Oct 15, Torture News: White House Wrote Secret Memos Endorsing CIA Torture Tactics

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Team VCS

Waterboarding Got White House Nod

October 15, 2008 – The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for “policy approval.”

The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers over the conduct of the Iraq war.

“It came up in the daily meetings. We heard it from our field officers,” said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the events. “We were already worried that we” were going to be blamed.

A. John Radsan, a lawyer in the CIA general counsel’s office until 2004, remembered the discussions but did not personally view the memos the agency received in response to its concerns. “The question was whether we had enough ‘top cover,’ ” Radsan said.

Tenet first pressed the White House for written approval in June 2003, during a meeting with members of the National Security Council, including Rice, the officials said. Days later, he got what he wanted: a brief memo conveying the administration’s approval for the CIA’s interrogation methods, the officials said.

Administration officials confirmed the existence of the memos, but neither they nor former intelligence officers would describe their contents in detail because they remain classified. The sources all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss the events.

The second request from Tenet, in June 2004, reflected growing worries among agency officials who had just witnessed the public outcry over the Abu Ghraib scandal. Officials who held senior posts at the time also spoke of deteriorating relations between the CIA and the White House over the war in Iraq — a rift that prompted some to believe that the agency needed even more explicit proof of the administration’s support.

“The CIA by this time is using the word ‘insurgency’ to describe the Iraq conflict, so the White House is viewing the agency with suspicion,” said a second former senior intelligence official.

As recently as last month, the administration had never publicly acknowledged that its policymakers knew about the specific techniques, such as waterboarding, that the agency used against high-ranking terrorism suspects. In her unprecedented account to lawmakers last month, Rice, now secretary of state, portrayed the White House as initially uneasy about a controversial CIA plan for interrogating top al-Qaeda suspects.

After learning about waterboarding and similar tactics in early 2002, several White House officials questioned whether such harsh measures were “effective and necessary . . . and lawful,” Rice said. Her concerns led to an investigation by the Justice Department’s criminal division into whether the techniques were legal.

But whatever misgivings existed that spring were apparently overcome. Former and current CIA officials say no such reservations were voiced in their presence.

In interviews, the officials recounted a series of private briefings about the program with members of the administration’s security team, including Rice and Cheney, followed by more formal meetings before a larger group including then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. None of the officials recalled President Bush being present at any of the discussions.

Several of the key meetings have been previously described in news articles and books, but Rice last month became the first Cabinet-level official to publicly confirm the White House’s awareness of the program in its earliest phases. In written responses to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rice said Tenet’s description of the agency’s interrogation methods prompted her to investigate further to see whether the program violated U.S. laws or international treaties, according to her written responses, dated Sept. 12 and released late last month.

“I asked that . . . Ashcroft personally advise the NSC principles whether the program was lawful,” Rice wrote.

Current and former intelligence officials familiar with the briefings described Tenet as supportive of enhanced interrogation techniques, which the officials said were developed by CIA officers after the agency’s first high-level captive, al-Qaeda operative Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, better known as Abu Zubaida, refused to cooperate with interrogators.

“The CIA believed then, and now, that the program was useful and helped save lives,” said a former senior intelligence official knowledgeable about the events. “But in the agency’s view, it was like this: ‘We don’t want to continue unless you tell us in writing that it’s not only legal but is the policy of the administration.’ “

One administration official familiar with the meetings said the CIA made such a convincing case that no one questioned whether the methods were necessary to prevent further terrorist attacks.

“The CIA had the White House boxed in,” said the official. “They were saying, ‘It’s the only way to get the information we needed, and — by the way — we think there’s another attack coming up.’ It left the principals in an extremely difficult position and put the decision-making on a very fast track.”

But others who were present said Tenet seemed more interested in protecting his subordinates than in selling the administration on a policy that administration lawyers had already authorized.

“The suggestion that someone from CIA came in and browbeat everybody is ridiculous,” said one former agency official familiar with the meeting. “The CIA understood that it was controversial and would be widely criticized if it became public,” the official said of the interrogation program. “But given the tenor of the times and the belief that more attacks were coming, they felt they had to do what they could to stop the attack.”

The CIA’s anxiety was partly fueled by the lack of explicit presidential authorization for the interrogation program. A secret White House “memorandum of notification” signed by Bush on Sept. 15, 2001, gave the agency broad authority to wage war against al-Qaeda, including killing and capturing its members. But it did not spell out how captives should be handled during interrogation.

But by the time the CIA requested written approval of its policy, in June 2003, the population of its secret prisons had grown from one to nine, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged principal architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Three of the detainees had been subjected to waterboarding, which involves strapping a prisoner to a board, covering his face and pouring water over his nose and mouth to simulate drowning.

By the spring of 2004, the concerns among agency officials had multiplied, in part because of shifting views among administration lawyers about what acts might constitute torture, leading Tenet to ask a second time for written confirmation from the White House. This time the reaction was far more reserved, recalled two former intelligence officials.

“The Justice Department in particular was resistant,” said one former intelligence official who participated in the discussions. “They said it doesn’t need to be in writing.”

Tenet and his deputies made their case in yet another briefing before the White House national security team in June 2004. It was to be one of the last such meetings for Tenet, who had already announced plans to step down as CIA director. Author Jane Mayer, who described the briefing in her recent book, “The Dark Side,” said the graphic accounts of interrogation appeared to make some participants uncomfortable. “History will not judge us kindly,” Mayer quoted Ashcroft as saying.

Participants in the meeting did not recall whether a vote was taken. Several weeks passed, and Tenet left the agency without receiving a formal response.

Finally, in mid-July, a memo was forwarded to the CIA reaffirming the administration’s backing for the interrogation program. Tenet had acquired the statement of support he sought.

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Perpetuating Lies: Memorial in New Mexico Incorrectly Ties Iraq War to September 11

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Team VCS

October 14, 2008 – A plan to etch the words and images of 9/11 on a monument to Soldiers who fell in Iraq has ignited a debate about whether the publicly funded memorial links the war in Iraq to the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The $300,000 war memorial officially broke ground Oct. 5 at the New Mexico Veterans’ Memorial Park in Albuquerque. Supporters hope to complete the project by May 30.

But at least one city councilor and some veterans want more public discussion about the cityfunded monument, and in particular, its depiction of the terrorist attacks in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“We want to make sure that we don’t revise history before history is even written,” Councilor Rey Garduo said. “In no way am I questioning whether we should honor our fallen heroes. But in no way should we connect Iraq and terrorism.”

The proposed memorial features a ring of laser-etched granite blocks depicting the 9/11 attacks and other images, including maps and photos of the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and of the hijacked plane that went down in Somerset County, Pa. It also features five empty dress uniforms cast in bronze hanging in lockers that form a ring around a central pillar.

The design does not require formal city approval, but councilors can bring up the project for discussion if they have concerns, said Brad Winter, council president.

Others question the wisdom of building a monument to wars that continue to be fought both militarily and in the national debate.

“We’re having an argument even amongst ourselves about whether it is appropriate to do a monument during the time in which an event is occurring because you don’t have perspective,” said Lou Hoffman, a member of the New Mexico Veterans’ Memorial design committee.

But the memorial has passionate supporters among city councilors and New Mexico veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“The conflict in which we are engaged in is officially referred to as the war on terror,” said David Schneider, an Iraq War veteran and member of the New Mexico War on Terror Committee, composed of veterans who proposed the monument and obtained city and state money to build it.

The 9/11 attacks are linked to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both in history and in the minds of Soldiers fighting the wars, said Schneider, who served in 2007 as a U.S. Marine captain in Iraq.

“The fact is that both campaigns are wrapped up in the war on terror, which originated with the attacks on 9/11,” he said. “Chronologically, (the wars) started with the attacks on 9/11.”

President Bush’s 2002 resolution to go to war with Iraq gave as reasons the threat of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s hostility toward the United States. It also said Iraq harbored terrorists, particularly members of al Qaida, which was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics say there never was any proof linking Iraq to the 9/11 attacks.

City councilors have appropriated $278,000 for the memorial, and state lawmakers approved $22,000 more. Supporters plan to raise additional private money.

Charles Powell, president of the Albuquerque chapter of Veterans for Peace, an anti-war group, said the memorial falsely links the 9/ 11 attacks with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“To connect the war in Iraq with 9/11 is clearly a political thing,” said Powell. “We don’t feel that it’s really an honor to put up a memorial to the brave men and women who died in Iraq to put on that memorial a false connection with 9/11.”

Steve Borbas, a member of the New Mexico Veterans’ Memorial design committee who is troubled by the use of 9/11 imagery, said his committee saw a draft of the proposed monument in September but had no input into the design.

“I think it was a done deal when we heard about it,” he said, adding that the committee has only advisory authority.

The criticism led planners to abandon the original name, the Memorial Honoring New Mexico’s Fallen in the Wars on Terror, said Councilor Don Harris. It was changed to the Memorial Honoring New Mexico’s Fallen in the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Harris and Councilor Trudy Jones contributed about $150,000 to the project from their own council districts’ discretionary funds.

“I think there’s a lot of valid argument that perhaps invading Iraq was not the appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks,” Harris said. “I think it’s difficult to argue, however, that Iraq was not a response to the 9/11 attacks at least in President Bush’s mind and members of Congress who authorized funding for the war.”

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Iraq War Veteran’s Family Seeks VA Compensation for Illness that Killed Him

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Team VCS

September 6, 2008 – They’ll hold a fundraiser in Auburn next Friday to help pay Matt Bumpus’ medical bills.

The Roseville man and his family worked on the event for months in hopes of raising money to treat his leukemia. Check these out grid-nigeria .

But Bumpus won’t be there. The 31-year-old father of two died a month ago after a series of battles with his disease. If you want more details,then visit us at spiritofthesea .

He believed – and his family still does – that he became ill because he was exposed to depleted uranium at a chemical weapons site while serving with the Army in Iraq.

“All of them were very concerned about what they were exposed to, very concerned,” said his stepmother, Laura Bumpus. To know more visit colabioclipanama2019 .

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs rejected one claim Bumpus filed seeking compensation for his illness. But on Friday, a VA official told The Bee the agency will revisit the case and see whether Bumpus’ widow, Lisa, and their two sons are eligible for assistance.

“Lisa and Matt’s parents all have the right to come in and file a claim, and I would really welcome that,” said Lynn Flint, the VA’s regional director in Oakland.

The family plans to file another claim but has seen firsthand the difficulty of proving that an illness diagnosed post-service may have stemmed from wartime conditions.

Veterans from the 1990-91 Gulf War worked years to convince officials that Gulf War syndrome illnesses were real.

And just last month, researchers at UC Davis Cancer Center said veterans exposed to Agent Orange are twice as likely to get prostate cancer as are other veterans – a finding that comes decades after the herbicide was used in Vietnam.

Bumpus, a staff sergeant in the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, was sent Dec. 23, 2003, to guard the Al Muthanna Chemical Weapons complex in Iraq and spent two nights there, his family said.

When they arrived, Bumpus and his comrades encountered a sign that read “Welcome to Mustardville,” and eventually were moved because of radiation readings emanating from the site, according to his family.

Bumpus, a 1995 Roseville High School graduate and defensive lineman for the school’s football team, was a strapping young man who never had been seriously ill, family members said. He joined the Army in August 1996.

He returned from Iraq in late 2004 and left the Army the following year, coming home to Roseville to be with Lisa, his wife and high school sweetheart, and their son, Nathaniel.

Soon, Lisa was pregnant with their second son, Aaron, and Bumpus was working as a technician for Comcast.You get details about Iraq War here rooftopyoga .

“In July of 2006, I was home, had a job with a bright future, we were expecting our second child, we had just moved into a house, and life was good!” Bumpus wrote this year on www.iraqradiation.com, a Web site his family set up to alert veterans of potential health risks from service in Iraq.

After returning from Iraq, Bumpus worried he might have been exposed to something at the weapons site that could have long-term effects, his family said, but was assured by the Army there was no reason for concern.

Everything seemed fine until one July night in 2006, when he was having trouble sleeping.

“We thought he had the flu, and he got up to use the bathroom,” his wife said. “I heard a bang and went to check, and he had hit the floor.”

Bumpus was rushed to Sutter Roseville Medical Center, where doctors diagnosed appendicitis. Tests done there also found he suffered from a rare form of leukemia – acute myeloid leukemia. According to his medical records, his doctor told him the illness “was related to radiation exposure.”

He began a regimen of chemotherapy and other treatments and eventually racked up $1 million in medical bills, most of which were covered by his health insurance. His illness was in remission by late 2006.

“I returned to work and an almost normal life,” he wrote on the Web site. “I was alive, in remission, and very thankful.”

When his leukemia returned in 2008, he filed a claim with the Department of Veterans Affairs saying the illness was related to his service. The VA denied the claim, noting in the rejection letter that his diagnosis had come more than a year after his separation from the Army.

The VA’s Flint said the original claim did not specifically indicate that Bumpus was claiming he had been exposed to radiation. She said the agency indicated at the time it would consider new information if Bumpus provided it.

Bumpus’ stepmother, Laura, said he told the family he had not mentioned the exposure in the claim because he believed that information was classified. He assumed VA officials would ask him about it, she said.

Earlier this year, Bumpus wrote to Congress seeking help, and he and his family set up the Web site detailing his case and others they had heard of. He was hoping for a bone-marrow transplant, and from his hospital bed helped plan Friday’s silent auction and dinner.

Bumpus died Aug. 3. Two weeks later, his widow received notice from the VA that his case had been the subject of an inquiry from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and that Bumpus could pursue benefits.

The VA asked Bumpus to schedule a new examination at a VA hospital. His widow is drafting a reply noting that “obviously as he is now deceased he cannot comply with this request.” Today, his family waits to see whether the VA will provide compensation to Lisa and their sons, 11-year-old Nathaniel and Aaron, who turns 2 in October.

Nathaniel, who started sixth grade earlier this week, is old enough to understand his father is gone.

“The youngest, I don’t think he really understands. He just thinks (his dad) hasn’t come home from the hospital,” Lisa Bumpus said this week. She sat crying on the deck of Laura Bumpus’ Foresthill home. Around her neck hung a chain that holds her husband’s wedding ring.

The VA’s regional director said the Bumpus family is eligible for benefits if the leukemia can be tied to Bumpus’ service. His widow could receive $1,091 in tax-free benefits monthly, and her children $271 a month.

“I’m so sorry this happened,” Flint said, adding that she hopes Bumpus can be recognized as having sacrificed much for his country.

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The Biggest Untold Mortgage Crisis: Help for Families Facing Military Foreclosures

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Team VCS

October 8, 2008 – Please send a message to Mr. Schieffer today. More and more military families are finding themselves in the middle of a mortgage nightmare. Soldiers are returning after several tours of duty, only to find they are on the verge of losing their homes. While trying to rebuild their lives, they face the additional pressure and stress of a looming foreclosure.

According to one recent study, the number of foreclosures in military towns are four times the national average. Why? Because military families were targeted as customers during the boom in subprime lending. Their frequent moves, overseas stints, and low pay meant they were likely to have weak credit ratings. The initial low rates and easy terms of these loans made them more attractive than the traditional route of taking out a Veterans Administration (VA) loan. In fact, at the peak of the U.S. subprime lending, the number of new VA loans fell to their lowest level in 12 years.

With that in mind, it is not surprising that a large number of military families are being caught in the subprime mortgage collapse, many of which are independant small-business owners. Fortunately, there is some help in the form of the Servicemembers´ Civil Relief Act (SCRA). The SCRA was created to protect soldiers and sailors from losing their homes for nonpayment of mortgages while they are on active duty and for 90 days after they return home.

Those who qualify for the SCRA include members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corp and Coast Guard. Also included are members of the public health service, commissioned corps of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Guard members who were called to active service during a national emergency and authorized by the President or Secretary of Defense for more than 30 consecutive days. In addition, citizens ordered to report for induction under the Military Service Act, and those serving with the Allied Forces are also covered under the bill.

If you are covered under the SCRA, a court ruling must be made before a foreclosure sale or seizure can occur to your property. Military personnel can ask for a court delay and be issued a 90-day adjournment. If the court denies the delay request, an attorney must be appointed to represent the service member in absentia.

If the lender forecloses without a court order, the sale is invalid. If a foreclosure sale was conducted lawfully, there is still some recourse. Foreclosed property cannot be seized until the service member completes active duty. In addition, the SCRA grants military personnel the right to revisit a default foreclosure judgment that was issued during active duty and also gives them the right to ask that it be overturned.

For veterans facing foreclosure, it is critical they understand the process and take action. There are two types of foreclosures – judicial and non-judicial. Judicial procedures are followed by states that use mortgages as the security instrument for property loans. Non-judicial procedures are used by states that use deeds of trust as the security instrument. For veterans who live in non-judicial foreclosure jurisdictions, lenders can foreclose on a property very quickly and without court proceedings.

For questions about the SCRA contact the Judge Advocate General´s office at your local military base or the local Veterans Administration regional office.

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Oct 14: Friendly Fire in the Iraq War – And a Military Coverup

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Team VCS

The Army says no, but a graphic video and eyewitness testimony indicate that a U.S. tank killed two American soldiers. The mother of one soldier demands answers. 

October 14, 2008 – Once a cop, always a cop. Asked if she wanted to see a graphic battle video showing her son Albert bleeding to death, Jean Feggins, retired from the Philadelphia Police Department, said yes.

“Listen, I’ve moved dead bodies of people I don’t even know,” she told me,  as she sat on a brown couch in the den of her West Philadelphia row house. “I need to know everything. Because he is not a stranger. That’s my baby. That’s my child.”

When Pfc. Albert Nelson died in Iraq in 2006, the Army first told Feggins that he might have been killed by friendly fire, and then that it was enemy mortars. She says she never believed the Army’s explanation. “I always felt like they were lying to me,” she said. “I could never prove it.”

“I would ask the casualty officer what was going on. I’d be told they are still working on the report,” she said. “They were still doing their investigation. What could I do? It’s the U.S. military. I had no control.”

She did not know that there was a video of his death until I contacted her recently. Salon has obtained evidence — including a graphic, 52-and-a-half minute video — suggesting that friendly fire from an American tank killed two U.S. soldiers in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, and that the Army ignored the video and other persuasive data in order to rule that the deaths were due to enemy action. Feggins watched the video with me in her den.

Shot from the perspective of the soldiers taking fire from what they clearly believe is an American tank, the footage shows how Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez-Gonzalez died. It also records soldiers trying to save Nelson’s life, and the sound of a platoon sergeant attempting to report over a radio that the casualties were due to friendly fire. He then seems to be overruled by a superior officer who insists it was an enemy mortar attack. Troops from Nelson’s unit interviewed by Salon, including three soldiers there that day, blamed friendly fire from a U.S. tank for the deaths. “A tank shot us,” said a soldier. “That is what happened.”

Video of Friendly Fire Incident: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/14/friendlyfirevideo/index.html

An Army investigation, however, found the deaths were caused by enemy fire. Soldiers from Nelson and Suarez’s platoon, based at Fort Carson, Colo., described what they felt was pressure from above to accept this official story despite evidence to the contrary — including the video, which has circulated widely. Jean Feggins, after watching the video, said it was more evidence that the Army had misled her about the circumstances of her son’s death. The Army told Feggins that her son had died instantly, while the video shows a painfully protracted attempt to get Nelson to a field hospital before he bled to death.

In a statement to Salon, Army spokesman Paul Boyce reiterated the Army’s conclusion that Nelson and Suarez were killed by enemy action. But the incident at Ramadi in December 2006 raises questions about how the U.S. military investigates alleged friendly fire incidents — for which there are no reliable statistics — and how it communicates its findings to the loved ones of the deceased. “I think [friendly fire] happens a lot,” said Mary Tillman, mother of football player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman. His death in Afghanistan in 2004 was first reported to be due to enemy action; it was later revealed he had been killed by members of his own unit. “[But t]he military is not addressing why these friendly fire situations take place,” she said, “because they lie about it and get away with it so frequently.”

Jean Feggins wants nothing less than the whole truth about what killed her son. “I’m not going to have any closure until I know exactly what happened to him,” she said. “I don’t care how gruesome it is.

“Tell me the truth. I can handle it.”

– – – – – – – – – – – –

The only reason there is a video of what happened in Ramadi is because Sgt. 1st Class Jack Robison, who was there that day, wanted to record a firefight. The video, which is all from the point of view of Robison’s helmet camera, begins immediately before the shell’s impact. It records the explosion, the effort to help the wounded — in bloody detail — and long patches of conversation in which the soldiers present describe how they were shot by an American tank.

As of Dec. 4, 2006, many of the U.S. Army soldiers fighting alongside Albert Nelson and Roger Suarez were well into 15-month tours of duty in Iraq. The troops were moving house to house through Ramadi, a city of half a million that hugs the shore of the Euphrates River 70 miles west of Baghdad, battling Sunni insurgents, taking casualties, delivering many score more. The men of 2nd Platoon, D Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division were fighting in one of the bloodiest areas of Iraq during one of the bloodiest stints of the war. December 2006 was a month before Bush announced the surge, and before 30,000 additional U.S. troops were sent to Iraq to quell the violence.

On the 4th, the fighting was so fierce that some of the Americans had dropped grenades off roofs right onto the heads of insurgents, and fired their machine guns till the barrels almost melted. As one of the men said recently, “I probably killed eight guys at least.”

View the official map of the U.S. Army battle plan for December 4, 2006.  http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/14/friendly_fire/map.html

Second Platoon was encamped in a battered white two-story ferro-concrete building, with a gray-dirt courtyard and an attached cinder-block latrine building, not far from the south bank of the Euphrates. On the night of Dec. 3, they had slept at their weapons posts on the speckled marble floors. They’d stolen blankets from evacuated Iraqi houses to keep warm in the cold desert night, throwing money onto the empty beds in payment.

On the roof of “building #2,” as it was known in U.S. Army battle plans for the day, stood Nelson, Suarez, seven other U.S. soldiers and an unknown number of Iraqi army troops. Nelson, Suarez and a soldier named Hobson had taken up a position on the northwest corner of the roof, while the other Iraqi and American soldiers had taken up positions a little further south along the western wall of the roof. Below and just in front of them, at ground level on the west side of the building, was the courtyard. Another group of soldiers, including the platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Jack Robison, was holed up next to the little cinder-block latrine building that hugged building #2 in the courtyard’s southeast corner.

Five hundred yards to the west was another cluster of Americans, 1st Platoon, broken into three squads, along with several tanks. Sandwiched between 2nd Platoon’s position in building #2 and 1st Platoon’s position to the west was a pocket of Iraqi insurgents. Due north of building #2, across the Euphrates on the north bank, was another clutch of Iraqis, firing mortars at the Americans.

From the northwest corner of the roof, Nelson and Suarez were shooting at the insurgents to the west, Nelson with his SAW (squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun), Suarez with an M240 machine gun. Hobson was standing slightly behind them and facing north, firing at the Iraqi mortar team across the river.

Albert Nelson, from West Philadelphia, was the class clown, a popular big brother figure to the other soldiers. At 31, he was years older than the other privates. Though his mother, Jean, was a Philly cop, he’d been unable to make the force himself because of too many unpaid parking tickets. He’d worked as a security guard before enlisting in the Army, thinking he’d have an easier time becoming a cop with a military background.

If Nelson was the guy telling the jokes, 22-year-old Roger Suarez was the guy who didn’t always get them, because his English wasn’t that good. A native of Nicaragua who had lived in Florida before enlisting, he struggled to pick up on the frat boy humor the other soldiers shared.

On the ground-floor level, in the courtyard just outside the latrine building, the man in charge of 2nd Platoon, Sgt. Robison, a 35-year-old from Oklahoma, put on a helmet camera. The cameras are normally used by medics to record, in grisly high-def, how they deal with battlefield injuries. The footage that results is used to train other medics.

“Sergeant Rob,” as the troops called him, had just arrived in Iraq and had never been in a battle before, and wanted to record the day’s action. After he strapped the camera on his helmet, he expressed regret. “I probably missed all that cool footage,” said Rob. “Of us fucking just nailing that fucking house,” said another soldier, finishing his sentence.

A soldier beckoned Rob. He led Rob from the courtyard and into the latrine building and over to a dirty, translucent window on the south end of the structure. “Check that fucking shit,” he told Rob. “See the tank?”

“No. Where?” asked Rob. “Right up the street that way,” said the soldier, pointing west. “Stand up right here.”

But Rob still couldn’t see the tank clearly, so a soldier knocked the panes from the window. “There’s a huge tank right there.” They craned their necks for a glimpse of the tank, which was nearly due west and situated at an extreme angle from the latrine building. Now Rob saw it. “Oh yeah. Fucking that shit up, huh?” The tank was one of several from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 37th Armored Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, part of the 1st Armored Division and attached to the infantry that day.

At that moment, the tanks to the west started pounding a nearby structure where insurgents were holed up. Some of the soldiers in building #2 had a clear view as one of the tanks fired a 120 shell into the position. A cheer went up.

Then some of the soldiers in building #2 noticed something ominous. A tank’s turret had turned their way. The Americans and Iraqis watched the muzzle flash. Almost instantly, the house shook from the impact of an explosion.

Sergeant Rob and the other soldiers in the latrine building were thrown to the ground. The troops began shouting. ” Everyone all right?” “Jesus fucking Christ!” “What the fuck was that?” Rob, who had also seen the muzzle flash, answered, “Dude, that was the tank.” “Is he shooting at us?” asked a soldier. “I think so,” said Rob.

Everyone in the latrine building was safe and sound. The roof of building #2, however, had taken a direct hit on the northwest corner, right where Suarez, Nelson and Hobson had been stationed, the shell spraying debris through the crowd.

After the shell hit, those men on the roof who could still walk bounded toward the staircase at the northeast corner, shoving each other forward and down the stairs, at least one fleeing so quickly that he committed the cardinal sin of leaving his gun behind. The men regrouped on the second floor. Meanwhile the tank’s M240 coaxial machine gun, mounted next to the turret, began firing into building #2. Instinctively, one of the soldiers who had fled to the second floor started firing back at the tank.

Rob began directing the effort to get the shooting to stop. ” Make sure that tank knows where we’re at!” he yelled into the radio, trying to reach the lieutenant in charge of the platoon, one of the refugees from the roof who was now on the second floor. “I think the tank fired at us.” “Yeah, it just took out the fucking roof,” marveled a soldier. “Who did?” demanded another. “That tank,” replied the soldier. “I saw him fucking hit it.”

“Somebody call that tank,” Rob yelled. “Make sure it knows where we’re at.”

The troops began to shout “Cease fire! Cease fire!” at the soldier on the second floor who was shooting at the tank. Sergeant Rob ordered a soldier in the latrine building to attract the attention of the tank by firing a white star cluster, a flare that is used to notify U.S. troops that they are firing on their own men. The soldier crept along the floor as the bullets kept coming, and handed the flare to another man, who shot it out the door. Within seconds, the firing had stopped.

“Dude,” said Rob, “I’m almost positive that was that tank, because I saw him flash.” The soldier pointed out the door. “Did you see the roof?

“I know, I see it.”

Then Rob and the others heard the shouting from above. “We got men hurt, upstairs!”

After a quick head count on the second floor, the men had realized that several soldiers were missing. Sgt. Jacobson sped back up the stairs and saw Nelson unconscious, blood pouring from the stump of his left leg. The shell had taken it off above the knee.

Robison bounded out into the courtyard and into building #2. He waited as a wounded Iraqi was brought down the stairs, and then ran up the staircase to the top floor. When he arrived, Nelson had already been dragged down from the roof. He lay on the floor in his desert fatigue pants, with his shirt unbuttoned and open. A medic was tying a tourniquet to what remained of the unconscious soldier’s leg. Nelson was also bleeding from the head.

“Who else is up, who else is hurt?” demanded Rob. “Nobody’s up there,” answered a soldier. “Hobson’s fucked up!” answered another.

“Tourniquet’s on,” proclaimed one of the soldiers working over Nelson, and then a U.S. jet screamed overhead. Everybody hit the deck, anticipating the possibility of more friendly fire, this time from the air.

Rob and the others began the task of evacuating Nelson, using the radio to call for medical evacuation, while other troops tried to encourage the wounded man, who was now moaning in pain. “Stay with me, Nelson!” “Don’t you die on me, Nelson!” “Don’t die, buddy!” Nelson’s friends were demanding a chopper, a “bird,” but the lieutenant on scene called for a medical evacuation APC, “Dog 5,” which was positioned not far from the tank that had fired the shell, to pick up his wounded. He sent a soldier to look for Nelson’s missing leg.

Hobson had taken a chunk of the building to the face, as had one of the Iraqis. Hobson had also been sprayed with the blood and body parts of someone else. “Cool scars, cool scars,” said Rob, trying to comfort Hobson. The impact of the explosion had dislocated the arm of another soldier named Meeker who had been standing just south of Nelson. The medic popped it back in. It was only after Nelson had been carried downstairs on a litter, moaning, “Oh God,” and babbling from loss of blood, that anyone noticed Suarez was missing.

“I can’t find Suarez,” said one of the troopers. “Where was he?” asked Rob. “He was up on the roof,” answered the soldier.

Rob began to search the compound and count his men. Three minutes into the search, a soldier gave him the news. “Sergeant Rob, I found Suarez.”

“Out back?” guessed Rob.

“He’s … gone,” confirmed the soldier. He’d found what remained of Suarez in the back yard. Suarez had taken a direct hit. The tank round had destroyed everything except his head and torso, which had been blown off the roof into the yard to the east of the building.

“Fuck. All right. All right,” muttered Rob, and then, all business, returned to the task of getting medical attention for his wounded. “Where’s the one one three?” he asked, using a military term for the APC that was supposed to evacuate the wounded.

Rob was informed that the medevac unit, Dog 5, had been and gone. Apparently misunderstanding a report that Suarez was dead to mean there were no more casualties to evacuate, the APC had driven away empty.

After threatening to hijack an Iraqi humvee, Rob was able to get Nelson and Hobson into the American vehicle, which had finally returned, and on their way to medical attention. Nearly a half-hour after the incident, he was still trying to collect and feed the proper information to headquarters via radio, and get them to understand just who had been hurt and who had died. His men, milling around in the darkness of the building’s ground floor, were still comparing notes and grousing about the friendly fire.

” Them tankers got an ass whooping coming from hell,” said one. “I swear to fucking God I’m beating some ass. That was uncalled for.”

“Hey. Live in the now,” cautioned Rob, taking a break from radio chatter. “Where it’s good.”

“Meeker said he saw when the bitch came in on him,” protested a soldier. “He saw the bitch come in on him.”

“I saw it too,” agreed Rob.

“I’m just pissed,” said the soldier. “I know,” said Rob.

“The reason why I was pissed is because he saw that round, from the tank. That was not an Iraqi.”

“I saw it too,” repeated Rob. “It was a tank.”

“And I was right next to him,” said a soldier who’d been on the roof.

“It was a tank, it was a tank,” repeated Rob, agreeing with his angry men, trying to get them to calm down.

“We know it was a tank. They got an ass whooping coming. That’s all I got to say.”

Rob decided to deliver the message to higher-ups. “I want it understood,” he said into the radio to Dog-6, the handle used by the company commander, Capt. James Enos. “That was one of our tanks.”

As Rob listened to what his superiors were telling him, the men on the ground floor started to catch the drift. Rob said, “Good, copy,” but before he could say anything to the soldiers around him, one of them had blurted, “That’s bullshit!”

“You’re going to have to walk with me,” said Rob.

“That’s fucking bullshit,” insisted the soldier.

The Army was telling Rob that the men on the roof, Hobson, Meeker, Nelson, Suarez and the Iraqis, had been hit by enemy fire, not a tank round.

“It is a tank,” insisted a soldier who’d been on the roof. “I was up there. I know.” “OK,” said Rob. “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. None of it matters. OK? Doesn’t matter.

“Yeah, it matters,” protested another soldier.

“Doesn’t matter,” insisted Rob.

“It matters to me,” said the soldier.

“They’re saying we got hit with a 120,” said another soldier, telling the men in the room what the official story would be. Rob addressed the men, confirming their suspicions. “It was a 120 mortar, OK? Got it? You fucking got it? It was a 120 mortar.”

“Don’t even worry about it, OK? Until we hear different it was a 120- millimeter mortar. I don’t think it was. But for now, that’s the way it is, and that’s what happened, got it?”

About 50 minutes after the explosion on the roof, one of Sergeant Rob’s men told him, “Your camera’s still on.” Startled, Robison responded, “Yeah. Turn that bitch off.”

By that time, Nelson was dead. He had lost too much blood during the confused and protracted effort to evacuate him. He died inside the medevac vehicle at the gates of the military hospital.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

Within hours of the chaos at building #2, Capt. Enos “suspected a friendly fire incident,” as an Army report would later put it. He visited building #2, and saw the remnants of a tank round in the structure. And he viewed the footage from Robison’s camera.

The video does not show the tank firing, or the shell hitting the building. It does record the sound of the shell’s impact and show the latrine building shaking, and it documents the subsequent machine-gun fire, the soldiers yelling, “Cease fire!” and Robison’s apparently successful attempt to quell the friendly fire by ordering the detonation of a white star cluster.

It also shows Robison rushing into building #2 and up the stairs to find Nelson bleeding from the stump of his leg, attended by a medic applying a tourniquet. It records his frustrating attempts to get Nelson evacuated, and also his search for Suarez.

Most important, it records Robison’s soldiers insisting to him that Nelson, Suarez and the others on the roof were hit by a tank shell. More than one soldier who was on the roof can be heard telling Robison that they saw the tank fire. In the footage, Robison supports their impression, saying he too saw the muzzle flash, but then backs down when a voice on the other end of the radio — his superior officer, Capt. Enos — tells him the men were hit with an Iraqi mortar. He clearly imparts to the troops that life will be easier for all concerned if they get with the official story, whatever they may have witnessed firsthand.

By the evening of the next day, 24 hours after Enos’ visit, the Army had initiated an official investigation into whether the deaths of Nelson and Suarez were the result of friendly fire. The investigation was handled under the auspices of the commander of the tank brigade that fired the shell, Col. Sean MacFarland.

There are a variety of flavors of Army investigations; they differ by degree of formality. In this case, the Army chose what is called a 15-6 investigation, an informal review typically carried out by a single officer investigating soldiers in his own unit who reports his results to the unit commander.

Salon obtained a copy of the investigation through the Freedom of Information Act. An Army major carried out the 15-6 and reported his results to MacFarland. The major’s name is redacted in the copy sent to Salon.

According to the major’s investigation delivered to MacFarland, shrapnel from a 120-millimeter U.S. tank round was found in building #2 after the incident. But during the investigation, a captain (name redacted) had “verbally stated” that the same tank unit had returned to the scene the next day, Dec. 5, and allegedly fired 120-millimeter tank rounds into an unoccupied building to the southwest of building #2. The major determined that the fragments must have been from the Dec. 5 shots, somehow landing in building #2, and not from activity on Dec. 4. (I interviewed three soldiers who claimed to have been in that area on Dec. 5. None recall any tank fire that day).

The investigation also found bullets in building #2 of the same caliber used in the M240 coaxial gun mounted next to the main turret of the tank. These bullets, the investigation found, probably came from a Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifle fired by insurgents. The Heckler & Koch G3 is a German assault rifle commonly used by European and Eastern European armies that fires the same round as the M240 coaxial gun. While not a favorite in Iraq, insurgents have used some G3 assault rifles. Fragments from one 120-millimeter mortar were also in the building.

MacFarland signed off on the findings and attached his own memo, dated Dec. 20, 2006. (Both the investigation and MacFarland’s memo can be seen here.) He noted that the soldiers of 2nd Platoon “fought well, demonstrating leadership and stamina in this long and complex firefight.” MacFarland wrote that the video was “only one piece of evidence to consider, taken from the perspective of the soldiers located in building #2.” But he added that by “analyzing shrapnel found at the location, uniform scraps, impact point analysis and audio analysis of the video, it is clear that fratricide was not the cause of death.” He added that “complete friendly force situational awareness will continue to be emphasized prior to every mission.”

“Soldiers inside building #2 believed that the tank located to the west was firing on their position,” MacFarland wrote. “When in actuality, it was enemy fire from a mortar position northwest of the Euphrates River.” After examining the evidence for several weeks, the investigation had arrived at the same explanation — enemy mortar fire — that Capt. Enos had apparently suggested to Robison over the radio within minutes of the incident.

On Dec. 15, 2006, before the report’s completion, the Department of Defense announced Nelson and Suarez’s deaths. “The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “They died December 4, 2006, in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries suffered from small arms fire while conducting security and observation operations.” The Army posthumously awarded Nelson and Suarez the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.

Then the effort began to get the soldiers of 2nd Platoon on message.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

On Dec. 16, Lt. Col. Chuck Ferry e-mailed family members of some of the soldiers in the battalion. In part, his e-mail warned that soldiers who talked about casualties out of turn might be prosecuted. “I want to remind everyone that it is a violation of operation security to discuss specific operations or casualties until after official notification has been made,” he wrote. “Soldiers who violate this are subject to punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Initial casualty information is often times incorrect and passing this information outside official channels often makes things worse for our families.”

Several weeks later, after Christmas, battalion leaders assembled the soldiers from 2nd Platoon at Camp Corregidor in Ramadi for a briefing on the deaths of Suarez and Nelson. By that time, the troops knew that there was video of the incident. They had also heard untrue rumors — the source of which remains unclear — that the families of the men would not receive benefits if their deaths were found to be the result of friendly fire.

At the meeting, Lt. Col. Ferry and Command Sgt. Maj. Dennis Bergmann told the troops that enemy mortars killed their comrades. Soldiers interviewed by Salon confirmed that there was an enemy mortar position, but said that the tank shot building #2. According to one soldier who was present in building #2 during the firefight on Dec. 4 and who attended the briefing at Camp Corregidor, the message of the briefing and of Ferry’s e-mail was clear. “It is fucking plain as day that the tank shot at the building I was in and killed two of my friends,” the soldier said. “And then we were all asked to lie about it.”

“The colonel and sergeant major were not all bad,” added another soldier from the company who fought near the tanks. “But they did cover some shit up.”

Since 2006, some of the soldiers involved have left the military. Others are back at Fort Carson in Colorado. The footage has circulated widely among soldiers who are stationed or have been stationed at Fort Carson, and beyond.

The video is also supported by firsthand accounts from troops who were on the scene and agreed, nearly two years after the incident, to talk to Salon if their names were not used. They requested anonymity because they feared retribution from the Army. I have spoken to soldiers who were in three different vantage points inside and outside building #2.

“Immediately after the round hit, we were hit with coax,” a soldier who was in building #2 explained about what he said was machine gun fire from the tank’s coaxial gun that followed the tank shell. “There is no other way to explain that,” he said as he watched the video with me. “Nothing else sounds like that.”

Another soldier in the same company who was not in building #2 witnessed the event from a different perspective, sitting in a line of vehicles directly behind the tank as the turret pointed at building #2. “I was behind the tank that shot the house,” he told me. “I saw the tank fire. The way it was oriented, it was pointed in that direction.”

Outside experts also confirmed that the deaths of Suarez and Nelson fit the pattern of a friendly fire incident. Three separate Army combat veterans reviewed the video and other Army documents from the incident obtained by Salon. All said they believed the tape showed a friendly fire incident involving a tank. “I believe the blast-injury deaths of Army Pfc. Suarez and Pfc. Nelson and the wounding of Iraqi soldiers appear to be caused by friendly fire — a U.S. tank round fired at a building occupied by U.S. and Iraqi forces,” said Paul Sullivan, a former Army cavalry scout who once received friendly fire during the first Gulf War.

Sullivan, who is also executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said the sound of the incoming rounds fit the pattern of a textbook tank attack against infantry. He and the other veterans also noted that the incoming fire stops after the cease-fire is called and Robison’s men shoot the white star cluster, warning of a friendly fire incident. Those veterans also said the soldiers that appear on video do not react like troops under enemy attack: They do not call for reinforcements, retreat or mount a counterattack.

“It was a friendly fire incident,” a soldier from building #2 said, explaining why the soldiers on the tape don’t act like soldiers taking enemy fire. “That is why we did not continue to do what we would normally do, because a tank fired on us.”

The combat veterans said a coverup would be unfortunate. In addition to the corrosive nature of lying in the military, friendly fire incidents are supposed to be meticulously studied in order to prevent future, similar events. A coverup would preclude further study, potentially placing other soldiers at risk in the future.

Soldiers from Nelson and Suarez’ company have not tried to share the video with the families of the deceased. Some said, however, that they were troubled that the families might not know the true circumstances surrounding their sons’ deaths.

Families are often lost when it comes to how to deal with a suspected friendly fire incident. Statistics are elusive and unreliable. The most detailed personnel spreadsheets available from the Department of Defense break down casualties in the so-called war on terror into 32 separate categories by cause, but do not mention fratricide. Mary Tillman, mother of friendly fire casualty Pat, said she receives a steady drumbeat of unsolicited inquiries, often via e-mail through the Pat Tillman Foundation, from families who suspect friendly fire may be to blame for the death of a loved one. Often, the families are angry and desperate for more information from the Army after hearing stories from fellow soldiers that conflict with the official Army narrative in a particular death. “I hear lots of stories,” she told me.

Tillman said she encourages the families to push the military hard for more answers and use whatever leverage is available to pry loose data, including the media. She said it is a painful process when families receive incomplete or conflicting information in dribs and drabs. “Your son dies many times when you get many stories,” she said.

Both Roger Suarez’s family and Albert Nelson’s family apparently had questions about the way their sons died, and made an effort to get additional information from the military. Pfc. Suarez’s family is from Nicaragua, where he was buried. A Salon staff member fluent in Spanish worked to locate the family there but was unsuccessful. Salon succeeded in contacting Albert Nelson’s family.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

The sky blue government sedan had been waiting.

Jean Feggins had been out all day and was walking up toward the front door of her home on Dec. 5, 2006, when two men in Army uniforms stepped out of the sedan parked at the curb, and followed her up to the front steps.

“Are you Jean Feggins?” one of the uniformed men asked.

“Are you here about my son?” she responded.

“Yes, ma’am,” one of the soldiers said, nervously folding his beret in his hands. “But we would rather talk to you about that inside.”

The three went up the front steps, stepped inside the front door and turned left into a small den.

“We think you should sit down,” one of the men said, gesturing to a brown sofa. “The United States Army regrets to inform you that your son, Albert Markee Nelson, has been killed in Iraq.”

Nelson, whom his mother had always called Mark, had not even told his mother he was in Iraq. She thought he was still training at Fort Carson. He had only been in Iraq six weeks when he died. “Maybe he didn’t want me to worry,” Feggins said nearly two years after the casualty officers’ visit, sitting on that same brown sofa.

Feggins is 53. She is taut and thin and looks too young to have six kids, five boys and a girl. Thirty-one at the time of this death, Pfc. Nelson was the oldest.

Feggins still regularly refers to Nelson as “my baby.” He was good-looking, popular with the ladies, a natural jokester. In a scrapbook, he’s hamming it up for the camera, striking a pose on some desert hill in Iraq, camels loping behind him. Feggins says that if they ever make a movie about 2nd Platoon, Will Smith should play Nelson’s role. “They just seem so much alike,” she told me.

“The casualty officer, the first day that I saw him, said, ‘There is a possibility that your son was killed by friendly fire,'” she remembered. “But there was no proof yet. There was no report yet.”

On Dec. 15, 2006, the Department of Defense announced that Nelson had been killed by small arms fire from the enemy.

But then Feggins heard almost nothing further. She received the death certificate, which listed the cause of death as “homicide.”

The Army told her the incident was under investigation. Weeks passed. Then months. By the following spring, Feggins still hadn’t received any more information on her son’s death.

It didn’t feel right to Feggins. “Every night I was crying myself to sleep because I kept saying to myself, ‘Something is wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong, but something is wrong,'” she remembered. “And  [I wasn’t] going to be able to relax or be comfortable or have closure, as they say, until I found out what [was] going on.”

She requested an autopsy report. She began writing letters and e-mails asking for answers. She wrote Nelson’s chain of command. She wrote the president. “I know in my heart that the Army is lying about the circumstances surrounding his death,” Feggins wrote in a Feb. 2, 2007, letter to the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chuck Ferry, that she shared with me.

One day the phone rang. An officer was going to brief her on the death of her son. She had a meeting with an officer, whose name she still cannot recall. He had a laptop and a PowerPoint presentation showing that shrapnel from an enemy mortar had killed her son.

“He said to me, ‘I know as a mother you are concerned about whether or not your son suffered. But I am here to tell you that your son didn’t suffer,'” she recalled. “He said, ‘He was killed instantly. He was killed so fast that he didn’t have time to feel pain, and he never knew what hit him,'” she remembered. “He said, ‘Also, when we found him on the roof, he was still in his position, holding his weapon.'”

“He just straight lied right in my face,” she said after watching the video that showed her son suffering for 25 minutes. “And he did it with a straight face. I have a problem with that,” she added. “I understand friendly fire because I’m a police officer. I had friends who were killed in friendly fire … I don’t like liars and I cannot deal with lies.”

“These are the people that are in control of our safety and these are the people that the country is supposed to trust,” she said angrily. “How are you going to trust somebody who can sit there and lie like that? They need to have more accountability,” she added. “It is so important to tell this story.”

And then, through tears, Feggins offered words of comfort to the surviving men of 2nd Platoon. Informed that some are haunted by what they insist was a friendly fire incident, followed by a coverup that includes hiding the truth from the families of the dead, she asked them not to feel guilty.

“For the soldiers that served with him, I just want you guys to know you are all my heroes, and I’m sorry that you had to go through that because I know what kind of friends Mark attracts and I know that it hurts you deeply, especially being told that you couldn’t tell the truth about it,” she said through tears. “So now you are feeling some type of weight. But it’s not your fault. You had to do what you had to do.”

– – – – – – – – – – – –

In an effort to get the Army to respond to questions about the incident and the subsequent investigation, I contacted the Army and Fort Carson public affairs officials via telephone and e-mail in late September requesting interviews.

I sought to speak to leaders of the tank and infantry units involved in investigating the deaths of Nelson and Suarez. The interview requests stated that Salon had obtained “evidence suggesting that the two men were, in fact, killed by friendly fire.”

The Army demanded details on this evidence prior to granting any interviews. “Sir, I’m going to need some idea as to the nature of this new, solid reporting before we can start the interview,” Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, wrote in a Sept. 25 e-mail. “I’m sure that with such solid journalist efforts you wouldn’t mind at least saying specifically what has brought on such confidence.” I offered to detail the evidence during any interviews — but not before.

Efforts to contact some of the officers directly produced similar results. “I’d like to know in advance what you think you have discovered,” Col. Sean MacFarland, the tank brigade commander who signed off on the Army’s investigation, wrote in a Sept. 26 e-mail. “If it is new, I will make time to talk to you. Otherwise, I would not want to waste either of our valuable time.” In a second e-mail, MacFarland said that “the supporting evidence” behind the Army’s investigation further proved that a tank did not kill Nelson and Suarez — but that evidence could not be produced because it was classified. He did not consent to an interview.

The infantry battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chuck Ferry, was curt. “Don’t know who you are and I am not familiar with your organization,” he wrote on Sept. 30 in response to an interview request. “Sounds like you have already made up your mind about your story. Why should I talk to you?”

Ultimately Boyce, the Army spokesman, forwarded a written statement that didn’t diverge from the findings of the Army’s 2006 investigation. He reiterated the report’s finding that two mortars landing simultaneously killed Nelson and Suarez. Boyce wrote, “Shrapnel, uniform scraps, impact-point analysis and audio analysis of the Soldier’s video clearly show fratricide did not occur during the attack.”

Link to Department of Defense Report: http://www.salon.com/news/primary_sources/2008/10/14/friendly_fire/index.html

Posted in Gulf War Updates, Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on Oct 14: Friendly Fire in the Iraq War – And a Military Coverup

Insider’s Projects Drained Missile-Defense Millions

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Team VCS

October 11, 2008 – They huddled in a quiet corner at the US Airways lounge at Ronald Reagan National Airport, sipping bottomless cups of coffee as they plotted to turn America’s missile defense program into a personal cash machine.

Michael Cantrell, an engineer at the Army Space and Missile Defense Command headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., along with his deputy, Doug Ennis, had lined up millions of dollars from Congress for defense companies. Now, Mr. Cantrell decided, it was time to take a cut.

“The contractors are making a killing,” Mr. Cantrell recalled thinking at the meeting, in 2000. “The lobbyists are getting their fees, and the contractors and lobbyists are writing out campaign checks to the politicians. Everybody is making money here – except us.”

Within months, Mr. Cantrell began getting personal checks from contractors and later returned to the airport with Mr. Ennis to pick up a briefcase stuffed with $75,000. The two men eventually collected more than $1.6 million in kickbacks, through 2007, prompting them to plead guilty this year to corruption charges.

Mr. Cantrell readily acknowledges concocting the crime. But what has drawn little scrutiny are his activities leading up to it. Thanks to important allies in Congress, he extracted nearly $350 million for projects the Pentagon did not want, wasting taxpayer money on what would become dead-end ventures.

Recent scandals involving former Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, and the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, both now in prison, provided a glimpse into how special interests manipulate the federal government.

Mr. Cantrell’s story, by contrast, pieced together from federal documents and dozens of interviews, is a remarkable account of how a little-known, midlevel Defense Department insider who spent his entire career in Alabama skillfully gamed the system.

Mr. Cantrell worked in a division that was a small part of the national missile defense program. Determined to save his job, he often bypassed his bosses and broke department rules to make his case on Capitol Hill. He enlisted contractors to pitch projects that would keep the dollars flowing and paid lobbyists to ease them through. He cultivated lawmakers, who were eager to send money back home or to favored contractors and did not ask many questions. And when he ran into trouble, he could count on his powerful friends for protection from Pentagon officials who provided little oversight and were afraid of alienating lawmakers.

Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican, for example, chewed out Pentagon officials who opposed a missile range Mr. Cantrell and his contractor allies were seeking to build in Alaska, prompting them to back off, while a staffer for former Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, intervened when the Pentagon threatened to discipline Mr. Cantrell for lobbying, a banned activity for civil servants.

“I could go over to the Hill and put pressure on people above me and get something done,” Mr. Cantrell explained about his success in Washington. “With the Army, as long as the senator is not calling over and complaining, everything is O.K. And the senator will not call over and complain unless the contractor you’re working with does not get his money. So you just have to keep the players happy and it works.”

The national missile defense program has cost the United States more than $110 billion since President Ronald Reagan unveiled his Star Wars plan 25 years ago. Today, the missile defense effort is the Pentagon’s single biggest procurement program.

The Army declined to discuss the Cantrell case, other than to say it had taken steps to try to prevent similar crimes from happening again.

But some current and former Defense Department officials say the exploiting of the system that preceded Mr. Cantrell’s kickback scheme has had a damaging impact, slowing progress toward building a viable missile defense system by diverting money to unnecessary or wasteful endeavors. That pattern of larding up the defense budget with pet projects pushed by lawmakers and lobbyists is a familiar one.

“What they did may have been a scandal,” said Walter E. Braswell, Mr. Ennis’s lawyer, referring to the actions of his client and Mr. Cantrell. “But even more grotesque is the way defense procurement has disintegrated into an incestuous relationship between the military, politicians and contractors.”

Dr. J. Richard Fisher, one of Mr. Cantrell’s former bosses, said: “The system needs to change. But it is not likely to do that. There is just too much inertia – and too much self-interest.”

Getting Around the System

Towering over the highway near the entrance to Huntsville is a replica of the Saturn V rocket, the powerful missile that lifted the first man to the moon.

Created in Huntsville, it is a fitting icon for this once-sleepy cotton mill town, now so dominated by the aerospace industry that it is nicknamed Rocket City. An estimated 18,000 uniformed and civilian federal employees work in the aerospace industry in the Huntsville area today, augmented by about 40,000 others, who work for federal contractors.

Michael Cantrell grew up on a dairy farm nearby, listening to the rumble of rocket test flights. As a young engineer, he became a civilian employee of the Army and quickly impressed his bosses. “Mike moved at the speed of sound,” said Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who briefly headed the missile command.

By 1990, Mr. Cantrell, then 35, took over an experimental program to develop faster, cheaper and lighter missiles that could intercept and knock out enemy missiles flying within the atmosphere. Under the Reagan administration, money was plentiful for such research, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the arrival of the Clinton administration, Pentagon bosses were forced to make budget cuts.

Like other Army employees, Mr. Cantrell was prohibited from lobbying or even visiting Capitol Hill unless he had permission from his agency’s Congressional liaison, a prohibition intended to block employees from promoting initiatives that Pentagon leaders did not see as a priority.

But General Garner said it was obvious to his managers what they had to do if they did not want their programs – and jobs – eliminated.

“If the money does not end up in the palm and you need it,” he said in an interview, “the only other place you can go to get it is the Congress.”

Soon enough, Army missile program managers started opening what amounted to their own lobbying shops in Washington, according to Mr. Cantrell and his former supervisors.

Mr. Cantrell became a regular on Capitol Hill, both in the halls of Congress and in the bars and restaurants where Hill staffers gather after hours. He set up a makeshift office in the US Airways lounge at Reagan National Airport, where he followed up on pitches for money to lawmakers and hid out from his Defense Department bosses. He identified lobbyists who could prove useful and contractors – many of them campaign donors – with projects that needed nurturing.

With the backing of the New York Congressional delegation, for example, he blocked cuts in financing for a sophisticated wind tunnel in Buffalo, where he promised to test his missile components. With help from then Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania, who wanted Army assistance for a “technology corridor” in his district, Mr. Cantrell managed to get millions more for his program. Eventually, a dozen or so lawmakers helped him.

“It was like I was going hunting in Washington,” Mr. Cantrell said. “And I would always come up with money.” One colleague was so impressed with Mr. Cantrell’s record that she gave him a bobblehead doll carrying a briefcase marked with dollar signs.

The Pentagon had objected to Mr. Cantrell’s financing requests, but he was not discouraged. “He kept trying to kill our programs,” Mr. Cantrell said of one supervisor. But “we would go around” and get a lawmaker “to whack him.”

Inspired by his successes, Mr. Cantrell soon embarked on a more ambitious project that would all but guarantee sustained financing.

His proposal, which was based on the premise that Congress would significantly increase annual financing for his experimental missile defense work, involved not just five test launchings, but the construction of a new launching site on a remote Alaskan island and the lease of a mothballed Navy helicopter carrier, which would be used to send the simulated attack missile.

The Launching Project

It was easy to find willing partners.

The program’s main contractors, including the defense giant Lockheed Martin, prepared presentations for Congress making the case for an extra $25 million to $50 million a year for the project.

Officials in Alaska, who had been seeking money for a spaceport on Kodiak Island to launch commercial satellites, eagerly chimed in. And nearly a dozen lawmakers also did their part, Mr. Cantrell said, including Senator Stevens of Alaska; Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama; Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine; and Representative C. W. Bill Young, Republican of Florida, all members of the Appropriations or Armed Services committees with missile defense contractors in their districts.

But the military already had rocket launching sites around the globe, and Gen. Lester L. Lyles of the Air Force, who then ran the missile defense program, had no intention of spending money on another one.

General Lyles and his deputy, Rear Adm. Richard D. West of the Navy, were particularly incensed when they learned of the plans to lease the helicopter carrier, the Tripoli, and spend several million dollars renovating it.

Summoned to Washington in 1997 to explain the project, Mr. Cantrell offered little information. That only further infuriated his bosses.

“Who in the hell is in charge of this program?” Admiral West finally demanded in an exchange both men recall.

Mr. Cantrell was ordered to remove his experimental equipment from the planned launching. But the money kept coming. Mr. Stevens’s office had called to insist that the Kodiak project proceed, Admiral West and Lt. Gen. Edward G. Anderson, then the head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said in interviews.

“I got hammered pretty hard,” Admiral West recalled. The military men backed off, and the construction at Kodiak continued.

Mr. Cantrell said he knew that building a new launching facility was wasteful. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The economics of it, they just don’t work.”

But he did not care.

“I went up there to get the money,” Mr. Cantrell said of his dealings on Capitol Hill. “And we got what we needed.”

Mr. Cantrell and his deputy, Mr. Ennis, visited Kodiak Island on the afternoon of the inaugural test launching in November 1998. The Air Force had substituted other equipment for Mr. Cantrell’s payload.

The two men, armed with a cooler filled with Miller Lite beer, watched the launching from a trailer, emerging just in time to see the missile burn an orange streak into the sky. They had hidden out to avoid any local newspaper reporters who might discover that Mr. Cantrell’s missile parts – the justification for millions of dollars in spending – were not even being tested. “There is no way we can explain this,” Mr. Cantrell remembered telling Mr. Ennis.

Fearless

The hand that grabbed Mr. Cantrell by the shoulder startled him.

It was General Lyles, who happened to be on Capitol Hill when he spotted Mr. Cantrell outside Mr. Lott’s office. It was February 1998, even before the dispute over the Alaska project had played out. But the general said he immediately suspected Mr. Cantrell was up to no good.

“Are you over here lobbying?” General Lyles asked in an exchange the two men recalled.

Mr. Cantrell had been working with Mr. Lott, then Senate majority leader, for several years. The lawmaker included several million dollars in the defense budget for an acoustics research center in his home state, and Mr. Cantrell made sure it went to the intended recipients: the University of Mississippi in Oxford and a Huntsville defense contractor that had a branch office in Oxford. In turn, Mr. Lott’s office helped get extra financing – $25 million or so every year – for Mr. Cantrell’s program.

It was an arrangement that Mr. Cantrell did not want to discuss with General Lyles. While he did not consider himself to have been lobbying that day, he readily acknowledges that he often did.

“I just mumbled a lot,” he recalled of his response to the general.

By then, Mr. Cantrell felt confident that he could find his way out of any trouble with the help of his many friends in Washington. Several were lobbyists or consultants working on his behalf; he had /placed them with friendly contractors, allowing them to bill the government for the costs, even though federal law prohibits paying any expenses associated with lobbying.

For example, Mr. Cantrell arranged for James Longley, a former Republican congressman from Maine who started his own consulting firm, to be hired as an employee by Computer Systems Technology, a missile defense contractor.

“The man could put ‘honorable’ in front of his name and go places with that,” Mr. Cantrell explained, saying that Mr. Longley introduced him to lawmakers and appealed to senior Pentagon officials to protect Mr. Cantrell’s program.

Mr. Longley, in an interview, insisted that he never sought money from Congress, but simply provided strategic advice to Mr. Cantrell.

But several people, including Dr. Fisher, one of Mr. Cantrell’s bosses, thought the arrangement improper.

“Here is an ex-congressman out there promoting Mike’s programs,” Dr. Fisher said. “He can call himself what he wants, but he is basically a lobbyist.”

The incident with General Lyles prompted a formal investigation into Mr. Cantrell’s activities that same year.

But Mr. Cantrell got Mr. Longley to call Army officials. Then Mr. Lott’s office requested that the case be closed, Mr. Cantrell said. Eric Womble, a former aide to Mr. Lott, said he could not remember taking such a step, but added that it would not have been surprising.

“Senator Lott’s staff protects people who are trying to help us and help the nation,” Mr. Womble said.

Soon, the investigation of Mr. Cantrell came to a close. He got only an oral warning from his boss.

That episode would embolden Mr. Cantrell. On several occasions, he would again be caught violating Pentagon rules and each time escape with nothing more than a reprimand.

“If you have the Senate majority leader’s office calling over to get you out of trouble, you can’t help but get a little cocky,” Mr. Cantrell said.

The Fallout

From the US Airways club, Mr. Cantrell could see the symphony of the arriving and departing planes, the Potomac River and off in the distance, the Capitol dome.

One day in 2000, Mr. Cantrell met in the airport lounge with Mr. Ennis, his deputy, and a Maine contractor to figure out how to pocket some of the government’s money.

There were easy ways to cheat. The prototype missile nose cone and heat shields that the Army had paid the Maine company to design for the Alaska tests. Why not hire the business to pretend to design them again? Mr. Cantrell asked.

The ballute – an odd cross between a balloon and a parachute – had been rejected by experts as a tool to strike an enemy missile. But why not pay the Maine company to develop them anyway? Mr. Cantrell suggested.

He could pull off such shenanigans because, by then, he had an extraordinary degree of independence. Mr. Cantrell”s experimental missile program, which had cost nearly $250 million, was about to be canceled. No working missile system had been built – and almost none of the components had ended up being tested in real launchings as planned. The effort had produced some benefits for the players involved: Congress sent an annual allotment of extra money to the Alaska launching site now totaling more than $40 million, and one of the contractors that had worked with Mr. Cantrell initially to pitch the space port, Aero Thermo Technology, had secured a no-bid federal contract to provide launching services.

Now Mr. Cantrell was on to another assignment overseeing missile defense research in Huntsville, and through his friends on the Hill, he was once again getting money for projects that the Pentagon did not want.

Mr. Cantrell, who by now was helping to oversee 160 or so contractors and managing a $120 million a year contracting budget, said he knew that if he only requested a few million dollars at a time for his scheme, there would be little scrutiny of his requests or demands that he prove that the work was actually done.

For example, the missile nose cones and other parts now made round trips from Huntsville to Maine with little or no change. Mr. Cantrell or his deputy simply marked off the work as complete, and that was the end of it.

For nearly six years, from 2001 to 2007, the men collected kickbacks from contractors. During one visit to the US Airways Club, Mr. Ennis picked up a briefcase stuffed with $75,000 in cash, according to federal court records. Mr. Cantrell also got checks, ranging from $5,000 to $60,000, once or twice a month, court records show.

The Maine contractor, Maurice H. Subilia, is under investigation; his lawyer, Toby Dilworth, a former federal prosecutor, declined to comment. Dennis A. Darling, a Florida contractor who got government research grants and then divvied them up with Mr. Cantrell, was indicted last month on a charge of paying Mr. Cantrell $400,000 in bribes from 2005 to 2007.

With his new wealth, Mr. Cantrell, now 52, built himself a $1.25 million home in an exclusive Huntsville neighborhood called the Ledges.

Mr. Cantrell, who received the bulk of the kickbacks, acknowledges his crime but he ticks off the failings of the system that he exploited: lawmakers who are eager to please contractors and campaign donors; unwillingness by the Army to push back against members of Congress whose agendas were at odds with those of the military; and little scrutiny.

“We just paid for meaningless work,” he said. “And there was so little oversight that no one noticed.”

Admiral West, the former deputy director of the Pentagon missile defense program, faults Mr. Cantrell for wrongdoing, but says there were multiple missed opportunities to investigate his activities.

“The blame needs to go around widely here,” he said. “Congress should know better; the contractors, too.”

Mr. Cantrell, who is awaiting sentencing on conspiracy and bribery charges, now spends his days sitting in the kitchen of his father-in-law’s house; his dream home was seized by the federal government.

On top of the kitchen table, next to a King James Version of the Bible and bottle of Extra Strength Excedrin, is a stack of books on how to master poker. Mr. Cantrell has reduced them to mathematical formulas pinned onto a bulletin board in front of a computer terminal, where he plays Internet poker for hours at a time. Even now, he is trying to beat the system.

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Bush Signs 2 Vet Benefits Bills Into Law

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Team VCS

October 13, 2008 – President Bush signed two veterans’ bills into law Friday, an omnibus benefits bill and a package of health-related legislation.

The Veterans’ Benefits Improvement Act expands the VA home loan program, attempts to improve the processing of disability claims and strengthens enforcement of employment and reemployment rights for reservists. It also allows service members deployed overseas for 90 days or longer or who make a permanent change-of-station move to cancel or suspend a cell phone contract without penalties or extra fees.

The Veterans’ Mental Health and Other Care Improvements Act increases the mileage reimbursement rate for beneficiary travel to 28.5 center per mile, relaxes rules for reimbursing community hospitals providing emergency treatment for veterans so they do not have to be moved out of the hospital as quickly, and increases funding for programs to prevent homelessness for veterans.

The health bill also includes an expansion of veterans’ mental health programs to provide wider treatment for those with substance abuse programs and more ways of trying to help suicidal veterans.

One change in the benefits law that would be vital to many veterans at a time of turmoil in the home mortgage market is an overhaul of the veterans’ home loan program that makes it easier for people with non-VA loans to refinance their mortgages through VA. This is done by raising the amount VA will guarantee and reducing the amount of equity a homeowner must have in order to refinance.

Several changes are aimed at cutting the processing time for veterans’ disability checks, but there is another simple change that also would help veterans by directing VA to simplify the notices sent out when benefits claims are incomplete or rejected so they are easier for the veterans to understand.

Mental health provisions of the health bill set new standards for treating substance abuse, and expand efforts to treat veterans who have mental health disorders such as PTSD and also have substance abuse problems.

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Vigil Highlights Military Women’s Deaths

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Team VCS

October 8, 2008, Fayetteville, NC – Several advocacy groups demonstrated Wednesday outside Fort Bragg to draw attention to what they see as an alarming rate of domestic violence in military families.

The vigil at the Yadkin Road gate to the Army post comes after four enlisted women, including three at Fort Bragg, were slain in the last 10 months. The men accused of each of the crimes are in the military.

    * Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach was beaten to death in December, and her charred remains were found in January in the back yard of Cpl. Cesar Laurean, a fellow Camp Lejeune Marine. Laurean is awaiting extradition from Mexico, where he was arrested after a three-month international manhunt.

    * Spc. Megan Touma’s body was found in a Fayetteville motel room in June, nine days after she arrived at Fort Bragg. Sgt. Edgar Patino, a student at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, has been charged in the case.

    * The burned remains of 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc, a nurse at Womack Army Medical Center, were found in Onslow County in July, three days after a suspicious fire was reported at her Fayetteville apartment. Her estranged husband, Marine Cpl. John Wimunc, and another Camp Lejeune Marine, have been charged in her death.

    * Sgt. Christina Smith was killed on Sept. 30 in an apparent mugging. Investigators said her husband, Sgt. Richard Smith, paid another serviceman to carry out the attack.

The activists said servicemen and women are trained to be violent in combat, and that behavior often spills into their personal lives. They said the military is ignoring the problem and downplaying the deaths.

“The military is not even acknowledging that there is this trend,” said Ann Wright, a retired Army Reserves colonel. “It’s taken the civilian community – us being here at the Quaker House – that’s where (the public) is finding out about it. It’s not because the military itself is saying, ‘We’re having a major problem.'”

The Quaker House, a local meeting place for members of the pacifist religious community, Veterans for Peace and the Fayetteville chapter of the National Organization for Women took part in the demonstration. They said the military should have more counseling and better ways to identify at-risk service members who are back from deployment.

“We call upon the senior leadership of the military to take this seriously,” Wright said. “It can make sure that it tracks people who are showing erratic signs.”

The demonstrators acknowledged that domestic violence is a problem throughout society – not just the military – but they said the rate of it is much higher among military families. They described a “culture of secrecy” in the military that enables service members to think they can get away with violence.

“We know that, No. 1, the incidents are a bit higher. They’re not extremely higher, but they are higher,” said Michael McPhearson, a Gulf War veteran and a member of Veterans for Peace.

Officials at Fort Bragg said no studies have shown a higher rate of domestic violence among servicemen and women. They have said the Army has more programs than any civilian workplace to address such problems.

“No one can compare to the programs we have in place,” Fort Bragg spokesman Tom McCollum said, adding that the post hasn’t seen a spike in domestic violence cases as a result of recent deployments.

In addition to the morning vigil, demonstrators laid a wreath at the grave of Beryl Mitchell, who was killed in 1974 by her soldier husband.

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Guantanamo Prosecutor Who Quit Had ‘Grave Misgivings’ About Fairness

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Team VCS

October 12, 2008 – Darrel J. Vandeveld was in despair. The hard-nosed lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a self-described conformist praised by his superiors for his bravery in Iraq, had lost faith in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals in which he was a prosecutor.

His work was top secret, making it impossible to talk to family or friends. So the devout Catholic — working away from home — contacted a priest online.

Even if he had no doubt about the guilt of the accused, he wrote in an August e-mail, “I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country. . . .

“I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they suffer, I’ll lose a lot of friends.”

Two days later, he took the unusual step of reaching out for advice from his opposing counsel, a military defense lawyer.

“How do I get myself out of this office?” Vandeveld asked Major David J.R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who represented the young Afghan Vandeveld was prosecuting for an attack on U.S. soldiers — despite Vandeveld’s doubts about whether Mohammed Jawad would get a fair trial. Vandeveld said he was seeking a “practical way of extricating myself from this mess.”

Last month, Vandeveld did just that, resigning from the Jawad case, the military commissions overall and, ultimately, active military duty. In doing so, he has become even more of a central figure in the “mess” he considers Guantanamo to be.

Vandeveld is at least the fourth prosecutor to resign under protest. Questions about the fairness of the tribunals have been raised by the very people charged with conducting them, according to legal experts, human rights observers and current and former military officials.

Vandeveld’s claims are particularly explosive.

In a declaration and subsequent testimony, he said the U.S. government was not providing defense lawyers with the evidence it had against their clients, including exculpatory information — material considered helpful to the defense.

Saying that the accused enemy combatants were more likely to be wrongly convicted without that evidence, Vandeveld testified that he went from being a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived” by the tribunals. The system in place at the U.S. military facility in Cuba, he wrote in his declaration, was so dysfunctional that it deprived “the accused of basic due process and subject[ed] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct.”

Army Col. Lawrence J. Morris, the chief prosecutor and Vandeveld’s boss, said the Office of Military Commissions provides “every scrap of paper and information” to the defense. Morris said that Vandeveld was disgruntled because his commanding officers disagreed with some of his legal tactics and that he “never once” raised substantive concerns.

Morris said last week that he had no idea why Vandeveld had become so antagonistic toward the tribunal process, adding that the lieutenant colonel’s outspokenness angered him because it was unfair and was a “broad blast at some very ethical and hardworking people whose performances are being smudged groundlessly.”

Vandeveld, who was prosecuting seven tribunal cases — nearly a third of pending cases — has declined to be interviewed about the particulars of the Jawad case. But he did engage in a series of e-mails with The Times about his general concerns, before being “reminded” last week that he could not talk to the press until his release from active duty was final. In the future, he said, he plans to speak out.

“I don’t know how else the creeping rot of the commissions and the politics that fostered and continued to surround them could be exposed to the curative powers of the sunlight,” he said. “I care not for myself; our enemies deserve nothing less than what we would expect from them were the situations reversed. More than anything, I hope we can rediscover some of our American values.”

Some tribunal defense lawyers are preparing to call Vandeveld as a witness, saying that his claims of systemic problems at Guantanamo, if true, could alter the outcome of every pending case there — and force the turnover of long-sought information on coercive interrogation tactics and other controversial measures used against their clients in the war on terrorism.

For years, defense lawyers and human rights organizations have raised similar concerns in individual cases. “But we never had anyone on the inside who could validate those claims,” said Michael J. Berrigan, the deputy chief defense counsel for the commissions.

Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vandeveld led a relatively placid life outside Erie, Pa., with his wife and four children. He worked as a senior deputy state attorney general in charge of consumer protection in the region, and he served on his local school board in Millcreek Township.

Anyone who knows him, Vandeveld, 48, told The Times, “will probably tell you that I’ve been a conformist my entire life, and [that] to speak out against the injustice wrought upon our worst enemies entailed a weather shift in my worldview.”

Mark Tanenbaum, an English teacher whose children are friends with Vandeveld’s, remembers talking to him while sitting around campfires at high school gatherings. “We talked a lot about religion. I’m Jewish. We’d talk about faith, value-based philosophy. We were kindred spirits in this.

“With him, it is all about doing the right thing.”

Vandeveld, called to active duty after 9/11, received glowing evaluations as a Pentagon legal advisor and judge advocate in Bosnia, the Horn of Africa and Iraq. “An absolutely outstanding, first-class performance by an extraordinarily gifted, intelligent, knowledgeable and experienced judge advocate, whose potential is utterly unlimited,” his commanding officer, Gen. Charles J. Barr, wrote in his June 2006 evaluation. “One of the corps’ best and brightest. Save the very toughest jobs in the corps for him.”

From his Iraq assignment, Vandeveld went to Guantanamo, where he began locking horns over the Jawad case with Frakt — a law professor at Western State University in Fullerton and a former active-duty Air Force lawyer who volunteered for the tribunals.

Frakt believed that his Afghan client was, at worst, a confused teen who had been brainwashed and drugged by militant extremists who coerced him into participating in a grenade-throwing incident with other older — and more guilty — men. He insisted that the prosecution was withholding key information or not obtaining it from those at the Pentagon, CIA and other U.S. agencies that had investigated and interrogated Jawad.

Vandeveld believed that Jawad was a war criminal who had been taught by an Al Qaeda-linked group to kill American troops and, if caught, to make up claims he had been tortured and was underage. Vandeveld insisted that he had been providing all evidence to the defense.

But by July, Vandeveld told The Times, he had grown increasingly troubled. He kept finding sources of information and documents that appeared to bolster Frakt’s claims that evidence was being withheld — including some favorable to the defense, such as information suggesting that Jawad was underage, that he had been drugged before the incident and that he had been abused by U.S. forces afterward.

Vandeveld also was having difficulty obtaining authorization to release documents in his possession to the defense.

On Aug. 5, he e-mailed Father John Dear, a well-known Jesuit peace activist. Dear, who boasts of being arrested 75 times in protests, encouraged him to act, saying he might “save lives and change the direction of the entire policy.”

With Frakt pressing for the charges against Jawad to be dismissed due to “outrageous government misconduct,” Vandeveld proposed a plea agreement under which Jawad, now thought to be 22, could return to Afghanistan for rehabilitation. But his superiors rejected it, Vandeveld said.

By late August, he had told Frakt that there were other “disquieting” things about Guantanamo and that his superiors were refusing to address them or to let him quietly transfer out, Frakt said in an interview.

“Now might be a good time to take a courageous stand and expose some of the ‘disquieting’ things that you have alluded to, whatever they may be,” Frakt replied in a Sept. 2 e-mail, noting that there would soon be a change of administrations in Washington.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to distance yourself from a process that has become largely discredited, or at least distinguish yourself as one of the good guys, an ethical prosecutor trying to do the right thing,” Frakt wrote.

On Sept. 9, Vandeveld e-mailed Dear to say he had resigned from the Guantanamo military tribunals: “The reaction was the expected outrage and condemnation. I have and will maintain my equanimity and, while scared for me and for my family, know that Christ will watch over me.”

That, however, was only the beginning. In late September — after the military, according to Frakt, initially tried to block it — Vandeveld testified by video link for the defense, saying he believed that insurmountable problems with the tribunals might make them incapable of meting out justice fairly.

Morris said that Vandeveld is not qualified to speak about systemwide problems at Guantanamo. But Frakt said that he is and that Vandeveld’s testimony and declaration only scratched the surface of his concerns, judging by their extensive conversations and hundreds of e-mail exchanges.

“There is a lot more that he knows,” Frakt said.

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GOP Dispatches Vets to Focus on Security

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Team VCS

October 10, 2008, Bangor, Maine – The Republican National Committee was host to a three-stop “Not Ready to Lead” tour through Maine on Thursday, attempting to shift the conversation in the presidential race from the economy to a portrayal of Sen. Barack Obama as inexperienced on national security. The business intercom systems dallas provide the best security system in the Dallas.

“You need to do more than shoot hoops with soldiers,” Gary Bernsten, a retired CIA officer, said Thursday at Sen. John McCain’s headquarters in Bangor. “This should be about what they have done, not what they say they’re going to do.”

Bernsten and Capt. Erik Swabb, an Iraq war veteran, made stops in Portland and Lewiston on Thursday morning before wrapping up the tour in Bangor. Both McCain supporters had strong words about Obama’s foreign policy credentials from his inability to acknowledge the benefits of the surge in Iraq to his position on Afghanistan.

“He talks about ending this misguided war, but what message does that send to troops [in Iraq],” said Swabb, who served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq in 2004-05. “Senator Obama has consistently advocated what is politically expedient.”

Adam Cote, chairman of Maine Veterans for Obama, countered that the Illinois Democrat’s judgment alone will make America more secure.

“He has strong support among veterans in Maine because we need change after the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the Iraq war, underfunding of veterans services, and refusal to use smart, aggressive diplomacy to make our country safer,” said Cote, an Iraq war veteran and one-time Republican. “For eight years, John McCain has marched in lockstep with President Bush, and the last thing we need is four more years of the same.”

Before the recent economic crisis, polls found the race between McCain and Obama to be much closer, in part because of the Arizona senator’s well-known foreign policy credentials. However, as the economy has become the top issue with most voters – Mainers included – polls have shifted in Obama’s favor.

“I understand that the economy is important and I don’t want to diminish it, but a healthy economy is not solely contingent on the president,” Swabb said. “National security is the president’s primary responsibility.”

Cote dismissed the national policy focus as a distraction.

McCain’s campaign has been more aggressive in Maine in recent days, trying to appeal to voters in the 2nd Congressional District, which is typically the more conservative part of the state. Because Maine splits its four electoral votes, McCain could steal one of those if he wins the 2nd District.

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