Veterans for Common Sense

December 28, 2007, CNN – The e-mail left me speechless. It was a posting from military.com forwarded to me by the good folks at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (militaryreligiousfreedom.org). There were two photos side by side. On the left: a photo of a Hamas suicide bomber in the familiar pose of a rifle in one hand and a Quran in the other. On the right: a photo from Fort Jackson, showing basic trainees at Campus Crusade for Christ’s “God’s Basic Training” Bible studies. The soldiers wielded rifles in one hand and Bibles in the other.

The caption reads, “Notice any similarities?” http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122107J.shtml

The photo of the Fort Jackson Army trainees originally appeared on a Campus Crusade website, along with photos of basic training battalion commander, Lt. Col. David Snodgrass, battalion chaplain, Maj. Scott Bullock-both posing in uniform-and Campus Crusade’s military director, Frank Bussey.

When I asked Mikey Weinstein, the head of the MRFF, about the photos he told me that religious endorsements by military personnel in uniform violate military regulations. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

He showed me two Campus Crusade for Christ promotional videos — one filmed at the U.S. Air Force Academy and another at Texas A&M. In the first one Scott Blom, the Academy’s Campus Crusade director at the time, openly states, “Our purpose for Campus Crusade for Christ at the Air Force Academy is to make Jesus Christ the issue at the Air Force Academy and around the world… [the cadets] are government paid missionaries when they leave here.”

The second video, “God and the Military,” filmed in 1997, has been re-released for distribution by Campus Crusade. In it, Pastor Tommy Nelson, speaking before an audience of Texas A&M cadets and military officers, opens his presentation with this anecdote:

“I, a number of years ago, was speaking at the University of North Texas – it happens to be my alma mater, up in Denton, Texas – and I was speaking to an ROTC group up there, and when I stepped in I said, ‘It’s good to be speaking to all you men and women who are in the ministry,’ and they all kind of looked at me, and I think they wondered if maybe I had found the wrong room, or if they were in the wrong room, and I assured them that I was speaking to men and women in the ministry, these that were going to be future officers.”

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been uncovering these kinds of blatant constitutional violations in the military for years. Weinstein told me that senior Bush administration intelligence officials who track Islamic websites and message boards told him that the fundamentalist Christian agenda surfacing in the U.S. military could lead to greater attacks against our soldiers. (Weinstein would not identify the intelligence officials he spoke with because they contacted him with the understanding they would not be named).

According to Weinstein, “The bottom line here is that the constitutionally mandated wall separating church and state in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, our U.S. Armed forces, is nothing but smoke and debris. This represents nothing short of a monumental internal national security threat to our country.”

We should all be asking ourselves whether we want to send soldiers or “government paid missionaries” to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once you know the answer to that question, I suggest you e-mail it to your Senator.

In Surprise Step, Bush Vows Veto of Military Bill

Brendan Daly, a spokesman for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said Friday evening that the House was reserving its right to schedule an override vote anyway, arguing that the president’s pocket veto was not legally viable.  Mr. Daly said House officials believed that, under their interpretation of the rules, Mr. Bush technically could not use his power to pocket veto the measure [while the Congress remains in session.] 

December 29, 2007, Crawford, Texas — For months President Bush harangued Democrats in Congress for not moving quickly enough to support the troops and for bogging down military bills with unrelated issues.

And then on Friday, with no warning, a vacationing Mr. Bush announced that he was vetoing a sweeping military policy bill because of an obscure provision that could expose Iraq’s new government to billions of dollars in legal claims dating to Saddam Hussein’s rule.

The decision left the Bush administration scrambling to promise that it would work with Congress to quickly restore dozens of new military and veterans programs once Congress returns to work in January.

Those included an added pay raise for service members, which would have taken effect on Tuesday, and improvements in veterans’ health benefits, which few elected officials on either side want to be seen opposing.

Mr. Bush’s veto surprised and infuriated Democratic lawmakers and even some Republicans, who complained that the White House had failed to raise its concerns earlier.

And it gave Democrats a chance to wield Mr. Bush’s support-the-troops oratory against him, which they did with relish.

“Only George Bush could be for supporting the troops before he was against it,” Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement, reworking a familiar Republican attack during his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004 that he supported the war in Iraq before he turned against it.

The veto was an embarrassment for administration officials, who struggled on Friday to explain why they had not acted earlier to object to the provision, Section 1083 of a 1,300-page, $696 billion military authorization bill. It would expand the ability of Americans to seek financial compensation from countries that supported or sponsored terrorist acts, including Libya, Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

It was unclear how the provision had been overlooked by White House lawyers. A senior administration official told reporters in a hastily arranged conference call that the bill’s consequences for Iraq came into “acute focus” only a week to 10 days ago — after Iraqi officials complained to the American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker. The White House said President Bush had recently spoken with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq about the consequences of the provision.

It was also an embarrassment for some in Congress, including Republican senators who sponsored the provision, like John Cornyn of Texas and Ted Stevens of Alaska. Republicans joined Democrats in overwhelmingly approving the broader military bill, but they backed the White House on Friday. Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, who led Republicans in drafting the military policy bill, said that he was now swayed by the administration’s arguments that it could endanger Iraq’s new government.

“The White House prepared a very detailed legal memorandum, and I am convinced that they are correct,” Mr. Warner said in a telephone interview.

While removing the provision would involve only a minor amendment, the veto could reopen many of the contentious issues that stalled the legislation’s approval in the first place, including efforts by Democrats to impose conditions on spending for the military operations in Iraq.

At a minimum, the veto will provoke a fight over an issue that was put into the legislation after no public debate. The Senate sponsor, Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, expressed strong support for the provision on Friday, saying it would help plaintiffs in lawsuits against Iran and Libya, including relatives of Americans killed in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and in the bombing of a Berlin disco in 1986.

“My language allows American victims of terror to hold perpetrators accountable — plain and simple,” said Mr. Lautenberg, who has long championed expanding legislation to let victims sue foreign governments.

In a “statement of disapproval,” or pocket veto that lets the bill expire on Dec. 31, Mr. Bush said that the provision could result in preliminary injunctions freezing Iraqi assets in American banks — $20 billion to $30 billion, according to a senior administration official — and even affect commercial ventures with American businesses.

He also warned that it was written to revive dormant legal claims, including a $959 million judgment won by American pilots who were prisoners of war during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The administration had declared the new government exempt from claims dating to Mr. Hussein’s government, which the United States overthrew in 2003.

“Exposing Iraq to such significant financial burdens would weaken the close partnership between the United States and Iraq during this critical period in Iraq’s history,” Mr. Bush said in his statement.

A senior administration official said, “The Iraqis certainly did raise very serious and strong concerns about this, which were confirmed as we really dived into this and gamed out the consequences.” The White House allowed the official to speak only if not identified.

Mr. Bush’s aides have already begun negotiations with Congress to remove the provision or rewrite it to exempt Iraq and enact the bill’s other provisions. The White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, and national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, spoke with Republican lawmakers in a conference call on Friday to explain the president’s decision and to build support for quick Congressional action next month, Mr. Warner said.

The White House also said it would make an added raise Congress approved for service members — a half-percent above the 3 percent increase that will take effect regardless — retroactive to Jan. 1, 2008, no matter when a final bill is approved.

The final military spending bill was adopted by overwhelming margins, 370 to 49 in the House and 90 to 3 in the Senate.

It was Mr. Bush’s eighth veto, an executive power he has used with greater frequency with Democrats in control of Congress. Because he used a pocket veto — allowing the legislation to expire 10 days after it was passed by the House — his decision cannot be overridden. Adding to the uncertainty, Brendan Daly, a spokesman for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said Friday evening that the House was reserving its right to schedule an override vote anyway, arguing that the president’s pocket veto was not legally viable.

Mr. Daly said House officials believed that, under their interpretation of the rules, Mr. Bush technically could not use his power to pocket veto the measure.

Still, Ms. Pelosi and the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, indicated that Democrats hoped to move swiftly to address the concerns of the White House and get the bill back to the president for his signature. The House returns on Jan. 15 and could send a revised version of the bill to the Senate by the time it returns a week later.

Some lawmakers accused the administration of siding with the Iraqi government over Americans who had suffered in terrorist attacks, a sensitive charge for a president who has made the fight against terrorism the central theme of his presidency.

“It is a shame,” Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement, “that the White House has taken this step to satisfy the demands of the Iraqi government for whom our troops have sacrificed so much.”

December 28, 2007, Official White House Press Release:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/12/20071228-3.html

White House Fact Sheet: National Defense Authorization Act Section 1083: A Danger to Iraq’s Progress

President Bush To Veto National Defense Authorization Act, Work With Congress To Quickly Pass Technical Fix To Protect U.S. Interests And Iraqi Assets
 
President Bush intends to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for FY08 (NDAA) because particular provisions included in the bill risk imposing financially devastating hardship on Iraq that will unacceptably interfere with the political and economic progress everyone agrees is critically important to bringing our troops home. Section 1083 of the NDAA amends the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which establishes rules on how foreign countries may be sued under U.S. law. The amendments would dramatically change these rules and potentially invite foreign governments to take reciprocal action allowing suits to proceed against the United States even for legitimate government activities. Among other things, Section 1083 would allow plaintiffs’ lawyers pursuing Iraq for Saddam-era acts of terrorism to freeze Iraq’s assets in the amount of damages claimed in their lawsuits, and would permit the relitigation of billions of dollars of lawsuits against Iraq that have already been dismissed by our courts. At the same time, by subjecting the democratically elected Government of Iraq to this liability, the provision would imperil billions of dollars of Iraqi assets at a crucial juncture in that Nation’s reconstruction efforts and undermine the foreign policy and commercial interests of the United States.

* The potential liability created by Section 1083 cannot be overstated – it could reach multiple billions of dollars and subject the Development Fund for Iraq and Iraq’s central bank reserves, which are both essential to building on security gains, to attachment and liens. The provision would tie up Iraqi assets in litigation, and would have a potentially devastating impact on the Government of Iraq with serious implications for U.S. troops in the field, which count on Iraqi funds to expand and equip the Iraqi Security Forces and provide an antidote to terrorists and insurgents. In particular, Section 1083 would:
* Allow Iraqi assets to be frozen solely upon the filing of a claim, up to the amount of plaintiffs’ lawyers claim in a lawsuit and before any court considers its merits.
* Expose both the assets of the Development Fund for Iraq and assets of the Central Bank of Iraq to attachment, potentially tying up tens of billions in core Iraqi assets while lawyers argue the merits of cases and the reasonableness of these actions in court.
* Permit the freezing of assets in commercial entities in which Iraq has an interest, potentially exposing partnerships between United States businesses and Iraqi national enterprises to attachment. Iraq would likely take its future business elsewhere.
* Overturn prior litigation victories for the new, democratically elected Government of Iraq in lawsuits for Saddam-era acts and allow lawyers to reopen and expand those cases.
* Authorize punitive damages against the new, democratically elected Government of Iraq for Saddam-era conduct and eliminate Iraq’s ability to assert standard legal defenses normally available to defendants in United States courts.
* Hold the democratically elected Government of Iraq, a friend and ally of the United States, liable in U.S. Courts for the crimes and atrocities of the Saddam Hussein regime.
* Once in place, the restrictions on Iraq’s funds that could result from the bill could take months to lift, and thus Section 1083 cannot become law even for a short period of time.
* The Administration is working with Congress to fix the flawed provision as soon as possible after Congress returns in January. While the Administration objected to many provisions in the NDAA, and continues to have concerns about the bill’s effects on U.S. commercial ventures in other countries, the President is vetoing the NDAA because of the threat that Section 1083 poses to Iraq. With modifications that fix this provision, the President would sign a new bill into law.
* The President will act quickly with Congress to ensure the full military pay raise provided by the NDAA will go into effect as quickly as possible. The NDAA includes authorization for a 0.5 percent additional pay raise for U.S. troops, on top of the 3 percent increase that will go into effect on January 1 without the NDAA. As soon as possible upon Congress’ return, the Administration will work with Congress to enact the NDAA adjusted in a manner that protects Iraqi interests in the United States and ensures that the additional pay raise for our troops is retroactive to January 1.

December 20, 2007 – Craig Unger, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, garnered national attention with his previous book, House of Bush, House of Saud. Michael Moore cited it as a key source for Fahrenheit 9/11, and the film popularized the author’s reports on Saudi investments in Bush family enterprises. In The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future, Unger turns his attention to neoconservative officials and theorists. At times he focuses so closely on neocon tactics that he misses other forces driving Bush-Cheney policies. Even so, the book offers a vivid account of the use of disinformation to promote extremism. You can check more book reviews at Mossgreen Childrens Books.

Unger traces the origins of Bush’s foreign policy to the 1970s, when prominent bureaucrats and writers gathered around such converts to conservatism as Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. The neocons scored their first big success in 1976, when two of their allies in President Ford’s administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, created a group outside the CIA to assess the Soviet threat. That panel, dubbed Team B, was staffed by neocon worthies and led by Richard Pipes of Harvard University. One of the group’s advisers was a Wohlstetter protege named Paul Wolfowitz.

Team B concluded that the CIA had vastly underestimated Soviet power and that supporters of detente were merely assisting the Kremlin’s drive for world domination. It was an imaginative assessment, given that the economy of the USSR was crippled and its military infrastructure was suffering—as CIA officers pointed out. Pipes’s group held, for instance, that the USSR had probably deployed a top-secret antisubmarine system, even though U.S. intelligence had found no credible evidence of such a program. As Unger writes, “The absence of evidence, [Team B] reasoned, merely proved how secretive the Soviets were!” It was a bold preemptive attack on fact and logic.

Team B’s creativity went unrewarded in the short term, as Jimmy Carter won the presidency that year. But Ronald Reagan would use the panel’s report to justify his enormous military buildup (and consequent budget deficits) in the 1980s, and in the ’90s Team B alumni and followers took aim at the Clinton administration’s Middle East policy. In 1996 a group of neocons led by Richard Perle produced a policy statement, “A Clean Break,” that prescribed military action to remove anti-Israel governments like Saddam Hussein’s. When George W. Bush entered office, flanked by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, it became a blueprint for war.

Unger is at his best in these early chapters, where he convincingly links neocon biases to the Republicans’ most disastrous policies. He gleans a thicket of reports and think-tank papers to reveal that the Bush administration’s claims about Iraqi weapons programs followed the same pattern as Team B’s exaggeration of Soviet power in the 1970s. Likewise, many of the administration’s rosy projections for post-Saddam Iraq originated with the authors of “A Clean Break.” In 1999 one of them, David Wurmser, stated that Iraq’s Shiite majority “can be expected to present a challenge to Iran’s influence” instead of aligning with Iran. Wurmser offered no factual support for his claim, but wrote that his thinking had been “guided” by his ideological allies, such as Ahmed Chalabi. By that point, Unger writes, “the neocon echo chamber had begun to rely on itself to reinforce its own myths.”

Four and a half years into the Iraq war, the price of upholding those myths is rising. The president and vice president appear smitten by the idea of air strikes against Iran. Unger cites Philip Giraldi, a former CIA specialist in counterterrorism, who argued that in the case of Iran, Bush officials were “using the same dance steps—demonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux.”

Describing three decades of right-wing gambits, Unger paints a stunning portrait of arrogance and duplicity. The Fall of the House of Bush may be the definitive group biography of the neocons. But he makes a few missteps when the story moves beyond that group. For instance, he calls President Bush a “genuine born-again Christian,” despite finding evidence that the president’s professions of faith are as cynical as anything Team B ever presented. Bush maintains that Billy Graham converted him to evangelical Christianity in 1985, but Graham has disagreed with that and so has Mickey Herskowitz, a ghostwriter of Bush’s 1999 autobiography.

Herskowitz told Unger that Bush couldn’t recall the details of his 1985 meeting with Graham and replied negatively when Herskowitz asked him whether Graham had said something like, “Have you gotten right with God?” (Herskowitz was “stunned” by the book’s account of Bush’s conversation with the minister.) “Witnessing” about your relationship with Christ is a key element of evangelicalism. Lying about your conversion experience for electoral gain is just about the last thing a sincere evangelical would do.

Unger also underplays the importance of oil-industry leaders, including his previous subjects, the Saudis. In his 2006 book Armed Madhouse, journalist Greg Palast writes about a 2000 report by the Joint Task Force on Petroleum, cosponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute (named for and headed by Bush I’s secretary of state). The panel, which included oil execs as well as foreign-policy specialists, complained that Iraq was a “swing producer” of oil, with a propensity to “manipulate oil markets.”

Saddam Hussein had a history of abruptly suspending and restarting oil production. In fact, he interrupted petroleum exports for 12 days the month the task force began its work. His tactics undermined efforts by the oil companies and Saudi-dominated OPEC to control the price of crude. An earlier assessment by the Baker Institute put it this way: “In a market with so little cushion to cover unexpected events, oil prices become extremely sensitive to perceived supply risks. Such a market increases the potential leverage of an otherwise lesser producer such as Iraq.” For its part the task force recommended “an immediate policy review toward Iraq,” including military options. Palast says Cheney got its report early in 2001, and its economic considerations may have provided the strongest impetus for war.

Likewise, the Saudis have played a large role in developing Bush’s aggressive approach toward Iran and Shiite Muslims throughout the Middle East. (Saudi rulers are Sunnis.) Bush and his aides choose to blame Iran for the disaster in Iraq, even though it’s the Sunnis who’ve inflicted the majority of casualties on U.S. troops. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh has reported that the administration has joined the Saudis in providing clandestine support to Sunni extremists in Lebanon and Syria. The president hopes these Sunni militias will attack Iran’s allies and not America’s, even though some of those receiving aid have ideological affinities with Al Qaeda. It’s an astonishing policy, completely at odds with the lessons of 9/11 and battlefield realities in Iraq. That contradiction is the best indicator of the House of Saud’s continuing grip on Bush-Cheney foreign policy. The administration’s close ties with the Saudi royals demonstrate that there are limits to the influence of the neocons, many of whom advocate regime change in Saudi Arabia.

Bush and his aides cite Iran’s nuclear capability as justification for air strikes. But Hersh has reported that American intelligence thinks Iran won’t have the ability to produce a warhead until sometime between 2010 and 2015. And according to an intelligence estimate released December 3, the country shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003. These assessments appear to have done little to deter the administration’s drive toward confrontation. “Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” said President Bush in response to the new intelligence estimate. “What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”

Rate highest for female troops, enlisted personnel.

December 23, 2007 – When Maria Braman’s marriage ended shortly after she joined the Army, she had trouble finding anyone to whom she could relate.

That was in 1989. There were only two women in her unit. “And the other girl was single,” Braman recalled, “so there was nobody really to talk to.”

The Army’s a different place now. And Braman said younger female soldiers often come to her to talk when their marriages are in crisis.

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It’s no secret that the current, frenetic pace of extended duty and war-related deployments have been tough on military members and their families. But an analysis of Pentagon data shows the suffering has not been shared equally. Female troops divorce at rates several times higher than their male counterparts. And enlisted service members end their marriages substantially more often than officers.

The gaps are significant. And growing.

A startling spike

When Joe Lappi’s marriage fell apart during his tour of duty in Iraq, he didn’t need to look far to find an empathetic ear: His roommate was also going through a divorce, as were many other soldiers from the young officer’s Utah National Guard unit.

The marital problems faced by Lappi and other Army officers in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq were a wake-up call for military officials.

More than 27,000 service members filed for divorce in 2004 – a 44 percent increase over 2001.

The 2004 spike was startling to those who monitor the well-being of U.S. troops. “That’s when we really started paying attention to divorce rates as an indicator of the overall health of the Army,” said Peter Frederich, the family ministries officer at the Army’s Chief of Chaplains Office.

While the data showed increases in divorce in nearly all segments of the military that year, the spike was led by a threefold rise in the number of Army officers, like Lappi, whose marriages had come to an end.

The Army quickly responded with a barrage of new resources and programs aimed at weathering deployment woes and shoring up rocky relationships. Since then, the number of divorces among Army officers has averaged about 1,200 a year, and officials now call the spike an anomaly. Indeed, taking 2004 out of the equation, divorces among Army officers have been relatively unchanged since 2001.

“We saw it come back down in 2005 and 2006 and said ‘all right, that’s good,’ ” said Frederich.

But Frederich said that as he and others continued to study the data, they grew less content.

“We all said, ‘wait a minute – what about these women?’ ” Frederich said. “I’ll be honest, I don’t think we were really tuned into this until last year.”

‘A nice image’

Even before the post-2001 increase in divorces, Pentagon statistics show, female service members were twice as likely to divorce as their male counterparts.

But while the rate of divorce among males has increased gradually in the past six years, the rate among women has skyrocketed. By September of 2007, female soldiers were filing for divorce at a rate three times greater than the Army’s men.

Army officials say they are in the process of commissioning a study to investigate the issue. But Frederich, who has led a number of focus groups on the topic, said some common themes already have emerged.

Though married women make up about 6 percent of the military, “we still don’t have a really good image of what a military husband is,” Frederich said. “There’s a definite narrative to the Army wife: She’s Meg Ryan with three kids, watching her man go off to war. She’s pretty tough herself – independent – but she loves him. That’s a nice image.”

But husbands of military wives, Frederich said, have a very vague social image. “Almost by definition, civilian husbands are isolated,” he said.

He noted that support groups for military spouses are dominated by civilian women, who often choose to get together over activities more geared toward their gender. He said men tend to see their careers as less mobile than women do – a major obstacle for nomadic military families. And when female soldiers go off to war, “their husbands know they’re going to be immersed in this testosterone-filled environment . . . and that’s a breeding ground for resentment,” Frederich said.

Harking on her conversations with younger female soldiers, Braman added some other common problems. She said civilian husbands often don’t understand why their military wives have to work long hours at odd times – sometimes for months at a time and often on a moment’s notice.

And female soldiers married to male soldiers often complain that their spouses are jealous – not of their relationships with other soldiers, but of their rank. “Very few males in the military can handle a female going up in rank faster than they do,” Braman said.

Though Frederich said a 10 percent annual divorce rate, “is still a 90 percent success rate” for married military women, “that’s not good enough.”

He’s hoping the Army study will help shed light on the issue – and point to some solutions.

“Women need to know that one of the costs of serving their country is not losing their families,” he said.

Marriage, divorce ‘gap’

Though less pronounced, the gap in the divorce rates of enlisted service members and commissioned officers also is widening.

While the number of divorcing officers fell drastically following the 2004 spike, the number of divorcing enlisted soldiers has continued to rise. More noncommissioned soldiers ended their marriages last year than at any time since 2001.

Utah National Guard chaplain Gerald White expressed surprise at the difference in male and female divorce rates. But he said the enlisted-officer divide is well known to people in his line of work.

Enlisted soldiers tend to have less life experience when they join the military, White said, and might rush into marriage unprepared for the challenges ahead.

In a report published earlier this year, David Popenoe of the National Marriage Project observed “the growth of a marriage and divorce ‘gap’ between differently educated segments of the population.” Those who have completed college – around a quarter of the population, Popenoe wrote – divorce at a rate much lower than less-educated persons.

Frederich said that holds true for the military, too. “The key difference between enlisted and officers, at least at the start, is college,” he said.

But while the average level of education among Americans has been on the rise for decades – pulling with it the rate of successful marriages, demographers say – the past six years have seen a precipitous drop in the level of education among newly enlisted military personnel, as military officials have lowered educational standards to counter recruitment problems.

The Army’s goal is for 90 percent of its new recruits to have high school diplomas, but it hasn’t met that mark since 2004. Last year, just 73 percent of its recruits were high school graduates.

December 27, 2007 – The Times (London) Washington correspondent, Sarah Baxter, reporting with a summary of the developments in the case involving the CIA’s destruction of recordings of the treatment of Abu Zabaydah, points to the growing belief in Washington that President Bush viewed the torture tapes. Baxter reports:

It emerged yesterday that the CIA had misled members of the 9-11 Commission by not disclosing the existence of the tapes, in potential violation of the law. President George W Bush said last week he could not recall learning about the tapes before being briefed about them on December 6 by Michael Hayden, the CIA director. “It looks increasingly as though the decision was made by the White House,” said Johnson. He believes it is “highly likely” that Bush saw one of the videos, as he was interested in Zubaydah’s case and received frequent updates on his interrogation from George Tenet, the CIA director at the time.

It has emerged that the CIA did preserve two videotapes and an audiotape of detainee interrogations conducted by a foreign government, which may have been relevant to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Al-Qaeda conspirator. The CIA told a federal judge in 2003 that no such recordings existed but has now retracted that testimony. One of the tapes could show the interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, a September 11 conspirator, who was allegedly handed to Jordan for questioning.

In this regards, the sequence of statements out of the White House is extremely revealing. It started with firm denials, then went silent and then pulled back rather sharply to a “President Bush has no present recollection of having seen the tapes.” This is a formulation frequently used to avoid perjury charges, a sort of way of saying “no” without really saying “no.” In between these statements, two more things unfolded that have a bearing on the question.

The New York Times squarely placed four White House lawyers in the middle of the decision about whether to destroy the tapes—Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Bellinger and Harriet Miers. It also reported that at least one of them was strongly advocating destruction. Suspicion immediately fell on the principle mover in support of torture, David Addington.

Second, John Kiriakou clarified his statements about the purpose for which the tapes were made. It was to brief higher ups about the process of the interrogation. Reports persist that one “higher-up” in particular had a special strong interest in knowing the details of the Abu Zubaydah case. His name is George W. Bush.

Are Bush’s denials that he has seen the torture tapes really credible? I don’t think so. And having seen them, the interest in their destruction would be equally fierce, which helps account for the involvement of the White House’s four most senior lawyers in the process. No doubt about it. The White House desperately wants to scapegoat some CIA people over this. (Laura Rozen’s article “Operation Stop Talking” is the best treatment so far of this phenomenon, which finds its best current expression in the effort to “get” John Kiriakou). But the trail leads to the White House, and that is clearly where the decision was taken. It will be interesting to see the techniques used by the Justice Department to obscure all of this. At this point, no one who’s tracked Justice Department antics over the past six years is anticipating anything but a crude cover-up.

December 16, 2007 – One morning last winter, the war showed up on Kathy Berry’s front porch.

It was just past 6 a.m., not quite dawn, when two soldiers in green dress uniforms passed by the patriotic bunting trimming her south Wichita home.

Awakened by the doorbell, Berry thought it was her son-in-law, who had just left for work. He probably had forgotten his keys. But when she opened the door, the chill she felt had little to do with the season’s early dark.

The solemn-faced National Guard officers stepped inside.

“How bad?” she asked.

They hesitated. And Berry knew.

“There was a mortar attack,” one said. “A response team was sent out, and there was one fatality.”

Berry rocked slowly on the couch, her face in hands, weeping uncontrollably.

Her husband, Staff Sgt. David Berry, was that one fatality, killed by a particularly deadly roadside bomb. It happened 13 hours earlier and half a world away, but the shock wave reverberated around Wichita and a good part of Kansas on Feb. 22, 2007. Small towns like Derby, Hillsboro and Wellington would all come to know bad news about their National Guardsmen serving in Iraq; Clearwater and Lancaster would, as well. It is still being felt today.

Lives were disrupted, bodies broken and dreams shattered, and those linked to Berry’s unit — soldier and family member alike — took the hit. Troops in active duty units come from all over the country, but a National Guard unit is a microcosm of home.

“We’re all small-town people,” explained Berry’s stepdaughter, Holli Gill.

“Just family.”

—

Berry was part of Battery B — known as Bravo — of the 1st Battalion, 161st Field Artillery out of Pratt and Kingman.

The 37-year-old foundry worker was well-liked and respected as a squad leader. In 2003, he won the Soldier’s Medal, the country’s highest peacetime award for valor, after saving an unconscious man from a burning pickup truck.

“I think who he was as a man … didn’t allow him any other course of action,” Sgt. David Mugg said of his friend at a memorial service in Iraq.

Berry was close to his comrades. His family knew many of them as well. When he led a patrol, they had a good idea who was with him.

In that sad Wichita living room, they pleaded with the officers to tell them, who else?

Of Bravo’s 127 men, death had chosen Berry that morning on a dark road 60 miles south of Baghdad. But for several chaotic, terrible minutes, it seemed it could have its pick.

Blood had clogged the throat of Berry’s oldest friend; his face had been shattered and his aorta lacerated.

“I knew I wasn’t going to see my wife again, my kids…” Staff Sgt. Jerrod Hays would recall of his desperation in trying to breathe. “I was never going to see Kansas again.”

Medics had worked frantically on the men pulled out of Berry’s Humvee. Shrapnel had destroyed part of Spc. Johnny Jones’ skull. The leg of Spc. Peter Richert had been severed except for a few tendons.

“The first one went off near the Hummer ahead of them, the second one came through the back door of their Hummer and got Richert and Hays,” said Jones’ wife, Laura. “The third one, that’s when they got David and John.”

The war had caught up with them all. Spc. Tyler Wing, 23, of Kingman, who drove up on the scene, said that when he joined the Guard, “What I knew about war was what I found in the movies.

“But you see dead bodies, blown-up trucks, you smell that smell, you realize what’s going on around you.”

—

As word of their fate rippled through south-central Kansas, routine things, making lunch and dusting furniture, suddenly became freighted with an infinite sadness. An otherwise normal day was now a point of demarcation.

“We’ve grown up with them,” said Maj. Gen. Tod M. Bunting, the Kansas adjutant general. “You know all their families, you know their hometowns, and everybody in that hometown considers them to be their soldier.”

In a regular Army outfit, you won’t find three sets of brothers, like in Bravo. Some of their mothers met monthly for dinner to share news and companionship.

The unit was led by an eighth-grade science teacher and football coach.

Its ranks were filled with blue-collar workers and college men, like Richert, a 23-year-old physical education major at Tabor College in his hometown, Hillsboro.

The youngest was 20, the oldest, 43. Some were single, some were married. There were children in law school; Richert had an infant daughter he’d never seen.

Hays, 38, from Wellington, met Berry in ninth grade in Anthony, and they had been fast friends ever since. They worked together at the iron foundry in Norwich. He once dated Holli.

Jones, 35, a Derby refrigeration technician for Farmland Foods, was also a friend.

“Well, throw my name in the hat,” he’d told them about going to Iraq. “Y’all ain’t going nowhere without me.”

— 

“The thing that you do not want to hear on a moonless security patrol in south-central Iraq is a panicked policeman shouting: “Ali Baba!

“Ali Baba everywhere!”

To Bravo, it was one more bad omen on a night with too many already.

“After you’re there for a while, you know what’s normal and what’s not,” said Wing. “Right off the bat, we’re getting warning signs that something’s up.”

Things started on the wrong foot when a “Secret Squirrel mission” in nearby Ash-Shumali had to be scrubbed at the last minute. The plan had been to pick up a bombmaker responsible for an IED — improvised explosive device — attack on a patrol weeks earlier.

That one had been a close call for Spc. Curtis Turpin, who walked away with only a concussion and scratches.

Bravo had trained for the mission all that day and night. Geared up, trucks fueled, an Iraqi SWAT team standing by, the men were getting antsy. But the snitch supposed to follow the bombmaker had lost him in the town of several thousand.

Finally the mission was called off. But since the squads were prepped, command decided to send some out on “presence patrol.”

The squads were known as Assassin 2-2 and Assassin 2-3, each with three Humvees, generally four soldiers per truck. Bravo normally patrolled in the morning and at night. The last-minute, six-hour assignment triggered grumbling, and a nagging sense of unease.

“It was kind of an odd time to go,” said Spc. Travis Waltner, from Wichita and one of Berry’s squad. “It was put together real quick. You got a feeling that something was just not right.”

Jones slid behind the wheel in Berry’s vehicle. Up above, Richert checked the M-240 machine gun poking out of the turret.

And then Hays tossed his gear in the back. As an assistant platoon leader, he normally didn’t ride with Berry, his old buddy. He could have sacked out. But this mission seemed a little like a “bum rap.”

“If you guys have to be out, I’ll be out. There’s no reason for me to sleep because everybody’s bone tired.”

It was typical Hays.

“He’s a guy you want to be like,” said Staff Sgt. Mike Seefeld, 26, who climbed into another of the 2-2 Humvees. He wasn’t a Kansan, but a member of the Wisconsin National Guard assigned to Bravo.

“He would give you the shirt off his back and take the time to teach you something. He’s just a man’s man.”

Outside the gate, the squads split up, with squad 2-3 going to Ash-Shumali about five miles east. The town felt creepy. Not a single light was on. Then a patrolling Iraqi police car saw the Americans and flipped on its siren as some kind of message. To them? Who knew?

The squad drove on, but increasingly uneasy. “Keep your eyes open,” the radio warned.

Assassin 2-2 rejoined them at a suspiciously undermanned police checkpoint outside of the town. They were there when command called to report that their base, Convoy Support Center Scania, was under mortar and rocket attack.

Told to look for the launchers, the squads headed west.

The barrage on the base stopped, then soon started up again. Spc. John Duncan, a 2-3 gunner, saw the flashes through his night goggles.

“Hey man, it looks like they’re hitting the base!” the 21-year-old University of Kansas student shouted to the others. “I’m counting. That’s five, that’s six…”

—

The first barrage, around 12:30 a.m., provoked little concern. Mortar attacks, probably by local Shiite insurgents, were pretty common. Only three had ever hit inside the compound in the time Bravo had been there. These missed, too.

“Another evening where it was business as usual,” said Capt. Sean Herbig, 40, commander of the 161st and a middle school science teacher and football coach from Sublette. “We had patrols out and route security out. It wasn’t anything for us to get mortared.”

After half an hour, the all-clear signal sounded, and everyone left the safety of the bunkers and went back to what they’d been doing.

Sgt. Michael Miller, 43, of Lancaster was among them. A steelworker at a castings plant in Atchison, he had served on active duty and in the reserves before joining the Guard.

“Ever since 9/11, I just wanted to get back in,” Miller said. “I got tired of watching young kids get hurt. They need to be in school. Then what happens? I get hurt.”

He was in the latrine when suddenly the plywood walls and PVC piping exploded into a fusillade of flying daggers. One found him, and the impact slammed Miller to the ground.

“It just felt like somebody had hit you in the back of the leg with a sledgehammer.”

His leg felt on fire. Shrapnel had almost cleanly torn the calf muscle away from his leg.

“We need to get you out of here!” shouted a soldier.

They huddled by the doorway as another round hit. Angry and wanting revenge, he told a medic to just wrap duct tape around his wound so he could grab a gun and go after the enemy. The medic poured iodine on it, instead.

“That’s a new level of pain for me,” Miller said. “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t have my weapon because I probably would have shot the doctor right there.”

Sgt. 1st Class Lloyde Mattix had just finished accounting for all of 2nd Platoon after the first barrage when the second thundered.

“I didn’t hear the one that landed on top of me,” he said. “I saw the flash before I heard the bang. It was like the biggest flashbulb you’ve ever seen.”

Mattix, 42, was an electrician at https://www.electricianperth.net.au/blog/ who had served on nuclear submarines in the Navy. He joined the Guard after being out of the service for five years. His family wasn’t thrilled about Iraq, but he said his wife knew “that’s who I am, that if I hadn’t gone or refused to go, I wouldn’t be the person she married.”

Now his legs refused to get off the barracks floor. Shrapnel had sliced into his legs and hip.

“I’m hit!” Mattix yelled.

Spc. Simon Makovec, a 23-year-old mechanical engineer from Ramona, heard his cry. In Army shorts and flip-flops, he carried his sergeant over his shoulder to a bunker. That’s when he discovered that his leg was bleeding, too. The wound would not require evacuation for surgery like the others.

Shrapnel also gouged a 3-inch-deep gash in Turpin’s abdomen.

“They let us have our siren go off for the all-clear … and started again,” the 34-year-old truck driver from Derby said ruefully. “They knew what our signal was to get out of our bunkers. We’ve talked about it among ourselves. All they’ve got to do is just pay attention.”

Seven rounds found their mark inside the compound that night. They knocked out some of the power, broke water pipes and smashed some buildings.

Amid the smoke and shouting, medics patched up the wounded, then put them on choppers for a military hospital in Baghdad. Meanwhile, beyond the gates, two squads of Kansas Guardsmen warily navigated the darkness.

Bravo’s bad night was far from over.

Iraq casualties

Nearly 4,000 American troops have been killed in Iraq since the fighting began. The number of wounded is approaching 30,000.

On the day David Berry was killed, three others died as well. Of the 10 fatalities from Kansas since the start of the war, nine were from the Kansas National Guard.

About this series

This story was constructed from dozens of interviews with the soldiers of Bravo Battery and family members who were involved with the events of Feb. 22, 2007. The Star’s Washington correspondent, David Goldstein, talked to the wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and visited several of their hometowns for interviews. The quotes are those recalled later by the participants after they returned home from Iraq.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE SERIES:  http://www.kansascity.com/bravobattery/story/405431.html

December 25, 2007 – Army infantry Sgt. Wally Fanene’s sister calls him “the face of who came back from the Iraq war,” a reminder of the savagery confronting American troops daily.

Fanene, while on foot patrol in Kirkuk in September, stepped on a fist-size land mine, heard a pinging noise and temporarily went deaf from an explosion that tore off his right arm and leg and seriously injured his remaining limbs.

The 25-year-old Temecula man’s fight today is to rebuild himself as completely as possible, regain as much as he can — to surf, pick a nickel out of his pocket, change his daughter’s diaper, resume his Army career as a weapons instructor.

With the assistance of a new rehabilitation center at Naval Hospital-San Diego, it’s a war Fanene says he intends to win. AHC is a world-class de-addiction center offering unique recovery experience in Holistic healing for substance abusers.

The $4.4 million Comprehensive Combat Casualty Care Center — C5, for short — opened in 2006 and provides the latest treatments and prosthetic devices for amputees. The new center means soldiers, sailors, Air Force personnel and Marines who live in the West won’t have to move from family and friends to rehabilitate their injuries at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio or Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Fanene’s father, Lynn, calls the center a “godsend” and attributes his son’s progress to being so close to home.

“We’re a hop, skip and a jump away from San Diego,” Lynn Fanene said. “We can provide all the emotional help he needs.”

In the 15 months since opening, the center has evaluated and treated 34 amputees, fitting many with prosthetic limbs, providing them the physical and mental-health therapy that’s part of any successful recovery. It also helps those who can’t return to service to forge civilian careers.

All told, about 725 American military personnel have lost limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Computer-assisted composite material prosthetics are helping service members learn to walk again, to run, swim, lift weights and play basketball and volleyball.

C-5 staff members say the prosthetics make some amputees resemble 21st century bionic men and women.

Jennifer Town, C-5 program director, said the goal is to return the superbly conditioned young military service members to the active lives they led before their injuries.

“They don’t want people to feel sorry for them,” Town said.

Indeed, Town said, Fanene’s attitude is off the charts and that his dream of continuing in the Army is not just possible, but probable. Many wounded veterans have returned in training roles.

Talk to Fanene and no hint of bitterness or pity enters the conversation.

“I don’t feel upset at all,” Fanene said. “I joined the military knowing full well this was possible. The infantry is the Army. We are the working parts and I wanted that experience.”

Family Support

Fanene’s wife and family have journeyed with him since his injury.

Lynn, a Temecula police officer and Navy veteran who served in Vietnam, bathed Wally in the early days after he was wounded, and found helping his son to be therapeutic. He said he’d rather struggle to help Wally shower than stand over his casket.

His mother and sisters say they are ecstatic because they can hug Wally and he can return the embrace.

No more deployments in war zones for him, said his sister, D’Lynn Fanene-Gascon.

“There’s no burden for us,” she said. “We’re happy because he’ll be here to make more memories with us as a family. So many others have died. We wanted him to make it home. He’s made it home.”

These days, Fanene and his wife, Scarlet, and 9-month-old daughter Nalia walk the block or so to a neighborhood park in San Diego’s Sierra Mesa neighborhood, where active-duty military personnel reside. He comes home to Temecula every weekend.

“He’s a very positive person who sees the glass as half full,” said Scarlet Fanene, 26, who met her future husband when both were students at Temecula Valley High School.

Terror in Iraq

Fanene drove trucks in Alaska before putting on the uniform.

He completed a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. He and Scarlet married May 20, 2006, right before his outfit, the 25th Infantry Division, deployed to Iraq.

Fanene frequently patrolled in and around Baqouba and Kirkuk, missions that he loved — “I got the chance to play G.I. Joe,” he said. But it left him mentally drained. Ambushes and house searches were particularly stressful, Fanene said, and he often smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes to take the edge off.

On Sept, 8, while on another foot patrol in Kirkuk, Fanene said he spotted someone running from a house. He knelt on a landmine known as a “toe popper,” the kind designed to maim. It detonated when he stepped off the pressure-sensitive device.

Fanene said he never lost consciousness. He looked down, saw his left leg shredded and the right one gone. The blast blew off part of his left pinky and left him with ugly purple, raised scars on his left leg and arm.

Phantom pain persists, like needles being shoved into his missing limbs. He quit taking the powerful painkillers, instead preferring to “gut out” the hurt rather than risk addiction.

Doctors operated in Iraq, Germany and at Walter Reed. On Oct. 1, three weeks after he was wounded, Fanene took his first steps on a prosthetic leg.

A-OK Attitude

His gait has improved since then.

Fanene wears his leg up to six hours at a time, far more than the two hours in the weeks after receiving the injuries. He can shave and hold a fork and brush his teeth with his prosthetic arm, all abilities he had to re-acquire. His prosthetic leg includes a “power knee” that can swing freely or provide more resistance, depending on whether Fanene is walking up a hill or running. Sensors in the knee let orthopedic specialists know via computer whether it is operating at maximum efficiency.

Temecula residents raised $40,000 for a new, specially adapted Chevy Tahoe for him to tool around town in. He received it Monday.

In a year, he hopes to return to surfing at Hawaii’s North Shore, just like he used to when he was a kid.

In a brilliant essay about the prophetic words of Sebastian Haffner, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern warns us with the wisdom of James Madison: “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations…. The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”  Veterans for Common Sense highly recommends reading McGovern’s essay, and we strongly suggest that Americans promptly read two critical books, “The Meaning of Hitler” and “Defying Hitler,” to understand that the greatest threat ever posed to our Constitutional freedoms comes from within our Nation.

Editorial Column: Creeping Fascism – Lessons From the Past

“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater…Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”

These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account.  His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).  The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.”

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth.  She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America…this is almost unbelievable.”

More about Haffner below.  Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”

Goebbels Would be Proud

It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.  The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.

In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen’s book, “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer.  It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’ trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print.  (The Times’ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”)

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005.  Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times.  The truth would out; part of it, at least.

Glitches

There were some embarrassing glitches.  For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag.  So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt (D-N.J.) that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.

Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after The Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”  But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan) apparently found Holt’s scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.

What followed struck me as bizarre.  The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense.  Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon.  On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Committee on the Judiciary.

Bush Takes Frontal Approach

Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so.  The president also said:

“Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.”

On Dec. 19, 2005 then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program.  Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.”  He answered:

“We have had discussions with Congress…as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”

Hmm.  Impossible?  It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the “Patriot Act” in record time.  James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: “In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America.”  It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn’t have a prayer for passage.

It turns out we didn’t know the half of it.

What To Call These Activities

“Illegal Surveillance Program” didn’t seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks.  It took six weeks to settle on “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself.  This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president’s rhetoric on Dec. 17:

“In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations…. The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem…”[emphasis added]

And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president.  At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant.  “I had to make this personal decision in early Oct. 2001,” said Hayden, “it was a personal decision…I could not not do this.”

Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11.  But we now know…

It Started Seven Months Before 9/11

How many times have you heard it?  The mantra “after 9/11 everything changed” has given absolution to all manner of sin.

We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent.  After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001.  Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home, as well?

Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News  and court documents and testimony in a case involving Qwest Communications strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans.  Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.

So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking.  It had to do with us.  We know that the Democrats who were briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA).  May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?

It is an important question.  Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?

Are They All Complicit?

And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations—AT&T and Verizon—who made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution?  (Qwest, to it’s credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)

What’s going on here?  Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake?  Lately the adjective “spineless” has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats—no offense to invertebrates.

Nazis and Those Who Enable Them

You don’t have to be a Nazi.  You can just be, well, a sheep.

In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933.  Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”

But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation.  Do you see any contemporary parallels here?

In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote.  Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power.

Haffner adds: “It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.”

The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers—“for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.”  In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.

The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship.

As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists:  “Oh God,” writes Haffner, “what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward…. They went along with everything:  the terror, the persecution of Jews…. They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.”

In sum: “There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle.  There was only panic, flight, and desertion.  In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis.  Overnight they found themselves without leaders…At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…. The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.”

This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.

Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations…. The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We cannot say we weren’t warned.

December 23, 2007 – Soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly running afoul of the law, bringing the stress of war to Colorado Springs’ streets.

Most of it is small-time stuff. But some of the allegations against soldiers in the past three years have been serious. This month, police said a crime ring of Fort Carson Iraq war veterans was responsible for the deaths of two GIs.

The volume of military-related crime off-post is beginning to tax civilian law enforcement authorities. Felony El Paso County jail bookings for service members have jumped from 295 in 2005 to 471 so far this year. During that time, the number of soldiers assigned to the post stayed about the same, around 17,500.

“It doesn’t take a study to know the potential for problems is going to be there,” said Colorado Springs police Sgt. Jeff Jensen, whose agency is girding for issues with nearly 4,000 soldiers due back in the next three weeks. “It’s huge. It affects us from all standpoints. The workload alone is increasing as the population increases.”

Commanders at Fort Carson acknowledge that soldiers coming home from a year in combat often have difficulty fitting into the society they went to Iraq or Afghanistan to defend.

It’s hard to turn off some of the reactions that will save your life in combat, but
which will lead to grief in a bar, said Nate Nugin, who oversees Fort Carson training programs for returning soldiers.

“It’s just about understanding they are back and what was necessary for them to do in the theater of operations doesn’t translate well back here,” Nugin said as he oversaw five days of mandatory classes for soldiers who returned last week from Iraq with Fort Carson’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team.

The Army has experienced increases in some types of crime on post that aren’t included in El Paso County statistics.

Last year, for instance, reports of thefts and domestic violence climbed over past years. This year, commanders point to some promising statistics, including a decline in drunken driving arrests on post to 200 this year — the lowest level since 2004.

The prison of Iraq

Experts say the war can fundamentally change the soldiers sent to fight it.

The El Paso County Public Defender’s Office this year began tracking the number of soldiers it serves and found a disturbing trend among those accused of serious crimes.

“They did not have drug addictions before” the war, said Deputy Public Defender Sheilagh McAteer, who has been seeing more uniforms in her office in recent years. “They had no criminal histories before the war.” Normally, people want tо avoid аnd wind uр аnу criminal charges аѕ soon аѕ possible – аnd a criminal defense lawyer іѕ thе best person tо resort tо fоr thіѕ purpose. Mоѕt оf thе people fіnd thе legal process difficult tо grasp аnd proceeding wіth legal actions ѕееmѕ like аn impossible task. Hеrе іѕ whеrе thе criminal attorneys соmе іn. It bесоmеѕ thеіr responsibility tо explain thе legal procedures аnd effects оf еvеrу legal action thаt іѕ tо bе taken аlоng wіth fighting fоr thеіr clients. Thеѕе attorneys аrе thе best means оf strengthening oneself tо proceed thrоugh legal action. A defense attorney аlѕо serves аѕ criminal trial legal representative аѕ thеу tаkе care оf hоw thе trial procedures ѕhоuld bе conducted. Thе main responsibility оf a Manassas criminal defense lawyer involves representing his/her client whо іѕ alleged wіth committing аnу sort оf crime. Thе primary job іѕ questioning аll thе significant witnesses, gathering аll possible facts аnd evidences bеѕіdеѕ asking questions durіng court trial periods. A Madison Branson lawyer саn settle thе case оut оf thе court bу negotiating wіth thе prosecutors аѕ wеll. Thrоugh negotiating wіth thе prosecutors оut оf thе court bу thе help оf a criminal defense attorney, thе illegal charges mау result іntо a reduced оnе wіth decreased penalties аnd a lesser period оf sentence.

Fort Carson commanders say they consistently remind returning soldiers that bad decisions are easy to make.

“There’s 14 months of testosterone built up,” said Capt. Tom Hanlon, a company commander in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, recently back from Ramadi, Iraq.

Troops in Iraq live in the most controlled of environments outside the prison system.
Except during combat — when soldiers must make splitsecond, life-or-death decisions — they have few choices to make. Everything from how they dress to what they eat to how they can spend their free time is decided by the Army, for a year or more.

“You might be able to draw a correlation between someone coming out of prison,” said Colorado Springs police Cmdr. Brian Grady. “We need to help them with re-entry and give them access to the services available in this community.”

Coming home hurt

The problems are more complex than a few GIs tearing up the bar district on Tejon Street in drunken exuberance.

The Army knows an increasing number of Fort Carson combat veterans are coming home with war-related mental illnesses and brain injuries that can change their behavior.

Fort Carson doctors diagnosed 615 soldiers in 2007 with post-traumatic stress disorder, up from 102 cases in 2003, when soldiers started returning from their first tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the fifth straight year with an increase in the number of soldiers being diagnosed with PTSD.

“You talk to some of these guys and you sense a lot of stress from the PTSD they bring home with them,” said Magistrate Robert Erler, who presides over the El Paso County Domestic Violence Fast Track court. He said there has clearly been an increase in cases of violence involving soldiers.

The Army is still trying to determine how many soldiers suffer brain-damaging concussions caused by insurgent bombs and what the behavioral symptoms might be.

“The war has forced us to realize and understand the parts of the brain that are impacted deals with emotions and impulse control,” McAteer said.

The public defender, who said she frequently sees soldiers with bomb-caused brain injuries, thinks there’s a link between the injuries and the crime.

“This is why we’re seeing more and more domestic violence, child abuse, homicides and drug cases,” she said.

Watching for signs

Every soldier at Fort Carson and hundreds of family members have been trained this year to spot signs of PTSD and brain injury. Every returning soldier is repeatedly screened for problems, and those who need help get it quickly, commanders say.

“The earlier you can find something, the easier it is to treat,” said Maj. Sean Ryan, the 2nd Brigade’s spokesman.

But the Army struggles with undiagnosed PTSD and brain-injury cases, some say, because it’s tough for soldiers to admit something is wrong.

“A lot of times they’re taught as officers and soldiers to be strong and stand firm,” said Colorado Springs police Lt. Fletcher Howard. “We as a society need to say to ourselves, ‘These people have been through a heck of a lot and need help processing what they’ve gone through.’”

Howard oversees a training program where officers learn how to deal with people who have PTSD issues, as well as other mental illnesses.
A professional actor comes to the classes and plays an Iraq veteran suffering PTSD.

“We teach our officers to use verbal judo to talk a person down, without them, or anyone else, getting hurt,” Howard said.

Most soldiers who are mentally ill or have brain damage remain law-abiding, Fort Carson and police officials said.
And even for mentally ill troops who break the law, there are no free passes.

“We can also see where that becomes a crutch, an excuse for them to act any way without being held responsible,” said Jensen, who heads the CSPD homicide unit that has investigated the recent killings in which soldiers are accused.

Hanlon said his focus is teaching his troops to transition from the day-to-day mentality of war to the long-term thoughts they can allow themselves only back home.

Too much of the trouble, from frivolous spending to drunkenness, comes from soldiers living only for the moment, he said. “I’m trying to convince them to be patient,” he said.

CRIMES LINKED TO CARSON VETERANS

Here are some notable criminal cases involving Iraq war veterans stationed at Fort Carson.

– Colorado Springs police allege two veterans from the same platoon are tied to a crime ring that could be responsible for the homicides of two soldiers. Spc. Kevin Shields was shot to death and his body was found Dec. 1. Pfc. Robert James was also shot to death. His body was found in a car parked in a Lake Avenue bank parking lot in August. The suspects are: Louis Bressler, 24, who was discharged and complained of suffering from PTSD; Pfc. Bruce Bastien Jr., 21; and soldier Kenneth Eastridge, who was an infantry rifleman. Authorities have charged or plan to charge all three with homicide, court records show.

– Former soldier Anthony Marquez, 23, admitted Thursday he shot and killed a 19-year-old Widefield resident and suspected drug dealer Oct. 22, 2006, during a robbery attempt. Marquez’s public defenders attempted to introduce PTSD as a possible defense, but dropped the effort when a judge ruled against them, court records show. According to the plea agreement, Marquez will spend 30 years in prison when he is sentenced in February.

– Pueblo police last month arrested Spc. Olin “Famous” Ferrier, 22, on suspicion of shooting taxi driver David Chance, 52, on Oct. 30. No charges have been filed.

– Former Pfc. Johnathon Klinker, 22, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in July for killing his 7-week-old daughter, Nicolette. Klinker blamed the baby’s October 2006 death, in part, on “war-related stress.”

– Former Pvt. Timothy Parker of the 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, was convicted by court martial of manslaughter for beating Spc. Piotr Szczypka to death in a November 2005 fight at an apartment complex near the base. Both men had been drinking before Parker hit Szczypka with a fireplace poker, trial testimony showed. Parker was sentenced to seven years in a military prison.

– Nine days after 2nd Brigade Combat Team Pfc. Stephen S. Sherwood, 35, came home from Iraq in August 2005, he drove to Fort Collins and shot and killed his wife of seven years, Sara E. Sherwood, 30. The soldier, described by his commanders as a hero who fought bravely in Iraq, then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.

December 22, 2007 – Look anywhere in Killeen, home to the sprawling Fort Hood army base, and there are patriotic signs like the giant banner that greets shoppers entering the local Wal-Mart: “Fort Hood Texas, Home of America’s Hammer!”

But beneath the bravado and bluster you find a more volatile mix of emotions – frustration, anxiety and anger – among military families after five years of war in Iraq.

As the presidential primaries get under way, disenchantment with the war here and elsewhere is having repercussions: A bloc of voters that has traditionally supported the Republican Party appears to be up for grabs.

“I’m definitely listening to who is saying what,” Belinda Larmore said as she sat in the Killeen Mall food court for lunch with her husband, Mike, an Army captain just back from a rotation in Iraq.

Ms. Larmore, 36, a mother of three, ages 5 to 19, grew up in a Republican family and has usually voted that way.

But in the 2008 national election, she is looking over the field carefully for a candidate – Democrat or Republican – who grasps the complex challenges facing a military stretched to the limit, fighting a war “with no end in sight.”

She wants to hear candidates address the issues directly affecting the military, such as multiple combat tours and rotations extended beyond the usual 12 months.

“Show me any politician who would be away from his family that long,” Ms. Larmore said as her husband sat silently across from her. Capt. Larmore declined to be interviewed but said he generally supported his wife’s views.

Ms. Larmore isn’t ready to support a quick exit from the war. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Let’s get out.’ But no one is coming up with a solution so that we can leave safely without leaving the people of Iraq high and dry.”

‘Military moms’ key

“Military moms” like Ms. Larmore and other women with relatives in the military are the swing vote in the nation’s first presidential primary in New Hampshire Jan. 8, said Jennifer Donahue, a senior political analyst with the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm University.

“They’re undecided and ambivalent. They have feelings of patriotism and wanting the war to be completed. But they’re getting reports home that the troops are very frustrated,” Ms. Donahue said.

“This bloc is very unsure as to what the right thing is for the troops. The question they face is whether to vote to limit [the war] or vote to let it play out.”

As a voting bloc, active-duty reservists and National Guard members number 2.6 million. About half are married – bringing the number of potential voters in this camp to nearly 4 million.

Now vs. then

A recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll showed that a majority of military families disapproved of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq. That contrasts with polls and surveys taken before the 2004 presidential election, including one by Gallup, which found that veterans overwhelmingly favored Mr. Bush over his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat and a war veteran.

The current Times/Bloomberg poll also found that nearly 70 percent of military households with a veteran of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan said that troops in Iraq should either come home right away or within the next year.

That’s how Maija Rojas feels.

A former Marine with a husband on his second tour in Iraq, Ms. Rojas, 25, says she’ll vote for the candidate “who can get them home the fastest.”

Multiple rotations and longer tours have caused problems and “a lot more divorces” among military families, said Ms. Rojas, a mother of two preschoolers.

Sheila Mengel’s husband retired after 23 years in the Army, including one tour in Iraq. If the election were held right now, “I’d vote Democrat because I’d like to see the war end,” she said.

Ms. Mengel said that Iraq is in a civil war, and that U.S. troops have no business providing security over there. “If the Iraqis want to kill each other, they should handle it themselves.”

Others remained supportive of Mr. Bush and his strategy in Iraq.

Sarah Martin, another military spouse, said she wants to “see it through” in Iraq. “I definitely will vote Republican.”

Vera Kingsley, a former Marine who served in Iraq in 2004, said the United States can’t “leave a country in shambles. The reason we’re there is to help them get back on their feet.”

Possible signs of shift

Which candidate is best situated to capture the military vote?

If you follow the money, campaign contributions to Democrats have risen sharply since the start of the Iraq war in 2003.

The Democrats’ share of military contributions has increased from 23 percent during the 2002 election to 40 percent so far this year, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The top recipients in the presidential race – Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Ron Paul – are both anti-war candidates.

Among Republican candidates for president, only Mr. Paul, a Texas congressman, opposes the war. Of the top three Democratic candidates, Mr. Obama and John Edwards would pull combat troops out of Iraq within 12 months. Hillary Rodham Clinton would withdraw troops but has no set timeline for a full pullout.

A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, released Dec. 4, found that in the key Republican primary state of South Carolina, military veterans and their spouses do not differ much in vote choice from those with no military experience.Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war John McCain actually did slightly better among nonveterans than veterans.

Ms. Donahue, the political analyst in New Hampshire, said that no candidate has clearly emerged as the favorite of veterans and active-duty military in either party.

“There are clearly signs of discontent. But does that shift voting patterns?” said James Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

Organizing voters

Signs of discontent are showing up on Internet blogs and with organizations such as VoteVets .org, which supports veterans running for office, and Veterans Against the Iraq War, which has sponsored anti-war demonstrations around the country.

Texas-based Military Spouses for Change was started in May by Carissa Picard, the wife of a Black Hawk pilot based at Fort Hood.

Military spouses tend to shy away from politics, Ms. Picard said. Her group wants to change that by educating voters and highlighting related causes such as wounded-warrior legislation and veterans benefits.

Ms. Picard, who was a practicing lawyer before deciding to stay home with her two young children, said the Iraq war was the impetus for starting Military Spouses for Change.

“What I wanted to do was provide for our spouses a place to go to look at each candidate’s plans for Iraq,” she said.

The group, which started with eight spouses at Fort Hood, now has 200 members scattered across the country and elsewhere.

The group isn’t endorsing any candidate. But in her conversations in the military community, Ms. Picard has found that frustration with the war has created an opening for Democrats.

“A lot of people I’ve been talking to in the active-duty and veteran community, who have traditionally voted Republican, are considering Democratic candidates because they’re very frustrated with the war in Iraq.”

Clint Douglas, a former staff sergeant who fought in Afghanistan, said he identifies as a Democrat and sees an opportunity for the party to pick up disenchanted military voters.

“So many military people, families, dependents are sick of this presidency and the wars,” he said.

But he thinks the Democrats’ perceived weakness on defense issues continues to hurt them among this bloc of voters.

“Why can’t Democrats do defense?” said Mr. Douglas, who lives in Chicago and is writing a book about his wartime experience.

University of Texas professor John Sibley Butler, a Vietnam veteran, agrees that Democrats aren’t as hawkish on defense issues as Republicans, although he is disappointed that few politicians in either party have military experience.

Perhaps no one knows the predicament facing military families better than Leslae Stewart, who lives in Killeen.

A soldier for eight years before leaving in 2003, Ms. Stewart said her son is getting ready to enlist in the Army and may soon be heading to Iraq.

“I’m tired of this war – enough is enough,” she said. But she also supports her son. “It’s what he wants to do.”

LEADING CANDIDATES’ VIEWS ON IRAQ

DEMOCRATS

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Favors starting a troop withdrawal but leaving some to fight terrorists, train Iraqi forces and protect U.S. interests. Wants to increase regional diplomacy. Has set no timeline for a full withdrawal.

John Edwards:  Favors withdrawing 40,000 to 50,000 combat troops immediately, and all within 10 months of taking office. Would prohibit permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and keep quick-reaction forces outside Iraq.

Barack Obama:  Vows to end the war. Would withdraw combat troops by the end of 2008 but leave some troops to protect the U.S. Embassy and attack specific targets.

REPUBLICANS

Rudy Giuliani:  Supports President Bush’s troop surge. Says U.S. forces must remain until Iraq is stable. Calls for expanding the U.S. Army by at least 10 combat brigades, or 35,000 soldiers.

Mike Huckabee:  Opposes withdrawal timetables. Says he’s “focused on winning.” Backs a regional summit.

John McCain:  Supports the troop surge. Wants troops to stay until Iraq’s government is stable and secure.

Mitt Romney:  Would bring U.S. troops home as soon as possible, but not in a precipitous way that might require them to go back.

Fred Thompson:  Wants to maintain the U.S. mission in Iraq as central to the war against Islamic terrorism; would greatly expand the military.

SOURCES: The Associated Press; McClatchy-Tribune