the option of trying to overcome wartime obstacles by unleashing even more lethal violence.
These days, there’s a lot of talk about seeking a political solution in Iraq—but the Bush administration and the military leaders who answer to the commander in chief are fundamentally engaged in a very different sort of project. Looking ahead, from the White House, the key goal is to seem to be winding down the U.S. war effort while actually reconfiguring massive violence to make it more effective.
Two sets of figures have paramount importance in mainline U.S. media and politics—the number of U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and the number of them dying there. Often taking cues from news media and many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, antiwar groups have tended to buy into the formula, emphasizing those numbers and denouncing them as intolerably high.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis killed by Americans don’t become much of an issue in the realms of U.S. media and politics. News coverage provides the latest tallies of Iraqis who die from “sectarian violence” and “terrorist attacks,” but the reportage rarely discusses how the U.S. occupation has been an ascending catalyst for that carnage. It’s even more rare for the coverage to focus on the magnitude of Iraqi deaths that are direct results of American firepower.
In the United States, many advocates of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq have focused on what the war has been doing to Americans. This approach may seem like political pragmatism and tactical wisdom, but in the long run it’s likely to play into the hands of White House strategists who will try to regain domestic political ground by reducing American losses while boosting the use of high-tech weaponry against Iraqi people.
Every night, I receive an email bulletin that’s called “U.S. Air Force Print News.” It’s one of countless ways the Pentagon does continual outreach to journalists with messages that encourage favorable coverage of what the military is doing. Those messages are filled with stories about the bravery, compassion and towering stature of—in the words of retired Gen. Colin Powell a decade ago— “those wonderful men and women who do such a great job.”
But journalists receive just a trickle of limited information about the bombing runs undertaken by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. The official sources have very little to say about what happens to people at the other end of the bombs. And, overall, U.S. media outlets don’t add much information about the human consequences.
In late May, an important challenge to those media patterns appeared on the website TomDispatch.com (and, in shorter form, in The Nation magazine). The in-depth article—”Did the U.S. Lie about Cluster Bomb Use in Iraq?”—went beyond probing the Pentagon’s extensive use of barbaric cluster bombs in Iraq since the spring of 2003. The piece, by journalist Nick Turse, also shined a bright light on fundamental aspects of a U.S. air war that has seldom seen any light of day in big American media outlets. Turse writes:
Unfortunately, thanks to an utter lack of coverage by the mainstream media, what we don’t know about the air war in Iraq so far outweighs what we do know that anything but the most minimal picture of the nature of destruction from the air in that country simply can’t be painted.
The article raises a key question:
Does the U.S. military keep the numbers of rockets and cannon rounds fired from its planes and helicopters secret because more Iraqi civilians have died due to their use than any other type of weaponry?
Turse, an associate editor and research director of TomDispatch.com, has written for daily newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle . His article pulls no punches about the press as he assesses huge gaps in media coverage of the Iraq air war funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Sadly, he observes,
media reports on the air war are so sparse, with reporting confined largely to reprinting U.S. military handouts and announcements of air strikes, that much of the air war in Iraq remains unknown—although the very fact of an occupying power regularly conducting air strikes in and near population centers should have raised a question or two.
The available evidence is strong that the U.S. air war is escalating—with a surge of resulting casualties among Iraqi civilians. Their suffering and their deaths get very little coverage in the U.S. news media. “Since the Bush administration’s invasion, the American air war has been given remarkably short shrift in the media,” Turse writes. And he cites “indications that the air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children.”
The combination of deceptive officials in the U.S. government and an evasive U.S. press has been a disaster for the flow of information to the American public. Turse points out:
With the military unwilling to tell the truth––or say anything at all, in most cases—and unable to provide the stability necessary for [non-governmental organizations] to operate, it falls to the mainstream media, even at this late stage of the conflict, to begin ferreting out substantive information on the air war. It seems, however, that until reporters begin bypassing official U.S. military pronouncements and locating Iraqi sources, we will remain largely in the dark with little knowledge of what can only be described as the secret U.S. air war in Iraq.
As the summer of 2007 gets underway, the demand to “bring the troops home” is necessary but insufficient. The numbers of Americans fighting and dying in Iraq are not a reliable measure of U.S. culpability in the continuing slaughter.
Norman Solomon is an author whose latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death ,” has been made into a documentary film produced by the Media Education Foundation.
Female War Reporters Hide Sexual Abuse To Continue Getting Assignments
Judith Matloff, Columbia Journalism Review
June 07, 2007
The photographer was a seasoned operator in South Asia. So when she set forth on an assignment in India, she knew how to guard against gropers: dress modestly in jeans secured with a thick belt and take along a male companion. All those preparations failed, however, when an unruly crowd surged and swept away her colleague. She was pushed into a ditch, where several men set upon her, tearing at her clothes and baying for sex. They ripped the buttons off her shirt and set to work on her trousers.
“My first thought was my cameras,” recalls the photographer, who asked to remain anonymous. “Then it was, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be raped.’ ” With her faced pressed into the soil, she couldn’t shout for help, and no one would have heard her anyway above the mob’s taunts. Suddenly a Good Samaritan in the crowd pulled the photographer by the camera straps several yards to the feet of some policemen who had been watching the scene without intervening. They sneered at her exposed chest but escorted her to safety.
Alone in her hotel room that night, the photographer recalls, she cried, thinking, “What a bloody way to make a living.” She didn’t inform her editors, however. “I put myself out there equal to the boys. I didn’t want to be seen in any way as weaker.”
Women have risen to the top of war and foreign reportage. They run bureaus in dodgy places and do jobs that are just as dangerous as those that men do. But there is one area where they differ from the boys — sexual harassment and rape. Female reporters are targets in lawless places where guns are common and punishment rare. Yet the compulsion to be part of the macho club is so fierce that women often don’t tell their bosses. Groping hands and lewd come-ons are stoically accepted as part of the job, especially in places where Western women are viewed as promiscuous. War zones in particular seem to invite unwanted advances, and sometimes the creeps can be the drivers, guards, and even the sources that one depends on to do the job. Often they are drunk. But female journalists tend to grit their teeth and keep on working, unless it gets worse.
Because of the secrecy around sexual assaults, it’s hard to judge their frequency. Yet I know of a dozen such assaults, including one suffered by a man. Eight of the cases involve forced intercourse, mostly in combat zones. The perpetrators included hotel employees, support staff, colleagues and the very people who are paid to guarantee safety — policemen and security guards. None of the victims want to be named. For many women, going public can cause further distress. In the words of an American correspondent who awoke in her Baghdad compound to find her security guard’s head in her lap, “I don’t want it out there, for people to look at me and think, ‘Hmmm. This guy did that to her, yuck.’ I don’t want to be viewed in my worst vulnerability.”
The only attempt to quantify this problem has been a slim survey of female war reporters published two years ago by the International News Safety Institute, based in Brussels. Of the 29 respondents who took part, more than half reported sexual harassment on the job. Two said they had experienced sexual abuse. But even when the abuse is rape, few correspondents tell anyone, even friends. The shame runs so deep, and the fear of being pulled off an assignment, especially in a time of shrinking budgets, is so strong that no one wants intimate violations to resound in a newsroom.
Rodney Pinder, the director of the institute, was struck by how some senior newswomen he approached after the 2005 survey were reluctant to take a stand on rape. “The feedback I got was mainly that women didn’t want to be seen as ’special’ cases for fear that (a) it affected gender equality and (b) it hindered them getting assignments,” he says.
Caroline Neil, who has done safety training with major networks over the past decade, agrees. “The subject has been swept under the carpet. It’s something people don’t like to talk about.”
In the cases that I know of, the journalists did nothing to provoke the attacks; they behaved with utmost propriety, except perhaps for one bikini-clad woman who was raped by a hotel employee while sunbathing on the roof in a conservative Middle Eastern country. The correspondent who was molested by her Iraqi security guard is still puzzling over the fact that he brazenly crept into her room while colleagues slept nearby. “You do everything right, and then something like this happens,” she says. “I never wore tight T-shirts or outrageous clothes. But he knew I didn’t have a tribe that would go after him.”
That guard lost his job, but such punishment is rare. A more typical case is of an award-winning British correspondent who was raped by her translator in Africa. Reporting him to a police force known for committing atrocities seemed like a futile exercise.
Like most foreign correspondents who were assaulted, those women were targets of opportunity. The predators took advantage because they could. Local journalists face the added risk of politically motivated attacks. The Committee to Protect Journalists, for example, cites rape threats against female reporters in Egypt who were seen as government critics. Rebels raped someone I worked with in Angola for her perceived sympathy for the ruling party. In one notorious case in Colombia in 2000, the reporter Jineth Bedoya Lima was kidnapped and gang-raped in what she took as reprisal for her newspaper’s suggestion that a paramilitary group ordered some executions. She is the only colleague I know of who has gone on the record about her rape.
The general reluctance to call attention to the problem creates a vicious cycle whereby editors, who are still typically men, are unaware of the dangers because women don’t bring them up. Survivors of attacks often suffer in lonely silence, robbed of the usual camaraderie that occurs when people are shot or kidnapped. It was an open secret in our Moscow press corps in the 1990s that a young freelancer had been gang-raped by policemen. But given the sexual nature of her injury, no one but the woman’s intimates dared extend sympathies.
Even close calls frequently go unmentioned. In my own case, I never reported to my foreign editor a narrow escape at an airport in Angola in 1995. Two drunken policemen pointing AK-47’s threatened to march a colleague and me into a shack for “some fun.” We got away untouched, so why bring up the matter? I didn’t want my boss to think that my gender was a liability.
Such lack of public discussion might explain why, amazingly, there are no sections on sexual harassment and assault in the leading handbooks on journalistic safety by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists. When one considers the level of detail over protections against other eventualities — get vaccinations, pack dummy wallets, etc. — the oversight is staggering. No one tells women that deodorant can work as well as mace when sprayed in the eyes, for example, or that you can obtain doorknob alarms, or that, in some cultures, you can ward off rapists by claiming to menstruate.
For women seeking security tips, hostile-environment training is the way to go. Yet those short courses also rarely touch upon rape prevention. The BBC, a pioneer in trauma awareness, is the only major news organization that offers special safety instruction for women, taught by women.
Most women recognize that even the most thorough preparation cannot prevent every eventuality. Yet victims of assault say that some training might have helped them make more informed decisions, or at least live with the outcome more easily. A correspondent for a major U.S. newspaper says that for some time she needlessly blamed herself for her rape by a Russian paramilitary policeman. How, she asked herself, had she not anticipated that he would follow her back to the hotel after an interview and force himself into the room? She believes that training “would have relieved me of the guilt that I had done the wrong thing.”
Reprinted from Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2007. © 2007 by Columbia Journalism Review.
“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
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
loans ez homedeductible family interest loanrefinance fannie mae loancredit farm poor for loansloans fast student altenativeloans fast payday cashfast payout loans remortgagesloans day virginia pay faxless in Mapnude pregnantskirt plaidaunts matureslutty momschubby matureusher nudebreast moviescum preteen Map
June 12th, 2007