Must see movie: No End in Sight. A blueprint of Bushmonkeys' incompetence in Iraq. Watch in full.

Powerful document about more crap polluting all our food

Donald Rumsfeld and aspartame

Guess what? He faked the evidence

Other names for aspartame: Equal, Nutrasweet, Sugar Twin

What was Donald Rumsfeld doing before he collaborated with George Bush and Dick Cheney to invade and destroy Iraq (and the US economy and military in the process?)

As CEO of G.D. Searle, he pimped for a chemical called "aspartame."

For eight years, even the highly corrupt FDA refused to certify aspartame as safe because it produced seizures and brain tumors in lab animals.

Then Ronald Reagan became president and removed the FDA commissioner who was blocking its acceptance.

Rumsfeld's company followed up by presenting the FDA "new and improved" studies showing the additive to be safe. The data presented was later proven to have been falsified.

Sound familiar?

Aspartame is everywhere

Take the time to watch this video if you or loved ones consume aspartame. It is a dangerous substance that causes cumulative damage to the brain and immune system.

The following products often have aspartame in them:

* Breath Mints
* Carbonated Soft Drinks
* Cereals
* Chewing Gum
* Flavored Syrups for Coffee
* Flavored Water Products
* Frozen Ice
* Frozen Ice Cream Novelties
* Fruit Spreads
* Gelatin, Sugar Free
* Hard Candies
* Ice cream Toppings
* Ice Creams, No Sugar Added or Sugar Free
* Iced Tea, Powder
* Iced Tea, Ready to Drink
* Instant Cocoa Mix
* Jams & Jellies
* Juice Blends
* Juice Drinks
* Maple Syrups
* Meal Replacements
* Mousse
* No Sugar Added Pies
* Non-Carbonated Diet Soft drinks
* Nutritional Bars
* Powdered Soft Drinks
* Protein Nutritional Drinks
* Pudding
* Soft Candy Chews
* Sugar Free Chocolate Syrup
* Sugar Free Cookies
* Sugar Free Ketchup
* Table Top Sweeteners
* Vegetable Drinks
* Yogurt, Drinkable
* Yogurt, Fat Free
* Yogurt, Sugar Free

Selling war to Americans with Dummy Rummy and the Warmongers

More on the propaganda machine

Nice Ideas from the Criminal Cabal

Rummy Resurfaces, Calls for U.S. Propaganda Agency

By Sharon Weinberger

One of the many things I love about Donald Rumsfeld is that he's totally unrepentant. Back in 2001, the Pentagon under his leadership created the controversial Office of Strategic Influence, which was closed down just a few months later after its existence became public. Rightly or wrongly, the Pentagon was accused of creating a propaganda office. Now, the former defense secretary has a bigger vision: he is advocating a "21st century agency for global communications."

This was one of the major themes in one of Rumsfeld's first post-Pentagon public comments at a conference today on network centric warfare sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement. According to Rumsfeld, the United States is losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, and the answer to that, in part, is through the creation of this new government agency.

During the the Q&A after the speech, I asked Rumsfeld what this new agency might entail (he was pretty clear it wouldn't be a resurrected U.S. Information Agency, which was merged into State Department in 1999), and why, when there is an abundance of media available in the private sector, the government needs to get involved.

I'll just let Rumsfeld speak for himself:

Private media does not get up in the morning and say what can we do to promote the values and ideas that the free Western nations believe in? It gets up in the morning and says they're going to try to make money by selling whatever they sell... The way they decided to do that is to be dramatic and if it bleeds it leads is the common statement in the media today. They've got their job, and they have to do that, and that's what they do.

We need someone in the United States government, some entity, not like the old USIA . . . I think this agency, a new agency has to be something that would take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities. We do not with any systematic organized way attempt to engage the battle of ideas and talk about the idea of beheading, and what it's about and what it means. And talk about the fact that people are killing more Muslims than they are non-Muslims, these extremists. They're doing it with suicide bombs and the like. We need to engage and not simply be passive and allow that battle of competition of ideas.

What would this agency actually do? Hard to say, but Rumsfeld referred approvingly back to when the Army paid reporters to plant stories in the local press in Iraq. He still thinks that was a good idea (and blames the U.S. press for screwing it up).

In Rumsfeld's view, the free press can co-exist with government sponsored/produced/paid news. "It doesn't mean we have to infringe on the role of the free press, they can go do what they do, and that's fine," says Rumsfeld. "Well, it's not fine, but it's what it is, let's put it that way."

UPDATE: MountainRunner, IntelFusion, Spencer Ackerman, and the Washington Post's William Arkin all weigh in. As does the New York Times' blog The Lede, which is kind enough to give us a high five. For sheer comedy gold, though, Ackerman wins, hands down.

Original article posted here.

The struggle for supremacy between the White House and the Pentagon for control of Iraq

A salvo at the White House

By Mark Perry

For military officers in the Pentagon's E-Ring (where the most important defense issues are decided), the shift in the public mood has been nearly miraculous: last September, on the eve of General David Petraeus' Congressional testimony on the George W Bush administration's 'surge' strategy, the American electorate was consumed by the war in Iraq.

Now, just four months later, that same electorate has shifted its attention to the 2008 elections. Public polls reflect the shift. Iraq no longer tops the list of issues of concern to Americans - its place having been usurped over worries about the economy - and is competing for attention with healthcare and immigration. (The "war on terror" is a poor seventh - a stunning turnabout from the two years following September 11, 2001.) But the perceptible fall-off in public attention from foreign policy to domestic issues is hardly a palliative for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or America's highest-ranking combatant commanders, all of whom continue to deal with the continuing uncertain military situation Iraq.

The fact that the Iraq war has been pushed off the front pages of America's newspapers has given the US military a seeming respite from the almost endless spate of disastrous stories coming out of the Middle East, as well as the almost endless round of embarrassing questions from the press about what they intend to do about it.

But military officers say that the American public should not be fooled: the relative quiet in Iraq - and it is, after all, only a "relative quiet" - does not mean the "surge" has worked, or that the problems facing the US military have somehow magically gone away. Quite the opposite. For while the American public is consumed by the campaign for the presidency, the American military is not. Instead, they are as obsessed now, in January of 2008, with the war in Iraq as they were then, in 2003 - except that now, many military officers admit, the host of problems they face may, in fact, be much more intractable.

First contact
"Don't let the quiet fool you," a senior defense official says. "There's still a huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White House would like to have you believe the 'surge' has worked, that we somehow defeated the insurgency. That's just ludicrous. There's increasing quiet in Iraq, but that's happened because of our shift in strategy - the 'surge' had nothing to do with it."

In part, the roots of the disagreement between the Pentagon and White House over what is really happening in Iraq is historical. Senior military officers contend that the seeming fall-off in in-country violence not only has nothing to do with the increase in US force levels, but that the dampening of the insurgency that took hold last summer could have and would have taken place much earlier, within months of America's April 2003 occupation of Baghdad.

Moreover, these officers contend, the insurgency might not have put down roots in the country after the fall of Baghdad if it had not been for the White House and State Department - which undermined military efforts to strike deals with a number of Iraq's most disaffected tribal leaders. These officers point out that the first contact between high-level Pentagon officials and the nascent insurgency took place in Amman, Jordan, in August of 2003 - but senior Bush administration officials killed the talks.

A second round of meetings, this time with leaders of some of al-Anbar province's tribal chiefs, took place in November of 2004, but again senior administration officials refused to build on the contacts that were made. "We made the right contacts, we said the right things, we listened closely, we put a plan in place that would have saved a lot of time and trouble," a senior Pentagon official says. "And every time we were ready to go forward, the White House said 'no'."

At the center of these early talks was a group of Iraqis led by Sheikh Talal al-Gaood, a Sunni businessman with close ties to Anbar's tribal leaders. Gaood, who died of a heart ailment in March of 2006, was a passionate Iraqi patriot who feared growing al-Qaeda influence in his country. Speaking over coffee from his office in Amman in 2005, Gaood was enraged by the "endless mistakes" of the US leadership. "You [Americans] face a Wahhabi threat that you cannot even begin to fathom," he said at the time, and he derided White House "propaganda" about the role of Syria in fueling the insurgency.

Gaood, looking every bit the former Ba'athist - complete with suspenders and Saddam Hussein-like mustache was particularly critical of what he called "the so-called counter-insurgency experts among Washington policymakers who think they know Iraq but don't." As he argued: "The guys who come through here, very educated, come in their brown robes and say they are going to Iraq to kill the Americans. They are not Syrians. They are Wahhabis. They are from Saudi Arabia. But if you talk to American officials, it is like they don't exist."

That might have been true for civilian policymakers, but it wasn't true for the military - who were beginning to take heavy casualties from armed insurgents in Sunni areas. Throughout 2004 and 2005, a group of senior US military officers, including high-ranking US Marine Corps commanders, attempted to expand their ties in western Iraq through Gaood and the network of leaders he provided them.

But these commanders continued to run into opposition to their program from then-National Security Council director Condoleezza Rice, who maintained her opposition to their program after she became secretary of state. L Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who had suspended the Ba'ath army and was intent to cleanse Iraq of its Ba'athist influence, also opposed the program through all of 2004. "Bremer was just nuts about any meetings with any insurgents, any Ba'athists, anyone he didn't approve," a Pentagon official notes, "and Condi backed him up".

By the end of 2005, Rice's opposition to any opening to the Sunni leadership in Iraq became almost obsessive, according to currently serving senior military officers. In one incident, now notorious in military circles, Rice "just went completely crazy" when she learned that a marine colonel had dispatched combat helicopters to help a "a Sunni sheikh" in Fallujah fight what the sheikh called an "imminent al-Qaeda threat".

As a senior Pentagon official now relates: "The Sunni leader literally picked up the telephone one day and called the ranking colonel at the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF)and pleaded with him, 'I need help and I need it now. Al-Qaeda is killing my tribe'." The marine colonel in question was John Coleman, the chief of staff to the same unit that had gone into Fallujah to fight the insurgency after the killing of four US security contractors in April of 2004.

"Rice was just enraged with Coleman and with the marines," a senior Pentagon officials say. "She said, 'you have to stop all of that right now and you can't do it unless you have State Department permission and the permission of the Iraqi government'. Well, the marines weren't about to do that. They were taking a lot of casualties and they were fed up. And they just concluded that it was their war and not hers," a senior Pentagon civilian recently noted. "So they just ignored her and went ahead anyway."

In the wake of his marines-to-the-rescue efforts, Coleman and the 1st MEF began a program of cooperation with Fallujah's leaders, making a broad range of contacts with local officials who were fearful of al-Qaeda's influence in their city. The marine commanders in the 1st MEF were under no illusions, a Pentagon official now says - they were "engaged in talks with the insurgents, people who had been killing American soldiers since the fall of Baghdad".

The tipping point
Coleman's action might well have ended his career, if it had not been for then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose lack of respect for Rice bordered on the neurotic, and Coleman's commanding officer, Marine Lieutenant General James T Conway. Conway, an oversize Arkansan who sports a carpet of combat ribbons, was not only a Coleman partisan, he had been angered by orders to send his marines into Fallujah in April of 2004 to take on the city's insurgents, a point he made clear to the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran, five months after the attack: "When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed," Conway said.

Conway told Chandrasekaran he preferred engagement with Fallujah's leaders to confrontation, but that he was bound to follow orders - which had come down to his superior, army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, from the White House. Conway protested to Sanchez that going into Fallujah "with guns blazing" was the worst thing his marines could do, but Sanchez would hear none of it. "I have my orders, and now you have yours," Sanchez pointedly said.

Months later, Conway was still seething: "We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah: that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge. Would our system have been better? Would we have been able to bring over the people of Fallujah with our methods? You'll never know that for sure, but at the time we certainly thought so."

The tight circle of Pentagon civilians around Rumsfeld (inherited and largely kept intact by Robert Gates), which had been pushing for an opening to Anbar's tribal leaders (who had been talking to Gaood in Amman, and through him to some of Anbar's tribal leaders) now cite the Coleman incident as perhaps the key "tipping point" in the military's shift in strategy in Iraq.

But it was a group of military commanders, working on the ground, who eventually took the lead, using the Fallujah effort as their model. After dispatching a marine combat team to help Fallujah's tribal leaders fight al-Qaeda, similar efforts sprang up among army units patrolling in Tel Afar and in Ramadi where, five months after Coleman's Fallujah initiative, American military officers began tentative approaches to the Rishawi tribe.

By September, the Americans and Ramadi's Sheikh Abdul Sattar abu Risha had come to an agreement - and the nascent Anbar Salvation Council, a grouping of 25 tribes, had been formed to fight al-Qaeda. The killing of Risha in a car bomb attack in September of 2007 was a clear setback for the strategy of recruiting tribal leaders to end the insurgency and turn their guns on al-Qaeda, but by then the strategy had spread to enough provinces, Pentagon officials say, that Risha's murder actually solidified the growing anti-al-Qaeda front.

The strategy had even taken hold in Babil province, the heavily fought-over area south of Baghdad - in "the Triangle of Death" - where contacts with the insurgency were put in the hands of the 501st Parachute Regiment. Since at least September of last year, according to published reports, officers of the 501st have been cooperating with Babil's Sunni tribal leaders to drive what American officers describe as "extremist elements" - insurgents affiliated with al-Qaeda - that had become rooted in the province.

In fact, the first contact with the tribal leaders of Babil took place five months before the first payments were made, in May of 2007. At first the leaders were even more hesitant to sign up with the Americans than their co-religionists to the north, in part because of pressures brought against them by the Shi'ite-dominated government - which mistrusted the Awakening Council movement.

Then too, Babil province was in the hands of Shi'ite political leadership, who were even less enamored of the American initiative than the Shi'ite leadership in Baghdad. But the Americans pushed hard for the alliance, telling Babil's Sunni leaders that the Baghdad government was incapable of providing them with local security, or effectively fighting off the al-Qaeda's threat.

Babil's leaders were inevitably convinced - in part because their hatred of al-Qaeda (and their mistrust of the Shi'ite-run government) ran so deep. But for the Americans, the new alliance came with a price. During September of 2007 alone, US military officers dispensed well over US$200,000 to Babil's tribal leaders, including $370 for each provincial policeman hired by Babil's Janabi tribe, a potent and influential force in southern and western Iraq.

The payments were and are a source of unease for American military officers, who fought the Janabis for two years in the province - and who lost American soldiers in attacks led by Janabi insurgents. "They used to want to kill me, now they want to sign a contract with me," a senior officer of the 501st told the Times of London. "It's hard to get your head around, but it is working."

The Mansour bombing
But the price has not only been paid by the Americans. The negotiations between US military officers and insurgents in Babil carried out during the late spring and early summer of 2007 were a source of increasing sensitivity inside the Iraqi government and were denounced both inside Iraqi religious circles and inside the Hawza - the institutions that constitute the centers of learning in the Shi'ite religion - where an expansion of the Anbar strategy war particularly controversial.

"The imams denounced this. They even talked against it during Friday prayers. For them, this was just another American attempt to subdue Iraq. It was one thing for the Americans to recruit Sunnis to the awakening - that's fine. But it is another thing entirely to do this in Shi'ite areas, which are more independent, and have a history of being subverted by outsiders," an Iraq government official said at the time.

Senior American military officers were warned by Iraqi officials that they were playing with fire in the areas south of Baghdad, but the American pleaded that, to prove its worth, the program needed to go forward outside of Anbar. This was particularly true in those areas not dominated by Sunnis. As a part of the effort to highlight the success of the Anbar initiative, the Americans called for a meeting of the Awakening Councils with Iraqi government officials on June 25 at the Mansour Melia Hotel in Baghdad.

But just hours before the meeting was to convene, a suicide bomber penetrated three levels of security and killed 12 Iraqis, including six members of the Anbar Salvation Council. The blast was so powerful that it blew the doors off the Mansour's heavily enforced dining room and caved in the dining room ceiling.

The Mansour bombing was a political catastrophe for the US and its new Sunni allies. Among the dead was Sheik Abdul-Aziz al-Fahdawi of the Fahad tribe, Sheik Tariq Saleh al-Assafi and Colonel Fadil al-Nimrawi, both from the al-Bu Nimr tribe, and Iraqi General Aziz al-Yasari and Sheik Husayn Sha'lan al-Khaza'i of the Khaza'a tribe. Also killed was Sheik Fassal al-Gaood, a former Anbar governor and the successor to Talal al-Gaood - the man who had first approached US military leaders in Amman in 2004.

Gaood's loss was deeply felt at the Pentagon, where civilian officials had been pressing for an opening to the insurgency since the fall of Baghdad. "This was a blow," a Pentagon official confirms. "We knew both men [Talal and Fassal] and admired their courage." Worse yet, while "Muslim extremists" were blamed for the murders, senior US officials suspected a range of suspects, including Iraqi government security officials who had been less than cooperative with the US military in promoting the Anbar initiative.

These suspicions were highlighted by reports that the meeting at the Mansour was called so that the Anbar officials could discuss expanding the "Awakening of the Tribes" into Shi'ite areas. Now that initiative seemed endangered. "The bombing was as clear a message as we could get," a Pentagon official later speculated. "While everyone's attention was focused on how this hurt us in Anbar, the real message was that we should end our efforts in the south."

The coda to the Mansour bombing was a triumphant broadside from US military officers that they would remain undeterred by "these despicable terrorist acts". In fact, senior military strategists began to tread more lightly, particularly in Shi'ite areas. According to a senior Iraqi official with ties into the nation's complex tribal network, in the wake of bombing the US military began to "sketch out and think through" inter-sectarian tribal relationships.

Babil was the key, where the emerging strategy was to focus on recruiting respected Iraqi leaders with close tribal ties to those leading the Awakening movement in Anbar. In Babil, military officers began to refocus their efforts on the Janabi tribe, according to a Janabi family member with access to the tribe's decision-making. The choice of the Janabis was purposeful - even insightful.

The Janabis are nearly ubiquitous in a large crescent of the country running from an area south of Baghdad in an arc to the west and north. For the Americans, the recruitment of the Janabis was crucial - since some Janabis are Sunni and some Shi'ite. Additionally, high-profile Sunni and Shi'ite Janabis served both in Saddam's government and as leaders in the anti-American insurgency.

Recruiting the powerful tribe to the side of the American military, even in the face Iraqi government opposition, became a key not only to "turning Iraqi guns on the real culprits", as one serving officer notes, but to "stitching together a political front that is based on something other than wishful thinking".

A senior Iraqi observer with ties to the tribal network confirms this view: "The Janabis in the south have strong links to those in the north, tribal links, but you should know some are motivated by sectarian concerns and some are simply extremists." The question remains, of course: what happens when the American money dries up? "The answer to that question is simple," this Iraqi says. And then he laughs: "When the money goes, they go."

Mark Perry is a director of Conflicts Forum and author of Partners in Command (Penguin Press, New York, 2007).

Original article posted here.

Dummy Rummy's memos reveal warmongering and stereotyping

From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld.

In Sometimes-Brusque 'Snowflakes,' He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

The memos, often referred to as "snowflakes," shed light on Rumsfeld's brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.

Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked "for official use only."

In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are "not unusual." Pessimistic news reports -- "our publics risk falling prey to the argument that all is lost" -- simply result from the wrong standards being applied, he wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.

People will "rally" to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. "They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory."

The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him "go out and push people back, rather than simply defending" Iraq policy and strategy. "I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can't win on the defense," he wrote. "We can't just keep taking hits."

The only man to hold the top Pentagon job twice -- as both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary -- Rumsfeld suggested that the public should know that there will be no "terminal event" in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. "It is going to be a long war," he wrote. "Iraq is only one battleground."

Based on the discussion with military analysts, Rumsfeld tied Iran and Iraq. "Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran," he wrote in his April 2006 memo.

Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld's distillation of the analysts' comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term "bumper stickers."

"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."

In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.

Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."

If radicals "get a hold of" oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he added, the United States will have "an enormous national security problem."

The memos delve into issues beyond Iraq and terrorism. In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2006, Rumsfeld warned that the United States is "getting run out of Central Asia" by the Russians, who are doing a "considerably better job at bullying" than Washington is doing to "counter their bullying."

As public discontent and congressional questioning grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one- or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.

"I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph Peters' op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible," he writes on Feb. 6, 2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried "chronic troop shortages in Iraq" while the Pentagon buys "high-tech toys that have no missions."

On March 10, he commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a "better presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard." A Washington Post-ABC News poll that month found that 65 percent of Americans thought that Bush had no plan for victory.

On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point analysis of the seven "mistakes" columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay -- which he wanted to see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had "gone sour."

"Please have someone find precisely when I said 'dead-enders' and what the context was," he ordered Smith in September 2006.

A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that said the Army was ruined "is disgraceful," Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The editorial said that "one welcome dividend" of Rumsfeld's departure was that the United States would "now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down."

Rumsfeld later reprimanded his staff, writing, "I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been." He then instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army. "We need to get that story out," he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft by Friday.

Original article posted here.

War criminal Dummy Rummy can run but not hide

Rumsfeld hit with torture lawsuit while visiting Paris

Jason Rhyne

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's jaunt to France was interrupted today by an unscheduled itinerary item -- he was slapped with a criminal complaint charging him with torture.

Rumsfeld, in Paris for a discussion sponsored by the magazine Foreign Policy, was tracked down by representatives of a coalition of international human rights groups, who informed the architect of the US invasion of Iraq that they had submitted a torture suit against him in French court.

The filed documents allege that during his tenure, the former defense secretary "ordered and authorized" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The head of one of the groups responsible for bringing the charges, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, told RAW STORY today by phone that the suit was a long time coming.

"We've been working on cornering Rumsfeld and getting him indicted somewhere going on three years now," said the Center's president, Michael Ratner. "Four days ago, we got confidential information he was going to be in France."

Joined by activists, attorneys for the human rights groups caught up with Rumsfeld on his way to a breakfast meeting. "He was walking down the street with just one person," said Ratner.

"Around 20 campaigners gave Rumsfeld a rowdy welcome...yelling 'murderer,' waving a banner and trying to push into the building," reports AFP.

Ratner, who wasn't personally at the scene, says his sources told him that the former defense secretary made some pre-scheduled remarks at the meeting before ducking through a door leading to the US Embassy.

According to Ratner, France has a legal responsibility under international law to prosecute Rumsfeld for torture abuses.

"If a torturer comes into your territory," he said, "there's an obligation to either prosecute the person or return him to a place where he will be prosecuted."

The rights groups notably cite three memorandums signed by the defense secretary between October 2002 and April 2003 "legimitizing the use of torture" including the "hooding" of detainees, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs.

Although his group has been a part of previous attempts to bring charges against Rumsfeld, including two former tries in Germany, Ratner believes French court has the highest chance of success.

"There are Guantananamo detainees who were tortured that are living in France," he said. "It gives French courts another reason to prosecute."

Ratner says Europe is "getting very hot for Rumsfeld," and suggests a French court could at least issue its version of a subpoena.

"We hope that this case will move forward," he said, "especially as the US says it can continue to torture people."

Other groups involved in the complaint include the International Federation of Human Rights, the French League for Human Rights and Germany's European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.

More details about the lawsuit are available at the website of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Original article posted here.

weazl has no way to check the veracity of claims made by Peter Bergen, but thinks this artcle is worth passing along anyway

‘US didn’t strike in Pakistan for fear of toppling Musharraf’

* Terror expert says Rumsfeld nixed proposed attack on Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan

By Khalid Hasan

Washington: The United States decided against striking Al Qaeda locations in Pakistan in 2006 because it was afraid the strike would destabilise General Pervez Musharraf and his government.

According to Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation, who is also the CNN’s terrorism expert, “America has handed $10 billion to the Pakistani government since September 11, 2001. Yet the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain headquartered in Pakistan. A US military official in Afghanistan with access to intelligence information told me this spring that Taliban leader Mullah Omar ‘is still in Quetta,’ ... And a Western official based in Pakistan told me that ‘target folders’ about the locations of high-value Taliban and Al Qaeda targets were provided by the US government to Pakistan in late 2006 – but never acted upon. Moreover, the Bush administration has, at least on one occasion, refused to do what Pakistan will not.”

Rumsfeld nixed attack: “This July, the New York Times reported that Donald Rumsfeld nixed a proposed 2005 attack on a meeting of Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan - a meeting thought to include Zawahiri - in part because the operation, which would have involved several hundred special forces and CIA personnel, could have destabilised Musharraf,” he added.

After Tora Bora, Bergen writes in the current issue of New Republic, Al Qaeda’s leaders fled into the tribal areas of western Pakistan, where they began the long process of rebuilding their devastated organisation. That process has gone far better than they could possibly have imagined as they slipped out of Afghanistan in late 2001. With the Bush administration’s attention in Iraq, Al Qaeda took the opportunity to reassert itself along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Art Keller, a CIA officer stationed in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2006, told Bergen, “People are going from the Afghan-Pakistan border to Iraq to learn the tactics and then come back. Seems like the reverse of the way the war on terror was supposed to work.”

Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who obtained un-coerced confessions from Ramzi Yousef and Mir Aimal Kansi, told Bergen, “Duped by the myth of Musharraf’s indispensability, Bush officials are now overly reluctant to push the Pakistani leader too hard on confronting Al Qaeda - for fear he will be seen as an American stooge, eventually toppled, and replaced by someone far worse. This situation has been compounded by the fact that, for much of the last six years, few American spies were operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”

Keller, the CIA officer, ran a spy network in one of the tribal regions in early 2006. While he noted that more agents have since been deployed, he said that, at the time, he was one of only a “handful” of CIA officers doing this kind of work in the Tribal Areas. Six years after September 11, writes Bergen, the Bush administration has yet to receive the cooperation it needs from Pakistan.

Bergen also writes that Omar Bin Laden, the son of the Osama Bin Laden, has heaped abuse on his father for the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 attacks had driven a permanent wedge between father and son. In the years since 9/11, Omar appears to have had no contact with his father.

Bergen writes that five years later, Al Qaeda has revived itself. The group’s leadership has reconstituted itself and now operates rather comfortably along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Last year, it came close to downing 10 US airplanes using liquid explosives - an attack that would have rivalled September 11 in magnitude. The largest Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership provided direction to its British followers “on an extensive and growing scale”.

Original article posted here.

Ever more disillutioned warmongers pointing fingers over the catastrophe that is Iraq

Working round the clock to clean the Moron and the NeoCons' mess . . .

After Rumsfeld, a new dawn?

By Mark Perry

In the American movie Cool Hand Luke - a cult classic in the US - a drunken Paul Newman faces his jailer. "What we have here," intones the captain of Road Prison 36, "is a failure to communicate." The movie has provided fodder for a gaggle of bloggers, who now refer to US Lieutenant General Douglas E Lute, President George W Bush's new "war czar", as "Cool Hand Lute".

Lute recently made the rounds of official Washington, telling everyone that aside from the advisability of invading Iraq in the first place (something with which, in private, he had real problems), the US national security establishment's failure to coordinate policy, its failure to communicate, is leading the nation into a foreign-policy debacle.

Lute's appointment in May as "war czar" is a talisman of this disaster. Lute's job, as he sees it, is to help reverse this potential disaster and shape a national security establishment that actually works. His colleagues say he's terribly worried that he's fated to fail.

Lute's most powerful ally in his lone battle to rebuild what he sees as the shattered American national security establishment is Robert Gates, the unassuming, seemingly soft-as-a-pillow new secretary of defense. Gates is Donald Rumsfeld-in-reverse. Gates is a man who has spent a career being underestimated. "Gates is soft-spoken, courteous, a very good listener, workmanlike, treats people well, has a good sense of humor - and is completely and absolutely ruthless," a colleague who has worked with him for three decades notes.

"It took a lot for Bob Gates to take that job," former US Marine Corps commandant Joe Hoar says. "Let me be blunt. He was president of Texas A&M [University] and he had the job for life. Why would he take on a major headache like the Pentagon? He told Bush he wanted the right to run the Pentagon his way and he didn't want what he said vetted by the White House. And Bush was in trouble and he knew it. So he agreed. And Gates might look like a soft guy, but he's a realist and he's a patriot and he knows Washington and he knows what he wants. And he got it."

What Gates got when he took over last December was the right to do things his way. "When Gates showed up at the Pentagon, he was just stunned," a senior civilian official at the Defense Department says. "No one knew what was going on. There were no plans. Nothing worked. The policy establishment was broken."

In his first meeting with the major heads of departments, Gates said they would not be replaced ("We don't have time for that," he said) and announced that he would spend the next weeks traveling. In his first two months as Defense Secretary, Gates might have spent four days at the Pentagon, if that. "We just didn't see him," an official said. "He was elsewhere."

Gates was in the Middle East - talking with coalition commander General George Casey and CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid. Gates talked to the troops, held press conferences, smiled for the cameras, shook hands - and decided that America was losing.

"I think it's pretty clear that Bob spent long nights, alone, thinking about all of this by himself," a friend says, "and he just decided to throw out all of this neo-con stuff and all this bunk about democracy and Islam and the clash of civilizations and he decided the country needed to get back to the basics. What is the mission? Are we accomplishing it? What do we need to get it done? Can we do it? How long will it take? How much will it cost? And he just decided that everything else is just so much talk. And really it was a breath of fresh air.

"He just stopped people talking about that stuff. So he went in and started to clean it up. And he was quiet about it, but he made it clear: there are rules, and if you don't obey the rules you're out. And there's a chain of command, and if you don't follow it, you're gone. There's a chain of command at the Department of Defense, and there's only one man at the top of it. And he's [Gates] at the top of it. Maybe at the end he won't fix all of it, but he's sure going to try."

Starting at the top
After just six weeks on the job, and after hours of discussions with Casey, Abizaid and their key combat subordinates, Gates was convinced that the US senior military leadership in Iraq and in the Middle East needed to be replaced. Casey and Abizaid were nearly exhausted from years of fighting both the Iraqi insurgency and Rumsfeld. Gates feared both had lost their edge as well as the confidence of their subordinate commanders.

In one sense, Gates was lucky. With Casey due to rotate back to Washington as the new army chief of staff and Abizaid up for retirement, the change in command could be seen as nothing out of the ordinary. The change would be swift and painless. Neither Casey nor Abizaid need be embarrassed. Both men would be given parades, medals and handshakes. "There would be no blood on the floor," a Pentagon civilian official said of the command change. But no one was fooled: Casey and Abizaid had been sidelined.

"Gates was particularly disturbed with Abizaid," a Pentagon official says. "His [Central Command Regional military] staff had ballooned, it was way out of wack. There were 3,800 officers in the region, sitting at their computers in their little cubby holes. That was more than [president Dwight D Eisenhower had in Europe in World War II. Gates came back to Washington and said, 'What the hell are these people doing? Why aren't they in the front lines'?"

Abizaid had always had problems with staffing. One of his jobs at the Pentagon prior to his Gulf deployment was to organize former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz's staff - "and he actually made it worse, if you can believe that".

The rap on Casey was different: "He was simply indecisive, like [former president] Jimmy Carter. His commanders would come to him with options and he would look around the table and say, 'Well gentlemen, what should we do?' Damn, why was he asking them? He was the one who was supposed to be in charge," the Pentagon official says.

Gates was not the only one who had decided there needed to be a command shift in Iraq. Retired Army four-star General Jack Keane, arguably the most influential military thinker in Washington - and author of the Bush administration's "surge" strategy from his aerie position at the American Enterprise Institute - had come to the same conclusion as Gates.

Keane has direct access to Bush and had been telling the president he needed a new Iraq commander. In December, at the same time that Gates was talking to Casey and Abizaid in Iraq, Keane told Bush that Casey should be brought back to Washington and replaced by General David Petraeus, the former commander of the 101st Airborne and the author of "Field Manuel 3-24", the bible of US counter-insurgency doctrine.

Keane was a Petraeus partisan, having served with the tough-as-nails Petraeus when Keane was a brigadier general in the early 1990s. Bush hesitated over appointing Petraeus because he knew that he had a habit of speaking his mind. But Bush finally conceded and, after consulting with Gates, he agreed to Petraeus' appointment.

By the time Petraeus had been appointed as the new coalition command in Baghdad, Abizaid had been sent into retirement and replaced by Admiral William Fallon, a 40-year navy veteran. Fallon's appointment as CENTCOM commander was a surprise, as the billet is usually reserved for the army. But Gates was impressed by Fallon's credentials. "He's probably got more service and more experience than any man in the navy," Joe Hoar says, "and he's more respected. There's no more refined bullshit sniffer than Fallon."

Gates had come to the same conclusion, and was also intent to make CENTCOM a workable regional command headed by someone who would not interfere with Petraeus. Gates was impressed with Fallon's background as a diplomat in the Pacific. When a Japanese fishing ship was accidentally sunk by an American navy vessel off Hawaii, Fallon volunteered to offer apologies to the Japanese families of the dead.

But Fallon's appointment to head CENTCOM immediately sparked fears that he would prepare the navy for an attack on Iran, speculation fueled by the deployment of two carrier groups to the Persian Gulf. Fallon did little to dispel this notion, and when asked by senators whether he believed Iran would acquire nuclear weapons he answer decisively: "Absolutely," he said. "Probably some time in the next decade."

Fallon has further dispelled fears that he favors such an attack when rumors circulated that he recently received a call from the White House that he consider providing air cover to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. He was aghast: "With what," he reportedly said. Fallon's influence at CENTCOM is also much in evidence. "Historically that place has been run by infantry and armor," Hoar says. "Well, he's turned that place upside down." Among the changes: upwards of 2,000 staffers have been sent to other assignments.

The fight over the czar
While Gates was running around the Middle East, Republican gadfly and presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich was circulating one of his inimitable 18-point leadership papers inside the White House. In a memo first floated there in January, Gingrich wrote to Bush that what was needed to right the listing Iraq military ship was a "war czar" - a supreme military commander who could coordinate war planning.

The appointment of a "war czar" was point number three on Gingrich's list of recommendations. "The slowness and ineffectiveness of the American bureaucracy is a major hindrance to our winning, and they've got to cut through it," Gingrich later explained to Washington Post reporters Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks.

Gingrich, who styles himself an expert on wartime leadership (he once told his staff to write an extensive research paper on the leadership qualities of one of his heroes - Napoleon, whom he emulates), believed that an eminent four-star retired officer would be perfect for the job: reporting only to Bush and able to stand above the Joint Chiefs.

Gingrich's idea was classically conservative. Like George Will, John McCain and others of their ilk ("conservatives without the neo," as Will has called them), Gingrich had only hesitantly backed the Iraq War, and then stood aghast as it was catastrophically managed. While they criticized the younger Bush's father for going soft on the conservative social agenda, they much preferred his management style - and competence.

They had grown to mistrust the neo-conservatives around Vice President Dick Cheney and increasingly viewed them as mindless ideologues. This slipped by the younger Bush, who was as attracted to the idea of a war czar as a mindless puppy to a new squeaky-toy. Bush passed the memo on to his national security staff, where it gained the approval of National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who was intent to gain some relief from the daily battering he was taking over Iraq.

But Gates and the US military were less than enthusiastic about the proposal and when Gingrich's idea became public the chiefs registered their disapproval in public. The disapproval came in the form of public condemnations of the idea from retired officers close to Pace and new Army Chief of Staff Casey.

"Standing up a war czar is just throwing in another layer of bureaucracy," retired Major General John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, told reporters on April 12. "Excuse me - we have a chain of command already and it's time for our leaders to step up and take charge." Retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard, who served as secretary of defense Robert McNamara's military assistant during the Vietnam War, was even more outspoken. "I thought the president was the commander-in-chief. Isn't he supposed to be his own war czar?"

Gates was asking the same question. But the more that Gates thought about the idea, the more it appealed to him - that is, if he could convince the White House to appoint a serving officer to the position. Pace was coming to the same conclusion. In mid-April, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman set to work, accessing his well-worn network of retired officers to recommend to Bush that he rely on the chiefs to recommend a current serving Joint Chiefs of Staff officer as his primary military advisor on the war.

While it is not certain exactly what influence Pace and the other officers of the American high command had on the retired community, we now know that when Hadley offered the "war czar" position to five retired officers, they not only turned him down, they did so publicly - and sometimes embarrassingly.

The betting in Washington is that that kind of denunciation is simply too unanimous to be an accident. The first to be offered the job was Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff and the author of the "surge" plan who, considering his access to Bush, might have been expected to take the job. He politely declined. The second was retired US Marine Corps General Jack Sheehan, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander who is a well-known critic of the administration's Middle East policies. Sheehan was shocked when he received Hadley's telephone call. "He didn't say 'no', he said 'hell no'," one retired Marine colonel says.

Sheehan was even more outspoken with the press. When asked why he turned down the position, he grunted his response: "The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going," he responded. "So rather than go over there [to the White House], develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, 'No, thanks'."

The third retired commander that Hadley called was former air force General Joseph Ralston, who also declined. Ralston was surprised by the offer. Ralston had served as the Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman from 1996 to 2000 and was expected to succeed John Shalikashvili when Shalikashvili retired. But the talented Ralston withdrew from consideration when it was discovered he had had an extramarital affair with a Central Intelligence Agency officer while separated from his wife.

When official Washington learned that Hadley had offered Ralston the job they wondered whether Hadley had remembered the incident - did he think that the Senate, which would have to confirm the appointment, had forgotten it? Did they think Ralston wouldn't be asked.

Two other commanders also turned down Hadley's offer: air force General John P Jumper (who had retired as air force chief of staff in 2005) and marine General Charles Wilhelm as blunt as Sheehan, with more combat ribbons. Wilhelm had apparently seen too many failed operations (in Vietnam, Somalia and Haiti to name just three) to undertaken another.

By the third week of April, it was clear that the White House would have to turn to Gates, Pace and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their recommendation. Pressure was building inside the National Security Council for a solution: Hadley was under increasing strain, and two key assistants - J D Crouch, the deputy national security advisor and one of the most outspoken proponents of the "surge" strategy inside the White House and Meghan O'Sullivan, the administration's top national security council official for Iraq and Afghanistan - had announced they would be leaving.

More critically, at a time when Bush was being pressed to defend the "surge", new CENTCOM chief Fallon was expressing troubling public doubts that the war in Iraq could actually worsen - despite the "surge". His views were buttressed by an entire host of retired military officers, who said that the solution to the Iraq crisis was more political than military.

Even more surprising, those views were echoed by Gates and Petraeus. At the same time that Bush and Hadley were searching vainly for a war czar, Gates was on yet another trip through the Middle East, and blithely punched holes in White House claims that the "surge" would provide a military solution to the Iraq debacle. The US commitment to Iraq was "not open-ended", Gates said on April 18 in Baghdad.

The next day, Petraeus echoed the sentiment, saying the security situation in Baghdad "has lost a little traction". To Hadley and the rest of the national security staff the message from Gates seemed hardly subtle: there would be a "war czar" all right - but he would come from the military.

Abandon ship
Gates returned to Washington from his mid-April trip to the Middle East more convinced than ever that the administration's new "war czar" needed to be a currently serving high ranking commander. His first days at the Pentagon did nothing to dissuade him from that view.

The national security establishment was more chaotic than ever - with few hands-on officials actually running the Iraq War. While Hadley's most outspoken critics have had a field day excoriating the former lawyer and assistant secretary of defense (he served under Cheney at the Pentagon during the first Bush administration), as one of the nation's weakest National Security Council chiefs, Gates knew that Hadley was working 18 hour days.

The reason for the additional pressure came from the resignation of Hadley's assistant, Crouch, Bush's deputy national security adviser and a key architect of the administration's "surge" strategy, who announced his resignation May 4. Not many senior military officers were unhappy to see Crouch go. The former Missouri deputy sheriff was known for his impractical military suggestions, derived in part from his time on the board of advisors of Frank Gaffney's ideologically driven Center for Security Policy.

Hadley's headaches had also worsened when earlier O'Sullivan said she would be leaving the White House. That was bad news for Hadley, though officials at the Pentagon shrugged. One Pentagon official says that O'Sullivan's loss was hardly felt. As he relates: just prior to Iraqi politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's visit to Washington in March, O'Sullivan was told the Shi'ite leader had strong ties to Iran. "She was shocked," this official remembered. "She just didn't have a clue."

O'Sullivan, a former aide to State Department official Richard Haass with a PhD from Oxford, has all the credentials of a Middle East expert - monographs on terrorism, appearances as the Brookings Institution, a stint with Jay Garner in Baghdad. Yet in all that time she never met a real Islamist. At one point during her final weeks on the job, she apparently took it on herself to invite Lebanese leader Samir Geagea to Washington, believing a photo-op of Bush and the Lebanese militiaman would strengthen the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

It was only when Geagea was in the air, on his way to France, that O'Sullivan was told that Geagea's visit would spark controversy. Blamed for the deaths of thousands during the Lebanese civil war, Geagea's invitation was embarrassingly rescinded.

Hadley's difficulties meant that Gates still had problems to solve - but he had made some headway. He was satisfied with his Baghdad trip and his meetings with Petraeus. Changes were on the way, including a very sensitive one that, according to high-ranking military officers in the Pentagon, had been on the minds of a number of senior officers.

While Major General William Caldwell had served well as spokesman for the multi-national forces in Iraq, there were growing concerns that he had leaked information to the press that should have been reported through US security channels - including a February report that Iran had been supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents. The weapons, and their serial numbers, had been given to a number of reporters and then aired. The information came from a "high-ranking US commander", the reports said. Some military officers in the Pentagon identified the leakers as Caldwell - and were enraged.

The officers thought it was inappropriate for a senior officer to give out that kind of information, whether true or not. Pace, in particular, was privately angered by Caldwell's leak and implied as much in a number of press interviews. The heads of press organizations were also beginning to question Caldwell's intentions. Was it appropriate for a high-ranking military officer to be playing politics with sensitive information of the kind that was so inflammatory that it might be used for political purpose to start a war?

It is not known whether Gates talked to Petraeus about Caldwell, or to anyone. But Petraeus wanted his own man in Caldwell's job, and believed strongly that the US military needed to be more open, and blunt, about its operations. In May, Caldwell was replaced. There was no blood on the floor.

There were only a few steps left before Gates completed his clean sweep of the upper reaches of the American high command. But before moving any further, the secretary of defense decided that he would check in with the network of retired military four-star generals that comprise a powerful, if unofficial, lobbying force in Washington.

Through May and into early June, Gates had lunch with a large number of some of the most eminent of these former commanders. Among the most prominent was General George Joulwan - as respected a former commander as any. Gates called Joulwan into the secretary's dining room in mid-May, just prior to the naming of a "war czar" to seek his advice on what to do about Iraq.

"They would clear out everyone and George would come in and the secretary and George would sit for an hour or two and Gates and Joulwan would sit and have a discussion," a senior officer says. "And Gates would listen and smile and nod. And mostly he agreed." Joulwan is a decorated Vietnam veteran (he was even called "general" by his classmates at West Point) and a former commander in Bosnia. Even in retirement, Joulwan spends time shuttling back and forth to eastern Europe, where he has maintained ties to senior commanders in the new NATO states of Poland and Romania. He is a constant presence on American television. He is most comfortable at an easel, telling audiences about how he designed strategies that brought down the Cali cartel in South America and integrated Eastern European militaries into NATO. "He does go on," a colleague says.

Joulwan may well be the most connected retired military man in Washington. With his shock of black hair, he falls forward on his feet and buttonholes anyone who will listen to his liturgy about the "proper way to get things done". He stabs the air with his finger: "There are only two things that matter when it comes to running operations like Bosnia or Iraq or I don't care where it is," Joulwan says. "And that is absolute unity of command and absolute clarity of instructions. These commanders have got to demand of the civilians that the mission be laid out. That's what I did in Bosnia. I said, 'Well you write it right down here and you say what you want and then we can get it done'. Otherwise it is never clear.

According to Pentagon officials, Joulwan focused on that - rather than personnel - in his talks with Gates. "George could see the chaos, because he lived through it in Bosnia and in Vietnam," a colleague says, "and it just scared the bejesus out of him. And so he insisted on that with Gates. And he told him, 'No matter what you do with the White House, you insist that they make it clear to you what they want'."

For the US military, unity of command is nearly liturgical - a commandment that dates from George Washington. The principle is so deeply rooted that a leading military think-tank recently conducted a day-long simulation that stipulated two teams (a "red" enemy team and a "blue" US team), in which the military US team was saddled with a number of nearly insurmountable premises: a weak president, an unengaged secretary of state, and a broken national security establishment. The task of the blue military team was to find ways to compensate for the broken national security establishment. One of the ways to do that is to make certain that the top-down command structure of the US military remains intact - that orders are obeyed exactly, and "by-the-book" - a command structure that many senior officers now believe was nearly catastrophically missing during the Rumsfeld years.

With major shifts underway in Iraq and in the region, and with the network of retired officers now firmly behind him in advocating that the "war czar" be picked from among the crop of currently serving officers, Gates recommended to the president that he appoint the Joint Chief of Staff's director of operations as the assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush checked Lute's record and noted that he had opposed the "surge", so he had his doubts, but after he and Hadley had interviewed him he agreed with Gates' assessment and Lute's appointment was announced on May 15. As always, the soft-spoken Gates explained the appointment in terms that were far more blunt than perhaps Bush would have liked: "One of the arguments that we hear frequently - and frankly are very sympathetic with - is that we and the State Department are about the only parts of the government that are at war," Gates said. "This kind of position is intended to ensure that where other parts of the government can play a contributing role, that in fact they understand what the president's priorities are and make sure that the commanders in the field, the ambassador in the field, gets what he needs."

For his part, Lute was unapologetic for opposing the "surge", saying simply that he agreed with the president's policy. Even so, like Petraeus and Fallon, Lute is convinced that a military victory in Iraq is impossible without political reconciliation. He has broad support in this from all parts of the high command.

"He's not afraid to get tough with the bureaucracy," a uniformed colleague says. "He will run the war. He won't be a supreme commander, of course, but he'll be a supreme coordinator - and we desperately need one." Lute is also one of the ablest political generals in the Pentagon, having served ably with both Abizaid and Petraeus and was apparently blunt with Bush and Hadley, telling them about his doubts about their policies. "He told them he didn't agree with a lot of what they were doing," a colleague related, "and said, 'so take it or leave it', and they were shook by that. But they took it."

Mark Perry is co-director of Conflicts Forum and the author of the recently released Partners in Command, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (Penguin Press, 2007).

Original article posted here.

The Farcical Rule of Law: War Criminal Rumsfeld Escapes "Universal Jurisdication" from ex Nazi Regime

German prosecutor dimisses Rumsfeld war crimes case

Germany's federal prosecutor announced she will not be proceeding with an investigation against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA Director George Tenet, and other high-ranking U.S. officials for torture and other war crimes committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, according to a press release obtained by RAW STORY.

"The 400-page complaint was filed on November 14, 2006, by Berlin attorney Wolfgang Kaleck on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Republican Attorneys' Association (RAV), more than 40 other international and national human rights groups, 12 Iraqi citizens who were held in Abu Ghraib, and one Saudi citizen still held at Guantánamo," the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) press release continues.

CCR president Michael Ratner told the Associated Press in a telephone call from New York, "If Germany is not willing to enforce their law we think other countries will be — we're not going to leave a stone unturned."

"It took 35 years to get (former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto) Pinochet and it won't take that long with the Rumsfeld case," Ratner added. "I think everyone recognizes that high-level U.S. officials ran a torture program around the world."

Opinions and documents related to the case can be found at this link.

Further excerpts from press release follow:

Attorneys said they are contemplating an appeal of the decision as well as filing similar cases in other countries.

"Fundamentally, this is a political and not a legal decision," said CCR President Michael Ratner. "We will continue to pursue Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and the others in the future – they should not feel they can travel outside the U.S. without risk. Our goal is no safe haven for torturers."

Prominent jurists, scholars, and human rights experts from around the world had examined the complaint and found it sound. Many signed on in support.

The complaint states that because of the failure of authorities in the United States and Iraq to launch any independent investigation into the responsibility of high-level U.S. officials for torture despite a documented paper trail and government memos implicating them in direct as well as command responsibility for torture, and because the U.S. has refused to join the International Criminal Court, it is the legal obligation of states such as Germany to take up cases under their universal jurisdiction laws.

In her decision to not go forward with an investigation, Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms argued that the crimes were committed outside of Germany and the defendants neither reside in Germany, nor are they currently located in Germany, nor will they soon enter German territory. However, the German law of universal jurisdiction expressly states that it is a universal duty to fight torture and other serious crimes, no matter where they occur or what the nationality of the perpetrators and victims is.

"Since its passage in 2002, not one of the many cases brought under our fine law of universal jurisdiction has been pursued by the prosecutor's office," said German attorney Wolfgang Kaleck. "Is this law meant only to look good on the books but never to be invoked?" In the same time period, according to human rights activists, other countries including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, and France have exercised universal jurisdiction and brought to justice perpetrators from countries such as Afghanistan, Mauretania, Argentina, Uganda, and more.

The prosecutor also stated that investigations would not have had a reasonable chance of succeeding, but in addition to providing extensive evidence in the form of publicly-available documents and government memos, attorneys had secured the cooperation of General Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, as well as other witnesses and victims who were willing to travel to Germany to testify before the court in Karlsruhe or meet with prosecutors to help them determine how to proceed with the case.

An earlier version of the complaint was lodged in fall 2004. In dismissing that case in February 2005 in response to heavy official pressure from the U.S., the former federal prosecutor stated that there were no indications that the authorities and courts of the United States were refraining from holding officials accountable. Yet more than two years later, only low-ranking officials have ever been charged. Although U.S. military and civilian personnel have been implicated in hundreds of known instances of detainee abuse, internal displacement, torture, and death, very few have been prosecuted in the U.S. anywhere else.

"We will continue to work for justice for the victims of these crimes," said a representative of FIDH. "Torturers are enemies of all humankind – they can be brought to justice anywhere."

Original article posted here.

Once again, a massive failure of legal system exposing sham secular religion of "Rule of Law"

Rumsfeld torture case dismissal raises specter of rights without remedy

[Hina Shamsi, deputy director of the Law and Security Program at Human Rights First and Cecillia Wang, senior staff attorney with the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union]: "On March 1, 2005, the ACLU, Human Rights First, and other co-counsel sued former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to hold him accountable for policies and practices of torture and cruel mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. We represent nine men, each a civilian released without ever being charged with a crime, who were subjected to acts of cruelty including: mutilation, isolation in wooden boxes, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, intentional prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures and forced painful stress positions including hanging from the ceiling by the arms. On March 27, 2007, a D.C. federal district court dismissed the lawsuit, Ali v. Rumsfeld.

No court in the United States would tolerate the kinds of brutality our clients suffered in a case on the merits. Yet, even as the district court called our clients’ allegations “horrifying” and said they “stand as an indictment of the humanity with which the United States treats its detainees,” it closed the courthouse door to them on legal grounds.

We brought claims under the U.S. Constitution, the law of nations and the Geneva Conventions. The prohibition against torture is a fundamental principle of both American and international law, and yet the government argued that neither could protect our clients. The government’s defense centered on claims that, even assuming the truth of what happened to our clients, the Judiciary is powerless to take any action to stop U.S. military officials from implementing a policy and practice of torture. The government argued that such policies should be entirely within the sphere of Executive power, and that the Constitution has no reach beyond the borders of the United States.

We disagreed; believing that the Constitution and our laws are stronger, we pointed to a long line of Supreme Court cases indicating that at the very least, U.S. government actors are bound by fundamental constitutional norms, such as the prohibition on torture.

Former military leaders and military law and history scholars filed an amicus brief supporting our arguments in opposition. They belied the government’s arguments that the lawsuit would interfere unduly with military functions, explaining to the court that the ban against torture and cruel treatment was a cornerstone of military law and doctrine. According to amici, not only would judicial enforcement of the torture prohibition not intrude into executive or military functions, but it would support the fundamental military principles of discipline and command responsibility. Indeed, amici said, it was the very core of Secretary Rumsfeld’s employment to be responsible for the conduct of subordinates and to investigate and punish violations: “immunizing [Defendants’] conduct is fundamentally inconsistent with the accountability that is the hallmark of Defendants’ command responsibilities.” The court disagreed.

The court’s decision wrongly renders the U.S. Constitution void in a critical area: When government officials sanction policies and practices that violate Constitutional and international law prohibitions against torture and cruel treatment, there’s no remedy.

Ours thus became the latest in a line of cases in which senior U.S. officials are escaping accountability for torture for reasons entirely unrelated to the truth or falsity of the underlying allegations. Among the others:

• Khaled El-Masri sued former CIA director George Tenet and others for the abuse he suffered when he was abducted and held in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. El-Masri’s suit was dismissed on the grounds that “state secrets” would jeopardize national security if the case were to proceed.
  
  
• “State secrets” were also raised by the government as a defense in the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, whom the United States rendered to Syria where he was beaten, whipped and held in an underground cell for 10 months. Eventually, a district court judge held that U.S. officials could not be held liable because of national security and foreign policy considerations and dismissed Arar’s case.
  
  
• Three former Guantanamo detainees, including Shafiq Rasul, sued Secretary Rumsfeld and others for the torture and abuse they suffered at the U.S.’s naval base in Cuba. Their case was dismissed in part because the judge held the defendants were acting within the scope of their employment, which foreseeably included torture, and were thus immune from suit.

Chillingly, the outcome in each of these cases is a vindication of the administration’s expansive notion of executive authority, that Congress and the courts must defer to executive action taken in the name of national security. Although the Supreme Court disagreed with this view in Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466 (2004), Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), and, most recently, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 126 S.Ct. 2749 (2006), the lower courts have largely agreed with it.

The outcome of our lawsuit against former Secretary Rumsfeld, and of the others cited above, is sadly reminiscent of the case of Fred Korematsu, who sued the government during World War II to stop the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Although different in scale and the type of wrong, Korematsu and these contemporary cases may prove to be similar in how history views them. The passage of time has shown that the internment was not needed for national security, as the government had argued, and the evolution of constitutional law has judged the Korematsu decision harshly. History will be the judge of our contemporary jurisprudence, as well.

Freedom from torture and cruel treatment is among the core rights on which the United States was founded and for which it has historically stood. But if our courts do not provide a remedy for violations of this right, when victims like our clients are not given at least a hearing on the merits of their allegations, the distinctive promise of American justice rings hollow."

Original article posted here.

Book Review: Pinning the tail on the donkey

Who Lost Iraq

When taking responsibility for the disastrous attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro with Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961, the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy commented "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." There is a growing consensus in Washington (and almost complete consensus in the world beyond) that the Iraq venture is looking like a serious strategic defeat for the United States. And this defeat will be no orphan.

A range of authors have already been named, from President George Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, the massed ranks of neo-conservatives and British prime minister Tony Blair.

Now some new targets are emerging. After their impassioned assault ('America Alone; the neo-conservatives and the global order') on the neo-con putsch that captured the commanding heights of the Bush administration's foreign policy, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke have turned their sights on the co-conspirators and enablers who cheered Bush into the Iraqi quagmire.

Their new book, "The Silence of the Rational Center; why American foreign policy is failing" (Basic Books, $26.95) comes with strong credentials. Halper served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and now teaches at Cambridge, England, and Clarke was a veteran British diplomat with particular knowledge of intelligence. With sharp pen-portraits and a host of citations that testify to their researches, they describe the way that the breathless simplifications of TV cable news combined with fame-seeking academics, partisan think-tanks and advocacy journalism to weaken the critical faculties of Washington's policy-making intelligentsia.

They aim their fire in all directions. Economist Paul Krugman, who is better known as an anti-war New York Times columnist, is condemned for stepping outside his specialty, just as Professors Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington get it in the neck for over-simplifying and sensationalizing their own erudition.

Partisan think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are slammed as cheerleaders for war, while the more objective institutions like Brookings, Carnegie Endowment and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are criticized for equivocation and for their near silence as the Bush administration headed for war.

The prestigious Council on Foreign Relations is accused of "institutional failure" for standing "mute on the matter of opposition." And the entire panoply of Washington's think-tanks are said to be "failing as a collective" in a city dominated by 'empty, slogan-based exchange that simplifies the variables and suppresses detailed discussion."

"The effect was to suppress the rational centre and the debate that was needed to form effective policy," they write. "Put another way, if policy is formed without the benefit of full debate, then one of the nation's most remarkable and indispensable treasures - its free-flowing intellectual energy - has simply been abandoned."

So far, so good. This kind of hindsight-powered polemic is a useful reminder of the dangers of the groupthink that gripped much of Washington's intellectual community (and Congress and much of the U.S. population) after the shock of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

And the authors are right to say that the American superpower deserves better of its policy intelligentsia, although there were important figures like Zbigniew Bzrezinski and Brent Scowcroft, two former White House national security advisers, and former national security Agency chief General William Odom who sounded dire warnings as the momentum gathered for the war to topple Saddam Hussein.

Halper and Clarke buttress their argument by suggesting that the American system is unusually vulnerable to a "Big Idea" that can be expressed in a pungent phrase like President Bush's "axis of evil." They cite the high-mindedly patriotic slogans that have caught the national imagination from "Manifest Destiny" to Abraham Lincoln's "Last Best Hope on Earth" and the "Domino Theory" that was deployed to justify America's misadventure in Vietnam .Such simplicities can turn sour, as they did with Senator Joe McCarthy's Red Scare.

And yet there have been some American Big Ideas that turned out admirably. Without the "bastion of democracy' in World War Two, Nazism might not have been defeated. And the grand strategy of the Cold War, to hold the line short of war while building up the economies of its European and Asian allies, proved robust enough to survive setback in Korea and humiliation in Vietnam while helping to spread an unparalleled prosperity throughout the West.

Halper and Clarke decry Bush's Big Idea of "Freedom on the March," the hitherto botched attempt to spread modernization and democracy in the Middle East and the Islamic world. And yet the United National Development Program's seminal Arab Human Development report of 2002, written by Arab intellectuals, suggests that Bush's Big Idea might deserve thoughtful consideration rather than mockery. There is no doubt that Bush's rhetorical support for democracy in the world of Islam has so far produced few results. But that is not to say that it is wrong, or that the goal should be simply abandoned, or that in more capable hands it might not prove beneficial.

The authors prefer to race on to their own Big Idea, that the disasters of policy-making over Iraq must now teach the essential lesson for the greater strategic challenge of managing the rise of China. "The far-reaching and perhaps catastrophic error would be a China policy built on a Big Idea and laced with passion. Perhaps we can avoid it, but the record is not encouraging," they suggest, adding "There is no room for error."

They suggest that the Bush team has been like France's Bourbon dynasty who when restored to power after the French Revolution "remembered everything and learned nothing." But in working with China on North Korea and with the Europeans and the UN on Iran, the merits of consultative diplomacy do not seem entirely lost on the Bush White House. Perhaps the Bush team has learned its lesson in Iraq, or perhaps new escalations lie in store for Iran. Whatever the decisions to come in the last two years of Bush's lame-duck presidency, Halper and Clarke are right to stress that the U.S. media, academics, think-tanks and policy-makers will all have to do a great deal better than their wretched performance on Iraq.