Before the war, for instance, there was a loud debate among intelligence analysts over the information provided to the Pentagon by Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi and defectors linked to him. Yet little of this seeped into the press. Not until September 29, 2003, for instance, did the New York Times get around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors associated with him. In a front-page article headlined “Agency Belittles Information Given by Iraqi Defectors,” Douglas Jehl reported that a study by the Defense Intelligence Agency had found that most of the information provided by defectors connected to Ahmed Chalabi “was of little or no value.” Several defectors introduced to US intelligence by the Iraqi National Congress, Jehl wrote, “invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program.”“Not Fit to Print,” by James C. Moore, Salon, May 27, 2004:Why, I wondered, had it taken the Times so long to report this? Around the time that Jehl’s article appeared, I ran into a senior editor at the Times and asked him about it. Well, he said, some reporters at the paper had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write too critically about him.
It turned out that the aluminum tubes were covered with an anodized coating, which would have been machined off to make them usable in a centrifuge. But that change in the thickness of the tube wall would have rendered the tubes useless for a centrifuge, according to a number of nuclear scientists who spoke publicly after [Judith] Miller’s story. Aluminum, which has not been used in uranium gas separators since the 1950s, has been replaced by steel. The tubes, in fact, were almost certainly intended for use as rocket bodies. Hussein’s multiple-launch rocket systems had rusted on their pads and he had ordered the tubes from Italy. “Medusa 81,” the Italian rocket model name, was stamped on the sides of the tubes, and in a factory north of Baghdad, American intelligence officers later discovered boxes of rocket fins and motors awaiting the arrival of the tubes of terror.“Media Mix,” by Peter Johnson, USA Today, May 26, 2004:The probable source for Miller’s story, in addition to U.S. intelligence operatives, was Adnan Ihsan Saeed, an Iraqi defector Miller was introduced to by Chalabi. Miller had quoted him in a December 2001 report when Saeed had told her he had worked on nuclear operations in Iraq and that there were at least 20 banned-weapons facilities undergoing repairs. Of course, no such facilities have been found—meaning Saeed was either lying or horribly uninformed. […]
The Times plays an unequaled role in the national discourse, and when it publishes a front-page piece about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, that story very quickly runs away from home to live on its own. The day after Miller’s tubes narrative showed up, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News went on national TV to proclaim, “They were the kind of tubes that could only be used in a centrifuge to make nuclear fuel.” Norah O’Donnell had already told the network’s viewers the day before of the “alarming disclosure,” and the New York Times wire service distributed Miller’s report to dozens of papers across the landscape. Invariably, they gave it prominence. Sadly, the sons and daughters of America were sent marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told and widely disseminated lie.
Martin Kaplan, dean of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that “for people who are serious and thoughtful, the Times is a gatekeeper of quality in terms of what’s credible and believable. When it published those pieces, it sent signals which legitimized our going to war and calmed people’s fears that we were rushing. It turns out that the Times was hoodwinked just like the rest of the country.”Get Your War On:
Sean Baker was a member of the Kentucky National Guard from 1989 to 1997. During that time, he served in the Gulf War. In the late 90’s, he got out of the Guard, but re-enlisted after September 11th.Nothing wrong with our military culture, though! Just a few bad apples.In January 2003, Baker was a member of the 438th Military Police company in Operation Enduring Freedom at Guantanamo Bay, where he says he was “given a direct order by an officer in the U.S. Army” to play the role of a detainee for a training exercise.
“I was on duty as an MP in an internal camp where the detainees were housed,” said Baker.
Baker claims that he was ordered to put on one of the orange jumpsuits worn by the detainees. “At first I was reluctant, but he said ‘you’ll be fine…put this on.’ And I did,” said Baker.
Baker says what took place next happened at the hands of four U.S. soldiers—soldiers he believes didn’t know he was one of them—has changed his life forever.
“They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down,” said Baker. “Then he—the same individual—reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breath. When I couldn’t breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’”
But, Baker says, the beating didn’t stop. “That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me,” he said. “Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier, I’m a U.S. soldier.’”
Baker says it wasn’t until one of the soldiers noticed what Baker was wearing did the exercise stop. “He saw that I had BDUs and boots on.”
Nearly 15 months after that day, and countless medical treatments at Walter Reed Hospital, Baker is now medically retired from the military, but still suffers.
“I sustained an injury to my brain, a traumatic brain injury which has caused me to have a seizure disorder I deal with daily,” said Baker.
Baker’s traumatic brain injury is outlined in a military document in his possession, which says the injury “was due to soldier playing role as a detainee who was uncooperative.”
(Via Looka!, which is full of much more cheerful posts about food and drink, all reminders that even among monstrousness life is worth living.)
Unfortunately, they’re us:
Her plight began on Jan. 30 at 2:30 a.m., when two U.S. Humvees pulled up to the door of her family’s house as an Apache helicopter circled overhead. The soldiers asked for her father, Abdullah, 66, an American-educated geologist. Moayad insists that she does not know what U.S. forces wanted from her father, whom she described as a low-level Baath party official.When will the civilized world realize that there can be no compromise with those who practice terrorism?Moayad told the soldiers that her father had gone to neighboring Jordan to undergo surgery for prostate cancer and she showed them his medical records. They arrested the only other man in the house: Moayad’s husband. As her mother and children started to cry, Moayad said the troops told the family that they just wanted to ask Ibrahim some questions and they promised to bring him back the next day. […]
On Feb. 17, Moayad said, a group of soldiers knocked on her door and delivered a handwritten letter from Ibrahim. It said he was being transferred from a U.S. base in Baghdad to Abu Ghraib prison “until the arrival of my father-in-law.” […]
Moayad has made the 40-mile roundtrip journey from Baghdad to Abu Ghraib 18 times. On most visits, she stood outside the gates with other family members waiting in vain for information about their relatives. One soldier who felt sorry for her looked up Ibrahim’s name on the prison’s computer system and told her that he was marked as a detainee with “intel value.”
Moayad, whose patchwork English is the legacy of her Texas childhood, doesn’t know what “intelligence value” means and how it might affect her husband’s status. But the Red Cross report documented a pattern of abuses—including humiliation, hooding and threats of execution—against Iraqi prisoners deemed to have an intelligence value.
“The American soldiers kept on telling me, ‘Bring your father, and you will get your husband back,’” said Moayad, her soft voice trailing off. “How can they say that he’s not a hostage?”
On May 15, her 18th visit to Abu Ghraib, Moayad finally got to see her husband. Ibrahim told her he was being well treated, but he said that military officials had forced him to write the letter pleading for his father-in-law to surrender.
In a related development, it has been brought to our attention that the state of Texas should probably not actually be “sawed off the mainland and pushed out to sea.” Electrolite regrets the error.
Elsewhere, Electrolite is entertained to find itself included in a list of scholars who blog. Electrolite is now entertaining suggestions as to what we’re a “scholar” in. Along with fellow scholar Avedon Carol, we will be setting up shop as a full-fledged academic movement just as soon as this question has been fully answered to our satisfaction.
Brooks has faith—literally—in democracy: “if we muddle through in Iraq and some semidemocratic nation slowly emerges, it won’t be because of American skill. It will be because the democratic creed is so strong it can withstand the highest incompetence.” He believes in American democracy the way an evangelist believes in his religion—which is exactly how the American Founding Fathers didn’t believe in democracy. Brooks seems to be saying that if we can make democracy work, then it works because it didn’t need us to make it work. This, of course, doesn’t make any sense. Then again, it’s quite familiar. Imagine the professional athlete who trains his whole life and then wins the big game, only to turn around and say “I didn’t win this. God wanted me to win.” Um, no—you trained really hard. If you didn’t train really hard, you wouldn’t have won. God is rather irrelevant. Likewise, if democracy works in Iraq, it’s because everybody made it work.Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation.I don’t think any idea is so good that “it can withstand the highest incompetence.” Jesus didn’t tell his disciples to sit around and do nothing: he gave them specific instructions and he told them that His message would only take hold if they made it work. Mohammed was the same. Faith is not enough. It may be well and good if your idea has transcendent validity, but in the end it will only appear transcendently valid if some very competent people put it into practice with skill and precision.
Perhaps he’s got a point, but he kind of loses me here:
I suppose preachers have the same sort of general license to opine at random as bloggers do, but at least the bloggers don’t put out press releases about it.Now, check me on this, but what exactly is it that bloggers do all the time?
(Shorter David Neiwert: We can forgive those who have wronged us; we cannot forgive those whom we have wronged. That’s where fascism comes from.)
UPDATE: Thanks to commenters Greg van Eekhout and Bryant, we now both have nifty new GMail accounts—and the “GMail: Threat or Menace” discussion has heaved over the horizon in the comment section. To your weapons!
Jay Allen has more. (Via Dan Gillmor.)
Unitarian Universalists have for decades presided over births, marriages and memorials. The church operates in every state, with more than 5,000 members in Texas alone.At which point milk would sour, dogs and cats would move in together, and Western civilization would fall. Oh, wait, that’s when gay people are allowed to marry. I get so confused.But according to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Denison Unitarian church isn’t really a religious organization—at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: the organization “does not have one system of belief.”
Never before—not in this state or any other—has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group’s religious philosophy, church officials say. Strayhorn’s ruling clearly infringes upon religious liberties, said Dan Althoff, board president for the Denison congregation that was rejected for tax exemption by the comptroller’s office.
“I was surprised—surprised and shocked—because the Unitarian church in the United States has a very long history,” said Althoff, who notes that father-and-son presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams were both Unitarians. […]
Questions about the issue were referred to Jesse Ancira, the comptroller’s top lawyer, who said Strayhorn has applied a consistent standard — and then stuck to it. For any organization to qualify as a religion, members must have “simply a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power,” he said.
“We have got to apply a test, and use some objective standards,” Ancira said. “We’re not using the test to deny the exemptions for a particular group because we like them or don’t like them.” […]
Those who oppose the comptroller’s “God, gods or supreme being” test say that it can discriminate against legitimate faiths. For example, applying that standard could disqualify Buddhism because it does not mandate belief in a supreme being, critics say.
Opponents note that the federal government applies less stringent rules for federal tax exemptions, yet manages to discourage fraud and abuse. They also question whether the comptroller’s office has formulated excuses to discriminate against nontraditional groups, such as those that include witches and pagans. […]
Strayhorn vows to continue the legal fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. “Otherwise, any wannabe cult who dresses up and parades down Sixth Street on Halloween will be applying for an exemption,” she said in a April 23 news release.
This kind of story always provokes the suggestion that maybe nobody should get a tax break for calling themselves a church, which would have the salutary effect of getting the government out of the business of ruling on what is and isn’t religion. In the real world, however, that isn’t going to happen. Meanwhile, to the State of Texas in 2004, a money-making racket founded by a third-rate science fiction writer qualifies as a “religion” and the faith of Ethan Allen and Daniel Webster doesn’t. This is what barbarism looks like.
Blogads has been easy to work with; they give us complete control over which ads actually appear on our sites, and our share of the revenue gets PayPalled to us with welcome regularity. We’re not planning any round-the-world voyages based on the proceeds, but they have helped defray the costs of our growing traffic. So we encourage you to take their survey. Of course, in our increasingly privacy-free society, there’s always the chance that this data is secretly being diverted to shadowy world-government organizations for use by the orbital mind-control lasers, so don’t let us pressure you or fnord anything. Also, the answer to question #22 is “Electrolite and Making Light.” Thank you for your time, and one of our underground agents will be contacting you soon.
Scribe is only at version 0.2, but it’s working for me on Windows Firefox so far. If it turns out to work on OS X Firefox as well, it may get me to switch from Safari. (Via Snarkout.)
Still, I have to wonder: if I’d actually fitted myself out with a degree from a diploma mill, could I, too, have become an Assistant Secretary of Defense?
UPDATE: Mark Kleiman points out that it’s not like Assistant Secretary Abell is in charge of anything important.
Sen. Inhofe (R-OK): As I watch this outrage that everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners I have to say and I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.From the ICRC report:The idea that these prisoners, they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood probably on their hands and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.
Allegations collected by the ICRC indicated that numerous people had been handed over to the [Coalition forces] on the basis of unfounded accusations (of hostility against the CF, or belonging to opposition forces) because they were unable or unwilling to pay bribes to the police. Alleged ill-treatment during arrest and transportation included hooding, tight handcuffing, verbal abuse, beating with fists and rifle butts, and kicking. During interrogation, the detaining authorities allegedly whipped persons deprived of their liberty with cables on the back, kicked them in the lower parts of the body, including in the testicles, handcuffed and left them hanging from the iron bars of the cell windows or doors in painful positions for several hours at a time, and burned them with cigarettes (signs on bodies witnessed by ICRC delegates). Several persons deprived of their liberty alleged that they had been made to sign a statement that they had not been allowed to read. These allegations concerned several police stations in Baghdad including Al-Qana, Al-Jiran Al-Kubra in al-Amriyya, Al-Hurriyyeh in Al Doura, Al-Salhiyye in Salhiyye, and Al-Baiah. Many persons deprived of their liberty drew parallels between police practices under the occupation with those of the former regime.Via Mark Kleiman, who points out that there’s no excuse for being unaware that our forces were being used as a tool in the cops’ protection racket—the ICRC report was submitted to the CPA three months ago.
Yet according to Senator Inhofe this morning, “If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, Senator Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America.