Veterans for Common Sense

Today John and Elizabeth Edwards were joined by surrogates from MoveOn.org, SEIU, the Center for American Progress, USAction, VoteVets.org and Americans United for Change in a conference call to talk about a new joint project reports CBS News’ Michelle Levi. The new initiative seeks to draw a link between the ongoing war in Iraq with economic concerns at home and the participants pledged to keep the issue at the forefront in the both presidential and congressional campaigns.

The coalition vowed to be a substantial voice this election year by targeting presumptive GOP nominee John McCain as the candidate who will continue Bush’s policies in Iraq and by working on the ground in states and congressional districts where the incumbent is challenged by an anti-war candidate (including Democratic candidates). A surrogate from each entity outlined what their organizations plan to do individually.

Speaking from his home in North Carolina, John Edwards credited Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for continuing to make “clear they will end the war in Iraq” and said he “wants to make sure [voters] know they have a clear choice between a Democratic candidate who will end the war and the other choice … who will continue failed policies.” Elizabeth Edwards reiterated her husbands concern about poverty, saying that the nation has “a limited amount of money, and we are spending too much on the war.”

Vote Vets, an organization founded by military veterans, released a new ad which, according to the release, will have a limited run on cable in the Washington, DC area this week. The ad features an Iraq veteran with her infant son and alludes to McCain’s comments that he’s committed to staying in Iraq for a lengthy period of time. The veteran says, “this is my little boy. He was born a year after I came back from Iraq. What kind of commitment are you making to him? How about a thousand years of affordable health care, or a thousand years of keeping America safe? Can we afford that for my child, Senator McCain? Or have you already promised to spend trillions — in Baghdad?”

February 23, 2008 – The Justice Department revealed Friday that its internal ethics office was investigating the department’s legal approval for waterboarding of Qaeda suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and was likely to make public an unclassified version of its report.

The disclosure by H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was the first official acknowledgment of an internal review of the legal memorandums the department has issued since 2002 that authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.

Mr. Jarrett’s report could become the first public accounting for legal advice that endorsed methods widely denounced as torture by human rights groups and legal authorities. His office can refer matters for criminal prosecution; legal experts said the most likely outcome was a public critique of the legal opinions on interrogation, noting that Mr. Jarrett had the power to reprimand or to seek the disbarment of current or former Justice Department lawyers.

The cloak of secrecy that long concealed the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program and its legal underpinnings has gradually broken down.

The C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, publicly admitted for the first time two weeks ago that the agency used waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 in the interrogation of three Qaeda suspects but said that the technique was no longer used, and its legality under current law is uncertain. The technique, which has been used since the Spanish Inquisition and has been found illegal in the past by American courts, involves water poured into the nose and mouth to create a feeling of drowning.

After General Hayden’s acknowledgment, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey rebuffed demands for a criminal investigation of interrogators who used waterboarding or of their superiors, saying C.I.A. officers could not be prosecuted for actions the Justice Department had advised them were legal. Mr. Jarrett’s review focuses on the government lawyers who gave that advice.

Mr. Jarrett’s disclosure came as prosecutors and F.B.I. agents conduct a criminal investigation of the C.I.A.’s destruction in 2005 of videotapes of harsh interrogations and a week after Congress passed a ban on coercive interrogations, which President Bush has said he will veto.

Mr. Jarrett did not say when his investigation might conclude. He did not respond to a request on Friday for an interview.

In a letter to two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Mr. Jarrett wrote that the legal advice approving waterboarding was one subject of an investigation into “the circumstances surrounding the drafting” of a Justice legal memorandum dated Aug. 1, 2002.

The document declared that interrogation methods were not torture unless they produced pain equivalent to that produced by organ failure or death. The memorandum, drafted by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, and signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was withdrawn in 2004.

Mr. Jarrett said the investigation was also covering “related” legal memorandums prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel since 2002. That suggested the investigation would address still-secret legal opinions written in 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, then and now the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, that gave legal approval for waterboarding and other tough methods, even when used in combination.

Mr. Jarrett said his office was “examining whether the legal advice in these memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.”

“Because of the significant public interest in this matter, O.P.R. will consider releasing to Congress and the public a nonclassified summary of our final report,” Mr. Jarrett wrote, using the initials for the Office of Professional Responsibility.

Justice Department officials said that the O.P.R. inquiry began more than three years ago and noted that it was mentioned in a Newsweek article in December 2004. It has since been expanded, the officials said, to cover more recent legal opinions on interrogation.

Mr. Jarrett’s letter, dated Monday, came in reply to a Feb. 12 letter from Mr. Durbin and Mr. Whitehouse to him and the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, seeking an investigation into the department’s legal approval of waterboarding.

“Despite the virtually unanimous consensus of legal scholars and the overwhelming weight of legal precedent that waterboarding is illegal,” the senators wrote, “certain Justice Department officials, operating behind a veil of secrecy, concluded that the use of waterboarding is lawful. We believe it is appropriate for you to investigate the conduct of these Justice Department officials.”

Mr. Fine replied in a letter this week that the law gave Mr. Jarrett’s office responsibility for reviewing the actions of department lawyers providing legal advice. Mr. Jarrett confirmed that his office was investigating.

Mr. Jarrett reports to the attorney general and oversees only the professional conduct of Justice Department attorneys. He does not enjoy the independence or authority of Mr. Fine, who covers all aspects of Justice operations and also reports to Congress.

In 2006, when Mr. Jarrett tried to look into the Justice Department’s role in approving the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, Mr. Bush blocked the investigation by denying Mr. Jarrett’s investigators the necessary security clearances. Mr. Fine’s office subsequently obtained the necessary clearances and began such an investigation.

Last November, days after Mr. Mukasey was confirmed as attorney general, Mr. Bush reversed course and granted clearances to Mr. Jarrett’s staffers, who began a delayed review of the legal authorization for the N.S.A. program.

Mr. Durbin and Mr. Whitehouse have been among the most outspoken critics in Congress of harsh interrogation methods. They have called on Mr. Bush to withdraw the nomination of Mr. Bradbury, author of the 2005 interrogation memorandums, as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel; he has filled the job on an acting basis since 2005.

In 2004, Mr. Durbin first proposed a ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment that Congress passed in 2005, when it was sponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Mr. Whitehouse, a former United States attorney, said in an interview that he believed the August 2002 memo on torture, as well as classified opinions he had reviewed, fell far short of the Justice Department’s standards for scholarship. He said that in approving waterboarding, the opinions ignored both American military prosecutors’ cases against Japanese officers for waterboarding American prisoners during World War II and a federal appeals court’s decision that upheld the 1983 conviction of a Texas sheriff for using “water torture” on jail inmates.

“I’m very, very pleased that the Office of Professional Responsibility is looking into this,” Mr. Whitehouse said.

Jose Padilla, the American sympathizer of Al Qaeda serving a 17-year sentence for conspiring to help violent Muslim extremists abroad, filed a lawsuit in January against Mr. Yoo, who left Justice in 2003 to return to his job as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The lawsuit claims Mr. Yoo’s legal opinions permitted the designation of Mr. Padilla as an enemy combatant and his interrogation using methods that amounted to torture.

Mr. Yoo, who asserted that a president during wartime has extraordinarily broad powers, was a highly influential figure in the Justice Department in the first year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His views found favor with Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal adviser, David S. Addington, who shared his views of presidential power.

But some of Mr. Yoo’s opinions, including the August 2002 memo on torture, were withdrawn in 2004 after Jack L. Goldsmith took over as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Yoo could not be reached for comment Friday.

February 23, 2008 – The Iraq War must finally change the way Americans support and back their war veterans. How nice it is to wear yellow ribbons and wave American flags in support of our troops; they need all we can give. It’s better than being cussed and spit on! But in my opinion, most people who do these patriotic gestures are only giving cheap, superficial, token, short-term support. I ask a favor of you – take your yellow ribbons and miniature flags and place them in your wallet or purse after the fighting ends. Most Americans have short memories and minds of sheep, a herd mentality that follows a president into war whose cost you cannot calculate. The same Congress and people who support this war and see no problem in spending up to $1 billion a day to kill and destroy will surely do what they have always done in the past.

When this war ends, the dead will be buried and forgotten except by loved ones and on special occasions. Artificial limbs will be made and fitted. Then on with life and goodbye war veterans. If you think I am wrong, just ask any veteran who needs medical help through our VA system.

Living death is another way of dying. The human mind is the most awesome, powerful living thing on earth. But yet, it can be more delicate, fragile and sensitive than the finest crystal. Wounds to the mind are surpassed by nothing else.

Except for the name of the war, this is the same letter I wrote about 19 years ago. It holds true for U.S. veterans today.

February 24, 2008 – During Michael Sherriff’s nine-month tour in the battlefields of Iraq, his mother worried that one day a pair of Army officers in full dress would come to her door with terrible news. To know more about that event songsforromance .

“You’re just on edge every single minute,” Jennifer Cass said. She didn’t dream her son would become a victim of the war the way he did — not on a faraway battlefield like she feared, but like a growing number of veterans — by his own hand once he made it home.

Of 807,694 veterans diagnosed with depression and treated at a Department of Veterans Affairs facility nationwide between 1999 and 2004, 1,683 committed suicide, according to a study released in October 2007 by the University of Michigan Depression Center.

After her son safely returned stateside in April 2004, Cass dealt with a new set of worries. She said she began experiencing stress and anxiety as her Mikey had an increasingly difficult time adjusting to civilian life.

When a police officer and a chaplain came to her north Redding door Feb. 1, she invited them in for coffee, not thinking they could be bearing the news that she once had feared so much — that her son was dead.

Sherriff, 27, had put a pistol to his head and ended his life after police approached his hotel room in downtown Redding earlier that day to talk to him about a felony arrest warrant out of Washington. You get more details about Iraq War salbreux-pesage .

Sherriff suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of the horrific scenes he experienced in Iraq, and his family thinks his condition caused him to commit suicide.

Like other families and friends of soldiers who have survived war only to lose the battle within themselves once home, those who knew Sherriff are left wondering if enough was done to recognize and treat his mental problems.

Bearing pain

“When I got home I thought I was fine,” said Jim Tyson of Shingletown, who served in the U.S. Army from 1996 to 2003, doing tours in Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia and Iraq.

Tyson drove an armored Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer, like those often seen at construction sites around the north state, but in wartime he used the massive tractor for destruction.

With the help of his uncle, Jim Richards of Redding, a veteran of three tours in Vietnam who suffers from PTSD himself, Tyson recognized his problem and sought help. He now regularly meets with a counselor and is on antianxiety medication.

Richards said it’s difficult for someone who has been hardened by military service to admit he needs help.

“Soldiers learn how to grit their teeth and bear pain,” he said.

Both said they think the military should put every returning soldier and Marine through counseling to search for subtle signs of PTSD. While veterans are screened when they leave the service, the two men said that step isn’t enough. They said there also should be classes about PTSD for the family and friends of veterans.

Bonded not just by blood, but by their combat experience, Tyson and Richards said veterans dealing with PTSD can get the most help from talking to other veterans.

With few lines drawn between who is friend or foe in combat zones like Iraq, Tyson said the nature of fighting today adds to the stress endured by those in the military.

“Nobody plays by the rules anymore except us,” he said.

The ever-present dangers of bombs hidden along roadways and suicide bombers who could be anybody cause those serving in Iraq to be tense and ready for action at all times. Once home, it’s hard to turn that readiness off, Tyson said.

Triggers for PTSD are ever present on the home front: The sound of a jet. Smell of gasoline. A flash of light.

A Different Michael

While he said war hadn’t changed him when he first got home, Cass said her son Michael soon started to show signs of PTSD.

He’d threaten violence against those he felt had wronged him. He had trouble maintaining relationships with women.

Once a talented debater who had aspirations of becoming an attorney, Sherriff developed a short fuse, said Brian Sherriff, the oldest of his two brothers and two stepbrothers.

“He had a lot more anger and a lot less control over that anger,” Brian Sherriff said.

Michael Sherriff was diagnosed with PTSD by VA physicians and sought help at VA clinics, but came to resent them, Cass said.

His father, John Sherriff of Incline Village, Nev., said his son didn’t talk much about what kind of counseling he had or medicines he was prescribed. John Sherriff said he wanted to know, but wasn’t able to find out through the VA because his son was an adult and his medical records were confidential.

“They can’t share any information,” he said.

John Sherriff said he hopes that VA officials would be more open with the families of those suffering from PTSD, and that he thinks bureaucracy could be cut by ensuring that veterans could consistently see the same physicians.

Lost Battle

Adrift after the Army, Michael Sherriff accumulated a criminal record, including driving under the influence and concealed weapon arrests, and spent about a month in jail while he lived in Reno. He’d moved there to attend the University of Nevada at Reno. He also had a girlfriend there whom he hoped to marry some day, though their time together was turbulent and punctuated with occasional breakups, Brian Sherriff said.

The relationship continued until early this year when the girlfriend broke it off for good.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was the last breakup,” Brian Sherriff said.

Michael Sherriff had lived in Redding off and on with his mother after he returned from Iraq, and he moved in with her again after the breakup. She said he became increasingly angry and difficult to live with.

Months earlier she’d thought about checking him into a VA mental health clinic in Mountain View that takes new patients at the start of each month, she said. But Michael Sherriff had convinced her that he’d be better off staying in Reno and helping his girlfriend with her ailing father, who eventually died.

“He said the best therapy he could have was helping someone else,” Cass said.

With the first of the month approaching again, she said she once again considered trying to get her son to the clinic. But living with Michael Sherriff became too hard and on Jan. 30, she kicked him out and changed her locks.

“Michael was just out of his mind,” Cass said.

She called his ex-girlfriend, who now lived in Kirkland, Wash., and left a message warning her that he had traded his laptop for a gun and he was headed up there from Redding to get her and her mother, according to a Kirkland Police report.

“She stated that her son has a list of people he wants to get and they are the top two,” the report said.

The ex-girlfriend called the police after hearing the message and told them that during a visit in December, Michael Sherriff had pointed a gun at her and held her hostage.

Because of the threats and the gun incident, Kirkland police issued a warrant for his arrest and sent notice to their Redding counterparts. Police learned that Sherriff likely was staying in a room at the Thunderbird Lodge based on a tip that he was in a motel near the bus station and preparing to go to Kirkland.

Officers tried calling him to get him to come out and talk, but he hung up after picking up the phone, said Redding police Sgt. Bruce Bonner. Sherriff then shot himself after seeing a police officer outside the room.

Amid his angry tirades, Michael Sherriff had talked of suicide.

“He said if a cop ever came at him again he would shoot himself,” Cass said.

She said she didn’t realize he meant it.

Paul Sullivan, a spokesman for Veterans for Common Sense, said studies show more than 5,000 veteran suicides a year and a tidal wave of returning war veterans needing mental health treatment.  “What we’re trying to do is stop the VA from turning away suicidal veterans,” he said. “We think the situation has reached a crisis stage.” 

The suicide of Jonathan Schulze is cited in the class-action suit filed by two national veterans groups.

February 22, 2008 – Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota — A class-action lawsuit filed by two national veterans organizations accusing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) of neglecting psychological fallout from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars cites the suicide of Minnesota Marine veteran Jonathan Schulze.

Schulze is one of several deceased veterans named in the suit, which a judge last month allowed to proceed and is headed for a hearing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco in March. Schulze, 25, committed suicide in January 2007 in New Prague, Minn., five days after he allegedly was turned away from the VA hospital in St. Cloud when seeking psychiatric help.

He had fought in Iraq. Medical records showed that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

His father, Jim Schulze of the Stewart, Minn., area, said Friday that attorneys for Veterans for Common Sense and a second group, Veterans United for Truth, asked his wife, Marianne, to file a declaration in support of the case.

Marianne Schulze, Jonathan’s stepmother, reviewed her first-person observations of Jonathan’s encounters with the VA, his psychological struggles and his death.

“For some reason, he was denied the emergency care that might have saved his life,” she wrote in the four-page declaration.

VA officials last year denied that Schulze was turned away from the St. Cloud hospital. An independent investigation by the VA’s Office of the Inspector General said that family allegations were inconclusive because the hospital had no record of the exchange.

Attempts to contact U.S. Department of Justice attorneys defending the VA against the class-action suit were unsuccessful. However, court records show that the VA has argued that it already has started several new programs to address suicide prevention and that the suit should be dismissed because the court and veterans groups shouldn’t be intervening in VA policies.

The class-action suit, filed in July, is the first of its kind and represents from 600,000 to 1.6 million Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have been or will be subject to delays, confusion and corruption at VA hospitals, said Gordon Erspamer, lead attorney for Morrison and Foerster, the California firm representing the veterans.

“We’re dealing with an agency that’s unfortunately in the Dark Ages,” said Erspamer, a Minnesota native and a graduate of Hamline University Law School.

Erspamer and attorney Heather Moser said a court order precluded them from identifying individual family members to protect them from retribution from the VA.

But Jim Schulze, an Army veteran, said he’s not intimidated by going public. “What are they going to do, send me to Vietnam? Hell, I’ve been there three times already,” he said. “They didn’t take care of Jon’s needs, and they didn’t take care of my needs.”

Paul Sullivan, a spokesman for Veterans for Common Sense, said studies show more than 5,000 veteran suicides a year and a tidal wave of returning war veterans needing mental health treatment.

“What we’re trying to do is stop the VA from turning away suicidal veterans,” he said. “We think the situation has reached a crisis stage.”

The class-action suit asks the court to force the VA to conform to federal laws and the U.S. Constitution by dealing with veterans needs in a timely and comprehensive manner.

“To my mind we’re dealing with a really serious harm,” Moser said. “The Schulzes are certainly not alone in having lost their son and trying to get the VA to do something.”

Kevin Giles: (651) 298-1554

February 22, 2008, London, United Kingdom — In tones freighted with frustration, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, on Thursday told the House of Commons that “contrary to earlier explicit assurances” the Central Intelligence Agency had confirmed using an American-operated airfield on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean for refuelling two American “rendition” flights carrying terrorism suspects in 2002.

The American acknowledgment of the flights, each carrying a single detainee, contradicted previous assurances by the United States to Britain’s Labor government that no such flights had landed on British territory or passed through British airspace. Although the C.I.A. attributed its earlier denials to a “flawed records search,” the admission could add to the animosity the government here has aroused, particularly with Labor’s left wing, over its alliance with the United States in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Miliband’s statement prompted protests from members of Parliament from various parties and from British-based human rights groups that had contended for years that Britain had been a knowing or unknowing partner in the American use of rendition flights. The term has been used to describe the secret transport of prisoners from one country or jurisdiction to another without formal extradition proceedings. It gained much of its notoriety from the American practice after Sept. 11, 2001, of transporting terrorism suspects secretly to other countries for interrogation.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Hayden, informed British officials of the 2002 flights during a visit to London last week. He issued a statement to the agency’s staff in Washington on Thursday saying that a fresh review of agency records had shown that the C.I.A. had erred in assuring Britain previously that “there had been no rendition flights involving their soil or airspace” since the 2001 attacks in the United States. Mr. Miliband said he had received a personal apology from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had told him that she shared his “deep regret” about the earlier false denials.

“That information, supplied in good faith, turned out to be wrong,” General Hayden said, adding, “This time, the examination revealed the two stops in Diego Garcia. The refueling, conducted more than five years ago, lasted just a short time. But it happened. That we found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British government, in no way changes or excuses the reality that we were in the wrong. An important part of intelligence work, inherently urgent, complex and uncertain, is to take responsibility for errors and to learn from them. In this case, the result of a flawed records search, we have done so.”

Mr. Miliband told the House of Commons he was “very sorry indeed” to have to revise the Labor government’s repeated assurances in recent years that it knew of no American rendition flights involving British airspace or airfields. The British assurances, on numerous occasions in 2005, 2006 and 2007, were given, among others, by the former prime minister, Tony Blair, who said in 2005 that he was “not prepared to believe” that the Americans had broken faith with Britain over the issue, and by a former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who dismissed the accusations as “a very old story,” and a discredited one.

“The House and its members will be deeply disappointed at this news, and about its late emergence,” Mr. Miliband said in his Commons statement.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, visiting Brussels, spoke in similar terms. “It is unfortunate that this was not known, and it was unfortunate it happened without us knowing that it had happened,” he said, adding that Britain would press for procedures to ensure that such a breach could not happen again.

For Mr. Brown, the information about the flights came at a politically awkward moment, when he has been struggling with low poll ratings driven by a series of government mishaps, and by months of uncertainty over the future of the troubled Northern Rock bank, which was finally nationalized in legislation rushed through Parliament on Monday. Mr. Brown, a silent skeptic during the Blair years about Britain’s military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, has also been working to replace the close relationship Mr. Blair had with President Bush with a more wary stance and moving rapidly to draw down Britain’s remaining 4,200 troops in Iraq.

In his account, General Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that neither of the two detainees carried aboard the rendition flights that refuelled at Diego Garcia “was ever part of the C.I.A.’s high-value terrorist interrogation program.” This appeared to be his way of saying what Mr. Miliband, in his Commons statement, made explicit, that the suspects on the two flights were not taken to any of the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, some of them in eastern Europe, and that they were not subjected to stress techniques that critics of the C.I.A. program have described as tantamount to torture, including waterboarding.

General Hayden said one of the detainees “was ultimately transferred to Guantánamo,” the American military prison on the eastern tip of Cuba, while the other “was returned to his home country,” identified by State Department officials in Washington on Thursday as Morocco. “These were rendition operations, nothing more,” General Hayden said. He also used the statement to refute accusations by human rights groups that the C.I.A. “had a holding facility” for terrorist suspects on Diego Garcia, a 40-mile long island leased by Britain about 1,000 miles southwest of the southernmost tip of India. “That is false,” he said.

For more than 30 years, the United States has operated a military air base on the island under an agreement with Britain, using it mainly for refuelling and as a forward base for long-range bombers, including B-52’s, that have been used in military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 2,500 American military personnel are said to be stationed at the base, while Britain has only a few hundred. More than 2,000 islanders were transferred elsewhere after Britain leased the island, many of them under bitter protest.

For years, governments and Parliaments across Europe have been roiled by accusations that the C.I.A. has used European airspace and airfields for rendition flights, but in the face of insistent American denials much about the practice has remained murky. The nations listed by human rights groups as having been involved in the flights — or of turning a blind eye to use of their airfields — have included Britain, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, among others. One British rights group, Liberty, contended in 2005 that aircraft operated by or chartered by the C.I.A. had used 11 British airports and air bases since 2001, involving 210 flights.

The CIA’s acknowledgment that it misled Britain about the two flights revived those accusations, and not only among the rights groups. Mr. Miliband said the foreign office was compiling a list of flights that protest groups have cited in their accusations of British complicity in the C.I.A. rendition program, which would be passed to the United States for “their specific assurance that none of these fights were used for rendition purposes.” William Hague, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Conservatives, espressed support for that plan.

“As America’s candid friend,” Mr. Hague told the BBC, Britain should insist that the Bush administration clear up all the uncertainties surrounding rendition, and not only the details of the flights, but whether it was prepared to “adopt a definition of torture” that met the standards laid down in international conventions.

February 22,, 2008 Chapel Hill, North Carolina – For John Heuer, burning a fake draft card on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus was a sort of deja vu.  Heuer said he burned draft cards in 1971 while refusing to be part of President Nixon’s army. He put his cigarette lighter to a symbolic card Thursday to support a student group’s anti-war rally.

“It’s important to get the word out in a creative way,” said Heuer, a retired UNC facilities designer.

About 30 people attended the brief noon rally in the Pit outside the Student Union. Members of UNC-CH Students for a Democratic Society handed out fake draft cards and sarcastically solicited passers-by to sign up for military duty in Iraq.

War is peace, the protesters said mockingly. For permanent peace, we need permanent war, they said.

The rally featured two speakers who were scheduled to participate in a campus teach-in about the war Thursday night.

Dahlia Wasfi, whose mother is American and father is Iraqi, began speaking out internationally after visiting occupied Iraq in 2004 and 2006.

“My family in Iraq has been liberated,” she said, “liberated from water, food, security and health care.”

Iraq war veteran Jason Hurd served in Baghdad from November 2004 to November 2005. He said one of his jobs was to shoot at anything that came within 50 meters of military vehicles.

“I went to Iraq to help people, but instead I ended up shooting civilians,” Hurd said. The people said they never had to worry about their safety before the Americans arrived, he said.

Hurd, who said he now takes medication to deal with nightmares and flashbacks, serves as president of the Asheville chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The organization, founded in 2004, calls for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage they have suffered, and full benefits and support for troops returning home.

Despite the opening sarcasm, graduate student Tamara Tal said SDS is serious about ending the war.

“The majority of Americans want this war to end,” she said. “We need to stand up, speak out and end it.”

Feb 22, 2008, Istanbul, Turkey (AP) – Turkish troops launched a ground incursion across the border into Iraq in pursuit of separatist Kurdish rebels, the military said Friday – a move that dramatically escalates Turkey’s conflict with the militants.

It is the first confirmed ground operation by the Turkish military into Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. It also raised concerns that it could trigger a wider conflict with the U.S.-backed Iraqi Kurds, despite Turkey’s assurances that its only target was the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

The ground operation started after Turkish warplanes and artillery bombed suspected rebel targets on Thursday, the military said on its Web site. The incursion was backed by the Air Force, the statement said.

Turkey has conducted air raids against the PKK guerrillas in northern Iraq since December, with the help of U.S. intelligence, and it has periodically carried out so-called “hot pursuits” in which small units sometimes spend only a few hours inside Iraq.

The announcement of a cross-border, ground incursion of a type that Turkey carried out before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a major development in its conflict with the Kurdish rebels, which started in 1984 and has claimed as many as 40,000 lives.

Turkey staged about two-dozen incursions in Iraq during the rule of Saddam, who launched brutal campaigns against the Kurdish population. Some Turkish offensives involved tens of thousands of troops. Results were mixed, with rebels suffering blows to their ranks and supplies but regrouping after the bulk of the Turkish forces had left.

PKK spokesman Ahmad Danas said two Turkish troops were killed and eight wounded in clashes along the 240-mile border, but there was no comment from the Turkish military and no way to independently confirm the claim.

The Kurdish militants are fighting for autonomy in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, and have carried out attacks on Turkish targets from bases in northern Iraq. The U.S. and the European Union consider the PKK a terrorist organization.

“The Turkish Armed Forces, which values Iraq’s territorial integrity and its stability, will return as soon as planned goals are achieved,” the military said. “The executed operation will prevent the region from being a permanent and safe base for the terrorists and will contribute to Iraq’s stability and internal peace.”

Private NTV television said 10,000 troops were taking part in the offensive and had penetrated six miles into Iraq, though some reports said that not all the troops had been deployed. The operation was reportedly concentrated in the Hakurk region, south of the Turkish border town of Cukurca.

The state-run Anatolia agency reported that warplanes were seen taking off from the air base in Diyarbakir in southeast Turkey. It said planes and helicopters were conducting reconnaissance flights over the border region, and that military units were deployed at the border to prevent rebel infiltration.

Dogan News Agency reported that the Habur border crossing, a major conduit for trade between Iraq and Turkey, was closed to vehicle traffic.

CNN-Turk television, however, quoted Deputy Prime Minister Hayati Yazici as saying the border gate was not closed but that priority was being given to Turkish military vehicles. Trucks routinely ferry supplies bound for U.S. military bases in Iraq through the Habur crossing.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. spokesman in Iraq, said the military had received assurances from its NATO ally Turkey that it would do everything possible to avoid “collateral damage” to innocent civilians or infrastructure.

“Multi-National Forces-Iraq is aware Turkish ground forces have entered into northern Iraq, for what we understand is an operation of limited duration to specifically target PKK terrorists in that region,” Smith said in a statement.

“The United States continues to support Turkey’s right to defend itself from the terrorist activities of the PKK and has encouraged Turkey to use all available means, to include diplomacy and close coordination with the Government of Iraq to ultimately resolve this issue,” he added.

Matthew Bryza, U.S. deputy assistant secretary for southeastern Europe, cited the importance of a Nov. 5 meeting in which President Bush promised Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Washington would share intelligence on the PKK.

“The land operation is a whole new level,” Bryza said in Belgium. “What I can say is that what we’ve been doing until now has been working quite well.”

The European Commission appealed to Turkey to act with restraint.

“Turkey should refrain from taking any disproportionate military action and respect human rights and the rule of law,” said Commission spokeswoman Krisztina Nagy.

“The EU understands Turkey’s need to protect its population from terrorism,” she said. “We encourage Turkey to continue to pursue dialogue with international partners.”

Turkish President Abdullah Gul spoke with his Iraqi counterpart Jalal Talabani late Thursday and gave him information about the goals of the operation, Gul’s office said. Gul also invited Talabani to visit Turkey.

The military said its target was PKK rebels and that it does not want to harm civilians “and other local groups that do not act in enmity against the Turkish Armed Forces.”

Nihat Ali Ozcan, a terrorism expert with the research center TEPAV, said the operation was likely launched to hit the group before the traditional start of the fighting season in the spring.

“I think it is aimed to keep the PKK under pressure before the group starts entering Turkey,” he said on CNN-Turk television.

Iraqi border forces officer Col. Hussein Tamer said Turkish shelling on Thursday hit several Kurdish villages in the Sedafan area, some 20 miles from the border.

Jabbar Yawar, a spokesman for Iraqi Kurdish security forces, said sporadic bombing had taken place in the border areas, but no casualties were reported.

Fouad Hussein, a spokesman for the semiautonomous Kurdish government in Iraq, said the Kurdish Peshmerga forces had been put on alert.

He said Iraqi Kurdish forces also had tightened security around bases housing Turkish military monitors operating in northern Iraq with permission from local authorities under a 1996 agreement.

“The government of Kurdistan ordered the Peshmerga forces to be on alert in fear of any Turkish incursion on Iraqi territory,” he said, claiming that Turkish military monitors had tried to leave their bases in violation of the accord.

“Those troops tried to move out, but the Peshmerga forces forced them to return to their camps within half an hour,” he said.

Turkish media reports said Friday that a total of 1,200 Turkish monitors in four camps in Iraq were helping to coordinate the ground offensive.

A military jury in Hawaii found Army Specialist Christopher Shore not guilty of third-degree murder, but guilty of the lesser charge.

Shore had blamed his platoon leader – charged with premeditated murder – for the 23 June killing.

Shore could face up to eight years in jail, a dishonourable discharge and a drop to the army’s lowest pay grade.

During the trial, he said he had been ordered to fire at the Iraqi by his platoon leader, Sgt Trey Corrales.

The Iraqi was suspected of firing at a US helicopter. Shore denied killing the man, saying he had intentionally missed him.

Sentencing will take place later on Wednesday.

Sgt Corrales will stand trial on 22 April.

February 23, 2008 – The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers expected a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined.

The cost of direct US military operations – not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans – already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion (that’s $5 million million, or £2.5 million million). With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese, the cost per troop (in today’s dollars) was less than $100,000 in 2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is costing upward of $400,000 per troop.

Most Americans have yet to feel these costs. The price in blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hired contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for it – in fact, taxes on the rich have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real even if they have been deferred, possibly to another generation.
Background

    * American voters must choose: more benefits or more defence

    * $3 trillion budget leaves little for Bush to bank on

    * MoD forced to cut budget by £1.5bn

    * They’re running our tanks on empty

On the eve of war, there were discussions of the likely costs. Larry Lindsey, President Bush’s economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they might reach $200 billion. But this estimate was dismissed as “baloney” by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, suggested that postwar reconstruction could pay for itself through increased oil revenues. Mitch Daniels, the Office of Management and Budget director, and Secretary Rumsfeld estimated the costs in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a portion of which they believed would be financed by other countries. (Adjusting for inflation, in 2007 dollars, they were projecting costs of between $57 and $69 billion.) The tone of the entire administration was cavalier, as if the sums involved were minimal.

Even Lindsey, after noting that the war could cost $200 billion, went on to say: “The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.” In retrospect, Lindsey grossly underestimated both the costs of the war itself and the costs to the economy. Assuming that Congress approves the rest of the $200 billion war supplemental requested for fiscal year 2008, as this book goes to press Congress will have appropriated a total of over $845 billion for military operations, reconstruction, embassy costs, enhanced security at US bases, and foreign aid programmes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the fifth year of the war draws to a close, operating costs (spending on the war itself, what you might call “running expenses”) for 2008 are projected to exceed $12.5 billion a month for Iraq alone, up from $4.4 billion in 2003, and with Afghanistan the total is $16 billion a month. Sixteen billion dollars is equal to the annual budget of the United Nations, or of all but 13 of the US states. Even so, it does not include the $500 billion we already spend per year on the regular expenses of the Defence Department. Nor does it include other hidden expenditures, such as intelligence gathering, or funds mixed in with the budgets of other departments.

Because there are so many costs that the Administration does not count, the total cost of the war is higher than the official number. For example, government officials frequently talk about the lives of our soldiers as priceless. But from a cost perspective, these “priceless” lives show up on the Pentagon ledger simply as $500,000 – the amount paid out to survivors in death benefits and life insurance. After the war began, these were increased from $12,240 to $100,000 (death benefit) and from $250,000 to $400,000 (life insurance). Even these increased amounts are a fraction of what the survivors might have received had these individuals lost their lives in a senseless automobile accident. In areas such as health and safety regulation, the US Government values a life of a young man at the peak of his future earnings capacity in excess of $7 million – far greater than the amount that the military pays in death benefits. Using this figure, the cost of the nearly 4,000 American troops killed in Iraq adds up to some $28 billion.

The costs to society are obviously far larger than the numbers that show up on the government’s budget. Another example of hidden costs is the understating of US military casualties. The Defence Department’s casualty statistics focus on casualties that result from hostile (combat) action – as determined by the military. Yet if a soldier is injured or dies in a night-time vehicle accident, this is officially dubbed “non combat related” – even though it may be too unsafe for soldiers to travel during daytime.

In fact, the Pentagon keeps two sets of books. The first is the official casualty list posted on the DOD website. The second, hard-to-find, set of data is available only on a different website and can be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act [as it was by Veterans for Common Sense]. This data shows that the total number of soldiers who have been wounded, injured, or suffered from disease is double the number wounded in combat. Some will argue that a percentage of these non-combat injuries might have happened even if the soldiers were not in Iraq. Our new research shows that the majority of these injuries and illnesses can be tied directly to service in the war.

From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending – and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.

From the beginning, the United Kingdom has played a pivotal role – strategic, military, and political – in the Iraq conflict. Militarily, the UK contributed 46,000 troops, 10 per cent of the total. Unsurprisingly, then, the British experience in Iraq has paralleled that of America: rising casualties, increasing operating costs, poor transparency over where the money is going, overstretched military resources, and scandals over the squalid conditions and inadequate medical care for some severely wounded veterans.

Before the war, Gordon Brown set aside £1 billion for war spending. As of late 2007, the UK had spent an estimated £7 billion in direct operating expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan (76 per cent of it in Iraq). This includes money from a supplemental “special reserve”, plus additional spending from the Ministry of Defence.

The special reserve comes on top of the UK’s regular defence budget. The British system is particularly opaque: funds from the special reserve are “drawn down” by the Ministry of Defence when required, without specific approval by Parliament. As a result, British citizens have little clarity about how much is actually being spent.

In addition, the social costs in the UK are similar to those in the US – families who leave jobs to care for wounded soldiers, and diminished quality of life for those thousands left with disabilities.

By the same token, there are macroeconomic costs to the UK as there have been to America, though the long-term costs may be less, for two reasons. First, Britain did not have the same policy of fiscal profligacy; and second, until 2005, the United Kingdom was a net oil exporter.

We have assumed that British forces in Iraq are reduced to 2,500 this year and remain at that level until 2010. We expect that British forces in Afghanistan will increase slightly, from 7,000 to 8,000 in 2008, and remain stable for three years. The House of Commons Defence Committee has recently found that despite the cut in troop levels, Iraq war costs will increase by 2 per cent this year and personnel costs will decrease by only 5 per cent. Meanwhile, the cost of military operations in Afghanistan is due to rise by 39 per cent. The estimates in our model may be significantly too low if these patterns continue.

Based on assumptions set out in our book, the budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs, the total impact on the UK will exceed £20 billion.

© Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, 2008. Extracted from The Three Trillion Dollar War, to be published by Allen Lane on February 28 (£20). Copies can be ordered for £18 with free delivery from The Times BooksFirst 0870 1608080.

Joseph Stiglitz was chief economist at the World Bank and won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2001. Linda Bilmes is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University