Veterans for Common Sense

U.S. Marine airstrikes targeting insurgents sheltering in Iraqi residential neighborhoods are killing civilians as well as guerrillas along the Euphrates River in far western Iraq, according to Iraqi townspeople and officials and the U.S. military.

Just how many civilians have been killed is strongly disputed by the Marines and, some critics say, too little investigated. But townspeople, tribal leaders, medical workers and accounts from witnesses at the sites of clashes, at hospitals and at graveyards indicated that scores of noncombatants were killed last month in fighting, including airstrikes, in the opening stages of a 17-day U.S.-Iraqi offensive in Anbar province.

“These people died silently, complaining to God of a guilt they did not commit,” Zahid Mohammed Rawi, a physician, said in the town of Husaybah. Rawi said that roughly one week into Operation Steel Curtain, which began on Nov. 5, medical workers had recorded 97 civilians killed. At least 38 insurgents were also killed in the offensive’s early days, Rawi said.

In a Husaybah school converted to a makeshift hospital, Rawi, four other doctors and a nurse treated wounded Iraqis in the opening days of the offensive, examining bloodied children as anxious fathers soothed them and held them down.

“I dare any organization, committee or the American Army to deny these numbers,” Rawi said.

U.S. Marines in Anbar say they take pains to spare innocent lives and almost invariably question civilian accounts from the battleground communities. They say that townspeople who either support the insurgents or are intimidated by them are manipulating the number of noncombatant deaths for propaganda — a charge that some Iraqis acknowledge is true of some residents and medical workers in Anbar province.

“I wholeheartedly believe the vast majority of civilians are killed by the insurgency,” particularly by improvised bombs, said Col. Michael Denning, the top air officer for the 2nd Marine Division, which is leading the fight against insurgents in Anbar province.

In an interview at a Marine base at Ramadi, Anbar’s provincial capital, Denning acknowledged that a city was “a very, very difficult place to fight.” He said, however, that “insurgents will kill civilians and try to blame it on us.”

But some military analysts say the U.S. military must do more to track the civilian toll from its airstrikes. Sarah Sewall, deputy assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1996 and now program director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, said the military’s resistance to acknowledging and analyzing so-called collateral damage remained one of the most serious failures of the U.S. air and ground war in Iraq.

“It’s almost impossible to fight a war in which engagements occur in urban areas [and] to avoid civilian casualties,” Sewall, whose center is a branch of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that focuses on issues such as genocide, failed states and military intervention, said in a telephone interview.

“In a conflict like Iraq, where civilian perceptions are as important as the number of weapons caches destroyed, assessing the civilian harm must become a part of the battle damage assessment process if you’re going to fight a smart war,” she said.

The number of airstrikes carried out each month by U.S. aircraft rose almost fivefold this year, from roughly 25 in January to 120 in November, according to a tally provided by the military. Accounts by residents, officials and witnesses in Anbar and the Marines themselves make clear that Iraqi civilians are frequently caught in the attacks.

On Nov. 7, the third day of the offensive, witnesses watched from the roof of a public building in Husaybah as U.S. warplanes struck homes in the town’s Kamaliyat neighborhood. After fires ignited by the fighting had died down, witnesses observed residents removing the bodies of what neighbors said was a family — mother, father, 14-year-old girl, 11-year-old boy and 5-year-old boy — from the rubble of one house.

Survivors said insurgents had been firing mortars from yards in the neighborhood just before the airstrikes. Residents pleaded with the guerrillas to leave for fear of drawing attacks on the families, they said, but were told by the fighters that they had no other space from which to attack.

Near the town of Qaim one day last month, a man who identified himself only as Abdul Aziz said a separate U.S. airstrike killed his grown daughter, Aesha. Four armed men were also found in the rubble of her house, he said.

“I don’t blame the Americans. I blame Zarqawi and his group, who were using my daughter’s house as a shelter,” said Abdul Aziz, referring to Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the foreign-dominated group al Qaeda in Iraq.

Abdul Aziz spoke beside his daughter’s newly dug grave, in a cemetery established for the 80 to 90 civilians who Anbar officials said were killed in the first weeks of the offensive. Several dozen new graves were evident, and residents said more than 40 victims of the fighting were to be buried that day alone. Witnesses saw only 11, all wrapped in blankets for burial. Residents said two of the 11 were women.

Abdul Aziz’s grandsons ascribed blame for their mother’s death more pointedly. “She was killed in the bombing by the Americans,” said Ali, 9, the oldest of three brothers.

Operation Steel Curtain is representative of a series of offensives in western Anbar that began in late April. Brig. Gen. James L. Williams of the 2nd Marine Division described them as a town-by-town campaign to drive out insurgents and establish a permanent Iraqi army presence in the heavily Sunni Arab region. Iraqi and foreign insurgents use the Euphrates River communities for bases and for logistics support to funnel money, recruits and ordnance from Anbar and neighboring Syria to fighters planning attacks elsewhere in Iraq.

Steel Curtain involved 2,500 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors and about 1,000 soldiers of the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, including newly established units of locally recruited scouts commissioned mainly for their knowledge of the area, the Marines said. As the Iraqi and U.S. forces moved through Husaybah, Karabilah and other towns, Marines said, they encountered scores of mines and insurgent-rigged bombs made from artillery shells or other ordnance. Ten Marines and 139 insurgents died in the offensive, the Marines said. They gave no totals for known civilian deaths.

Statements issued by the U.S. military during the offensive reported at least two incidents that were described as airstrikes unwittingly conducted on buildings where civilians were later found to have been present.

On Nov. 8, a man in Husaybah led U.S. and Iraqi forces to a house destroyed by U.S. airstrikes the previous day, Marines said. Searching the rubble, Iraqi troops and U.S. Marines found two wounded civilians — a young girl and a man — and recovered five bodies.

The Marines were told that fighters loyal to Zarqawi had forced their way into the house, killed two of the people inside and locked the rest of the family on a lower floor before using the building to attack Iraqi and U.S. forces clearing the neighborhood.

“The soldiers and Marines had no knowledge of the civilians being held hostage in the home at the time of the attack,” Marines said in a statement. It could not be determined if that airstrike was the same as the one described by witnesses who watched removal of the dead family.

On Nov. 15, U.S.-led forces called in an airstrike after coming under small-arms fire from a building in the hamlet of New Ubaydi. Two men ran from the building waving white flags after the airstrike, followed by 15 male and female civilians, a U.S. Marine statement said.

Marines described other instances of insurgents hiding among civilians in Anbar, including occasions when they dressed as women and tried to pass unnoticed among townspeople fleeing the battles. Residents, local officials and emergency workers said insurgents often sheltered among civilians in urban neighborhoods.

Arkan Isawi, an elder in Husaybah, said he and four other tribal leaders gathered to assess the damage while the operation was still underway and identified at least 80 dead, including women and children. “I personally pulled out a family of three children and parents,” he said.

An exact count, however, was impossible, he said. “Anyone who gives you a number is lying, because the city was a mess, and people buried bodies in backyards and parking lots,” with other bodies still under rubble, Isawi said.

Townspeople, medical workers and officials often exaggerate death tolls, either for effect or under orders from insurgents. However, accounts from other officials and residents are borne out at least partially by direct observation of bodies and other evidence.

The accounts of U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians of airstrikes often diverge sharply.

On Oct. 16, for instance, a U.S. F-15 pilot caught a group of Ramadi-area insurgents planting explosives in a blast crater on a road used by U.S. forces, Denning said. The F-15 dropped a bomb on the group, and analysis of video footage shot by the plane showed only what appeared to be grown men where the bomb struck, Denning said. After the airstrike, he said, roadside bombs in the area “shut down to almost nothing.

“That was a good strike, and we got some people who were killing a lot of people,” Denning said.

Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a spokesman for the 2nd Marines, said it was not possible that children were killed in that strike unless they were outside the range of the F-15’s camera.

Residents, however, said the strike killed civilians as well as insurgents, including 18 children. Afterward, at a traditional communal funeral, black banners bore the names of the dead, and grieving parents gave names, ages and detailed descriptions of the children they said had been killed, witnesses said. The bodies of three children and a woman lay unclaimed outside a hospital after the day’s fighting.

American commanders insist they do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, but overall, Denning said, “I think it would be very difficult to prosecute this insurgency” without airstrikes.

The precision-guided munitions used in all airstrikes in Anbar “have miss rates smaller than the size of this table,” Denning said in the bare-bones cafeteria of one of several Marine bases around Ramadi. He said that officers at Ramadi and at the Marines’ “lessons learned” center in Quantico coordinate each attack using the best intelligence available. “I have to sell it to about two or three different chains of command: ‘What are you doing to make sure there are no civilian casualties?’ ” Denning said.

Sewall, the former Pentagon official, also said air power often is the best means for taking out a target more cleanly than ground forces could. But, she said, U.S. forces don’t do enough after the airstrikes to figure out whether each one succeeded in hitting the intended targets while sparing civilians.

Marine officers said their lessons-learned center at Quantico did not try to assess civilian casualties from attacks. At the Pentagon, routine bomb-damage assessments rely heavily on the examination of aerial photos and satellite images, which Sewall said were “good for seeing if a building was hit, but not as good for determining who was inside.”

“I have enormous respect for the extent to which U.S. air power has become discriminate,” Sewall said. “But when you’re using force in an urban area or using force in an area with limited intelligence,” and facing an enemy actively “exploiting distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, air power becomes challenging no matter how discriminate it is.

“When it comes to the extent to which they are minimizing civilian harm, the question becomes: How do you know?” Sewall said.

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.

My Christmas present to George W. Bush is a copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s splendid study of Lincoln and his Cabinet, ”Team of Rivals.” President Bush believes in redemption, and so do I. Here are just a few things Bush might profitably learn from our first Republican president.

Lincoln assumed the presidency at a time when the nation was horribly divided, not into culturally warring ”blue” states and ”red” ones, but into a real civil war between blues and grays — the states that stayed in the Union and those that seceded. Even among the unionists, Lincoln’s own Republican Party and Cabinet were bitterly rent between those who wanted to accelerate emancipation and punish the South and those who gave top priority to keeping the Republic whole.

Lincoln’s priority, always, was to preserve the Union and to reduce the sectional and ideological bitterness. As Goodwin brilliantly shows, he did so by the force of his personality and the generosity of his spirit. Lincoln had an unerring sense of when public opinion was ready for partial, then full abolition of slavery, and he would not move until he felt he had the people behind him. He governed by listening and persuading.

By contrast, Bush’s entire presidency is about eking out narrow victories, not about building national consensus. Even when he prevails, Bush wins by manipulation and stealth. His legacy is deepened division and bitterness.

Bush is said to live in a bubble. His tiny inner circle protects him from realities that might upset him or challenge his dimly informed certitudes. Lincoln, by contrast, had the confidence to reach out to critics and seek out widely divergent viewpoints.

Goodwin’s unusual title, ”Team of Rivals,” refers to the fact that Lincoln deliberately included in his Cabinet the prominent leaders of different factions of his party who had opposed him for the 1860 nomination. Some, like his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, a fierce abolitionist, wanted Lincoln to proceed much more aggressively. Others feared that Lincoln was moving too fast and alienating border states like Maryland and Kentucky that permitted slavery but had voted not to leave the Union.

Goodwin, improbably finding something wholly new to illuminate this most heavily researched of historic figures, relies partly on the diaries of his contemporaries to reveal Lincoln’s sheer genius at winning the trust and affection of rivals.

Can you imagine Bush including in his inner Cabinet such Republicans as John McCain, who opposes Bush on torture of prisoners, or Chuck Hagel, who challenges the Iraq war, or Lincoln Chafee, who resists stacking the courts with ultra-right-wingers? Not to mention Democrats, a group Lincoln also included among his top appointees.

Bush, despite today’s ubiquity of media, doesn’t read newspapers, much less the Internet, and he settles for carefully filtered briefings. Lincoln was a voracious reader; he haunted the War Department’s telegraph office to get firsthand reports from the battlefield.

Lincoln gained incomparably in wisdom over four years. Does anyone think George W. Bush is wiser now than in 2001?

Despite civil insurrection, Lincoln resisted broad intrusions on democratic rights. Bush runs roughshod over liberties.

Bush’s visits to Iraq are choreographed media events. Lincoln often went to the front on horseback or by ship, almost alone, shunning news coverage, to confer at length with his generals, thank the troops, and educate himself.

Bush relies on secondhand inspirations of a speechwriting staff. He blathers when he wanders off script. Lincoln wrote his own words, including the timeless eloquence of the Second Inaugural or the Gettysburg Address. More often, his eloquence was extemporaneous.

Lincoln was magnanimous almost to a fault. His personal generosity and numerous acts of kindness helped him win over critics and, too briefly, to ”bind up the nation’s wounds.” Salmon Chase, who never gave up his dream that he should have been elected in 1860, allowed his allies to seek to push Lincoln aside and nominate Chase in 1864. Urged to break irrevocably with the faithless Chase, Lincoln instead appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Critics of the more moderate William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, claimed that Seward functioned as acting president. Goodwin makes clear that this was fantasy. Dick Cheney, however, really does operate as de facto president.

When Lincoln was assassinated, three days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, the nation lost the one man who might have spared America the awful years of inconclusive struggle between radical Reconstructionists and segregationists who wanted to restore slavery in everything but name. Much of today’s red state versus blue state bitterness has its roots in the struggle for black liberty versus the wounded humiliation of the white South, something Lincoln wanted to avoid at all cost.

The crippled presidency of his successor, Andrew Johnson, who ended up a pitiful captive of radical reconstructionists in Congress, was one of the bleakest chapters in our history. But this Union of the people did not perish from the earth. Reading Goodwin’s magnificent book, one has to believe that our nation, in a new birth of freedom, will survive even George W. Bush.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

In asserting his right to ignore the law, President Bush has slapped Congress right across the face and told them they better like it.

Congress can now mutter “Yes, sir” and cower in its corner like a whipped dog, as it has for most of the past five years, or it can fight back to defend its institutional authority. Either choice will mark a turning point in U.S. history.

At immediate issue is the president’s decision four years ago to allow the National Security Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, to spy on phone conversations and e-mails of U.S. civilians without court-approved warrants. President Bush insists the program is legal, but it’s important to understand what he means by that term.

Bush and his advisers do not claim that his actions are legal because they abide by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA; they quite clearly violate that law. Instead, they claim his actions are legal because as commander in chief, he can violate the law if he chooses and still be acting legally.

It is, in other words, his royal prerogative.

That is an extraordinary assertion of executive power, particularly since the president claims this authority will last “so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens,” which is pretty much forever.

Conservatives rushing to support Bush’s position out of personal loyalty might want to think about that. If allowed to stand, the president’s claim will fundamentally alter the balance of power not just between Congress and the presidency, but between our government and its citizens, and it will do so regardless of who occupies the Oval Office in the future.

Bush grounds his argument on need, claiming that current law gives him too little leeway to fight the war on terror effectively. That argument has at least four basic flaws.

First, it ought to alarm anyone who is truly serious about preserving personal liberty in the face of government power. “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom,” British statesman William Pitt warned in 1783. “It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

Second, the claim that Bush has had to violate FISA to protect our security is false. Under FISA, the government has explicit authority to begin wiretapping whenever it deems necessary, without seeking prior approval from a judge. The law merely requires the executive to seek after-the-fact approval from a top-secret special court within 72 hours. Since 1978 that FISA court has rejected just five of 18,748 warrants sought by the government.

Third, even if the law were defective, as Bush claims, no president has the power to make that determination on his own. This is a democracy; if there’s a problem with a law, the Constitution gives us a process for fixing it. In this case, FISA was a carefully calibrated, thoroughly debated effort to find the right balance between security and liberty; Bush does not have the authority to simply toss that work out the window because he disagrees with it. That’s the power of a dictator, not of a president.

Fourth, and most fundamentally, this argument of necessity calls into question who we have become as a people.

More than 160,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq this holiday season, putting their lives, bodies, souls and futures on the line. Thousands more are on duty in Afghanistan. And while those of us here at home celebrate their bravery, for the most part we are not required to share in it. We let them do the fighting and dying for us; we do the applauding and burying.

We do, however, run an infinitesimally small chance of falling victim to a terrorist attack. It happened once; it could certainly happen again, and we should do everything within reason to prevent a recurrence.

But it does not seem too much to ask that in facing down that danger, we demonstrate just a fraction of the bravery and resolution that our soldiers show. Osama bin Laden, after all, is not Adolf Hitler or imperial Japan or the Soviet Union.

If we civilians quake at the comparatively minor danger that he and his followers pose, if we rush to offer up our civil liberties in hopes of a little more safety, we prove ourselves unworthy of the sacrifice that our men and women in uniform are prepared to make.

Yes, the president has told us we should be fearful, encouraging us to compromise not just our freedom but our constitutional system of government. But if this is still the country we claim it to be, we will tell him no.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.

Large demonstrations broke out across the country Friday to denounce parliamentary elections that protesters say were rigged in favor of the main religious Shiite coalition. Meanwhile, a lawyer for Saddam Hussein said he saw evidence that his client had been beaten.

Several hundred thousand people demonstrated after noon prayers in southern Baghdad Friday, many carrying banners decrying last week’s elections. Many Iraqis outside the religious Shiite coalition allege that the elections were unfair to smaller Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups.

“We refuse the cheating and forgery in the elections,” one banner read.

During Friday prayers at Baghdad’s Umm al-Qura mosque, the headquarters of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a major Sunni clerical group, Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidaei told followers they were “living a conspiracy built on lies and forgery.”

“You have to be ready during these hard times and combat forgeries and lies for the sake of Islam,” he said.

Sunni Arab and secular Shiite factions demanded Thursday that an international body review election fraud complaints, and threatened to boycott the new legislature. The United Nations rejected the idea.

Their demand came two days after preliminary returns indicated that the current governing group, the religious Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, was getting bigger-than-expected majorities in Baghdad, which has large numbers of Shiites and Sunnis.

On Friday, more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Mosul, where some accused Iran of having a hand in election fraud. About 1,000 people demonstrated in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown.

The former leader claimed at his trial this week that he had been beaten by his American captors.

Defense lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi said Friday that he had seen marks on his client’s body. Speaking in Amman, Jordan, Dulaimi said that he had filed a compliant Thursday with the court hearing Saddam’s case.

The chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, told The Associated Press on Friday that he hadn’t seen a complaint but planned to visit Saddam and his seven co-defendants to review their health and “listen to their demands and supply them with everything they need.”

Meanwhile, gunmen Friday attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint in the city of Adhaim, in religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala province, killing eight soldiers and wounding seventeen, an Iraqi army officer said on condition he not be identified for fear of reprisal.

“There were too many to count,” said Akid, a 20-year-old soldier from Diwanayah being treated for gunshot wounds to both thighs. “They tried to kill everybody.”

Akid, who would only give his first name for fear of reprisal, said his battalion of about 600 men had already suffered over 250 desertions after a Dec. 3 ambush in Adhaim killed 19 Iraqi soldiers.

“They gave up,” he said. “They said, ‘The hell with this.”’

In Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt outside a Shiite mosque, killing four people and wounding eight, Diyala police said. Among the dead was a policeman guarding the mosque.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that President Bush had authorized new cuts in U.S. combat troops in Iraq, below the 138,000 level that prevailed for most of this year. Rumsfeld did not reveal the exact size of the troop cut, but Pentagon officials have said as many as 7,000 combat troops could be leaving.

Criticisms of last week’s elections are seen by some as jockeying for position by both Sunnis and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, before negotiations on forming a new coalition government begin. No group is expected to win a majority of the legislature’s 275 seats.

The formerly dominant Sunni minority fears being marginalized by the Shiite majority, which was oppressed during Saddam’s reign.

—

Associated Press writers Jason Straziuso, Robert Burns and Anthony Castaneda contributed to this report.

Veterans for Common Sense End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign

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Raised: $7,900
Pledged: $2,950

Almost halfway there! Help us meet our goal by December 31.

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December 22, 2005

Dear VCS Members and Supporters:

A political crisis is brewing in Washington, DC since the New York Times broke the news that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to wiretap the communications of American citizens on U.S. soil, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. According to The Times, up to several thousand people have had their emails and telephone calls intercepted since 2001.

The first casualty of the news was last week’s late vote on extension of the Patriot Act — according to many interviews, several Senators may have reconsidered their vote when the news broke that the administration was evading the law to monitor the communications of Americans. Some conservative columnists, such as George Will, have argued that the President has overreached executive powers, and yesterday morning we learned that a member of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had resigned over the issue.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has announced he will conduct hearings into the issue early in the new year. Veterans for Common Sense will continue to closely monitor this issue and alert you to changes.

• Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5820
• Bush Defends U.S. Wiretaps, Urges Patriot Act Renewal http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5827
• Spying Could Create Backlash in Congress http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5834
• Limits Being Tested On Wartime Powers http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5856
• Arguing for enhanced powers of presidency http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?page=article&id=5886
• Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?page=article&id=5890
• The Truman precedent for Bush’s eavesdropping http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?page=article&id=5888
• George F. Will: Bush assumes too much executive power http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5873

Harvey Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, writes in the VCS weblog on what he believes Thomas Paine would think of a Presidential violation of law. Read it and make your own comments at:

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?page=weblog

On January 26, Florida Veterans for Common Sense will sponsor an evening with Professor Kaye at the University of South Florida. This promises to be an interesting and educational event, and we recommend our members in Florida check it out (and, if you haven’t already, consider getting involved with the chapter)). Find out more online at:

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/Index.cfm?Page=Module&ModuleID=2&EventID=81

Wrangling Over Defense Spending

Dianne M. Grassi wrote yesterday morning that the various add-ons to the Defense spending authorization (including provisions such as drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge) have little to do with national defense or the needs of the troops.

• Add-Ons To Defense Bill Ill-Serve Troops And America http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5889
• Arizona Senator decries Defense earmarks for games, museums http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5906

News on the Iraq War:

Some members of Iraq’s Sunni minority raised objections this week over early results from last Thursdays national elections in Iraq. As of now, current counting shows that the elections largely went to a coalition of religious Shiite parties, some of whom have ties to Iran.

• Sunnis cry foul over Iraq vote http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5883
• In Iraq, even packing for home hides danger http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?page=article&id=5882
• Center for Strategic and International Studies: Iraq Election Analysis http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=5904
• Embedded With the 101st Airborne http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm?page=article&id=5905

Finally, I’d like to that those of you who have come forward and made a gift or pledge in our end-of-year fundraising campaign. We’re more than half-way to our $20,000 goal, but there’s only ten days left before the end of the year!

If you haven’t made a gift to VCS lately, please consider supporting our work with a donation today.

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/donate.htm

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As always, thanks for your support of Veterans for Common Sense.

With highest regards,

Charles Sheehan-Miles
Executive Director

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