Desperate times call for dead dogs

There's nothing I hate more than dumb jerks. Except dumb jerks who hurt animals.

Which is the reason I, right now, hate Palestinians.

Unable to kill Egyptian riot police who were trying to protect their country, Palestinians storming the border Friday took aim at the policemen's dogs instead, killing three.

Unable - or afraid - to take their frustration out on those responsible for their situation, some cowardly Palestinians instead took aim at dogs, who don't only not care one way or another about the blockade, but surely don't even understand the concept. They're animals for christ's sake.

Shame on the Palestinians. To add to the insult, after storming the border a bunch of them began using a crane to lift and drop farm animals from the Egyptian side to the Palestinian side of the border. I'm not about to assign blame or responsibility for the latest turmoil, but please leave the animals out of it. What in "the prophet's" name did they ever do to Palestine?

See for yourself: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18409510

Democracy In Iraq Not A Priority in U.S. Budget

By Peter Baker

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 5, 2006; A01

While President Bush vows to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, his administration has been scaling back funding for the main organizations trying to carry out his vision by building democratic institutions such as political parties and civil society groups.

The administration has included limited new money for traditional democracy promotion in budget requests to Congress. Some organizations face funding cutoffs this month, while others struggle to stretch resources through the summer. The shortfall threatens projects that teach Iraqis how to create and sustain political parties, think tanks, human rights groups, independent media outlets, trade unions and other elements of democratic society.

The shift in funding priorities comes as security costs are eating up an enormous share of U.S. funds for Iraq and the administration has already ratcheted back ambitions for reconstructing the country's battered infrastructure. While acknowledging that they are investing less in party-building and other such activities, administration officials argue that bringing more order and helping Iraqis run effective ministries contribute to democracy as well.

Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, an advocacy group that hosted a Bush speech last week, called the situation "a travesty" and said she is "appalled" that more is not being done. "This is the time to show that democracy promotion is more than holding an election. If the U.S. can't see fit to fund follow-up democracy promotion at this time," then it is making a mistake, she said.

"The commitment to what the president of the United States will say every single day of the week is his number one priority in Iraq, when it's translated into action, looks very tiny," said Les Campbell, who runs programs in the Middle East for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, known as NDI.

NDI and its sister, the International Republican Institute (IRI), will see their grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development dry up at the end of this month, according to a government document, leaving them only special funds earmarked by Congress last year. Similarly, the U.S. Institute of Peace has had its funding for Iraq democracy promotion cut by 60 percent. And the National Endowment for Democracy expects to run out of money for Iraqi programs by September.

"Money keeps getting transferred away to security training. Democracy's one of the things that's been transferred," said Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's project on democracy and the rule of law. "Without that, all the other stuff looks like just background work."

Among the projects facing closure is the Iraq Civil Society and Media Program, funded by USAID and run by America's Development Foundation and the International Research & Exchanges Board. The program has established four civil society resource centers around the country, conducted hundreds of workshops and forums, and trained thousands of government officials in transparency and accountability. It also helped Iraqis set up the National Iraqi News Agency, the first independent news agency in the Arab world.

The program was supposed to run at least through June 2007 but without $15 million more, it will have to close this summer.

Officials at the White House, the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget and USAID were contacted for comment in recent days, but none would speak on the record. In response to a request for comment, USAID sent promotional documents hailing past accomplishments in Iraq, such as sponsoring town hall meetings, training election monitors, and distributing pamphlets, posters and publications explaining voting and the new constitution.

The president's supplemental Iraq spending request includes just $10 million for democracy promotion, and his proposed budget for fiscal 2007 asks for $63 million, a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars spent each year on Iraq. But officials argue that other funds in effect further the same goal. For instance, the administration targeted $254 million for enhancing the rule of law by creating a fair judiciary and a humane prison system.

For Bush, developing democracy in Iraq has become perhaps the signature of his presidency, and he takes special pride in the three elections held since sovereignty was transferred by U.S. authorities. Veterans of past democracy-building efforts, however, have complained that having elections is not enough -- an argument the president has embraced lately, both in his speeches and in his newly released National Security Strategy.

"Elections start the process. They're not the end of the process," Bush told Freedom House last week. "And one of the reasons I respect the Freedom House is because you understand that you follow elections with institution-building and the creation of civil society."

Money flowed to such programs in the beginning of the Iraq enterprise. The National Endowment for Democracy, which supported projects in the Kurdish north of Iraq even before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, found itself soon after Baghdad fell with $25 million to expand elsewhere in the country and eventually received a total of $71 million. It distributed some to IRI and NDI and some to groups such as the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights in Babylon and the Organization for a Model Iraqi Society.

Last month the endowment received the final $3 million owed on past allocations, with no further funding identified. "It does feel like everybody's getting squeezed in this area," said Barbara Haig, the endowment's vice president. "There probably is a commitment to these programs in principle. I don't know how much commitment there is in specificity."

IRI and NDI, which are affiliated with the two U.S. political parties, will lose USAID financing April 30. The two party institutes led a coalition to educate Iraqis before last year's elections. An evaluation commissioned by USAID in December called it "essential" that the program "be continued for at least another 24 months."

The party institutes will be able to continue some programs for now only because of a special earmark inserted into legislation last year with $56 million for the two groups. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) sponsored the earmark with support from Sens. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) after it appeared that NDI and IRI would run out of money last year.

"The solution to Iraq lies in the political process, and it's reckless for the White House to cut funds to strengthen democracy in Iraq at this time," Kennedy said yesterday.

At current spending rates, the earmark will run out this year. After that, the Bush administration has included just $15 million for the two party institutes as part of the $63 million for Iraqi democracy in next year's budget, which would require most programs to be cut.

The U.S. Institute of Peace faces similar cutbacks to its program. "It's just vital," said Daniel P. Serwer, an institute vice president. All the democracy programs in Iraq combined, he noted, cost less than one day of the U.S. military mission. "Am I absolutely sure that we will shorten the deployment time of American troops enough to justify the cost of the program? Yes," he said.

The Endgame in Iraq

April 2, 2006
NY Times Editorial

Iraq is becoming a country that America should be ashamed to support, let alone occupy. The nation as a whole is sliding closer to open civil war. In its capital, thugs kidnap and torture innocent civilians with impunity, then murder them for their religious beliefs. The rights of women are evaporating. The head of the government is the ally of a radical anti-American cleric who leads a powerful private militia that is behind much of the sectarian terror.

The Bush administration will not acknowledge the desperate situation. But it is, at least, pushing in the right direction, trying to mobilize all possible leverage in a frantic effort to persuade the leading Shiite parties to embrace more inclusive policies and support a broad-based national government.

One vital goal is to persuade the Shiites to abort their disastrous nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Jaafari is unable to form a broadly inclusive government and has made no serious effort to rein in police death squads. Even some Shiite leaders are now calling on him to step aside. If his nomination stands and is confirmed by Parliament, civil war will become much harder to head off. And from the American perspective, the Iraqi government will have become something that no parent should be asked to risk a soldier son or daughter to protect.

Unfortunately, after three years of policy blunders in Iraq, Washington may no longer have the political or military capital to prevail. That may be hard for Americans to understand, since it was the United States invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and helped the Shiite majority to power. Some 140,000 American troops remain in Iraq, more than 2,000 American servicemen and servicewomen have died there so far and hundreds of billions of American dollars have been spent.

Yet Shiite leaders have responded to Washington's pleas for inclusiveness with bristling hostility, personally vilifying Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and criticizing American military operations in the kind of harsh language previously heard only from Sunni leaders. Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, the radically anti-American cleric and militia leader, has maneuvered himself into the position of kingmaker by providing decisive support for Mr. Jaafari's candidacy to remain prime minister.

It was chilling to read Edward Wong's interview with the Iraqi prime minister in The Times last week, during which Mr. Jaafari sat in the palace where he now makes his home, complained about the Americans and predicted that the sectarian militias that are currently terrorizing Iraqi civilians could be incorporated into the army and police. The stories about innocent homeowners and storekeepers who are dragged from their screaming families and killed by those same militias are heartbreaking, as is the thought that the United States, in its hubris, helped bring all this to pass.

It is conceivable that the situation can still be turned around. Mr. Khalilzad should not back off. The kind of broadly inclusive government he is trying to bring about offers the only hope that Iraq can make a successful transition from the terrible mess it is in now to the democracy that we all hoped would emerge after Saddam Hussein's downfall. It is also the only way to redeem the blood that has been shed by Americans and Iraqis alike.

Who's driving?

As a person who used to live in New York and has, on occasion, hailed a cab, I know better than most that we don't always know exactly who's in charge of where it is we hope we're going.

Such is the case with Iraq*. Only instead of trusting our course - and our lives - to a cabby with an unpronouncable name, we've entrusted our president (about whom we know surprisingly little (such as, what do you know of his brother Neil?) despite the fact that he's more recognizable a figure than even god, whose picture is awfully hard to come across considering how much everyone likes to talk about him) with the task of keeping us from metaphorically barreling recklessly off the end of a pier or through a throng of wheelchair-bound quadrapalegic orphans of troops killed in Iraq. The problem is it seems nobody checked to make sure George W. had a license before handing him the keys.

But that may not even be the worst of our problems. You see, George W. also happens to be the kind of guy who likes to pick up hitchhikers. Now as we all know, a lot of hitchhikers are really just nice people looking to get from one place to another for some sort of picnic or library gathering. There are other hitchhikers, though, who wave their thumbs around for the prospect of getting picked up by some person who can be taken advantage of for more than a ride. These people want to prey on the charity of others in order to fuck those nice people up the ass and steal their car.

That's what's going on right now in Iraq. Georgie boy thought he was driving the car in Iraq. But it turns out that when he volunteered to pick up regime change in that country, he was immediately knocked senseless, tied up and locked in the trunk next to our civil liberties. Since then, the terrorists have been driving, and Georgie, unconscious and dreaming of strawberry daquiris and a lapdance from a droopy-faced woman named Harriet, hasn't realized he's not in the driver's seat anymore. The Iraqis control not just their own destiny, but also ours. And I can't help but wonder: who, if anyone, can take the keys away from W?


*My apologies, but as I don't have much time right now, this post will likely ramble in and out of coherence as thoughts dribble stream of conscience onto the page. If I'm feeling up to it later, I'll come back and clean this mess up, I almost promise.

Tortured Logic

By ANTHONY LAGOURANIS

I HAVE never met Sgt. Santos Cardona or Sgt. Michael Smith, but we share similar experiences. In late 2003 and early 2004, both men used their dogs to intimidate Iraqi prisoners during interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison. They maintain that they were following legal orders. Now they both face impending court-martial.

From January 2004 to January 2005, I served in various places in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib) as an Army interrogator. Following orders that I believed were legal, I used military working dogs during interrogations. I terrified my interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence (mostly because 90 percent of them were probably innocent, but that's another story). Perhaps, I have thought for a long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted. But if that is the case, culpability goes much farther up the chain of command than the Army and the Bush administration have so far been willing to admit.

When the chief warrant officer at our interrogation site in Mosul first told me to use dogs during interrogations, it seemed well within what was allowed by our written rules and consistent with what was being done at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers. The dogs were muzzled and held by a handler. The prisoners didn't know that, though, because they were blindfolded; if they gave me an answer I didn't like, I could cue the handler so the dog would bark and lunge toward them. Sometimes they were so terrified they'd wet their jumpsuits. About halfway through my tour, I stopped using dogs and other "enhancements" like hypothermia that qualify as torture even under the most nonchalant readings of international law. I couldn't handle being so routinely brutal.

In training, we learned that all P.O.W.'s are protected against actual and implied threats. You can never put a "knife on the table" to get someone to talk. That was clear. But our Iraqi prisoners weren't clearly classified as P.O.W.'s, so I never knew what laws applied. Instead, a confusing set of verbal and written orders had supplanted the Geneva Conventions.

When an Army investigator asked Col. Thomas Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, how intimidation with dogs could be allowed under this treaty, he gave the chilling reply, "I did not personally look at that with regard to the Geneva Convention." Colonel Pappas later testified that he was taking his cue on the use of dogs from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who took over detainee operations in Iraq after running them in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

General Miller has denied recommending the use of guard dogs to intimidate prisoners during interrogations in Iraq. He also recently said he would not testify in the courts-martial of Sergeants Cardona and Smith, invoking his right to avoid self-incrimination. As someone who voluntarily spoke at length about my actions in Iraq to investigators, without a lawyer present, I can't have a favorable opinion of General Miller. By doing the military equivalent of "taking the Fifth," he's decided to protect himself, apparently happy to let two dog handlers take the fall — a stunning betrayal of his subordinates and Army values.

Sergeants Cardona and Smith have been accused of sick and sadistic behavior. They face the prospect of serious jail time. But they almost certainly acted believing they were following legal orders. In the military, orders are orders unless there is clear, uncluttered law transmitted from far above our commanders' rank and station. Instead of a clear message prohibiting torture, our top commanders gave us a deliberate muddying of the waters.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, recently shepherded a ban on torture through Congress. Then, while reluctantly signing the legislation, President Bush muddled this very clear ban on torture by stating that he would construe it "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

Those who serve in the prisons of Iraq deserve to know clearly the difference between legal and illegal orders. Soldiers on the ground need a commander in chief who does not seek strained legalisms that "permit" the use of torture. The McCain amendment, prohibiting "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment in all instances, is an accurate reflection of the true values of the military and American society. We should adhere to it strictly and in all cases. I know, from personal experience, that any leeway given will be used to maximum effect against detainees. No slope is more slippery, I learned in Iraq, than the one that leads to torture.

Anthony Lagouranis served in the Army from May 2001 to July 2005.

When Bush Falls in Love

February 26, 2006
Guest Columnist
When Bush Falls in Love
By SARAH VOWELL

The charges of cronyism against the current administration have piled up higher than the rotting rubble in New Orleans: "Heck of a job, Brownie," is fast replacing "Way to go, Einstein" as the wiseacre-to-dummy put-down du jour. And what of Harriet Miers, the good friend/lame nominee for the Supreme Court the president defended as "plenty bright."

Then there's the 24-year-old political appointee who was rewarded for working on the president's re-election campaign with a job as a press aide at NASA, where he was accused of trying to silence a top climate scientist who is, go figure, concerned about global warming. That, and he demanded that the apparently too science-y NASA Web site insert the word "theory" after every use of "Big Bang."

(To be fair, he resigned after it turned out that he'd lied on his résumé about graduating from college, so he might have dropped out before his class got to the textbook chapter titled "Just Big Bang: That's What Jesus Calls It, Too.")

Plus, in a word, Abramoff.

All of which is appalling. At this point, five years after oil and gas lobbyists started scoring Interior Department appointments overseeing national parks and the Bureau of Land Management, I'm heartened that I can still scrape up a glimmer of dismay. And yet, there is a tiny, honest voice in my head that has never let me condemn the president too loudly for wanting to work only with his allies and friends. Because that's pretty much how I live my life, too.

The other day, I was on a plane where "Good Night, and Good Luck" was the in-flight movie. I'd already seen it, but watching it again afforded me the opportunity to look beyond its grand central theme and curl up with the film's lovely periphery.

Around the edges, a second, softer movie flickers, an unpretentious but sly portrait of what real camaraderie looks and feels like. By opening with a party where Edward R. Murrow and his old staff are gussied up and drinking and giggling and taking pictures with their arms around one another as a saxophone plays "When I Fall in Love," the viewer figures out right away that this is more than Murrow vs. McCarthy circa "High Noon." This guy has backup.

My favorite scene starts with George Clooney as the producer Fred Friendly and David Strathairn as Murrow a couple of minutes before Murrow goes on the air with a potentially controversial report about a Red Scare flare-up in Michigan. I don't think I've ever seen a subtler, truer image of partnership. And not just in the way the two men talk to each other, either confessing their fears or joshing around or both.

When Friendly counts down the seconds left until Murrow goes live, Friendly sits just off-camera and taps Murrow's leg with his pen when it's time. The gesture is mundane and loving all at once.

I'm lucky enough to have a Friendly of my own. Is there anything better than figuring out what you're supposed to do with your life and getting paid to do it? Yep, doing it alongside the calm and tweedy person you regard as the brother you never had.

"Good Night, and Good Luck" taps into this understandable yearning for solidarity, for affectionate toil, for a shared mission, that's also behind the allure of the founding fathers, the Boston Red Sox, the Clash. Part of me can't blame the president for his pro-crony tendencies because I also have them to an almost sickening degree.

Then I remember — wait, neither I nor any crony of mine has ever slept through the soggy downfall of an entire city, or failed to track down the genocidal maniac who still has a few American items left to check off on his mass-murder To Do list, or sent our soldiers to wage a berserk war crisscrossing the most dangerous roads in the world in flimsy vehicles with the protective capability of Vespa scooters. (But my comrades and I would like to apologize for that reading we "organized" at a noisy Chinatown restaurant in '98, when the short stories were drowned out by egg roll orders.)

Bonhomie, as our ex-cronies the French call it, should have its limits. Seems as if American voters picked the current president because they thought he'd be a fun hang at a cookout — a jokey neighbor who charred a mean burger and is good at playing Frisbee with his dog. What we should be doing is electing a president with the nitpicky paranoia you'd use to choose a cardiologist — a stunted conversationalist with dark-circled eyes and paper-cut fingertips who will stay up until 3 tearing into medical journals in five languages trying to figure out how to save your life.

In the beginning, there was no armor

When those running the U.S. government decided to go to war against Iraq in 2003, a lot of things were missing. A clear objective would have been nice, seeing as how even the troops, such as I, still don't have a clear idea of why we're in Iraq. Even without that, a way to get out of Iraq would be nice.

The troops, I'll tell you, would be just as happy to have the government tell them all the objectives have been met and that the U.S. is done with Iraq. But that can't happen yet because of another missing piece: there is no exit strategy.

Of course, in a lot of ways our non-existent exit strategy is tied to our ever-changing objectives. We started out looking to eradicate Iraq's WMD programs, then when that didn't pan out we decided we were there for the liberation of the Iraqi people. After it was apparent that the Iraqi government had dissolved completely through "liberation" and that the country wouldn't be able to pick the pieces up without help, Iraqi democracy became our objective. Now our objective isn't just democracy, but a democracy that gives unequally high representation to Hussein's backers. This is a brand new development, and one that has further fuzzied our objectives in Iraq. It could be argued that our exit strategy can be seen only through the lens of our objective. Until the objective is clear, an exit strategy is fuzzy at best.

But that's now. The questions of objectives and exit strategies are big parts of a bigger picture that troops, for the most part, aren't concerned with in the way Karl Rove is concerned. Day to day, the troops care about things like their families, whether their equipment will hold up, whether they are going to make it home alive. What they don't worry about so much is whether planning for the war was botched - at least the majority doesn't worry about that. The average troop's attitude is one that says, 'we're here now, so we're going to have to deal with it.'

A little more than a year into the war in Iraq, my unit became attached to the Coalition Forces Land Component Command. CFLCC, as it is called, is the organization that led the war effort early on, before it became apparent that there was a need for a headquarters in Iraq. CFLCC, based in Kuwait, was too far away from the action to call the shots for a drawn out campaign against insurgents. By the time I arrived in Kuwait on Aug. 1, 2004, CFLCC had become nothing more than a logistics hub for the war in Iraq.

As the logistics hub, CFLCC bore a lot of the responsibility for making sure that U.S. military units on their way to Iraq were properly equipped. Even by December 2004, it was pretty clear that CFLCC was falling behind in its equipping mission. It wasn't CFLCC's fault so much as it was the fault of the Pentagon and the White House. Both had failed to prepare for what had been predicted by many inside the White House and the Pentagon: a lengthy and bloody post-Hussein insurgency. Long before I got to the Middle East, former Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Eric Shinseki had been fired for suggesting the war in Iraq could take a lot of time and a lot of troops because of the threat of insurgency. Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs when the U.S. went to war against Iraq in 1991, had predicted more than a decade before that it would be unwise to invade Iraq because of the possibility of insurgency. In that war, we drove Hussein back to his border and stopped.

But despite that an Iraq invasion would bog the U.S. down in an insurgency was a widely-held point of fact, the White House and Pentagon decided not to bend to this view, and in fact did not even prepare for the possibility of an insurgency. It was this key mistake that resulted in CFLCC's continued rush to catch up with the demand for armored Humvees and other trucks two years after the war began. And we aren't talking top-of-the-line armored Humvees and trucks. Most of what we're talking about is known as "hillbilly armor", armor made from rough-cut, 3/8-inch steel plating that is bolted or welded onto the sides of vehicles. CFLCC called this "Level 3 Up-armor," but later changed the name to "Level 3 Hardening" after criticism of the plating was made public during a town hall meeting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In fact, I was present at that town hall meeting when Rumsfeld was asked the now-infamous question that went something like, 'Why do we have to dig through landfills to find armor for our vehicles.'

The other kind of armor CFLCC put on vehicles is known as Level 2 Up-armor. This level of armor comes as a prefabricated kit, and it is bolted or welded onto the vehicle for which it was designed. Two years after the war began, the Army still hadn't designed Level 2 armor kits for all of the unarmored vehicles it had rolling around Iraq. (A third type of armored vehicle, known as Level-1 Up-armor, was produced in the U.S. This type of armor is integrated into the vehicle during production).

In order to assuage concern over the lack of armored vehicles, CFLCC issued and enforced a policy that prohibited unarmored vehicles from rolling into Iraq under their own power. Unarmored vehicles instead had to be hauled into Iraq by armored vehicles. What happened with the unarmored vehicles after they left Kuwait wasn't CFLCC's responsibility, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from troops returning from Iraq that there were plenty of unarmored vehicles rolling along the streets of Iraq.

This is far from a conspiracy. That's not to say, however, there wasn't a conspiracy. Shortly after Rumsfeld's visit - really within hours - we (the CFLCC Public Affairs Office) were answering to every major U.S. publication and wire service about the status of CFLCC's armor program. The hoopla surrounding the armor question and Rumsfeld's callous response that we "go to war with the Army we have, not the Army we wish we had" had everyone asking for exact numbers of vehicles with each kind of armor. They were also asking how many armored vehicles were needed to carry on the war. It turned out the number needed was far more than the number on hand.

However, just a few months earlier it had been determined that far fewer armored vehicles would be needed for Iraq. Those numbers had been adjusted upwards at almost the same time as Rumsfeld's town hall meeting. CFLCC didn't want to look bad. The Petagon didn't want to look bad. They had me scrambling for statistics on the numbers of vehicles produced for World War II, which the White House and Pentagon were struggling to compare Iraq to, then scrapped that idea when it turned out the U.S. had produced such a phenomenal amount of materiel for that war that the whole military was embarrassed by their current low production numbers.

At the rate the Pentagon was producing new armored trucks for Iraq, it would take almost 400 years just to equal the number of trucks produced in four years during World War II. The only solution the Pentagon and CFLCC could find was to say that the requirement for armored vehicles was much lower than it actually was. CFLCC's logistics section coordinated with the public affairs section to give the media the old numbers that showed less of a need for armored vehicles.

By the time CLFCC caught up to the number of vehicles actually required for the Iraq war, the hoopla over armor had died down. No media outlets were coming to ask for numbers or to follow up to find out if CFLCC had met the downgraded quotas. By then, the country and the media were focused on Bush's Medicare prescription drug program and his plans for Social Security. And now, almost three years after the war began, there still isn't adequate armor for vehicles in Iraq. But at least there's more armor now than there was in the beginning when there was no armor. That's the line that Rumsfeld would give anyway.