Honoring Service Rather than Trumping Up War

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Seven years ago, Dick Cheney addressed the Veterans of Foreign War national convention (George Bush was otherwise occupied in Crawford, clearing brush). In a speech he did not have vetted by the Intelligence Community (as was normal), Cheney made the claims about Iraq having nukes that served as a foundation for the Iraq War campaign rolled out just a few weeks later (remember, you don’t introduce a new product in August).

The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country, requires a candid appraisal of the facts. After his defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam agreed under to U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 to cease all development of weapons of mass destruction. He agreed to end his nuclear weapons program. He agreed to destroy his chemical and his biological weapons. He further agreed to admit U.N. inspection teams into his country to ensure that he was in fact complying with these terms.

In the past decade, Saddam has systematically broken each of these agreements. The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents. And they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago. These are not weapons for the purpose of defending Iraq; these are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam can hold the threat over the head of anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.

On the nuclear question, many of you will recall that Saddam’s nuclear ambitions suffered a severe setback in 1981 when the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor. They suffered another major blow in Desert Storm and its aftermath.

But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors — including Saddam’s own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam’s direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

Today, Obama is the one addressing the VFW. While he’s describing his stance in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is, at the same time, repeating his promise to America’s service men and women.

That is why I have made this pledge to our armed forces: I will only send you into harm’s way when it is absolutely necessary. Read more →

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Suspension of Posse Comitatus for 9/11 Anniversary?

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Remember the OLC memo eviscerating the Fourth Amendment–the one they claimed was only ever hypothetical? Well, Cheney was itching to try it out to arrest the Lackawanna Six.

Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

[snip]

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

Unless I missed it, NYT didn’t tell you when Dick Cheney was proposing to suspend posse comitatus. But as it happens, most of the Lackawanna Six got arrested on September 14, 2002.

Which to me is just as interesting as the news that Cheney was pushing to do this: Imagine how well it would work to impose military rule just in time for the first anniversary of 9/11, and just as you’re rolling out the case for the Iraq War?

Update: scout prime reminds us that when it came to saving brown people, BushCo hesitated, citing the Constitution.

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Is DOD So Sure They Weren’t Involved in the Rashid Dostum Massacre?

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Last Monday, I noted two particular details of the Obama Administration’s response to news of spiked investigations into General Rashid Dostum’s massacre of up to thousands of prisoners in 2001. First, DOD said it didn’t need to investigate because there was no evidence American personnel were involved.

There’s DOD, which bases its opposition to an investigation on the claim that there’s no evidence US forces were involved in the massacre.

Asked about the report, Marine Corps Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said that since U.S. military forces were not involved in the killings, there is nothing the Defense Department could investigate.

"There is no indication that U.S. military forces were there, or involved, or had any knowledge of this," Lapan said. "So there was not a full investigation conducted because there was no evidence that there was anything from a DoD (Department of Defense) perspective to investigate."

And, President Obama offered up the suggestion that we might have been involved.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that, you know, there are responsibilities that all nations have even in war. And if it appears that our conduct in some way supported violations of the laws of war, then I think that, you know, we have to know about that.

Which is why Mark Benjamin’s addition to this story is so key. He reports that American forces may have observed the men packed into trucks.

Earlier this month, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter James Risen advanced the story, revealing that the United States had resisted any war crimes investigation into the massacre, despite learning from Dell Spry, the lead FBI agent at Guantánamo Bay following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, that many Afghan detainees were telling similar stories of a mass killing. Spry directed interviews of detainees by FBI agents at Guantánamo Bay, and compiled allegations made by the detainees.

[snip]

What the Times did not say was that these Guantánamo prisoners also said that U.S. personnel were present during the massacre. "The allegation was that U.S. forces were present while Dostum’s troops were herding these people into these containers," Spry, now retired from the FBI and working as an FBI consultant, told Salon. "They were out rounding up alleged Taliban and insurgent folks."

Spry said that at the time of the interviews not long after the invasion of Afghanistan he found the detainees’ claims of a massacre "plausible," since the detainees separately told similar stories. Spry thought an investigation Read more →

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Obama on the Afghan Massacre

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Given President Obama’s apparent order that his national security team look into the Afghan massacre, I wanted to look at the various statements about the Administration response to the massacre and disaster, because I think it speaks to the same internal tensions as described in the Klaidman story on Holder.

Risen’s original story on Afghan massacre lacked any statement from the White House. But it did have several comments from the State Department suggesting the Obama Administration was laying the groundwork to marginalize Dostum. 

But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

[snip]

While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.

A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.”

While I’m not entirely sure how much the statement, "and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry" is Risen’s or is his State Department source, it does suggest that the Obama Administration was laying the groundwork to marginalize Dostum, making it easier to conduct an investigation into his actions.

Within hours of the publication of Risen’s article, Laura Jakes had a seeming response–attributed to the Obama Administration generally–disavowing any intent or jurisdiction to conduct an investigation. The article starts by stating the opposition to an investigation generally.

Obama administration officials said Friday they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who human rights groups allege were killed by U.S.-backed forces

[snip]

U.S. officials said Friday they did not have legal grounds to investigate the deaths because only foreigners were involved and the alleged killings occurred in a foreign country.

Read more →

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US Government Covered Up War Crimes Committed by CIA’s Warlord

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The NYT, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to dump this James Risen story into the Saturday news black hole, as if they were trying to hide it in a deep dark hole.

Sickeningly, that’s what the story reports: that after Afghan warlord, Rashid Dostum, let perhaps 1,500 men die in a shipping container, he dumped them all in a big hole, and the US government continued to hide his crime in a deep hole of indifference and bureaucracy.

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that, over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Laili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

[snip]

A military commander in the United States-led coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the official, who, in keeping with his organization’s policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and declined to identify the commander.

A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been “stacked like cordwood” in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.

Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Read more →

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Was Porter Goss Briefed on Things Pelosi and Harman Weren’t?

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I decided recently that it was time to re-read George Tenet’s book.

And given all the recent discussion about CIA briefings, I was a little surprised to see this paragraph pertaining to early discussions with the UK on the Iraq war.

In May of 2002, my counterpart in Great Britain, the head of MI-6, Sir Richard Dearlove, traveled to Washington along with Prime Minister Blair’s then national security advisor, David Manning, to take Washington’s temperature on Iraq. Sir Richard met with Rice, Hadley, Scooter Libby, and Congressman Porter Goss, who was then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. (309) [my emphasis]

The paragraph almost appears to be a non-sequitur. The previous paragraphs discuss the series of meetings in 2002 that discussed the challenges of war in Iraq, without first addressing the question of "whether" war in Iraq was a good idea. Then the two paragraphs directly preceding this one pose the question, "When did you know for sure that we were going to war in Iraq"–but they focus on July 2002, not May. And the paragraphs following this one discuss the July 2002 Downing Street Memos amd Dearlove’s explanation to Tenet that he had concluded at the July 2002 meeting that war was "inevitable." (They also describe Dearlove disputing Libby’s allegations of a tie between al Qaeda and Iraq.)

So ostensibly, at least, this paragraph about May 2002 might be there for contrast–the previous meetings with which Dearlove was comparing the July 2002 meetings, after which he concluded there had been a "perceptible shift" and the war was definitely going to happen. Except that Tenet offers no details about what was said at that May 2002 meeting (note, Tenet did not apparently attend). 

And regardless of the content of the meeting, what was Porter Goss doing at a meeting with the National Security Advisor, the Deputy National Security Advisor, Cheney’s henchman, and the UK’s chief spook? Was he representing "the temperature" of those in Congress on a potential Iraq war? Or was he participating in the Administration’s early planning for that war?

I raise that question because of all the recent discussions about CIA briefings of Congress. This meeting occurred, of course, just as the Administration was implementing its torture program for Abu Zubaydah. CIA originally claimed that Bob Graham had been briefed on torture, twice, the previous month (April 2002). Read more →

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HPSCI Writes Sternly-Worded Letter Report on JSOC Activities

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Steven Aftergood catches the House Intelligence Committee bitching about the Defense Department conducting covert operations under the guise of "Operational Preparation of the Environment," and thereby avoiding any oversight over those activities.

The Committee notes with concern the blurred distinction between the intelligence-gathering activities carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the clandestine operations of the Department of Defense (DOD). Congress chartered the Committee for the purpose of conducting oversight of all intelligence activities of the U.S. Government, including all programs funded under both the National Intelligence Program and the Military Intelligence Program.
In categorizing its clandestine activities, DOD frequently labels them as "Operational Preparation of the Environment” (OPE) to distinguish particular operations as traditional military activities and not as intelligence functions. The Committee observes, though, that overuse of this term has made the distinction all but meaningless. The determination as to whether an operation will be categorized as an intelligence activity is made on a case-by-case basis; there are no clear guidelines or principles for making consistent determinations. The Director of National Intelligence himself has acknowledged that there is no bright line between traditional intelligence missions carried out by the military and the operations of the CIA.

Clandestine military intelligence-gathering operations, even those legitimately recognized as OPE, carry the same diplomatic and national security risks as traditional intelligence-gathering activities. While the purpose of many such operations is to gather intelligence, DOD has shown a propensity to apply the OPE label where the slightest nexus of a theoretical, distant military operation might one day exist. Consequently, these activities often escape the scrutiny of the
intelligence committees, and the congressional defense committees cannot be expected to exercise oversight outside of their jurisdiction.

This recalls something Sy Hersh has reported on–in which CIA partnered with JSOC to destabilize Iran, but only CIA activities were included in a finding (and therefore briefed to Congress).

But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

[snip]

Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. Read more →

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The Iraq Survey Group Leads Its Witness, Saddam Hussein

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After David Kay determined that there were no WMDs in Iraq, Charles Duelfer was brought in to create the appearance of a casus belli by focusing on Iraq’s ongoing intent to develop WMDs and on the Oil for Food scandal. Ultimately, Duelfer achieved the former goal with this claim.

Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities.

  • Iran was the pre-eminent motivator of this policy. All senior level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq’s principal enemy in the region. The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary.
  • Iraq Survey Group (ISG) judges that events in the 1980s and early 1990s shaped Saddam’s belief in the value of WMD. In Saddam’s view, WMD helped to save the Regime multiple times. He believed that during the Iran-Iraq war chemical weapons had halted Iranian ground offensives and that ballistic missile attacks on Tehran had broken its political will. Similarly, during Desert Storm, Saddam believed WMD had deterred Coalition Forces from pressing their attack beyond the goal of freeing Kuwait. WMD had even played a role in crushing the Shi’a revolt in the south following the 1991 cease-fire.
  • The former Regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead, his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them.

For that reason, it was critically important to Duelfer to get Saddam to personally admit his intention to develop WMD after sanctions. Here’s how Duelfer described that "admission" in his book.

It was the second week in June when [Saddam’s FBI interrogator George] Piro came to me, beaming. Read more →

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The Saddam Interviews

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The National Security Archive has posted a bunch of FBI interview reports from Saddam’s interrogation. As the NSA notes, this record is not complete.

Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.

This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic.  One interview, #20, is redacted in its entirety on national security grounds, although it is not clear what issues agents could have discussed with Saddam that cannot now be disclosed to the public.

While they don’t say it specifically, there are interview notes specifically excluded. Not noted by the NSA, for example, is that the CIA interrogated Saddam from the time he was captured in mid-December until when the FBI took over in February. As Charles Duelfer describes in his book, Hide and Seek, they weren’t the best equipped to conduct this interrogation.

While the team was expert, only one analyst had spent much time in Iraq and personally knew senior Iraqis. (389)

Furthermore, as NSA does suggest, there are more "Casual Conversations" than have been turned over to NSA. Duelfer, for example, describes Special Agent Piro, Saddam’s interrogator, finally getting Saddan to open up in April.

Saddam began to open up with Piro in April, at least in his informal meetings. (402)

As you can see from the NSA list of interview materials, there’s a gap in what NSA got from the end of March through May–precisely the period when Duelfer describes Saddam beginning to open up.

I’m still reading these reports, but for the moment I’m interested in a paragraph from the June 11 Conversation (it is mislabeled June 1 in the NSA list).

Hussen commented he allowed the UN inspectors back into Iraq to counter allegations by the British Government. Hussen stated this was a very difficult decision to make, but the British Government had prepared a report containing inaccurate intelligence. It was this inaccurate intelligence on which the United States was making their decisions. Read more →

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Pride And Petulance

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Today is Victory In Iraq Day. For Iraqis. Well, actually, it is the day American troops (yes we are the only ones left; even our "special friends", the Brits, left long ago) officially marked their exit from urban areas to be concentrated in centralized bases in the countryside. From the New York Times:

With parades, fireworks and a national holiday, the Iraqi government celebrated the final withdrawal of American troops from the country’s cities on Tuesday, trying to exploit a political milestone to trumpet what the prime minister called sovereignty from foreign occupation.

Indeed, in spite of the still tenuous security situation in many areas, it is and should be a day of celebration of the return of another piece of sovereignty for the Iraqis. They will never truly stand until they stand on their own; it will be painful, fitful and slow, but it is a necessary process.

And how are neocons and some elements of the military (by no means all) taking the events of the day? Not well of course. The Dick, Cheney, is concern trolling that the U.S. troop withdrawal might “waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point.”

The neocons and PNACs who ginned up this war, and lied us into it, are worried about the frailty of the situation because of the American sacrifice. There were no WMDs, no links to al-Qaida, no threat form Sadaam to the US or anybody in the region at the time, and the one real power in the region, Iran, has been strengthened. And Dick Cheney marks the occasion by whining about our sacrifice. The Iraqis must be thrilled to here those words.

As CNN’s Michael Ware reports in the attached video clip, no one, whether American, Iraqi or otherwise, should demean or devalue the efforts and lives lost by the American military, they did the job they were told to do, but the bigger picture on the Iraqi adventure is very ugly, and contrary to Dick Cheney, it is the sacrifice of the Iraqis that ought to be considered, because the American loss is insignificant to the hell we hath wrought upon Iraq. The US military and coalition forces have lost about 4,500 casualties (and nearly 1,400 contractor deaths which no one ever mentions).

The carnage on the Iraqi populous has been far more devastating however:

Thus, the best guess Read more →

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