War and Piece

Tom Friedman is must-read today.

We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.

This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable. Words matter, but deeds matter more. If the Pentagon leadership ran any U.S. company with the kind of abysmal planning in this war, it would have been fired by shareholders months ago.

Do read the whole thing. And then call your Congressman and Senator and demand Rumsfeld and Bush be held accountable.

Post-Script: Philadelphia Daily News journalist Will Bunch emails me his article on Steve Stefanowicz, originally of Telford, Pennsylvania.

A few thoughts on this latest news story indicating that not only has nobody from the government yet contacted the defense contracting company CACI International whose employees are alleged in the Taguba report to have been involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib. The identified employee Steve Stefanowicz is still working at Abu Ghraib!

Here is the thought: this is a private sector firm whose employees are shielded from both the US military justice system, and by written agreement, from Iraqi law. The only place they can really face justice is right here in the USA.

I think some enterprising Americans lawyer should head to Iraq, identify the Iraqis who were in Abu Ghraib who were abused and get a class action law suit going here in the States, and sue the wazoo out of this company. [CACI International is a public company, and such a lawsuit would at least destroy the company's stock value for the time being, and get shareholders riled up]. There's a bit of America for you, Iraq! Sue every private contractor involved. Perhaps Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International would file briefs to back up their case. Here are more victims and perps.

Jesus Christ, he should sue too.

[My, the Weekly Standard is quiet on this case. Not a word! Not a peep! It's not a very pleasant look at the American morals they believe we should be spreading all over the Middle East at the point of a gun.]

I have a question: do some American troops think that the Iraqis were behind 9/11? Have Cheney and the Bush Administration's none so subtle efforts to equate Saddam Hussein with the perpetrators of 9/11 had the effect of making some US troops think the Iraqis are "the enemy?"

I posted this a few days ago, but will just say it again as it gets more, needed attention: Isn't Major General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of Guantanamo now moved to head Abu Ghraib, part of the problem?

Rumsfeld is in trouble with his boss.

Via Juan Cole, a really interesting article on South African apartheid-era and Serbian mercenaries working as private security consultants in Iraq. What the author fails to note is that Erinys Iraq, the company that employed some of the South Africans who admitted to apartheid-era killings of blacks before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, is affiliated with a relative of a close aide of Ahmad Chalabi.

Erinys Iraq came into being last May, after the U.S.-led invasion. Saboteurs had started blowing up oil pipelines and attacking other petroleum facilities, plunging Baghdad and other Iraqi cities into darkness. Blackouts and fuel shortages remain endemic. The authority solicited bids on the pipeline security contract in July. Just two weeks later, the contract was awarded to Erinys Iraq.

A founding partner and director of Erinys Iraq is Faisal Daghistani, the son of Tamara Daghistani, for years one of Chalabi's most trusted confidants. She was a key player in the creation of his exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which received millions of dollars in U.S. funds to help destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime before the coalition invasion last year. The firm's counsel in Baghdad is Chalabi's nephew Salem Chalabi.

Anne Applebaum is 100% right in this thoughtful oped about the unintended culture of impunity Rumsfeld may have fostered in US troops, here.

Dept. of Pure Speculation: Was Richard Perle's resignation from the Defense Policy Board in February related to emerging revelations that Ahmed Chalabi had been feeding US classified information to Iran? Perle's resignation letter to Rumsfeld was written February 18th [and leaked February 25 to Knight Ridder]. An interesting Stratfor analysis on Chalabi's long reputed ties to Iran was published on February 18th as well. Who was providing Ahmad Chalabi secret US information? [Thanks to reader RS for the pointers, we are happy to speculate]. Here's my question. The Iranian government is as factionalized as our own. Who is Chalabi's Iranian?

Meantime, Perle's co-author David Frum has the most ridiculous piece in the National Review online trying to defend Chalabi's ties to Iran! Perle and Frum don't usually have any use for those who defend foreign policy realism and talking with such regimes as Tehran's -- except when it involves their own crooks.

So the neocons are apparently split on Chalabi. Perle, Frum, Harold Rhode, Michael Ledeen, Laurie Mylroie still weakly defending Chalabi in one corner, and apparently Mark Zell and -- who else? -- in the other. [Does Mark Zell even count as a neocon, or is he just a neocon by association with Doug Feith?]

Interesting discussion of the uses and uselessness of the UN going on at Dan Drezner's site, born of despair at Sudan, whose government has been implicated in contributing to the single largest wave of ethnic cleansing currently on earth these days, re-winning its seat on the UN High Commission for Human Rights. More on these issues soon!

Here is the full text of the Taguba report.

Much of the specific witness testimonies about violence and abuse against prisoners have already been reported, and are the most upsetting.

But this is also very disturbing: why is the CIA trying to sneak prisoners out of the site of the Red Cross?

33. (S/NF) The various detention facilities operated by the 800th MP Brigade have routinely held persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib called these detainees “ghost detainees.” On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of “ghost detainees” (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law. (Annex 53)

Is this really necessary? Is that how we expect US prisoners of war to be treated by foreign governments?

Here is more on the alleged abuse by contractors.

11. (U) That Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, Contract US Civilian Interrogator, CACI, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, be given an Official Reprimand to be placed in his employment file, termination of employment, and generation of a derogatory report to revoke his security clearance for the following acts which have been previously referred to in the aforementioned findings:

Made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses.

Allowed and/or instructed MPs, who were not trained in interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by “setting conditions” which were neither authorized and in accordance with applicable regulations/policy. He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse.

12. (U) That Mr. John Israel,Contract US Civilian Interpreter, CACI, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, be given an Official Reprimand to be placed in his employment file and have his security clearance reviewed by competent authority for the following acts or concerns which have been previously referred to in the aforementioned findings:

Denied ever having seen interrogation processes in violation of the IROE, which is contrary to several witness statements.

Did not have a security clearance.

13. (U) I find that there is sufficient credible information to warrant an Inquiry UP Procedure 15, AR 381-10, US Army Intelligence Activities, be conducted to determine the extent of culpability of MI personnel, assigned to the 205th MI Brigade and the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib (BCCF). Specifically, I suspect that COL Thomas M. Pappas, LTC Steve L. Jordan, Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, and Mr. John Israel were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib (BCCF) and strongly recommend immediate disciplinary action as described in the preceding paragraphs as well as the initiation of a Procedure 15 Inquiry to determine the full extent of their culpability. (Annex 36)

Would be interesting to find out more about Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz (Stefanowicz), and Israel

Post-Script: The New York Times reports in Wednesday's addition that Israel worked for a subcontractor to Titan [whch Titan would not reveal]. I wonder who? It seems it's only a matter of days or even hours 'til it all comes out.

Isn't Miller part of the problem at Abu Ghraib? It was he who wrote one of the military's internal investigation reports of the Abu Ghraib prison, recommending that US military police serve as "enablers" of the interrogations. I wouldn't want him to be in charge of policing the hen houes by any means. And better get the Red Cross in there.

Meantime, how seriously can the Pentagon be taking this case, if it has not even contacted the two private defense contractors, CACI International, and Titan, whose employees are alleged in the Taguba report to have been responsible for urging US MPs to soften prisoners up? Indeed, one of the civilian contractor employees was accused of raping an Iraqi youth, two people who reviewed the Taguba report told the Wall Street Journal.

And the New York Times reports in Wednesday's paper that in over 30 criminal investigations the Pentagon has been conducting about abuse of detainees in US military custody, nobody has gone to jail.

Meanwhile, three people have seen and described to me some extremely disturbing other photos. of US abuse of prisoners in Iraq out there. I have no way to know if they are genuine or not. The website where they are supposedly available is so overloaded one cannot open it, but this is it: www.albasrah.net. Again, I reiterate, I have not even seen the photos myself and have no way of knowing if they are genuine or fake.

Post-Script: The photos described above are most likely fake.

I know some of my readers esp. those with family serving abroad will be interested in this oped in the New York Times today by William Broyles that calls for bringing back the draft.

If the children of the nation's elites were facing enemy fire without body armor, riding through gantlets of bombs in unarmored Humvees, fighting desperately in an increasingly hostile environment because of arrogant and incompetent civilian leadership, then those problems might well find faster solutions.

The men and women on active duty today — and their companions in the National Guard and the reserves — have seen their willingness, and that of their families, to make sacrifices for their country stretched thin and finally abused. Thousands of soldiers promised a one-year tour of duty have seen that promise turned into a lie. When Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, told the president that winning the war and peace in Iraq would take hundreds of thousands more troops, Mr. Bush ended his career. As a result of this and other ill-advised decisions, the war is in danger of being lost, and my beloved military is being run into the ground.

This abuse of the voluntary military cannot continue. How to ensure adequate troop levels, with a diversity of backgrounds? How to require the privileged to shoulder their fair share? In other words, how to get today's equivalents of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney — and me — into the military, where their talents could strengthen and revive our fighting forces?

The only solution is to bring back the draft. Not since the 19th century has America fought a war that lasted longer than a week with an all-volunteer army; we can't do it now. It is simply not built for a protracted major conflict. The arguments against the draft — that a voluntary army is of higher quality, that the elites will still find a way to evade service — are bogus. In World War II we used a draft army to fight the Germans and Japanese — two of the most powerful military machines in history — and we won. The problems in the military toward the end of Vietnam were not caused by the draft; they were the result of young Americans being sent to fight and die in a war that had become a disaster...

If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People's Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it's not worth your family fighting it, then it's not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration's handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.

Stunning story on Chalabi at Salon. Doug Feith's former law partner Mark Zell, who's been a business partner of Chalabi's nephew Salem Chalbi, now has only the harshest words for him:

Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another." While Zell's disaffection with Chalabi has been a long time in the making, his remarks to Salon represent his first public break with the would-be Iraqi leader, and are likely to ripple throughout Washington in the days to come.

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.

What's turned Zell? Chalabi's reputed long ties with Iran, and post-war dissing of Israel.

[This piece says Doug Feith will resign by mid-May. Hope to learn more about this when Feith speaks Tuesday at AEI].

Post-Script. This piece is brilliantly investigated, and makes one ill. The neocons in policy positions [Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle] have to go to jail. They willfully deceived the American public, perhaps even the president, and they allowed themselves to be deceived by the kind of two-bit con artist you or I wouldn't buy a car from. Why did some of my smartest friends subscribe to their baloney for so long? And what do they have to say for themselves now? It just goes to prove that intelligence and intellectual ability have nothing to do with good sense.

What to do with Chalabi is easily answered: a one-way ticket to Jordan, where he will face prison for the rest of his sorry life.

Should we get out of Iraq? Something that seemed inconceivable a few months ago as a foreign policy failure of staggering proportions, now seems something that some sensible people are urging. Including military analyst Andrew Bacevich, in this op-ed, that compares the US "descent into dishonor" in Iraq to the French campaign in Algeria:

Day by day, the evidence mounts that an ugly war is turning uglier. U.S. and coalition troop losses, which have again spiked upward, provide one measure of that ugliness. The ratcheting up of American firepower and the climbing toll of Iraqi dead, many of them evidently innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, provide a second. But there is a third measure, perhaps the most troubling of all: hints that the discipline of U.S. forces is beginning to fray.

Indiscipline, lawlessness and the excessive use of force will not guarantee
victory in Iraq; indeed, the reverse is true.

The French experience in Algeria stands as a warning: Down that road lies not
only defeat but also dishonor.

Bob Dreyfuss highlights more US officials calling for getting out as fast as the US can here.

[Thanks to reader JR for the heads up on the Bacevich article].

Post-Script: When I read articles like this, I am so outraged, it's hard to think straight. It is clear that the people who conned us into this war, including Richard Perle, Ahmad Chalabi and Doug Feith, should go to jail. Even watching the coverage of the abuses on that White House cheerleader Fox News the past few days (I was in the Midwest, captive of other people) it seems to me that Americans will not long have the stomach for seeing the monstrous deeds that some US forces and intelligence have committed in Iraq.

Whatever anyone thought invading Iraq would get us (and oh yeah, forgot to create the conditions that would allow us to stabilize it and win), it's not worth it to turn our own forces into the kinds of monsters one hears about in the war crimes trials at the Hague. It's only a matter of degree. [I've been assured by a friend in the intel business who's been in Iraq that he's just as horrified by these revelations as everyone else]. But I would be interested to know what they think, given their past talk about the "school girl" rules that US intelligence had to operate under in the era following the Church committee hearings. But surely between the Geneva Conventions and the 'schoolgirl' rules and what we are reading about in the New Yorker, there must be some middle ground, right? What happened? When does the tremendous pressure the US military and intelligence is under to produce more actionable intelligence translate into human rights abuses and torture of detainees? Are the rules changing again?

What does it come down to? It's trying to remember what was the point of this whole exercise of invading Iraq, which had less to do with Al Qaeda than at least five other governments. To protect this country. To get rid of an admittedly very evil man who had aspired to possess weapons of mass destruction and invaded another big oil producing country twelve years ago. To show that the US was willing to take losses, to project American power into the heart of the Arab world. But isn't it clear that after a year of demonstrating how stretched thin and desperate we are in Iraq, that what we have wrought is so incredibly destructive for Americans, that the Iraq misadventure has demonstrated weakness, failure, incompetence, arrogance, and now -- this -- that, in the eyes of most in Iraq and I would bet most people in the Middle East, we are perceived as hardly any better and arguably worse than the power we overthrew in Baghdad? What was the point of this little exercise? Whatever it was, at some point, better sooner than later, one has to count one's losses and go home. This administration clearly doesn't know how to climb its way out of a paperbag. It doesn't have any fresh ideas for how to fix the situation in Iraq that doesn't have us reinstalling Saddam's Republican Guard or turning our own personnel into war criminals. Clearly we've got to change our regime. And put Perle, Chalabi and the others on trial. Simply having them lose their jobs will not reveal all they did to get us in this half century rare world class screw up.

Post-Post Script: Will the humiliation of what we've witnessed at Abu Ghraib (and what Hersh says we will see more of in coming days) lead Americans to reject the extra-judicial gray area the US has waded into post-9/11 in Guantanamo and elsewhere? Do we really want our interrogators and our soldiers and our government to feel beyond the scope of international law, the constitution, commonly understood ethical behavior and the law? Will it remain such an abstract notion? Will we remember why restraints were put on these institutions in the past?

For before Maj. Gen. Antonio Tagaba reported on the abuse at Abu Ghraib earlier this year, apparently a director of the US facility in Cuba, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D Miller, investigated reports of abuse in the Baghdad prison and wrote that US MPs should act as "enablers" for US military intelligence officials. "In late August and early September 2003, a team from Guantanamo overseen by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller visited Iraq to advise U.S. prison operations there. Among its recommendations were that military police guards act as "enablers" for interrogations, Taguba reported," the Post reports.

Moreover, doesn't the fact that nobody has lost their jobs, nobody has been fired, nobody has gone to prison, or worse, so far in this case, indicate that something is seriously wrong with the follow through by the US military in investigating these reports of abuse? Isn't there an air of condoning this sort of thing, until it becomes a PR problem? [or a career problem for someone like Sanchez?] Shouldn't we have expected more action in a military system with clear chains of command and photographs for g-d's sake and three internal military investigations conducted several months ago by now? And if we haven't seen any action until the 60 Minutes report, what does that indicate? A serious lack of will, it would seem to me. Should Rumsfeld be implicated for failing to condemn this?

In his article on the torture, abuse and the killing of at least one Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib by US military intelligence officials, contractors and reservists, Seymour Hersh notes that an internal army report on the abuse by Gen. Antonio Taguba found that military intelligence officials, some on contract from private firms, were most culpable for encouraging such wanton criminal behavior:

General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)

“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.

The blogosphere has gone to work to figure out who these alleged perpetrators are. Billmon found Stefanowicz described here, apparently working as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib as recently as April 26.

Here's some more on Stefanowicz, who has been identified by Hersh as an employee of CACI International, but who may indeed be affiliated with a naval reserve program. His mother is written about here.

Jean Campbell's son, Steven Stefanowicz, is on active duty with the Navy in the Middle East...Jean [of Telford, Pennsylvania] said she admitted that from the outset she never wanted Steven, her second of four children, to join the armed forces...

About four years ago, Stefanowicz joined a Naval Reserve program for people aged 28 to 32. When terrorists attacked the American homeland Sept. 11, Stefanowicz quit his job as an information technology recruiter in Australia and was back home by October. He volunteered for active duty in the Middle East and was sent overseas in March.

More on this later. It's disturbing the military has been sitting on these internal reports since at least January. Mark Kimmitt on Fox on Sunday said they'd been concerned for months about the impact those photos would have. Clearly. But why does it seem like the military was sitting on purveying justice to the perpetrators until 60 Minutes II put this on the air? Why does this incident seem to have been treated more as a PR problem than a seriously disturbing substantive one, that demanded that the identified perpetrators and their superiors lose their careers and go to jail? And what does it mean that Stefanowicz is still apparently knocking golf balls off the roof of Abu Ghraib?

Post Script: Hersh, on Fox's O'Reilly Factor Monday night, said he has received calls in the past twenty-four hours that there are more photos, and videotapes, of abuse and torture by US personnel of Iraqi prisoners, including of underage Iraqis. He also pointed out that Taguba's report, which came out in January, is the third internal military report on abuse at Abu Ghraib. Why haven't heads rolled yet?

Post-Post Script: Phil Carter offers more insight into how the military police are likely to treat their own found of criminal wrong doing, as well as pointers to some pieces on the problem of the legal loophole involving defense contractors found to have committed criminal wrong doing on assignments abroad.

Seymour Hersh on the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. More on the internal military report on 'sadistic' treatment of detainees by US soldiers. "This systematic and illegal abuse, Major General Antonio M. Taguba reported, was perpetrated by members of the 320th Military Police Battalion, and also by members of the American intelligence community." I wonder, who are the members of the American intelligence community and are they subject to prosecution as well? I agree with Kevin Drum, that we should turn these scumbags over to an Iraqi court.

British troops have their own abuse scandal. The Guardian report suggests that one of the detainees in Abu Ghraib abused by US soldiers died from the stress of his interrogation. The Guardian is also on top of the fact that contractors from defense contracting firms Titan and CACI were apparently involved in the prison abuse. When are firms like this going to pay - seriously pay - for when consultants on their payroll break the law or the most basic moral standards of human behavior abroad? These contractors who commit crimes in countries abroad with no functional justice system are not accountable to the military justice system as US soldiers would be; when a contractor commits a crime, engages in 'human trafficking' as employees of DynCorps have been involved in in Bosnia and Kosovo; tortures prisoners as in Iraq, the companies just quietly fly these criminals back to the States and fire them. When is that loophole going to be closed?

Am in the midst of an edit of a long article on the UN, and found that this piece in TNR by the Editors gets it just right: the Bush administration has only itself to blame for needing to rely so heavily in Iraq now on the UN and Lakhdar Brahimi.

Sudan Calamity: Glen Ford and Peter Gamble have a strong piece in TomPaine, on the Bush administration's failure to take a more aggressive stance against what they call a genocide-in-progress in the Sudan.

"At what point do we ask this uncomfortable question: Why does the United States seem to consider it acceptable for such genocidal acts to occur in Africa?" It was a rhetorical question, posed by Africa Action Executive Director Salih Booker on April 7 as the world marked the 10th anniversary of the genocide that left at least 800,000 Rwandans dead. Two weeks later, President George Bush answered Booker’s question in the usual manner: the United States has more pressing business at hand than ending a genocide-in-progress, this time in the western region of Sudan.

While U.S. diplomats feigned outrage at the UN Human Rights Commission's weak response ("grave concern") to massive ethnic cleansing of black Africans in Darfur—the committee could not bring itself to even whisper the terms "rape" or "forced removals"—Bush last week vouched for the Khartoum government’s good faith in ending a much longer campaign of genocide against blacks. As Newsweek reported:

President George W. Bush certified, as required every six months under the 2002 Sudan Peace Act, that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is negotiating in good faith for an end to Sudan's other civil war: the decades-old rebellion in southern Sudan. If the president had withheld his signature, he could have unleashed severe economic sanctions against Khartoum. But a southern peace framework seems tantalizingly close, so policymakers faced a tough choice. "It's frustrating," says a senior State Department official, "but given all the progress, we couldn't say they weren't cooperating."

This is all too familiar - a US administration that sees no vital interests at stake in a third world conflict, Europeans doing nothing, a UN commission that brings no relief. As Ford and Gamble write:

The Europeans issued a statement on the crisis that scrupulously avoids asking anyone in particular to stop killing anybody:

The European Commission today launched a strong appeal to warring parties in the Darfur region of Western Sudan to secure "safe humanitarian access" so that the enormous needs of the population can be properly addressed....Speaking at the launch of the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office Annual Review ("ECHO 2003"), Poul Nielson, Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, highlighted the "tragic situation" in Darfur. Threats to the "humanitarian space" is the central theme of ECHO's Annual Review this year.

Having done their bit to save humanitarian "space," if not the human beings themselves, the EU got on with the business of... business.

The whole cri-du-coeur is here and well worth reading.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch's Carroll Bogert writes in the Los Angeles Times asking, where is the media on the Sudan calamity?

The international media don't send reporters to cover genocides, it seems. They cover genocide anniversaries.

We've just finished a spate of front-page stories, television docu-histories and somber panel discussions on "Why the Media Missed the Story" in Rwanda, pegged to the 10th anniversary of one of the most shocking tragedies of last century, or any century. More than 500,000 people were killed in a small African country in only 100 days, and the world turned away.

But even as the ink was drying on the latest round of mea culpas, another colossal disaster in Africa was already going uncovered.

Nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes in western Sudan; many have fled into neighboring Chad. They report that militias working with the Sudanese government have been attacking villages, ransacking and torching homes, killing and raping civilians. These armed forces are supposedly cracking down on rebel groups based in the Darfur region, but in fact they are targeting the population...

Reporters have begun trickling to the scene. The Los Angeles Times has a correspondent en route to Darfur, as does the New York Times. But the fact is, with or without a war in Iraq, American journalists are generally slower to cover mass death if the victims are not white. The Rwandan genocide is a case in point.

The tragedy in Darfur may not cross the genocide threshold, but should that really make a difference? Thousands of civilians have been killed, and the pattern and intent behind these massive crimes must be carefully mapped and loudly broadcast around the world if there is to be any hope of stopping them.

We need more information and more firsthand reporting. We need reporters at the scene, making this disaster real to their audience by telling the stories of individual victims.

It's the media's job to inform us. They should do it, and quickly — because 10 years from now there won't be any excuse for another round of hand-wringing.

Back in February 2001, six months before the September 11 attacks, Paul Bremer, then the head of the National Commission on Terrorism established by the Clinton administration, told a conference that the Bush administration was not paying attention to the terrorism problem. "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism," Mr. Bremer told the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, Reuters reports today. "What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, `Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?' "

[Bremer's 2000 testimony to Congress was dead on target as well].

I am glad this is getting wider play. But I do believe the blogosphere had this first, more than a week ago.

This is interesting. The meeting to do a "work up" of Joe Wilson was called by senior Republicans as far back as March 2003 -- in other words, a full four months before his New York Times oped about what he did not find in Niger. And Newt Gingrich, of the American Enterprise Institute, was reportedly among those present.

Mr. Wilson writes that a White House effort to damage him began at a March 2003 meeting called to develop a critique of him for the vice president's office. Citing an unnamed source "close to the House Judiciary Committee," Mr. Wilson writes that "either the vice president himself or, more likely, his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby chaired a meeting at which a decision was made to do a work-up on me."

Mr. Wilson writes that the meeting was attended by senior Republicans, possibly including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker. On Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Gingrich, Rick Tyler, said Mr. Wilson's account was a "complete fabrication."

Mr. Wilson says those in the meeting decided that "the strategy of the White House was to confront the issue as a `Wilson' problem rather than as an issue of the lie that was in the State of the Union address."

Posted by Laura at 07:15 AM

More than 120 US soldiers have been killed in combat in Iraq since April 1. That is more troops killed just in the month of April alone than the total number of US soldiers who were killed in the whole six week US invasion of Iraq a year ago. Something is seriously wrong with Rumsfeld's formula, that the post-war a full year into the occupation is increasingly and considerably more lethal for US soldiers than than the war itself.

Post Script: The AP reports that 1,361 Iraqis have been killed in April.

Slate's Justice correspondent Dahlia Lithwick's piece on the Supreme Court hearing of the Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi case concerning whether US citizens can be declared enemy combatants and lose all of their Constitutional rights, is worth reading. She captures why this case is so utterly terrifying:

How you feel about the indefinite military detentions of Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla will turn largely on what you think life will look like when it starts. By "it," I mean the moment at which fundamental liberties are curtailed by well-meaning governments and the legal system becomes unable to offer relief. Never having seen "it" happen in my lifetime, I'm hardly an expert. German Jews who survived the Holocaust will tell you that it's hard to know at exactly which instant you've crossed the line into "it." Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American detained during World War II, knows what "it" looks like, and he says it looks a bit like this. Professor Jennifer Martinez, Padilla's oral advocate at the Supreme Court this morning, says we are at the line separating "it" from "not it" right now, today—as the court stands poised to decide whether "the government can take citizens off the street and lock them up in jail forever."

I am not as exercised as some people I know with concerns about things like no-fly lists (as flawed as they are) as the government tries to increase its information gathering on US citizens and foreigners to prevent terrorism; but this case concerning the detention, potentially forever, with almost no legal representation and due process of Hamdi and Padilla, and no real definition or criteria for what "enemy combatant" means, is truly beyond the pale. In particular because it is hard to escape the suspicion that the reason the government moved Padilla from the Justice system to a military enemy combatant status with no rights is because it just didn't have the evidence to prosecute the case. And if that is the case, it is even more horrifying to think of him locked in a windowless room with no contact with anyone, for the past two years, and potentially for the rest of his life.

The case of US soldiers' abuse of Iraqi prisoners detained at Abu Ghraib prison is plenty disturbing on its own. But it's made even more so by the suggestion made by US Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez that the soldiers' supervisors seemed to condone the abuse; and secondly, by the suggestion of one of the accused soldier's attorneys that the soldiers were under orders to create conditions favorable for US intelligence operatives to interrogate the prisoners.

The soldiers "were provided no guidance on how to run the prison while they were there," [Gary] Myers, [the lawyer for one of the accused, Ivan Frederick,] said. "They came under the influence of the intelligence community, whose interests may not be necessarily consistent with good prison management. The prison was set up in such a fashion that the intelligence community had far too much influence.

"They were instructing or advising the MPs to create 'favorable conditions' for interrogation. . . . 'Favorable conditions' were conditions where the detainees were susceptible to providing intelligence information, and that process involved techniques of humiliation."

The soldiers were congratulated by their senior officers, he said. "These guys are being told they are doing a fantastic job for their country, that they are saving lives and to keep up the good work," Myers said.

During Frederick's hearing, three of his supervisors appeared, and all invoked their constitutional right against self-incrimination, Myers said.

Three of the soldiers involved have been recommended for court-martial, and several more are to face hearings to determine if they too should face court-martial. Perhaps just as important, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez has quite rightly recommended severe penalties for the soldiers' supervising officers.

A senior U.S. official said Thursday that Sanchez was surprised by the severity of the abuses and the apparent lack of response by the military police unit's officers.

"One of the things General Sanchez was concerned about was the fact that this was more than one bad apple, one bad incident," an aide to Sanchez said on condition of anonymity, because of the continuing investigation. "Why wasn't the chain of command involved? Why wasn't the chain of command aware?"

This case is so troubling not only because it makes one ashamed that the US led an invasion of a dictatorship only to have US soldiers abuse prisoners in a manner one would expect only in a dictatorship. But what is the atmosphere that leads to a culture among US soldiers running that prison where such cruelty and degradation was celebrated? Just how bad are things going in Iraq that at least this unit was letting off steam by abusing these people in such a cruel and ugly way? Is this how confident soldiers behave? Or is this rather more a sign of the anxiety of -- losing it?