Author: Helena

How to train abusers

You want more clues as to how widespread physical abuse is in US-run detention facilities? Read about Specialist Sean Baker.
Baker was a member of a military-police unit in the Kentucky National Guard who pulled a tour of guard duty at Gitmo. One day in January 2003, an officer ordered Baker to play the role of a balky detainee in a training exercise. He put that dehumanizing orange jumpsuit on over his unifrm and cowered, as ordered, under a bed in a mock ‘cell’.
According to this report by the NYT’s Nick Kristof, this is what Baker said happened next:

    “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. 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 breathe. When I couldn’t breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was `red.’ . . . That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: `I’m a U.S. soldier. I’m a U.S. soldier.’ ”
    Then [continues Kristof] the soldiers noticed that he was wearing a U.S. battle dress uniform under the jumpsuit. Mr. Baker was taken to a military hospital for treatment of his head injuries, then flown to a Navy hospital in Portsmouth, Va. After a six-day hospitalization there, he was given a two-week discharge to rest.
    But Mr. Baker began suffering seizures, so the military sent him to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for treatment of a traumatic brain injury. He stayed at the hospital for 48 days, was transferred to light duty… and was finally given a medical discharge two months ago.
    Meanwhile, a military investigation concluded that there had been no misconduct involved in Mr. Baker’s injury. Hmm. The military also says it can’t find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident.
    Most appalling, when Mr. Baker told his story to a Kentucky reporter, the military lied in a disgraceful effort to undermine his credibility.

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Gelb on Tenet resignation

I cruised around the ‘net a bit to check out speculation etc about Tenet’s resignation. Actually, the most interesting thing I found came from that very well-connected old fox, Les Gelb.
(Gelb even taught Tenet in a seminar when Tenet was a senior at Georgetown U., back in 1981, and they’ve stayed in pretty close touch since.)
Here’s the most interesting thing I saw Gelb saying, in the interview with him on cfr.org:

    Generally, you never know exactly what is going on. You hear some people repeating one rumor and other rumors come out, too. I don’t think his leaving helps Bush politically, and I don’t think he would resign to help Bush politically.

There are some other interesting things in the interview, too. Check it out.
Btw, I agree with Gelb that Tenet’s resignation doesn’t help Bush politically.
#1 It adds to the impression of an administration in gathering chaos (prez hiring private legal advice, polygraphing of high officials at the Pentagon over the Chalabi leak, Ashcroft not talking to Ridge, etc etc etc…. )
#2 If Tenet is a “private citizen”, he’ll be in a much better position to defend himself and name the other names that need to be named since the upcoming, reportedly extremely damaging reports on pre-9-11 failures and other issues start rolling off the presses.

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Tenet resigning–who’s next?

I’m in Ontario. I see there’s lots of speculation about why George Tenet resigned. Of course, there are many reasons he should have resigned, at many points along the way– him and Colin Powell, both. Indeed, those two and anyone else of any possible integrity in the service of this government…
One of the delightful (and weird) twists on this story is that our dear old buddy Ahmad (‘Don’t blame me, I only sold them the snake-oil’) Chalabi, who is now in Najaf, rapidly trying to reinvent himself as a Shi-ite national hero (?), is now acting the wounded party and blaming Tenet for having framed him re the passing-secrets-to-Iran business.
If we were to believe Chalabi – oh, ha-ha-ha, this is almost to crazy to write… If we were to believe Chalabi (!), then Tenet’s sudden downfall might look like the doing of Chalabi’s longtime backers in the Wolfie-Feith-Perle circle?
But what it certainly looks like to me is that there’s a really delightful falling-out among all the rabble who’ve been running our country’s so-called foreign ‘policy’ under Bush…
And Tenet’s resignation surely isn’t the end of it.

Kurds doing okay

Am I the only person remarking on this– but aren’t the Kurds doing pretty well in the current government-forming process?
They have two of the top five jobs. In addition, they have the Foreign Affairs portfolio, and the Public Works portfolio (a.k.a. the huge patronage possibilities portfolio). I am really, really glad that after decades of getting screwed by Saddam and his neighbors, these Kurds look as though they may be well positioned to look out for their own interests in the months ahead.
It ain’t ever easy being a minority. But over the past 13 years, the Kurds have been able to set their society on its feet–with the help of the Western air umbrella–and in particular, they’ve been able to create a fairly stable-looking system of political representation. (After a small but bloody intra-Kurdish civil war along the way there in the mid-1990s.)
They’re lucky. The crystallization of differing political interests into well-formed political parties is far less well advanced in the Sunni Arab or especially the Shi’a Arab community. That means that if–as I surely hope–the country moves into a situation of increasing and mainly democratic self-rule, the country’s non-Kurds may continue to be at a relative disadvantage compared with their Kurdish compatriots.

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U.S. military pressgangs at work

The strain imposed on U.S. military planners by the total failure to do decent follow-up (‘Phase 4’) planning for either Iraq or Afghanisatn continues to grow. Today, the NYT carried an impassioned plea from an Army captain that the soldiers about to be re-impressed into the forces to keep up the troop strength are being very harshly treated.
The program in question is called “stop-loss”. The captain is called Andrew Exum. Here’s the bottom line on what he wrote:

    for enlisted soldiers, men and women who sign on with the Army for a predetermined period of service in lieu of commissions, stop-loss is a gross breach of contract.
    These soldiers have already been asked to sacrifice much and have done so proudly. Yet the military continues to keep them overseas– because it knows that through stop-loss it can do so legally, and that it will not receive nearly as much negative publicity as it would by reinstating the draft.
    Volunteer soldiers on active duty don’t have the right to protest or speak out against the policy… For those of us who have seen these soldiers repeatedly face death, watching them march off again– after they should have already left the Army– is painful.

Exum also wrote about the high costs the activation of the Individual Ready reserve is imposing on all the families affected by that program, too.
I don’t know when he wrote that piece. But it sure is timely. Today, AP has some big stories about stop-loss being implemented for:

    several units about to go to Iraq: most of the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, from Fort Drum, N.Y.; the 265th Infantry Brigade of the Louisiana National Guard; the 116th Armored Brigade of the Idaho National Guard; the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment of the Tennessee National Guard, and the 42nd Infantry Division’s headquarters staff, from the New York National Guard.
    The 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, a South Korea-based unit, is expected to deploy later this summer and will be subject to the expanded stop-loss program as well, officials said.

I wonder, was the whole Iraq war “adventure” a fiendish plot to try to break the back of the US Army? Can we blame Ahmad Chalabi? Can we blame the Iranians?
Nah, I think we all really know where the buck really stops. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in Northwest DC is where the guy in question lives. (Or just possibly, the Naval Observatory up on Mass Ave… home of Unca Dickie.)
All that sorrow, all those lives ended, broken, or mangled beyond recognition. In our country and even more so in Iraq.
As Yankeedoodle would say: 86-43-04.

Transitional justice and Iraq

I’ve just been reading a really intriguing report about the attitudes of Iraqis towards reconciliation and ‘justice’ that has been published by a body called the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), in New York.
The report is called Iraqi Voices. It’s 74 pages in that PDF version, and quite a lengthy read. The data in it are a little old, since they all date from last July and August. Also, the ICTJ did not use a totally “scientific” social-science methodology in their investigation (and as a result, their findings are presented in narrative rather than quantitative form, which is fine by me.)
What they had done to get their data was conduct fairly detailed interviews with 38 “opinion leaders” around the country and then hold smallish focus-group discussions among a total of some 340 Iraqis from different background. Their sampling was not “representative” at all. For example, of the 38 “opinion leaders”, only six were from the south, while 20 were from the much more sparsely populated “north” of the country.
But still, I find the report really interesting. I don’t know that attitudes on these important issues have necessarily changed very much inside Iraq in the past ten months. (What does anyone else think?) And honestly, that method of taking an unrepresentative but broad sampling from throughout a society, and doing some individual interviews and some small-group discussions, is almost exactly what I did in Mozambique last year, and it was incredibly revelatory and productive for me.

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Riverbend’s new post

Riverbend has a great new post up on her blog. She says she hasn’t felt much like blogging recently. The new post is a great little reflection on cleaning the family’s roof ready for summer-time sleepouts there.
She notes that sleeping out on the roof used to be just a tradition that her parents told her about… from the “olden days”:

    They used to tell us endless stories about how, as children, they used to put out mats and low beds on the roof to sleep. There were no air-conditioners back then… sometimes not even ceiling fans. People had to be content with the hot Baghdad air and the energetic Baghdad mosquitos. Now my parents get to relive their childhood memories like never before because we’ve gone back a good fifty years. It’s impossible to sleep inside of the house while the electricity is off.

She promised that “tomorrow” (i.e., today?) she’d write more about the new government.
Great, River! Thanks so much for coming back up. I am really eager to hear what-all you think of what’s been going on.

Zero tolerance for torture: the column!

Yes!!!
The life of a humble scribe like myself has its frustrations and disappointments. But every so often, I feel unbelievably blessed by being able to do what I do. And right now is one such moment. My column Zero-tolerance on torture: How hard is that? is in tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor. And it’s already up, here, on their website.
I can’t tell you how strongly I feel about this issue. (Regular JWN readers just possibly have an inkling.) I am really grateful to my editor on the CSM Opinion page, Clara Germani, for having squeezed this one into the paper outside of my regular schedule. It was probably she, too, who picked the title, which I’m kinda fond of.
So would any of the rest of you like to join in this campaign? Like, if you’re a US citizen, you could write to your representatives in Congress? We could make signs and go hold ’em outside the political conventions?
Alternatively, if you prefer your activism to be in cyberspace, maybe you could send the column around to anyone on your lists. Call your local paper and ask them to run it… I don’t know, I just wish we could get this campaign off the ground. How hard is that, indeed?

What to do with $119.4 billion

The AP wire has a great little story that just came across my transom. It starts by reminding us that, “Congress and President Bush have so far provided $119.4 billion for the war in Iraq.” And then, it gives a few examples of what that sum could buy.
Well, in the interests of “fair use” (!) I shan’t reproduce the whole story here. But let’s just note that that bunch of dough could pay tuition, room, and board to send 748,495 people–nearly the whole population of of Jacksonville, Florida– to Harvard University for four years.
Or, it could buy a median-price ($174,100) U.S. home for 685,813 people– slightly more than all the residents of Austin, Texas. One home for EACH of them, man, woman, and child, that is.
I hope your local newspaper carries the whole AP story, with the rest of its truly eye-opening examples.
Here’s the thing, though. The story also notes that, “If the $119.4 billion were divided evenly among Iraq’s estimated 25 million residents, each would get $4,776. That would be eight times the country’s $600 per capita income.”
So here’s my question:

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Après nous, le deluge?

It strikes me that things are getting bad very rapidly for the U.S. in the Gulf. We have political mayhem in Baghdad, with the IGC quasi-puppets flexing their political muscles, Lakhdar Brahimi’s mission in chaos, and no word at all from Sistani in the past two weeks. We have a once-again dangerously deteriorating situation in Najaf and Kufa. We have the Saudis running round like the Keystone cops at Khobar and, almost certainly, the world oil market about to get into a tizzy over that. We had the big bomb in Karachi…
It feels like it’s too late and too dire now to sit around enjoying the schadenfreudies.
I’ve been really disappointed with the U.N. in recent weeks, and most particularly with Lakhdar’s apparent willingness to let himself get rolled by Paul Bremer. But if the UN, with all its weight of international legitimacy, etc., can’t help to midwife a half-way acceptable transition in Iraq, who can? Sometimes I wonder if the folks calling the shots in Washington still really, deep-down, want the UN to fail.
“Apres nous, le deluge”? Is that what’s happening here?