 2:00 pm
1:30 pm
12:29 pm
10:54 am
Thursday
Vlada Lounge
Enter to win a $50 gift certificate to Vlada Lounge!
Alice Smith
Enter to win tickets to see Alice Smith on Thursday, May 22nd at the Highline Ballroom!
SoHo Stroll 2008
Enter to win a SoHo Stroll 2008 broom signed by James Blunt and designed and decorated by the New York Academy of Art!
Elia Salon
Enter to Win A Hair Package Special by the BEST DOMINICAN SALON for you & a friend!
Lit Lounge
Enter for complimentary admission to see Power Solo from
Denmark with Band Antenna, Sea That Dried Up, and Chem Trail at Lit Lounge!
United Artists
Enter to win a 90th Anniversary United Artists DVD prize package!
Iron & Silk
Enter to win 5 personal training sessions at Iron & Silk Fitness!
|
Posted by Harkavy at 5:26 PM, May 5, 2008
The Rooskies are rolling out the hardware once again.
Everybody's talking tough these days. Hillary threatens to nuke Iran and now Vladimir Putin is launching the kind of "Victory Day" parade on Red Square that hasn't been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Here's how France 24's Nick Coleman described it today:
Fighter jets circled over Red Square on Monday as Russia prepared a huge patriotic display around this week's presidential inauguration, amid rising tension with pro-Western neighbour Georgia.
MiG fighter jets together with strategic bomber planes thundered over the capital in a rehearsal for traditional World War II commemorations on Friday featuring a show of military hardware unprecedented for the post-Soviet era.
Vlad the Paler may be stepping down as president, but he's still the prime minister, in every sense of the word. He ain't giving up anything.
He's rolling out the big guns, just like in the bad old days when thousands of missiles, troops, and weapons paraded in the square before the doddering conservatives who called themselves Communists.
Coleman's story goes on to note Putin's explanation of how the current display of planes, trained soldiers, and airplanes isn't anything other than peaceful:
The military parade is part of the dramatic backdrop to president-elect Dmitry Medvedev's inauguration on Wednesday, following Soviet-style May Day parades last week.
President Vladimir Putin, who is to step down after eight years but retain power in the prime minister's post, said the pumped up display was not intended as a threat.
"For the first time in many years heavy military equipment will be used. This is not sabre-rattling. We are not threatening anyone.... This is a demonstration of our growing defence capability," Putin said.
Everybody loves a parade. That's an order.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:45 AM, October 17, 2007
Today's scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.
Bush's new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.
That's a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.
In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he's won several pizza prizes since Bush's operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.
This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize "for his consistent resistance to the use of violence."
Meanwhile, China is pissed, as the L.A. Times notes this morning:
"We solemnly demand that the U.S. cancel the extremely wrong arrangements," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told reporters before the meeting. "It seriously violates the norm of international relations and seriously wounded the feelings of the Chinese people and interfered with China's internal affairs."
Too bad that Hunter S. Thompson, the Dalai Lama's deceased twin, isn't around to write about this absurd face-to-face between two spiritual leaders whose approaches to violence are so different.
Will the peace-loving Buddhist leader have any impact on Bush? It's too late for that. The best we can hope for is that, instead of gonzo pol Karl Rove whispering into Bush's ear, "Stick to principle, stick to principle," this Gyatso pol will whisper, "Stay in the moment, stay in the moment."
It would be nice if he also told Bush, "Don't stay in Iraq, don't stay in Iraq."
Posted by Harkavy at 8:38 AM, October 8, 2007
Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.
Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.
As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,
With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers can legally be brought into the country.
The effort, urgently underway at the departments of Homeland Security, State and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vise between a complex process to hire legal guest workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of illegal planters, pickers and middle managers crossing the border.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.
Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:
The embassy, which will be the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, was budgeted at $592 million. The core project was supposed to have been completed by last month, but the timetable has slipped so much that the State Department has sought and received permission from the Iraqi government to allow about 2,000 non-Iraqi construction employees to stay in the country until March.
As I wrote on August 8:
Shanghaied to build to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Working on the construction site without safety equipment — or even shoes. The story of the alleged kidnapping of Filipino workers who thought they were going to Dubai but instead were flown to Baghdad to help build the $500 million embassy is stunning.
That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:
Because of allegations of labour trafficking and other abuses, First Kuwaiti is also being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, an action precipitated by U.S. citizens claiming that company workers loaded onto planes in Kuwait were handed boarding passes for Dubai before flying directly to Baghdad. The passengers were mostly low-wage Asian migrant labourers earning as little as 250 dollars a month.
Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:
The agreement also lays out salary: 346 dollars a month for eight-hour days, seven days a week, plus 104 dollars a month for mandatory two hours overtime every day.
Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."
The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:
"It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a workforce, and that is a factor of what is going on today."
The push to speedily rewrite the regulations is also the Bush administration's attempt to step into a breach left when Congress did not pass an immigration overhaul in June that might have helped American farms.
These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:
The administration has pursued the project discreetly. The issue of immigration has generated friction between President Bush and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has strongly opposed many of the initiatives that Bush has pursued.
Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.
Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.
Posted by Harkavy at 11:59 AM, September 19, 2007
$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.
While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."
In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.
Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.
Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:
ARINC already has a wealth of hands-on experience supporting just this type of program. We now expect to play a key role developing and fielding new solutions at the cutting edge of drug interdiction.
Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:
The contract, worth up to $15 billion over the next five years, illustrates the extent to which the Defense Department is relying on contractors to perform critical missions while combat forces are stretched thin by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In response to specific task orders issued under the indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract, companies will develop and deploy new surveillance technologies, train and equip foreign security forces and provide key administrative, logistical and operational support to Defense and other agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to the work statement provided to bidders, the vast majority of the drive will be conducted overseas.
Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.
It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.
Posted by Harkavy at 10:55 AM, September 19, 2007
How about "large armies of foreign mercenaries"?
Regarding the army of mercenaries I wrote about in "Dreadlock in Baghdad" (September 18), Harry Byrne writes from Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania:
Dear Ward: From the pen of Thomas Jefferson:
"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for reading, Harry, but look, this sounds like some typically liberal claptrap. Anyone can lift a quote from Jefferson. What's the context?
Oh, wait, it's from the Declaration of Independence.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:26 AM, September 19, 2007
U.S. officials already banned from travel in Baghdad.
Despite Sunday's gun battle in Baghdad in which 20 civilians were killed by Blackwater mercenaries, there are new reports that the Iraqi government may not cancel Blackwater's contract after all.
No surprise there, because Iraq's foundering government seems to have been canceled.
Radio Free Iraq reports that the Iraqi Parliament called off its September 18 session because a majority of its members didn't show up for work. The parent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news service says in today's roundup:
Only 115 out of 275 parliamentarians appeared for the session. Meanwhile, a committee formed by the United Iraqi Alliance has failed to lure parliamentarians loyal to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr back to work, Al-Sharqiyah television reported on September 18. The news channel also reported that "some members" of the so-called moderates' front in the parliament asked two members of the Iraqis List to leave the list and join the front in exchange for government posts and other privileges.
U.S. officials have already been forbidden to travel outside the Green Zone. Iraqi officials, targeted by insurgents, don't want to travel either.
Bring in more mercenaries! That seems to be the message. Tel Aviv-based Dominic Moran of Zurich's International Relations and Security Network (ISN) reports today:
The Iraqi government appears to be backing down from an earlier pledge to revoke the operating license of the largest private foreign security contractor in the country, Blackwater USA.
Providing a good roundup of U.S. mercenary work, Moran also notes:
The [Sunday] deaths again turn the spotlight on the extensive use of private security contractors by US government agencies in Iraq. Blackwater is the largest private security firm involved in the conflict, with an estimated 1,000 personnel on the ground, and has benefited from at least US$750 million in US State Department contracts since mid-2004 according to the UK daily The Guardian. Many contracts have allegedly been secured without a tendering process.
The current use of private security contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in scale for a US overseas entanglement, with security companies employing around 48,000 personnel. Most work on limited rotations cycling in and out of the country with the expiry of contracted agreements. The same is true in Afghanistan.
The unprecedented reliance on the services of private security contractors was underlined Tuesday with the US decision to suspend all overland travel by its diplomats and related civilian workers beyond the confines of the Baghdad Green Zone.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:30 AM, September 19, 2007
Latest appraisal of Iraq debacle comes from an unlikely source: the magazine for mercenaries.
Our deputy in Iraq: If the Iraq Army hadn't been disbanded in 2003 by Jerry Bremer (above), military officials tell Charles Ferguson, "we could have nipped this insurgency in the bud."
The latest piece of evidence that the Bush regime bungled post-invasion Iraq — and one of the first bits we've read from a high official that it likewise bungled Afghanistan's "reconstruction" — comes from the unlikeliest source: the trade journal for mercenaries like Blackwater.
Career diplomat Robert Pearson, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey during the Iraq invasion, treats the re-destruction of Iraq as a given — merely background for his article about how the mercenary industry can pitch in to help around the world.
Quite unintentionally, what Pearson says dovetails neatly with Charles Ferguson's response to preposterous pasha Jerry Bremer's op-ed about who didn't do what in the early stages of the Iraq disaster. (All you need see is Ferguson's journalistically groundbreaking video letter to the editor, "The Debacle of Disbanding the Iraqi Army - 9/14/07."
)
If Bremer and the White House hadn't disbanded the Iraq Army, there wouldn't have been as much chaos, and "private security contractors" from companies like Blackwater wouldn't have invaded Iraq in such numbers. There are an estimated 129,000 private contractors of all types in Iraq, almost as many as the number of U.S. soldiers before the "surge" began last January.
Pearson matter-of-factly writes, on page 11 of the September/October issue of the super-jingoistic and wonderfully named Journal of International Peace Operations:
In 2003, global attention focused on U.S. stabilization roles in two key fragile states. In Iraq, it was apparent that the U.S. had no post-conflict plan ready to implement. [Emphasis added.] The civil administration began with a quarrel between Washington and General Jay Garner, the dismissal of Garner, and the arrival of Paul Bremer to head the CPA.
In Afghanistan, NATO began operations in Kabul, its first ever deployment outside Europe. While the move was applauded, in reality it was a coalition of the willing inside NATO, as the U.S. and its allies made individual decisions about the effort. Clearly, the U.S. was entering onto a new phase of experimentation in managing international crises, despite its long experience in dealing with such challenges.
What a mess! In this magazine that features a full-page ad for Blackwater — the main U.S. mercenary company and the one now being driven out of Iraq — Pearson, an ally of Colin Powell's, notes that serious planning for post-invasion Iraq began in the fall of 2003.
Yes, that's six months after the U.S. invaded.
Even then, the White House refused to go along. Oh, at first, SecDef Don Rumsfeld did. But the regime refused to fund State's Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS, as it was known):
Secretary Powell wanted a contingency fund of about $200 million to allow S/CRS to react promptly with all its assets in case of need. Senators Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) and Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) strongly supported this fund, but the U.S. Office of Management and Budget repeatedly refused to include the request in the Administration budget. In the end, the Administration was content to live with the promise rather than the reality of a truly serious international reconstruction effort led by the U.S.
Wait. It gets worse. At least we had this S/CRS in place. But while Iraq and Afghanistan veered quickly into chaos, S/CRS had to fight to find some fighting elsewhere to fight. Pearson writes:
This shortfall forced S/CRS from the beginning to fight for both personnel and operating resources, limiting its intended purpose and focusing it on short-term survival tactics.
Looking for a reason to prove its worth, S/CRS became involved in rebuilding efforts in Haiti and then in Sudan at the Department’s direction.
These moves, though worthy on their merits, still detracted from the office’s original aims and roused the jealousy of USAID, now fearing that S/CRS might be intended to be a State Department ploy to replace USAID’s core mission. The commitment to training, gaming and overall widespread preparation for responding to overseas emergencies on a serious scale suffered badly. The result was a loss of focus on S/CRS’s original scope and purpose.
This episode also illustrates the struggle between Powell and Rumsfeld over the Bush-Cheney regime's "war on terror." It was a battle that Powell continually lost.
By the way, if you're interested in becoming a mercenary, especially now that Blackwater has been kicked out of Iraq and there's nobody left to guard Ambassador Ryan Crocker and U.S. officials have been forbidden to leave Baghdad's Green Zone, be sure to attend the "annual summit" of the International Peace Operations Association on October 28-30 in D.C.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:28 AM, September 18, 2007
IBC
Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:
Who's gonna bodyguard ya, Mr. Bodyguard?
I want to know who.
Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.
That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.
Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.
After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:
The shooting started at noon on Sunday when a car bomb exploded near a State Department motorcade traveling through the western Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad near Nisoor Square, U.S. officials said. Following the explosion, Blackwater employees guarding the diplomats exchanged fire with armed attackers, Blackwater and U.S. officials said.
The subsequent battle killed at least nine people and wounded 14, Iraqi police and hospital workers said. [An Iraqi official] put the death toll at 11.
Followed by the second version:
"We were shocked when we saw these fighters getting out of their SUVs and shooting randomly at people," said Sgt. Mohammed Juwad Hussein, an Iraqi army soldier who said he was manning a checkpoint in Baghdad near the scene of the fighting. "We didn't know who they were targeting or who they wanted to shoot."
They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:
One of these days it a go dread (dreader than dread)
Ev'ryone looking a place to hide 'em head (well dread)
But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.
Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."
One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?
In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:
Baghdad: car bomb kills 11 outside bakery, Amil; 11 bodies.
And this one:
Karma: 3 bodies.
Posted by Harkavy at 10:03 AM, September 13, 2007
Fore! More Years! At Least!
U.S. Army/Staff Sgt. Jacob Boyer
No grunts, please: A sergeant and a captain tee off at the Camp Victory driving range.
While Americans were being shelled Tuesday by White-House-driven propaganda from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in D.C., rebels bombed our Camp Victory in Baghdad, a little-noticed Xanadu that illustrates the golf between us and the Iraqis.
Five years ago we "liberated" Saddam Hussein's sumptuous Al Faw Palace and planted the Pentagon's flag there.
 By now we could have returned the palace to Iraq's citizens, who are dying of the heat, among other things. But all we've done is given it a friendlier second name, Camp Al-Nasr, for PR purposes aimed at Iraq's surviving Arab populace.
The only lifeguards with a good track record at Camp Victory are probably those at its pool — here's a photo of the actual palace swimmin' hole.
On Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Camp Victory, the U.S. military HQ, was shelled. Here's an AP report from this morning:
A fatal attack launched two days ago against the sprawling headquarters base of the American military in Iraq was carried out with a 240 mm rocket — a type of weapon provided to Shiite extremists by Iran, a U.S. general said Thursday.
One person was killed and 11 were wounded during the "indirect fire" attack Tuesday against Camp Victory, which includes the headquarters of Multinational Forces-Iraq. …
The attacks came despite the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began Thursday for Iraq's Sunni Muslims, and Friday for the country's majority Shiites. Tradition requires faithful to abstain from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset during the monthlong observance. …
The attack was overshadowed by congressional appearances by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Washington.
And talk about surges and track records: How about that Christopher Harris! I still remember his Ironman Triathlon at Camp Victory in October 2005. The U.S. Army captain conducted his one-man surge while his wife competed in Hawaii's Ironman Triathlon.
But Iraqis are pretty fortunate, too. Praise Allah for good timing: Ramadan's month-long fasting coincides perfectly with the current food crisis. As IRIN reports:
The monthly food rationing system on which millions of Iraqis depend is not working properly, according to officials. They warn that delays in food deliveries will have a serious impact on those fasting during the upcoming holy Islamic month of Ramadan (beginning around 13 September), when Muslims go without food and drink from dawn to sunset.
The shortage of food can't be that serious if they're already fasting. Mind if we play through?
Posted by Harkavy at 6:19 AM, September 4, 2007
Troops still there.
George W. Bush's unannounced, but not surprising, visit to Iraq on Labor Day was the kiss of death to Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
If you're Maliki, it's one thing for Philip Zelikow to work behind the scenes to oust you; it's another thing altogether to have the word get out that Bush took you aside and told you, "You're my friend."
That little tale with which Bush regaled the press corps afterwards should make Maliki even more popular with his countrymen.
As Beirut's Daily Star opines this morning:
Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday, but neither he nor visitors from any other foreign capital can make up for weak leadership in Baghdad. Washington has expected too much of its Iraqi partners in many respects, but it has also tied their hands on many issues over which they should have been turned loose. Maliki needs more of this brand of American "support" like he needs a proverbial hole in the head.
The only way Maliki can survive is if he's seen as strong, independent, decisive. A visit from Bush is not what he needs. U.S. papers fell right in line by treating this trip seriously. But as the Star notes:
[Maliki] can only improve his authority and legitimacy if his actions are manifestly aimed at dealing with realities on the ground in Iraq and the wider Middle East, not the ebbs and flows of America's electoral comedies or the shortsighted tribalism that inspires some of his allies and their sponsors.
By the way, you see that Bush landed in Anbar province, not in Baghdad. Those days of of surprise visits to Baghdad are over. Too dangerous.
But meeting officials and troops 100 miles of Baghdad works just as well. Newspaper headlines are blaring, "Bush Hails Anbar Gains."
Posted by Harkavy at 6:38 PM, August 29, 2007
Lieutenant Colonel Steve Jordan's acquittal of charges in his court-martial over Abu Ghraib tortures should have been no surprise. Only a week ago, some of the most serious charges against Jordan — including that he lied — were dropped just before the court-martial began.
It didn't matter that the Abu Ghraib scandal — and its coverup — reached all the way up to the White House of Dick Cheney. Check out my August 22 piece, "Chains of Command," for links to the Washington Post series on Cheney and to great stuff by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh.
The Post's Josh White reports today:
The jury of nine colonels and a one-star general concluded that Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, 51, of Fredericksburg, Va., was not responsible for training or supervising soldiers who have been convicted of abusing detainees at the prison. Jordan was also cleared of charges that he personally abused prisoners, after prosecutors tried to link him to supervising the use of forced nudity and the use of military working dogs to intimidate detainees in interrogations in late 2003.
What's curious is that White's story today doesn't at least mention the previous dropping of charges. After all, White's excellent August 21 story reported it:
Military prosecutors dropped two charges against Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan yesterday, hours before his court-martial for allegedly abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was set to begin at Fort Meade.
The dismissal of allegations that Jordan lied to investigators in the 2004 probe of the notorious abuses was a last-minute surprise in the military courtroom at the Maryland Army base. Based on new evidence that surfaced over the weekend, prosecutors determined that Jordan had not been read his rights before giving detailed statements to Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, who led the seminal investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal. Those statements are therefore inadmissible in the proceedings. …
The development was a significant victory for Jordan's defense attorneys, who had been arguing for suppression of the statements. Jordan gave extensive statements to Fay outlining his role at Abu Ghraib and explaining specific incidents for which he has been criminally charged. In May, Henley also tossed out statements Jordan gave to Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, because Taguba also did not properly advise him of his rights. Now, none of Jordan's statements can be used against him.
White explained the situation quite well in his earlier story, just before the court-martial trial began:
Fay's failure to read Jordan his rights appears to be a major oversight in the probe, and prosecutors did not explain the discrepancy. The move reduces Jordan's potential sentence almost by half, to a maximum of 8 1/2 years.
It was the latest in a series of odd twists in Jordan's case. Prosecutors have recommended for years that Jordan face administrative punishment rather than trial. An investigative officer once advocated a reprimand to avoid a public rehashing of the Abu Ghraib abuses. And emerging evidence has now led to the dismissal of eight out of 12 original charges against the Army officer. Jordan said in a recent interview with The Washington Post that he believes he is a scapegoat because authorities want an officer to go to trial as a final chapter in the Abu Ghraib scandal, even though a more senior officer who admitted approving the use of dogs, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, received only a reprimand and a fine.
Jordan, 51, is the last soldier to face charges related to the Abu Ghraib abuses and the only officer to go to court-martial for alleged crimes there. A jury panel of nine Army colonels and one brigadier general is expected to hear opening statements in the case today, and yesterday each member told the court — under questioning by Capt. Samuel Spitzberg, one of Jordan's defense attorneys — that they would not use Jordan's trial as "a referendum on Abu Ghraib."
In any case, don't let Abu Ghraib slip down the memory hole. We've known for a long time that the genesis of the abuse was in D.C., that it was a rogue presidency, not just rogue soldiers. Read Hersh's June story on Taguba and Taguba's own 2004 report.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:10 AM, August 28, 2007
Hackneyed headline fits: Ex-Iraq czar Bremer peddles armor technology to military while armor contracts go unfilled.
This morning's New York Times story on the widening weapons scandal in Iraq is shocking — the biggest shock is that the Pentagon's special investigator has been saying this for a long time and we're just now sending teams of investigators from numerous agencies to check it out.
Still awaiting investigation is war profiteering related to weapons and armor. One of the people planning to profit from the continuing Iraq war is ex-czar and Medal of Freedom winner Jerry Bremer, and not just from his book tours.
Meanwhile, we never have found out what happened to the $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue that Bremer's regime oversaw but which can't be exactly accounted for. Just one of many oil-for-slush scandals in Iraq, that story was broken by the British NGO Christian Aid in June 2004
Back to the present: The latest quarterly report by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, revealed that numerous contracts for weapons and armor have gone unfulfilled.
An audit last October by Bowen's office revealed that we weren't even keeping track of — or prepared to maintain — the thousands of weapons we were handing out to Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.
Just about the same time, Bremer, the Bush regime's former head man in Iraq when the country started descending into civil war, joined the board of directors of BlastGard, which sells a reinforced wrap to protect Humvees from mines and homemade bombs. He's also a lobbyist for BlastGard. An enthusiastic article by Philip Siekman in April's Fortune Small Business accented Bremer's value to the company in one paragraph:
In November, BlastGard announced that it had signed a $186,000 deal to provide its products to the U.S. Marine Corps for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company also named L. Paul Bremer, former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, to its board.
The article explains just what the company does and how its prospects are truly "explosive":
Military forces around the world are a major target of opportunity for BlastGard. A pad of BlastWrap on the bottom of a Humvee, for example, would complement the vehicle's armor plate. Conventional armor is pretty good at blocking the shock wave and shrapnel from a mine or from the homemade explosives that litter roads in Iraq. But armor plate also compounds the jolt that tosses the vehicle, often causing serious injury to its occupants. BlastWrap would reduce that bone-breaking whump. …
Amid the good news lurks the risk that this small company could choke on the sheer variety of its opportunity. BlastGard's SEC filings and marketing materials catalog a multitude of possible Blast-Wrap applications, few of which have yet attracted customers. For the first nine months of 2006, BlastGard posted an operating loss of $1.2 million on just $197,000 in sales.
Numerous competitors are developing alternative blast mitigators, including metal alloy mesh and foamed metals. And the company's easily fabricated material is certain to attract knockoff artists. [BlastGard execs James Gordon and John Waddell] have filed a patent application to protect their multimillion-dollar investment in BlastWrap. But if the duo can overcome the near-term challenges, their company's potential, in this era of terrorism and war, would be explosive.
Meanwhile, inspector Bowen's report last October showed that of a $531,000 contract for reinforced armor for the Iraqi Army, $424,800 hadn't even been spent. The Pentagon has, however, completed a $76,955.50 contract to put decals on the Iraqi Army's Hummers.
Back when he took over in Iraq in the spring of 2003, Bremer obviously never foresaw that he would be joining a company like BlastGard that has such exciting and explosive prospects. As Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 22, 2003:
We are making progress. In my most recent conversation with Presidential Envoy Bremer, he reports that, while the security situation is serious — and still imposes severe restrictions on our ability to move freely — Baghdad is not a "city in anarchy," shops are open, and the city is bustling with traffic.
Now Bremer is working to make a profit off the chaos of Baghdad. BlastGard itself proudly points to a November 15, 2006, Wall Street Journal article saying that Bremer will be a "director and lobbyist with an eye on opportunities within the government and Defense Department."
You can't say exactly the same thing about Bremer's predecessor in Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner.
Garner has also joined BlastGard, but only as a "military advisor," not a director.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:22 AM, August 27, 2007
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, getting almost as much heat as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has resigned, according to news reports.
It was just a matter of time, after his own party savaged him earlier this month. Now you can relax and enjoy some of his greatest hits, starting with his confirmation hearing in January 2005.
His reign was pure torture, even after John Ashcroft's gospel show.
Even when he was Bush's counsel during the POTUS's term in Texas as the nation's hangingest governor, Gonzales was lame. As I noted in January 2006, "his timing is off, but his boss's execution never is."
Gonzales was small, but he was slow
Posted by Harkavy at 7:40 AM, August 27, 2007
Zelikow's role in anti-Maliki agitprop raises 9/11 Commission questions
From the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, this June 2005 cartoon from the Baghdad newspaper Al-Mada: The man on the left, peering into the head of a government official, says, "There is nothing in there."
What else is embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supposed to do but counterattack the American politicians who are blasting him? He can't very well agree with their calls for his ouster. And he's already seen as a U.S. puppet by his own populace.
But Salon's Glenn Greenwald summarizes well the murky politics behind the attacks on Maliki by Hillary Clinton and other senators: Former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow has been lobbying on behalf of Tony Soprano lookalike (and former CIA stooge) Ayad Allawi, who wants to seize the reins from Maliki.
 Greenwald notes how this slimy episode destroys Zelikow's credibility, and after all, Zelikow directed the 9/11 Commission. Now Zelikow pulls strings for Allawi, and everybody dances on Maliki's grave.
So I have a related question, or questions: What happened to the numerous juicy tidbits the staff under Zelikow dug up about the Bush regime's machinations before 9/11? For instance, why were morsels about Brian Sheridan, the government's chief counterterrorist adviser, not being replaced until after 9/11 and related stuff about dual-disloyalist Doug Feith not included in the final commission report? I wrote about some key differences between the staff reports (prepared by Zelikow's underlings) and the final report in June 2004.
Now we have an idea why some of that good stuff was left out of the final report: Zelikow was, after all, running the commission staff and no doubt had a major hand in OK'ing the final version of the report.
And here's another question: Why was the commission report initially released without an index? Another nice piece of stonewalling. Zelikow got some 'splainin' to do. That will never happen, at least not in our lifetime.
Anyway, from Greenwald's continually updated piece:
In a solid piece of reporting, CNN disclosed [August 23] that the most powerful GOP lobbying firm, founded by former GOP Party Chair and current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and staffed by key former Bush national security officials, is being paid by Allawi to coordinate these anti-Maliki, pro-Allawi efforts. …
Allawi hires the most powerful GOP firm in the country, with former top Bush officials as partners, and almost immediately, the key Op-Ed pages of our nation's newspapers open up to him and all of official Washington, beginning with the President, changes course. Suddenly, key figures in both parties begin calling for Maliki to be replaced.
Most extraordinary of all is how deceitful this whole process is. As CNN reports: " The lobbying firm boasts the services of two onetime foreign policy hands of President Bush: Ambassador Robert Blackwill, the former Deputy National Security Adviser, and Philip Zelikow, former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
But currently, Zelikow in particular runs around Washington holding himself out — and being held out — as an Expert on the Future of Iraq while concealing that his firm is being paid by Allawi to undermine Maliki. As but one example, Zelikow was a featured Iraq Expert on ABC News with Charles Gibson [on August 21].
Reporter Martha Raddatz narrated the story which began (via LEXIS): "today, for the first time, President Bush said Maliki could be replaced." The story then flashed to Michael O'Hanlon, who said: "I think Mr. Bush made a very significant change in his policy today. He made it clear that his support for al-Maliki is on very thin ice."
Shortly thereafter, Raddatz said: "The former counselor to Secretary of State Rice says a plan B is now likely being considered," and then showed Zelikow — identified on-screen only as a "Former Counselor to the State Department." Great stuff, as usual, from Greenwald, who notes:
So Zelikow, an Extremely Respected Washington Leader, strongly insinuates that the Bush administration is working to depose Maliki and warns the country of "how much concern Iraqis have about their leadership" without disclosing that his lobbying firm is being paid to achieve that result and that the prime beneficiary is his client. This is fraud and deceit of the highest order. How can this not, by itself, destroy Zelikow's credibility on every level? Just fathom the reams of pious journalistic condemnation if a blogger did something like this.
But the fraud seems even deeper than that. The CNN article yesterday, citing an anonymous Bush source, claimed that "White House officials are not privately involved or blessing the lobbying campaign to undermine al-Maliki." CNN quoted the official: "There's just no connection whatsoever. There's absolutely no involvement."
But Zelikow, at least, now seems to have some official role in forming Bush policy on Iraq.
Allawi was a U.S. stooge when he "ran" the Iraq government. We already know that Bush is a puppet whose strings are pulled by Karl Rove and whose role as commander-in-chief on 9-11 was taken over by Dick Cheney.
I guess it's not news that we're all being led. But just remember that the next time your buttons are pushed by something you read or hear about from your pols, someone like Zelikow may actually be pulling your strings.
Posted by Harkavy at 12:55 PM, August 22, 2007
To unravel the tortured excuses for Abu Ghraib abuses, go back to June 25, a day of brilliant journalism.
Once so proud of plans for "War on Terror detainees" that they even showed off their special Gitmo chains and other jewelry, the Bush regime's various soldiers are now crying, as the Nazis did, "We were only following orders." Or they're saying, "Hey, I didn't even give the orders."
Blame them, but save the biggest share of blame for their higher-ups — all the way up to Vise President Dick Cheney.
The freshest example is that of Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, whose court-martial right now at Fort Meade, Maryland, for Abu Ghraib abuses that occurred on his watch is a travesty of cover-up upon cover-up.
Despite the fact that the soldiers under Jordan got off by torturing and humiliating prisoners — most of whom were innocent and none of whom were of any intelligence value — Jordan himself will probably get off with a wrist-slap.
Today's account of this extremely important trial is buried on page A14 of the Washington Post:
Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the only officer charged in connection with abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, did not train, supervise or work directly with interrogators who questioned detainees, the prison's top military intelligence officer testified yesterday.
Testifying for the prosecution in Jordan's court-martial at Fort Meade, Col. Thomas M. Pappas said that Jordan's duties centered on improving the quality of life for soldiers at the austere base outside Baghdad and improving the flow of intelligence information — not on the interrogations or harsh methods of eliciting information approved for use at the time.
The news cycles of real news, especially follow-ups, cause so much frustration. How can anyone put his or her hands around what's going on?
Abu Ghraib blazed in the headlines in 2004, but now that details of who did what and when are coming out, it's considered old news. That's why I try to salt my posts with so many links. All we can do is point to some stories that point to the facts and provide context.
And one unmistakable fact is that no matter what happens to Jordan, the torture scandal goes all the way up the chain of command, right into the White House run by Dick Cheney.
When it comes to Abu Ghraib, all you really have to do is focus on just one day's worth of brilliant journalism. Go back to this past June 25 and you'll see what I mean.
Now, I'm not faulting the Post for burying today's Jordan story. It has kicked the ass of the New York Times on almost every topic since the Bush regime came to power. While Jordan's court-martial continues, go back and re-read the Post's stellar series on Cheney, particularly Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's June 25 "Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power," which I wrote about that day. Here's how that Post story began:
Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney's lawyer, [ David Addington], who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby. The meeting marked "the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up" among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. "The CIA guys said, 'We're going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees'" if interrogators confined themselves to humane techniques allowed by the Geneva Conventions.
From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials. Remarkable stuff. Too bad it didn't come out before the November 2004 presidential election.
If you really want to understand how such a coverup happened — and what tragic roles this Colonel Jordan and various other officials played in this sick drama —go back to Seymour Hersh's brilliant piece "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties," also published on June 25.
Taguba's investigation (PDF of his report) was circumscribed by his higher-ups, Hersh reveals. And of course now it comes out that Jordan supposedly wasn't read his rights at the proper time and he might skate on serious charges.
What about the people above — way above — Jordan? Hersh's reporting explodes the Bush regime's lame excuse that Abu Ghraib's abuses were the work of a few "rogue soldiers":
Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General [ Ricardo] Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003 — when much of the abuse took place — Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, "Sanchez knew exactly what was going on."
Taguba learned that in August, 2003, as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was gaining force, the Pentagon had ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantánamo, to Iraq. His mission was to survey the prison system there and to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence. The core of Miller’s recommendations, as summarized in the Taguba report, was that the military police at Abu Ghraib should become part of the interrogation process: they should work closely with interrogators and intelligence officers in "setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees."
Taguba concluded that Miller’s approach was not consistent with Army doctrine, which gave military police the overriding mission of making sure that the prisons were secure and orderly. His report cited testimony that interrogators and other intelligence personnel were encouraging the abuse of detainees. "Loosen this guy up for us," one M.P. said he was told by a member of military intelligence. "Make sure he has a bad night."
The M.P.s, Taguba said, "were being literally exploited by the military interrogators. My view is that those kids" — even the soldiers in the photographs — "were poorly led, not trained, and had not been given any standard operating procedures on how they should guard the detainees." Rogue soldiers? No, a rogue presidency.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:16 AM, August 6, 2007
If you build it, they will
come
be shanghaied.
Cheney sez: Welcome to Baghdad. Now get to work.
Shanghaied to build to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Working on the construction site without safety equipment — or even shoes. The story of the alleged kidnapping of Filipino workers who thought they were going to Dubai but instead were flown to Baghdad to help build the $500 million embassy is stunning.
But it's likely to be all for naught. Congressman Henry Waxman should haul Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney before the House Oversight Committee to explain.
Waxman exposed the embassy scandal on July 26, but a full-fledged investigation of this particular Cheney regime scandal probably won't happen. And even if it does, the final result of our having built this super-expensive supermax embassy will be reminiscent of Saigon in 1975: civilians fleeing a U.S. embassy by helicopter.
In case you've forgotten about the little-publicized new embassy in Baghdad, it's already officially insane. As I noted in September 2004:
We're going to be spending $1 billion a year just to maintain our beautiful new embassy in Baghdad, and it's going to have a full-time psychiatrist for in-house counseling and drugs for our own people.
Great. Americans already had to have counseling just to work in the old embassy in Baghdad. Because the Green Zone gets bombed so often, the new one will be much more of a prison. Think of the shrink work that will entail. Just building it can cause one to freak out. Here's yesterday's story in the Times (U.K.):
An American civilian contractor has described scenes of panic and hysteria last year as Filipino construction workers were told that they were on a plane bound for Baghdad rather than Dubai.
Passengers jumped out of their seats screaming in protest until a gun-toting air steward ordered them to sit down, claimed Rory Mayberry, an emergency medical technician travelling on the same flight.
Mayberry said the men were "kidnapped" to build America's luxurious new embassy in Baghdad's green zone. He gave his account to a congressional committee investigating allegations of fraud at what will be America's largest diplomatic mission.
Mayberry's full statement, courtesy of the hard work of Waxman's House Oversight Committee, is riveting. Here's an excerpt:
As I found out later, these men thought they had signed up to work in Dubai hotels. One fellow I met told me in broken English that he was excited to start his new job as a telephone repair man. They had no idea they were being sent to do construction work on the U.S. Embassy.
Well, Mr. Chairman, when the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were headed for Baghdad, all you-know-what broke loose on that airplane. People started shouting. It wasn't until a security guy working for [contractor] First Kuwaiti waved an MP-5 in the air that people settled down. They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad.
Let me spell it out clearly. I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the U.S. Embassy. They had no passports
When the airplane touched down at Baghdad airport, they where loaded into buses and taken away. Later, I found that they were being smuggled into the Green Zone. They had no IDs, no passports, nothing. They were being smuggled in passed U.S. security forces. I had a trailer all to myself in the Green Zone. But they were packed 25 to 30 in a trailer, and every day they went
out to work on the construction of the embassy without the proper safety equipment.
How's that construction going? You need a telephoto lens (see the AP pic below).
You won't see photos of it on the websites of the White House or the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
But Martin Kemp of the Guardian (U.K.) wrote in May:
The new American Embassy in Baghdad scowls at the world with a neo-Stalinist frown. It occupies some 104 acres next to the Tigris, assigned to the USA by the nominal Iraqi government in 2004. A hideous modernist bunker, devoid even of the residual classical motifs favoured for totalitarian architecture, it speaks bleakly of the USA's position in the world. …
The new Baghdad embassy can hardly be dignified as "architecture". It is an insult to a city of great historic visual culture. Its walls are punctuated by soulless eyes. Its ears are deaf to the world. It is a monster.
Whoever will rule Iraq, or that part of Iraq, or that strip of land in Baghdead, will be able to use the embassy as a supermax because it already is one.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:41 AM, August 3, 2007
Karl Rove's revised (by me) disclosure form.
Free of charge, I'm updating the "liabilities" section of Karl Rove's personal-financial-disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission in light of Washington Post reporter Paul Kane's story this morning:
A young White House political aide was grilled inconclusively by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday about the firings of U.S. attorneys after Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser, failed to show up at the committee's hearing in response to a subpoena.
J. Scott Jennings, 29, the deputy political director for the White House, refused to address the firings but tried to explain how thousands — or possibly millions — of White House e-mails to and from the political office were transmitted only through communications accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee.
That use of the RNC accounts put some of the political office's messages outside the reach of the National Archives, which sought to preserve them under a federal law mandating eventual public access, and the reach of Democratic congressional investigators, who have sought to look at them for evidence of improper actions.
Jennings offered a stripped-down explanation: He wanted a White House-supplied BlackBerry and was told no, and so he got one from the RNC, as many other political affairs aides had done. …
Jennings's testimony on the RNC e-mails was the most detailed explanation to date of why President Bush's top political aides had sent and received so many e-mails on their RNC accounts. House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) is probing whether the use of RNC e-mails for official purposes violated federal laws requiring presidential records to be preserved.
The RNC told Waxman recently that it has more than 200,000 e-mails sent and received by Rove, Jennings and Sara M. Taylor, the former White House political director.
Posted by Harkavy at 5:28 PM, December 15, 2004
Al should have taken his own advice on interrogation techniques
What a remarkable series of conversations it must have been: Alberto Gonzales grilling Bernie Kerik.
If you believe this morning's New York Times, Bush's nominee as attorney general conducted "hours of confrontational interviews" with Kerik, to make sure none of the little Napoleon's cream filling had spilled into places it shouldn't have. (See photo of tough guy Gonzales below.)
Gonzales, prepping for his arduous grilling of Kerik, practices his steely-eyed tough-guy face on Bush.
The Times' Elisabeth Bumiller pins her tale to an unnamed "government official." I hesitate to believe it only because Bumiller also describes the White House as "normally careful." I think she means "normally careful" only in vetting potential nominees, which means that the White House is careful about whom it trusts and picks? Uh-huh. In her same story, she points out that the White House was careless in dispensing top-security information after 9/11: Kerik, while still the NYPD commissioner, was put on the list even though he neglected to fill out the basic form to start the security-check process. I wouldn't call that "normally careful."
If Bumiller means "normally careful" in general—no, she can't mean that.
Anyway, this is how Bumiller sketched Gonzales's personal vetting of Kerik:
Well, let's see. Gonzales was a key figure in OK'ing the torture that we've used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. As my colleague Nat Hentoff writes today:
If there ever is an honest investigation of who is ultimately responsible for what happened [at Guantánamo] and at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Gonzales might well be in the dock, along with Donald Rumsfeld and a number of the defense secretary's closest aides.
When Gonzales was faced with vetting Kerik, we could reasonably assume that Al took his own advice on interrogation techniques, like the ones listed in today's Washington Post story by Thomas E. Ricks, "Detainee Abuse by Marines Is Detailed."
Which means that Gonzales probably burned Kerik's hands by dipping them in an alcohol-based cleaner and then igniting them, tied him up and held a pistol to his head, made him kneel next to an open grave and then fired a shot as a "mock execution," and hooked him up to an electric transformer to make him "dance."
Apparently, none of that worked on Kerik. Some people just won't talk about some things.
But then there's Paul Wolfowitz, who before the U.S. invasion of Iraq just wouldn't shut up about how easy the occupation was likely to be. As I wrote a while back, to get Wolfowitz to spill his guts back then, you didn't even have to drag the deputy secretary of defense by his hair from a Humvee to a prison cell or strip him and wedge him into a pyramid of naked people or punish him while he prays or have him simulate masturbation or threaten him with rape or throw him into a wall or smear shit on his back or scare him with a growling dog or put a dog collar on him or ride him around like a donkey or | |
