Report: Air Force lost track of five nuclear missiles
Mike Carney, USA Today
September 05, 2007
Mistakes by U.S. Air Force personnel left five nuclear warheads unaccounted for during a three-hour period on Aug. 30, according to Army Times.
The paper, a fellow Gannett publication, cites anonymous sources who say that five Advanced Cruise Missiles were mistakenly loaded on a B-52 bomber that flew from a base in North Dakota to one in Louisiana. The missiles, set to be decommissioned, should have been removed from the plane. Instead, they were mounted on the bomber’s wings.
“Air Force standards are very exacting when it comes to munitions handling,” Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Ed Thomas says. “The weapons were always in our custody and there was never a danger to the American public.”
The crews that handled the warheads at Minot Air Force Base have been “decertified,” according to the Times.
The paper says the W80-1 warhead has a yield of 5 to 150 kilotons, but quotes experts who say the public wasn’t at risk because of safeguards that should have kept the warheads from detonating in the event of a crash or accidental launch.
CNN says the crew didn’t know the weapons were on the bomber.
Update at 5:33 p.m. ET: The AP now has comment from the Pentagon and writes that the incident was so serious that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were quickly informed and Gates has asked for daily briefings on the Air Force probe. DoD press secretary Geoff Morrell said, however, “At no time was the public in danger.” ++
In Error, B-52 Flew Over U.S. With Nuclear-Armed Missiles
Josh White, Washington Post
Thursday, September 6, 2007
An Air Force B-52 bomber flew across the central United States last week with six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads that were mistakenly attached to the airplane’s wing, defense officials said yesterday.
The Stratofortress bomber, based at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, was transporting a dozen Advanced Cruise Missiles to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on Aug. 30. But crews inadvertently loaded half of them with nuclear warheads attached.
Air Force officials said the warheads were not activated and at no time posed a threat to the public. But a timeline of the episode supplied by the Air Force yesterday to House and Senate lawmakers indicated that the missiles in question sat on a runway in Louisiana for nearly 10 hours before workers noticed that the nuclear warheads were inside.
Military officials also said they were concerned that the warheads were unaccounted for several hours while the missiles were in transit. The missiles never left Air Force control, they said.
The cruise missiles — part of an Air Force fleet of more than 400 of their kind — are being retired and usually would not carry nuclear warheads while being transported. Defense officials said the B-52’s mission last week did not include training runs, so the missiles were never meant to be launched. The cruise missiles have a range of about 2,000 miles and are designed to hit precision targets well behind a potential enemy’s lines.
Two defense officials said it is unclear how stringent safeguards for the handling of nuclear weapons were skirted, allowing the missiles with the warheads to be loaded onto a pylon that was then attached to the underside of the B-52’s wing. Air Force officials said the mistake was a serious breach of rules and that an investigation began immediately.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the panel’s ranking Republican, yesterday jointly called the episode “a matter of grave concern” and, in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, requested an investigation of the incident by the Pentagon’s inspector general.
The aircraft’s pilots and other crew members were unaware that they were carrying nuclear warheads, officials said. “Essentially, this is an issue of a departure from our very exacting standards,” said Lt. Col. Edward Thomas, an Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon, who declined to confirm that nuclear warheads were involved. “The Air Force maintains the highest standards of safety and precision, so any deviation from these well-established munitions procedures is very serious, and we are responding swiftly.”
The incident, first reported by the Military Times, prompted senior leaders to relieve a munitions squadron commander of his duties. Other airmen have been temporarily suspended from duties.
“Nothing like this has ever been reported before, and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-chairman of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation. “The complete breakdown of the Air Force command and control over enough nuclear weapons to destroy several cities has frightening implications not only for the Air Force, but for the security of our entire nuclear weapons stockpile.”
The Air Force’s Air Combat Command has ordered a stand-down for its bases next week to review procedures and prevent a repeat of the mistake. “All evidence seems to point to this being an isolated mistake,” Thomas said.
Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters at a news conference yesterday that Gates was informed of the incident early last Friday and has been receiving daily progress reports. Morrell said President Bush was also notified.
In a statement yesterday, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he found the reports “deeply disturbing.” ++
Shakeup after nuclear missiles flown across US by mistake
Simon Jeffery in Washington, The Guardian
Thursday September 6, 2007
As many as six nuclear warheads, each with a destructive potential almost 10 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, were mistakenly flown across the US, Pentagon officials conceded yesterday.
The incident last week saw nuclear-armed cruise missiles mounted on the wings of a B-52 bomber and flown from an airbase 40 miles below the Canadian border to the southern state of Louisiana. The 1,500 mile journey from the Minot airbase in North Dakota to Barksdale in Louisiana lasted three and a half hours, during which time the crew were unaware of their nuclear load.
Pentagon officials said a munitions squadron commander had been relieved of his duties and crews involved with the mistaken load - including ground crew workers - have been temporarily “decertified” from handling munitions.
The director of air and space operations at US air combat command is to lead an investigation into how the plane was able to mistakenly fly nuclear weapons without anybody realising.
The cruise missiles were being transferred to Louisiana for decommissioning, as part of a programme to retire 400 of them. Three air force officers who spoke to the Military Times newspaper said the nuclear warheads should have been removed before the missiles were loaded under the bomber’s wings. It is unclear why they were not. The W80-1 warheads have an explosive yield of 150 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb is calculated to have had an explosive yield of 16 kilotons.
A US air force spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Thomas, claimed the public was never at risk. “All evidence we have seen so far points to an isolated mistake. The error was discovered during internal checks. The weapons remained in air force control and custody at all times.”
The missiles were not armed and safety features in the warheads would have prevented a nuclear detonation in the event of a crash, according to military officials.
“The main risk would have been [had] the air force responded to any problems with the flight, because they would have handled it much differently if they would have known nuclear warheads were on board,” Steve Fetter, a former Pentagon official who worked on nuclear weapons policy, told the Military Times.
The US air combat command has suspended all similar operations until September 14, pending a review. ++
Did You Hear the Joke About the Warheads That Got Away?
Jackson Williams, HuffPo
September 5, 2007
Six nuclear warheads walk into a bar.
The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve WMDs here.”
The main warhead replies, “Oh, you’ll serve us, pal, or we’ll blow this place to kingdom come and let Con Edison take the blame.”
The bartender, shaken and stirred, promptly moves to Canada.
Take a picture of this: President Bush insists the “war on terror” involves parking the U.S. military squarely in the middle of Arabia for year after year. We’re up to five now if my math is right, and just two months ago General Petraeus compared the latest surge effort to Britain’s experience in Northern Ireland, saying that similar counterinsurgency operations “have gone at least nine or ten years.”
I don’t know a soul — of any persuasion — who bought into the concept of a 15 year American war in the Middle East, do you? Besides, Ireland was under British control for over eight centuries, and Dublin and Liverpool are only 130 miles apart. What possible relevance is that to our current mess six thousand miles away, on the other side of the planet?
Meanwhile, back home, non-mythical weapons of mass destruction are accidentally carted over red state America from North Dakota to Louisiana without even the pilots knowing their cargo. As Kansan Bob Dole used to say, “Where’s the outrage?”
Try and imagine the hue and cry from Republicans if the past seven years of across-the-board incompetence had occurred under a Democratic president. Under, say, Hillary Clinton. It would be deafening. Instead they are silent, while their leading presidential contenders, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson, proudly promise more of the same bedrock beliefs.
That’s the real joke, but nobody’s laughing. ++
“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.
September 6th, 2007
Yep, that’s what they call the base our Dubby visited, buried safely in the vast stretches of Anbar territory … and was that not just the PERFECT destination for our wee, bubbled Decider? I swear, you can’t make this stuff up. And, let loose internationally, Dubby is cutting a wide swath of deluded braggadocio, telling the Aussie’s we’re “kicking ass” in Iraq … he’s the “Ugly American” in spades.
Couple of nights ago, Charlie Rose talked to Michael Gordon of the NYTimes about the “good news” Bush’s surge has produced — what intelligence quietly calls “getting worse but not as fast.” Some months ago, a soldier I know in Iraq reported that they were “working with the bad guys” … that shakes out to be the Sunnis in outlying provinces, unhappy because their own leadership was being occulted by Al Queda types; we’re supporting them, as you know, to help beat back AQ … but to what eventual end? The numbers of troops on the ground has produced an uptick in Baghdad stability, a shift of insurgents, a lull in activity — and the Righty politico’s are enthusing that having Iraqi Muslims disapprove AQ is a major PR success, one that needs to go on well into the next decade. Meanwhile, the administration has devolved their plan for democracy to hope that each of the little Iraqi fiefdoms will turn to their own brand of independence, and tolerate one another under a weak umbrella of governance in Baghdad. How many years … generations … will that take, do you think? Gordon, talking to Rose, was reluctant to give an estimate for success, finally saying on a scale of one to ten, it was probably a two or three.
That’s kicking ass, alright! OURS! The Pub excitement over all this “good news” strikes hollow and desperate — I have no doubt, NONE, that they are genuinely terrified of Al Queda and the “Hadji minions” … but the Republican strategy to beat them back [guns, bombs, soldiers, death] isn’t working now because it never could, and more of us see that every day. They probably see it themselves, but are too stiff-necked to rethink the course — pride goeth before a fall.
Here’s your pre-Petraeus report, and a few snippits on the Dubby’s Middle Eastern Adventure.
Jude
Kabuki at Camp Cupcake
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
[snip]
What Bush Saw
More than four years after declaring ” Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, Bush still can’t make an announced visit to the war-wracked country.
But his supposed “visit to Anbar Province” was in some ways even more cynical — and accepted even more gullibly by the media — than his June 2006 visit to Baghdad. There, at least, he actually set foot on Iraqi soil.
This time, Bush visited Al-Asad Air Base — an enormous, heavily fortified American outpost for 10,000 troops that while technically in Anbar Province in fact has a 13-mile perimeter keeping Iraq — and Iraqis — at bay. Bush never left the confines of the base, known as “Camp Cupcake,” for its relatively luxurious facilities, but nevertheless announced: “When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like.”
Bush Playing Us With “Withdrawal”
Keith Olbermann, Countdown MSNBC
Youtube
Another Iraq Photo Op
New York Times Editorial
September 5, 2007
Iraq is a long way to go for a photo op, but not for President Bush, who is pulling out all the stops to divert public attention from his failed Iraq policies and to keep Congress from demanding that he bring the troops home. As Americans and Iraqis continue to die — and Iraqi politicians refuse to reconcile — Mr. Bush stubbornly refuses to recognize that what both countries need is a responsible exit strategy for the United States, not more photo ops and disingenuous claims of success.
With Congress launching a series of pivotal hearings this week, Mr. Bush’s eight-hour stopover in Iraq on Sunday won him major play in the news media, including photos of smiling American military forces with their commander in chief. But the facts of the visit undermined his claims that his troop escalation is working and deserves more time and more lives to bear fruit.
Mr. Bush’s only destination was an isolated, well-fortified air base in Anbar Province, not Baghdad where his so-called surge was supposed to bring stability and persuade Iraqi politicians that they had more to gain from reconciliation than score-settling. We suppose Mr. Bush could claim one success for his visit: he did manage to get Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to visit the Sunni-dominated province.
Mr. Bush pumped up his headlines by suggesting continued gains in security could allow for a reduction in troops as his critics have been demanding and most Americans desperately want. But this is a cruel tease and a pathetic attempt to repackage old promises. Mr. Bush has been dangling that same as-soon-as-possible drawdown for years. The Pentagon had a plan to do just that in 2004. Today, the troop level stands at 160,000, up 30,000 from the start of this year.
Despite all Mr. Bush’s cheerleading, a new report by nonpartisan Congressional investigators tells a much grimmer and closer to reality tale, concluding that the Iraqi government has failed to meet 11 of 18 military and political benchmarks to which it had agreed.
The report by the Government Accountability Office said that Iraq’s government has failed to eliminate militia control of local security forces, failed to increase the number of army units capable of operating independently, failed to enact long-promised legislation essential for political reconciliation and even raised doubts whether the government is capable of spending $10 billion in reconstruction funds.
And that was the buffed-up version. An earlier draft of the G.A.O. report had the Iraqis failing on 15 of the 18 goals, until the Pentagon protested that the grading was too harsh.
Mr. Bush clearly has no strategy to end this conflict, which has no end in sight. The American people deserve considered judgments not come-ons from their leaders. Congress needs to insist on a prudent formula that will withdraw American forces and limit the hemorrhaging.
True or false: Can Bush tell difference?
ANDREW GREELEY, Chicago Sun Times
September 5, 2007
Is President Bush able to distinguish truth from falsehood? Is he too caught up in the double-talk generated by his spin masters to grasp the difference? After reading his talk to the VFW last week, I think that at this stage of his presidency he is utterly incapable of honest communication with the rest of the country.
Objectively, his claim that the United States can win in Iraq, his comment that the Iraqi prime minister is a good guy and his history of the Vietnam War go far beyond the boundaries of truth. Granted, the speech was ground out by one of the spin masters (perhaps trained in dishonesty by Karl Rove), the president ultimately is responsible for it. It follows logically from all the falsehoods going back to weapons of mass destruction. It is contradicted by the intelligence estimate released the same day by the director of National Intelligence. The killing continues, the Iraq government is not improving, the war continues.
And, one would add, Americans continue to die.
Why does the president continue to deny the obvious, even when his own intelligence agency affirms it? Because some conservatives insist the United States could have won the Vietnam War if it hadn’t ”lost its nerve”? There is no serious support for this folklore.
The only similarity is both wars were foolish wars for which there was no good reason, the United States was doomed to defeat from the beginning, and if someone had not pulled the plug, we’d still be fighting in Vietnam, just as we are still fighting — perhaps forever — in Iraq.
The Iraq Study Group gave the president a way out. He didn’t take it because he wanted victory. He can’t have victory. But he is not quitting during his administration, no matter how many more senseless deaths occur. His VFW speech is part of a campaign to elect a president who will continue the war. Whether Bush is deliberately deceiving his potential supporters or whether he no longer knows truth from falsehood because of his personality traits must remain a question only God can answer.
However, it is not wrong to question his credibility — and the suffering it causes to the families of those who die because of his stubborn insistence on ‘’staying the course” until a democratic Iraq becomes a reality. Must we not say, Mr. President, you have spoken so often against the truth, that we no longer believe anything you say.
Some writers tell me I am driven by hatred of the president, and as a priest I ought not to hate anyone. (These are people who generally did not think it was wrong to hate President Clinton or President Kennedy). I don’t hate the president, but I hate this stupid, unjust and evil war. To be a priest and not condemn evil would be sinful.
The war will end only when it ends, when someone in power says, “already, all right, enough,” and announces that the war is over. Lyndon Johnson tried to do that when he withdrew from the 1968 election. The Iraq Study Group tried to do the same thing.
Johnson’s plan was frustrated when Richard M. Nixon won the election and continued the war for six more years (during which time more people died than had in the previous six years). The Iraq Study Group, basically conservative men, ran afoul of the president’s stubbornness and the reluctant loyalty of his congressional allies.
The long-awaited reports of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will provide another escape hatch. They will have to report in some way the Iraq government is not able to end the raging civil war. Does anyone want to bet the president will say, ”Then, let’s get out of there”?
Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq
DAVID E. SANGER, NYT
September 5, 2007
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.
That shift in emphasis was implicit in Mr. Bush’s decision to bypass Baghdad on his eight-hour trip to Iraq, stopping instead in Anbar Province, once the heart of an anti-American Sunni insurgency. By meeting with tribal leaders who just a year ago were considered the enemy, and who now are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis — depending on how one counts — may now be on the cusp of yet another.
It is not clear whether the Democrats who control Congress will be in any mood to accept the changing measures. On Tuesday, there were contentious hearings over a Government Accountability Office report that, like last month’s National Intelligence Estimate, painted a bleak picture of Iraq’s future.
It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.
The White House insists that Mr. Bush’s fresh embrace of Sunni leaders simply augments his consistent support of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
But some of Mr. Bush’s critics regard the change as something far more significant, saying they believe it amounts to a grudging acknowledgment by the White House of something these critics themselves have long asserted — that Iraq will never become the kind of cohesive, unified state that could be a democratic beacon for the Middle East.
“They have come around to the inevitable,” said Peter W. Galbraith, a former American diplomat whose 2006 book, “The End of Iraq,” argued that Mr. Bush was trying to rebuild a nation that never really existed, because Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds had never adopted a common Iraqi identity. “He has finally recognized that fact, and is now trying to work with it,” Mr. Galbraith said Tuesday.
Still, like the other strategies Mr. Bush has embraced, this one is fraught with risks.
There is no assurance that the willingness of Sunnis in Anbar to join in common cause with the United States against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia can be replicated elsewhere in Iraq.
And as reporters who have been embedded with units working to enlist the support of the Sunni sheiks have written, in vivid accounts from the scene, there are many reasons to question how sustained the Sunnis’ loyalty will be.
The sheiks and their followers have been barred from the Iraqi military, and it is unclear whether Mr. Maliki’s government will let large numbers of Sunnis sign up in the future. That creates the risk that the Sunni groups, once better trained and better armed, will ultimately turn on the central government or its patron, the American military.
Then there is the worry that, even if Mr. Bush is successful in working in promoting “moderate” Sunnis in Anbar and “moderate” Shiites in the south, the result will be exactly the kind of partitioned state — with all its potential for full-scale civil war — that the White House has long insisted must be avoided.
“Those are real risks, and they explain in part why the strategy was not pursued before late in 2006,” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who, as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House until he left this summer, was one of the architects of the “New Way Forward,” the plan Mr. Bush unveiled in January.
“But the first principle we embraced in the new strategy is that Iraq is a mosaic,” Mr. Feaver said, “and that the risks of approaching it that way were deemed worth taking, given the alternative.”
The White House insists that by flying into the tribal areas, Mr. Bush is not undercutting Mr. Maliki or cutting him loose. Instead, White House officials say that ever since his January speech, Mr. Bush has been pursuing a dual strategy, pressing for “top down” change from Baghdad as well as “bottom up” change from the provinces.
The current focus on the provinces, they say, reflects the fact that the White House overestimated what could be achieved by Mr. Maliki and his government, and underestimated the degree to which the local tribes developed a deep hatred for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.
“It’s not that they love us Americans,” said one senior administration official. “It’s that Al Qaeda was so heavy-handed, taking out Sunnis just because they were smoking a cigarette. In the end, that may be the best break we’ve gotten in a while.”
As he flew from Iraq to Australia on Monday, Mr. Bush cast the Sunni leaders he had met in the deserts of Anbar in the most positive light possible.
“They were profuse in their praise for America,” he told reporters on Air Force One, according to a pool report. He said they “had made the decision that they don’t want to live under Al Qaeda,” adding that “they got sick of them.”
Mr. Bush, of course, has had similar public praise for just about every Iraqi leader he has met, even a few leaders now disparaged by White House officials as unreliable, powerless or two-faced.
Mr. Bush himself has told associates that in the end, the Iraq experiment depends on whether Mr. Maliki and his aides are truly willing to share power, or whether they are determined to keep the Sunnis down.
For now, however, the White House is arguing that the ground-up relationships they are building in places like Anbar are more important than keeping a scorecard of legislation passed or stalled in Baghdad. Whether that argument is enough to keep a few wavering Republicans on board may determine whether Mr. Bush gets a bit more time to try his latest strategy.
Overheard in Australia, Bush tells minister ‘we’re kicking ass’ in Iraq
John Byrne, Raw Story
Wednesday September 5, 2007
Things are going well in Iraq, according to President George W. Bush.
Upon his arrival in Sydney Wednesday, Deputy Australian Prime Minister Mark Vaile “inquired politely” about his stopover in the war-torn country.
“We’re kicking ass,” Bush said.
The remark was overheard by a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald and caught by an Australian blog.
According to the paper, Bush arrived in Australia in a “chipper mood.”
“Despite his unpopularity in” Australia, the paper said, “Bush used yesterday’s media conference with [Prime Minister John] Howard to try to bolster the Prime Minister’s electoral prospects in the next poll. Labor was quite happy at the spectre of one unpopular leader backing another but should not underestimate the defiance and polished performance Bush is able to muster. On Iraq, climate change, Kyoto and nuclear power, he backed Howard to the hilt. He claimed diplomatically he did not want to interfere in the Australian election and said he looked forward to today’s meeting with Kevin Rudd,” leader of the Australian Labor Party.
“Apart from his introductory remarks, Howard never spoke during the press conference,” the paper added. “It was the George W. Bush show.”
The Herald asserted that Howard’s staunch position backing the Iraq war “is growing.”
“He implied that those who argued against the war in the first place had no role in the current debate,” the article said.
Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq
Military Statistics Called Into Question
Karen DeYoung, Washington Post
Thursday, September 6, 2007
The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.
Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.
Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers — most of which are classified — are often confusing and contradictory. “Let’s just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree,” Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.
Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month’s pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. “If a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian,” the official said. “If it went through the front, it’s criminal.”
“Depending on which numbers you pick,” he said, “you get a different outcome.” Analysts found “trend lines . . . going in different directions” compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. “It began to look like spaghetti.”
Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military’s statistics. “Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances,” the spokesman said, “we do not track this data to any significant degree.”
Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen — recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda — are also excluded from the U.S. military’s calculation of violence levels.
The administration has not given up trying to demonstrate that Iraq is moving toward political reconciliation. Testifying with Petraeus next week, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker is expected to report that top Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders agreed last month to work together on key legislation demanded by Congress. If all goes as U.S. officials hope, Crocker will also be able to point to a visit today to the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province by ministers in the Shiite-dominated government — perhaps including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. The ministers plan to hand Anbar’s governor $70 million in new development funds, the official said.
But most of the administration’s case will rest on security data, according to military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who would not speak on the record before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony. Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were offered military statistics during Baghdad visits in August said they had been convinced that Bush’s new strategy, and the 162,000 troops carrying it out, has produced enough results to merit more time.
Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war. In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified “significant underreporting of violence,” noting that “a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base.” The report concluded that “good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.”
Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the military’s findings into question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since the AP began collecting data in April 2005.
The GAO report found that “average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007,” a conclusion that the military said was skewed because it did not include dramatic, up-to-date information from August.
Juan R.I. Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan who is critical of U.S. policy, said that most independent counts “do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths.”
In a letter last week to the leadership of both parties, a group of influential academics and former Clinton administration officials called on Congress to examine “the exact nature and methodology that is being used to track the security situation in Iraq and specifically the assertions that sectarian violence is down.”
The controversy centers as much on what is counted — attacks on civilians vs. attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, numbers of attacks vs. numbers of casualties, sectarian vs. intra-sect battles, daily numbers vs. monthly averages — as on the numbers themselves.
The military stopped releasing statistics on civilian deaths in late 2005, saying the news media were taking them out of context. In an e-mailed response to questions last weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were favorable, “exact monthly figures cannot be provided” for attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall. “MNF-I makes every attempt to ensure it captures the most comprehensive, accurate, and valid data on civilian and sectarian deaths,” the spokesman wrote. “However, there is not one central place for data or information. . . . This means there can be variations when different organizations examine this information.”
In a follow-up message yesterday, the spokesman said that the non-release policy had been changed this week but that the numbers were still being put “in the right context.”
Attacks labeled “sectarian” are among the few statistics the military has consistently published in recent years, although the totals are regularly recalculated. The number of monthly “sectarian murders and incidents” in the last six months of 2006, listed in the Pentagon’s quarterly Iraq report published in June, was substantially higher each month than in the Pentagon’s March report.
MNF-I said that “reports from un-reported/not-yet-reported past incidences as well as clarification/corrections on reports already received” are “likely to contribute to changes.”
When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent “since last year,” the statistic was quickly e-mailed to U.S. journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, MNF-I said that “last year” referred to December 2006, when attacks spiked to more than 1,600.
By March, however — before U.S. troop strength was increased under Bush’s strategy — the number had dropped to 600, only slightly less than in the same month last year. That is about where it has remained in 2007, with what MNF-I said was a slight increase in April and May “but trending back down in June-July.”
Petraeus’s spokesman, Col. Steven A. Boylan, said he was certain that Petraeus had made a comparison with December in the interview with the Australian paper, which did not publish a direct Petraeus quote. No qualifier appeared in the White House fact sheet.
When a member of the National Intelligence Council visited Baghdad this summer to review a draft of the intelligence estimate on Iraq, Petraeus argued that its negative judgments did not reflect recent improvements. At least one new sentence was added to the final version, noting that “overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks.”
A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed it “odd” that “marginal” security improvements were reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony.
The intelligence official in Washington, however, described the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting process and said that the “new information” did not change the estimate’s conclusions. The overall assessment was that the security situation in Iraq since January “was still getting worse,” he said, “but not as fast.”
Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.
Study: Iraqi Security Forces Not Ready
ANNE FLAHERTY, AP
September 5, 2007
WASHINGTON — Iraq’s security forces will be unable to take control of the country in the next 18 months, and Baghdad’s national police force is so rife with corruption it should be scrapped entirely, according to a new independent assessment.
The study, led by retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, is a sweeping and detailed look at Iraq’s security forces that will factor heavily into Congress’ upcoming debate on the war. Republicans see success by the Iraqi forces as critical to bringing U.S. troops home, while an increasing number of Democrats say the U.S. should stop training and equipping such units altogether.
The 20-member panel of mostly retired senior military and police officers concludes that Iraq’s military, in particular its army, shows the most promise of becoming a viable, independent security force with time. But the group predicts an adequate logistics system to support these ground forces is at least another two years away.
The report also offers a scathing assessment of Iraq’s Interior Ministry and recommends scrapping Iraq’s national police force, which it describes as dysfunctional and infiltrated by militias.
Overall, Iraqi security forces “have the potential to help reduce sectarian violence, but ultimately the ISF will reflect the society from which they are drawn,” according to the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “Political reconciliation is the key to ending sectarian violence in Iraq.”
The United States has spent $19.2 billion on developing Iraq’s forces, and plans to spend $5.5 billion more next year. According to Jones’ study, the Iraqi military comprises more than 152,000 service members operating under the Defense Ministry, while the Interior Ministry oversees some 194,000 civilian security personnel, including police and border control.
The review is one of several studies that Congress commissioned in May, when it agreed to fund the war for several more months but demanded that the Bush administration and outside groups assess U.S. progress in the four-year war.
Jones, a former commander of U.S. troops in Europe and former Marine Corps commandant, is scheduled to testify before Congress on Thursday. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other officials have already been briefed on the study, officials said last week.
A senior Pentagon official said Wednesday that the military does not believe the Iraqi national police should be disbanded but acknowledges that getting the Iraqi army up to speed will take a while.
“We’ve always recognized that this was a long-term project,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Wednesday. “Getting the Iraqi army on its feet and capable of defending the borders of the country independently is not an overnight project.” He added: “It is our belief that this will come to fruition. It’s going to take some time to happen.”
Several lawmakers -many of whom face tough elections next year -said they would be unswayed by the Jones report and other independent assessments. Congress would fare better by finding a bipartisan solution that would bring troops home, they say.
“No matter what these reports suggest or what Congress infers from them, it is clear that it is time to develop a post-surge strategy,” wrote 13 lawmakers, including three Republicans, on Wednesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
But other lawmakers were expected to take keen interest in Jones’ report, which is a rare, detailed look at individual pieces of Iraq’s emerging security force. The report was requested by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who said he wanted an assessment independent of the Pentagon’s findings.
According to the study, the panel agreed with U.S. and Iraqi officials that the Iraqi army is capable of taking over an increasing amount of day-to-day combat responsibilities but that the military and police force would still be unable to take control and operate independently in such a short time frame.
“They are gaining size and strength, and will increasingly be capable of assuming greater responsibility for Iraq’s security,” the report states, adding that special forces in particular are “highly capable and extremely effective.”
The report is much more pessimistic about Baghdad’s police units. It describes these units as fragile, ill-equipped and infiltrated by militia forces. And they are led by the Interior Ministry, which is “a ministry in name only” that is “widely regarded as being dysfunctional and sectarian, and suffers from ineffective leadership.”
Accordingly, the study recommends disbanding the national police and starting over.
“Its ability to be effective is crippled by significant challenges, including public distrust, sectarianism (both real and perceived), and a lack of clarity about its identity - sp ecifically whether it is a military or a police force,” the report states.
A group of liberal Democrats said Wednesday the U.S. should stop supporting these forces entirely and withdraw U.S. troops.
“How can we be sure we are not putting guns into the hands of a future enemy and empowering them for generations to come?” said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.
Other Democrats say party leaders have set their sights on the $147 billion Bush requested for the war as a means of forcing a drawdown of U.S. forces. The money was requested by Bush to pay for combat in budget year 2008, which begins Oct. 1.
Rep. James Moran, D-Va., a member of the House panel that oversees the military budget, said an option being considered is a bill that funds the troops, but in three- or four-month installments, and directs the money pay only to bring them home.
The approach would guarantee another showdown with Bush on the war before year’s end, putting Republicans squarely in the middle of the debate. With Democrats lacking the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto, they need GOP votes to force legislation ending the war.
GOP leaders say they are waiting to hear from Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq. But they said they aren’t so sure they’ll lose members to the Democrats’ anti-war push.
“The success our troops have had put some oxygen back in the room, both for the party and the American public,” said Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., the No. 3 House Republican.
“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.
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