New Swedish Documents Illuminate CIA Action

Posted on May 22, 2005 by Team VCS

STOCKHOLM — The CIA Gulfstream V jet touched down at a small airport west of here just before 9 p.m. on a subfreezing night in December 2001. A half-dozen agents wearing hoods that covered their faces stepped down from the aircraft and hurried across the tarmac to take custody of two prisoners, suspected Islamic radicals from Egypt.

Inside an airport police station, Swedish officers watched as the CIA operatives pulled out scissors and rapidly sliced off the prisoners’ clothes, including their underwear, according to newly released Swedish government documents and eyewitness statements. They probed inside the men’s mouths and ears and examined their hair before dressing the pair in sweat suits and draping hoods over their heads. The suspects were then marched in chains to the plane, where they were strapped to mattresses on the floor in the back of the cabin.

So began an operation the CIA calls an “extraordinary rendition,” the forcible and highly secret transfer of terrorism suspects to their home countries or other nations where they can be interrogated with fewer legal protections.

The practice has generated increasing criticism from civil liberties groups; in Sweden a parliamentary investigator who conducted a 10-month probe into the case recently concluded that the CIA operatives violated Swedish law by subjecting the prisoners to “degrading and inhuman treatment” and by exercising police powers on Swedish soil.

“Should Swedish officers have taken those measures, I would have prosecuted them without hesitation for the misuse of public power and probably would have asked for a prison sentence,” the investigator, Mats Melin, said in an interview. He said he could not charge the CIA operatives because he was authorized to investigate only Swedish government officials, but he did not rule out the possibility that other Swedish prosecutors could do so.

The basic facts of the Stockholm rendition were reported last year; this article is based on newly released documents from the parliamentary probe that provide elaborate details about an operation that normally unfolds entirely out of public view and about the government deliberations that preceded it.

Swedish security police said they were taken aback by the swiftness and precision of the CIA agents that night. Investigators concluded that the Swedes essentially stood aside and let the Americans take control of the operation, moving silently and communicating with hand signals, the documents show.

“I can say that we were surprised when a crew stepped out of the plane that seemed to be very professional, that had obviously done this before,” Arne Andersson, an assistant director for the Swedish national security police, told government investigators.

At 9:47 p.m., less than an hour after its arrival at Bromma Airport, the jet took off on a five-hour flight to Cairo, where the prisoners, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Zery, were handed over to Egyptian security officials.

The CIA has not acknowledged playing any part in the expulsion of the two men. An agency spokesman in Washington declined to comment for this article, and U.S. Embassy officials in Stockholm also declined to answer questions.

CIA officials have testified that they have used rendition for years after tracking down suspected terrorists around the world. They say the U.S. government receives assurances of humane treatment from the countries where the suspects are taken. Human rights groups say that such pledges, from governments with long histories of torture, are worthless.

The two Egyptians later told lawyers, relatives and Swedish diplomats that they were subjected to electric shocks and other forms of torture soon after their forced return to their country.

Agiza, a physician, was convicted in an Egyptian military court and sentenced to 15 years in prison after a trial that lasted six hours. He was charged with being a leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a radical group that the U.S. government has listed as a terrorist organization. He and his lawyers have acknowledged that he once worked with Ayman Zawahiri, a fellow Egyptian and the ideological leader of al Qaeda, but say that he cut ties with the group many years ago.

Zery was released from prison in October 2003. Egyptian officials notified the Swedish government last year that he was no longer under suspicion. His lawyer said he remained under surveillance.

The Swedish government kept the CIA’s role in the case a secret for more than three years. Then, in 2004, following unofficial reports of the rendition, it released documents showing that a U.S.-registered plane had been used to transport the Egyptians to Cairo but said the details were classified. It wasn’t until March, when the parliamentary investigator released his findings, that the CIA’s direct involvement was publicly confirmed.

The revelations created a stir in Sweden, which has long been outspoken in its support of international human rights. A parliamentary committee is scheduled to open hearings on government officials’ handling of the expulsion.

Although the parliamentary investigator concluded that the Swedish security police deserved “extremely grave criticism” for losing control of the operation and for being “remarkably submissive to the American officials,” no Swedish officials have been charged or disciplined.

“It’s quite clear that laws were broken. It is against Swedish law and against international law,” said Anna Wigenmark, a lawyer for the Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, which has worked on behalf of the Egyptian suspects. She and other human rights advocates have charged that the treatment of Agiza and Zery also violated the European Convention on Human Rights.

“It’s unacceptable that something like this could happen on Swedish soil and yet nothing has been done about it,” Wigenmark said.

Before their expulsion, the two men had lived in Sweden for extended periods and had applied for political asylum.

The Swedish government has revealed little about why it suddenly decided to expel them, three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. It has said only that the decision was made on the basis of secret intelligence information, some of it from foreign services, indicating that the men posed a security threat. Swedish officials have refused to disclose any of the evidence or reveal where the information came from.

Fresh details of the transfer are contained in more than 100 pages of interview transcripts with Swedish police officers who witnessed the events at the Stockholm airport and police commanders who oversaw the case, as well as in other documents from the national security police. The records describe a hectic and haphazardly planned effort to deport the men.

Swedish security police wanted to arrest the men and put them on a flight to Cairo immediately to avoid giving their lawyers a chance to file an emergency appeal in court.

Swedish government ministers hastily scheduled a meeting for Dec. 18, 2001, to formally approve the expulsion. But the security police were unable to charter a flight to take the Egyptians to Cairo until the next morning. Police officials, worried about an overnight delay, turned to the CIA for help, according to the documents.

CIA officials told the Swedes they had a private jet with special security clearances that could fly nonstop to Cairo on a moment’s notice. Andersson, the Swedish police commander in charge of the case, characterized the offer as a “friendly favor from the CIA which allowed us to have a plane that had direct access throughout Europe and could take care of the operation very rapidly.”

About 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 18, the CIA plane left Cairo for Stockholm. About a half-hour later, the Swedish government ministers voted to expel Agiza and Zery.

By 5 p.m., Swedish police had arrested both men and were waiting for the plane to arrive. Already, however, problems had begun to surface.

Two unnamed officials from the U.S. Embassy informed Swedish officers that there would be no room on the jet for them on the trip back to Cairo. The Swedes complained and were ultimately given two seats on the plane, but raw feelings persisted.

“I felt that they were backing into our territory,” an unidentified female Swedish security officer told investigators, according to a transcript of her interview.

More conflicts arose after the plane landed. One Swedish officer walked up the steps of the aircraft to greet the crew and was surprised to see that the agents — a half-dozen or so Americans and two Egyptians — were wearing hoods with semi-opaque fabric around the face, even though the small airport was essentially deserted.

“I told them that you don’t need to wear hoods because there is no one here,” the officer recalled in his statement to investigators. The foreign agents ignored him.

The Swedish police said they were also perplexed by a demand from U.S. agents that they be allowed to strip-search the prisoners, even though the two men had already been searched and were in handcuffs. The Swedes relented after the captain of the plane said he would refuse to depart unless the Americans were allowed to do things their way, the documents show.

The prisoners were taken into the airport police station, one by one, to be searched.

One agent quickly slit their clothes with a pair of scissors and examined each piece of cloth before placing it in a plastic bag. Another agent checked the suspects’ hair, mouths and lips, while a third agent took photographs from behind, according to Swedish officers who witnessed the searches.

As the prisoners stood there, naked and motionless, they were zipped into gray tracksuits and their heads were covered with hoods that, in the words of one Swedish officer, “covered everything, like a big cone.”

Swedish police later marveled that the whole search procedure took less than 10 minutes. “It surprised me,” one officer told investigators. “How the hell did they dress him so fast?”

Paul Forell, a Swedish airport police officer who was on duty that night, added: “Everything was very smooth, professional. I mean, I thought, they have done this before.”

Zery later complained to his lawyers that the CIA agents tranquilized him by inserting suppositories in his anus during the search and that the two prisoners were forced to wear diapers. Swedish police officers said they couldn’t recall if the Egyptians had been forcibly medicated.

Investigators did find a report written by one of the Swedish officers that said Agiza and Zery were both “probably given a tranquilizer before takeoff.”

While investigators said they could not prove that the prisoners had been forcibly medicated, such a tactic would have violated Swedish law.

In a January letter to parliamentary investigators, the new director of the security police, Klas Bergenstrand, said the decision to rely on the CIA was a mistake.

“In my judgment, it is clear that some of the measures adopted after the two Egyptians had arrived at Bromma Airport were excessive in relation to the actual risks that existed,” Bergenstrand wrote. “For my part, I would find it alien to use a foreign aircraft with foreign security staff.”

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on New Swedish Documents Illuminate CIA Action

The Unknown Unknowns of the Abu Ghraib Scandal

Posted on May 22, 2005 by Team VCS

It’s been over a year since I published a series of articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There have been at least 10 official military investigations since then – none of which has challenged the official Bush administration line that there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking such abuse. The buck always stops with the handful of enlisted army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company whose images fill the iconic Abu Ghraib photos with their inappropriate smiles and sadistic posing of the prisoners.

It’s a dreary pattern. The reports and the subsequent Senate proceedings are sometimes criticized on editorial pages. There are calls for a truly independent investigation by the Senate or House. Then, as months pass with no official action, the issue withers away, until the next set of revelations revives it.

There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centers in south-east Asia and elsewhere. I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home. The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they – and everybody in the command – understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.

What else do I know? I know that the decision was made inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the Afghanistan war – which seemed “won” by December 2001 – to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout the country. At the time, according to a memo, in my possession, addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, there were “800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody”. I could not learn if some or all of them have been released, or if some are still being held.

A Pentagon spokesman, when asked to comment, said that he had no information to substantiate the number in the document, and that there were currently about 100 juveniles being held in Iraq and Afghanistan; he did not address detainees held elsewhere. He said they received some special care, but added “age is not a determining factor in detention … As with all the detainees, their release is contingent upon the determination that they are not a threat and that they are of no further intelligence value. Unfortunately, we have found that … age does not necessarily diminish threat potential.”

The 10 official inquiries into Abu Ghraib are asking the wrong questions, at least in terms of apportioning ultimate responsibility for the treatment of prisoners. The question that never gets adequately answered is this: what did the president do after being told about Abu Ghraib? It is here that chronology becomes very important.

The US-led coalition forces swept to seeming immediate success in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and by early April Baghdad had been taken. Over the next few months, however, the resistance grew in scope, persistence and skill. In August 2003 it became more aggressive. At this point there was a decision to get tough with the thousands of prisoners in Iraq, many of whom had been seized in random raids or at roadside checkpoints. Major General Geoffrey D Miller, an army artillery officer who, as commander at Guantánamo, had got tough with the prisoners there, visited Baghdad to tutor the troops – to “Gitmo-ize” the Iraqi system.

By the beginning of October 2003 the reservists on the night shift at Abu Ghraib had begun their abuse of prisoners. They were aware that some of America’s elite special forces units were also at work at the prison. Those highly trained military men had been authorized by the Pentagon’s senior leadership to act far outside the normal rules of engagement. There was no secret about the interrogation practices used throughout that autumn and early winter, and few objections. In fact representatives of one of the Pentagon’s private contractors at Abu Ghraib, who were involved in prisoner interrogation, were told that Condoleezza Rice, then the president’s national security adviser, had praised their efforts. It’s not clear why she would do so – there is still no evidence that the American intelligence community has accumulated any significant information about the operations of the resistance, who continue to strike US soldiers and Iraqis. The night shift’s activities at Abu Ghraib came to an end on January 13 2004, when specialist Joseph M Darby, one of the 372nd reservists, provided army police authorities with a disk full of explicit images. By then, these horrors had been taking place for nearly four months.

Three days later the army began an investigation. But it is what was not done that is significant. There is no evidence that President Bush, upon learning of the devastating conduct at Abu Ghraib, asked any hard questions of Rumsfeld and his own aides in the White House; no evidence that they took any significant steps, upon learning in mid-January of the abuses, to review and modify the military’s policy toward prisoners. I was told by a high-level former intelligence official that within days of the first reports the judicial system was programmed to begin prosecuting the enlisted men and women in the photos and to go no further up the chain of command.

In late April, after the CBS and New Yorker reports, a series of news conferences and press briefings emphasized the White House’s dismay over the conduct of a few misguided soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the president’s repeated opposition to torture. Miller was introduced anew to the American press corps in Baghdad and it was explained that the general had been assigned to clean up the prison system and instill respect for the Geneva conventions.

Despite Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo – not to mention Iraq and the failure of intelligence – and the various roles they played in what went wrong, Rumsfeld kept his job; Rice was promoted to secretary of state; Alberto Gonzales, who commissioned the memos justifying torture, became attorney general; deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz was nominated to the presidency of the World Bank; and Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence and one of those most directly involved in the policies on prisoners, was still one of Rumsfeld’s closest confidants. President Bush, asked about accountability, told the Washington Post before his second inauguration that the American people had supplied all the accountability needed – by re-electing him. Only seven enlisted men and women have been charged or pleaded guilty to offenses relating to Abu Ghraib. No officer is facing criminal proceedings.

Such action, or inaction, has special significance for me. In my years of reporting, since covering My Lai in 1969, I have come to know the human costs of such events – and to believe that soldiers who participate can become victims as well.

Amid my frenetic reporting for the New Yorker on Abu Ghraib, I was telephoned by a middle-aged woman. She told me that a family member, a young woman, was among those members of the 320th Military Police Battalion, to which the 372nd was attached, who had returned to the US in March. She came back a different person – distraught, angry and wanting nothing to do with her immediate family. At some point afterward, the older woman remembered that she had lent the reservist a portable computer with a DVD player to take to Iraq; on it she discovered an extensive series of images of a naked Iraqi prisoner flinching in fear before two snarling dogs. One of the images was published in the New Yorker and then all over the world.

The war, the older woman told me, was not the war for democracy and freedom that she thought her young family member had been sent to fight. Others must know, she said. There was one other thing she wanted to share with me. Since returning from Iraq, the young woman had been getting large black tattoos all over her body. She seemed intent on changing her skin.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , | Comments Off on The Unknown Unknowns of the Abu Ghraib Scandal

Red Cross told U.S. of Koran incidents

Posted on May 21, 2005 by Team VCS

The International Committee of the Red Cross documented what it called credible information about U.S. personnel disrespecting or mishandling Korans at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and pointed it out to the Pentagon in confidential reports during 2002 and early 2003, an ICRC spokesman said Wednesday.

Representatives of the ICRC, who have played a key role in investigating abuse allegations at the facility in Cuba and other U.S. military prisons, never witnessed such incidents firsthand during on-site visits, said Simon Schorno, an ICRC spokesman in Washington.

But ICRC delegates, who have been granted access to the secretive camp since January 2002, gathered and corroborated enough similar, independent reports from detainees to raise the issue multiple times with Guantanamo commanders and with Pentagon officials, Schorno said in an interview Wednesday.

Following the ICRC’s reports, the Defense Department command in Guantanamo issued almost three pages of detailed, written guidelines for treatment of Korans. Schorno said ICRC representatives did not receive any other complaints or document similar incidents following the issuance of the guidelines on Jan. 19, 2003.

The issue of how Korans are handled by American personnel guarding Muslim detainees moved into the spotlight after protests in Muslim nations, including deadly riots in Afghanistan, that followed a now-retracted report in Newsweek magazine. That story said U.S. investigators had confirmed that interrogators had flushed a Koran down a toilet.

The Koran is Islam’s holiest book, and mistreating it is seen as an offense against God.

Following the firestorm over the report and the riots, the ICRC declined Wednesday to discuss what kind of alleged incidents were involved, how many there were or how often it reported them to American officials prior to the release of the 2003 Koran guidelines.

“We don’t want to comment specifically on specific instances of desecration, only on the general level of how the Koran was disrespected,” Schorno said.

Schorno did say, however, that there were “multiple” instances involved and that the ICRC made confidential reports about such incidents “multiple” times to Guantanamo and Pentagon officials.

In addition to the retracted Newsweek story, senior Bush administration officials have repeatedly downplayed other reports regarding alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo, largely dismissing them because they came from current or former detainees.

Pentagon confirms reports

Asked about the ICRC’s confidential reports Wednesday night, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed their existence but sought to downplay the seriousness of their content. He said they were forwarded “on rare occasions” and called them “detainee allegations which they [the ICRC] could not corroborate.”

But that is not how Schorno, the ICRC spokesman, portrayed the reports.

“All information we received were corroborated allegations,” he said, adding, “We certainly corroborated mentions of the events by detainees themselves.”

`Not just one person’

Schorno also said: “Obviously, it is not just one person telling us something happened and we just fire up. We take it very seriously, and very carefully, and document everything in our confidential reports.”

It was not clear whether the ICRC’s corroboration went beyond statements made independently by detainees.

The organization has said that it insists on speaking “in total privacy to each and every detainee held” when its delegates and translators visit military detention facilities.

Still, Whitman said there was nothing in the ICRC reports that approximated the information published in the story retracted by Newsweek.

“The representations that were made to the United States military at Guantanamo by the ICRC are consistent with the types of things we have found in various [U.S. military] log entries about handling Korans, such as the accidental dropping of a Koran,” he said.

the military’s sensitivity about Muslim religious issues, but they did not note that the ICRC had confidentially reported specific concerns before the guidelines were issued.

The procedures outlined in the memorandum, which is entitled “Inspecting/Handling Detainee Korans Standard Operating Procedure,” are exacting. Among other things, they mandate that chaplains or Muslim interpreters should inspect all Korans, and that military police should not touch the holy books.

The guidelines also specify that Korans should not be “placed in offensive areas such as the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet areas,” according to a copy.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan suggested Tuesday that the guidelines should be broadly reported in the wake of the retracted Newsweek story.

“The military put in place policies and procedures to make sure that the Koran was handled, or is handled, with the utmost care and respect,” he said.

U.S. credited for response

The ICRC gave U.S. officials credit for taking corrective action at Guantanamo by issuing the guidelines, with Schorno saying Wednesday, “We brought it up to the attention of the authorities, and it was followed through.”

He also said, “The memo doesn’t mention the ICRC, but we know that our comments are taken seriously.”

Still, Schorno did not say the guidelines were issued specifically in response to the ICRC’s reports. Schorno’s remarks Wednesday represented a departure from the ICRC’s customary policy of confidentiality with the governments it deals with in an effort to maintain their trust and the organization’s neutrality.

A senior State Department official, speaking only on the condition that he not be named, said Wednesday the issuance of the guidelines followed the ICRC’s reports and that they were “a credit to the fact that we investigate and correct practices and problems.”

Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman, said he was not aware of “any specific precipitating event that caused the command to codify those in a written policy.”

Whitman also said, “The ICRC works very closely with us to help us identify concerns with respect to detainees on a variety of issues, to include religious issues. But I can’t make any direct correlation there” between ICRC concerns on the Koran and the issuance of the 2003 guidelines.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on Red Cross told U.S. of Koran incidents

Military Recruiters Lie About Dangers In Iraq

Posted on May 21, 2005 by Team VCS

Military Recruiters Lie About Dangers In Iraq

Army To Suspend Recruiting For Retraining Following Target 5 Investigation

CINCINNATI — This is the text of WLWT’s report exactly as it appeared on the 11 p.m. newscast on May 18, 2005:

 

Announcer: “An explosive Target 5 investigation. Our hidden cameras catch military recruiters making the Tri-state sound more dangerous than Iraq.”

 

Video: Watch Dave Wagner’s Report

 

Recruiter: “You’ve got more chance of dying over here than you do over there.” Announcer: “So, why are Tri-state recruits ready to risk their lives not getting honest answers?” Anchor: “The problem is so bad the military is planning a nationwide stand-down day. That means this Friday the Army won’t do any recruiting. Why? ecruiters using outrageous tactics to get your son or daughter to enlist. “You won’t believe how bad the problem is. “Dave Wagner has the shocking Target 5 investigation.” Dave Wagner: “Each day, thousands of American teenagers consider the merits of military service, young men and women willing to wear a uniform and put their lives on the line. Tonight, a revealing look at what goes on when teenagers go behind closed doors with Tri-state military recruiters. In a startling number of cases, it’s high pressure, false statements and ‘Conduct Unbecoming.'” Bill Fisher, retired Army recruiter: “Their job is to call you and try to get your interest sparked.” Recruiter: “I’m not trying to do a sales pitch.” Wagner: “In the world of sale, every pitch has a price.” Fisher: “I think with honesty and integrity you can fill any quota.” Wagner: “In the land of a free-market economy, facts can get in the way of a good prospect.” Recruiter: “You have more chance of dying here in the United States.” Wagner: “Even when the pitchman is in uniform.” Fisher: “It’s insane. That’s ludicrous. You just don’t do that.” Larry Clock: “My name is Larry Clock and I’m a senior.” Wagner: “They are the fresh faces of our future.” Adrienne Morrison. “I’m a senior.” Wagner: “High school seniors in the prime of their lives.” Morrison: “I’ve received phone calls, letters in the mail.” Wagner: “Kids in the crosshairs of U.S. military recruiters.” Fisher: “In recruiting throughout all the branches, they’re looking for the good students, the ones that you consider the good students in high school.” Fisher: “I’m Bill Fisher. I’m a retired master sergeant with the United States Army. I recruited for 13 years. Yea, I’ll talk to anybody.” Wagner: “These days, it’s a lot easier talking to high school students because military recruiters have easier access to your kids. As part of the No Child Left Behind Act, all schools that receive federal funding, and nearly all of them do, are required to give military recruiters access to your child’s name, address and phone number.” Fisher: “From a recruiting standpoint, that’s a great thing because a lot of people we couldn’t get numbers to actually tell the Army story or the armed forces story we now can.” Recruiter: “I’m not trying to do a sales pitch.” Wagner: “But as Target 5 discovered, those military pitches can turn from fact to fiction in a matter of seconds. Target 5 sent four young men, with hidden cameras, into every Tri-state armed forces recruiting center. The conversations began with talk of job security.” Recruiter: “We guarantee you a job.” Wagner: “Signing bonuses.” Recruiter: “Up to $20,000.” Wagner: “And cash for college.” Recruiter: “Up to $70,000 for college.” Wagner: “But when the questions turn to safety, some Tri-state recruiters make Iraq sound more like a trip to Tahiti than a journey to war.” Recruiter: “You have more chance of dying here in the United States at, what is it, 36-percent die, kill rate here in the United States, people here just dying left and right, you have more chance of dying over here than you do over there.” Wagner: “The U.S. does not have a 36-percent kill rate. If that were true, more than 100 million people, one-third of the U.S. population, would be killed each year.” Fisher: “To just openly not tell the truth, to push it aside, that’s just wrong.” Wagner: “Back at the recruiting center.” Recruiter: “The way I am, I’m a no-bull type of guy.” Wagner: “But you’d never know that based upon what he tells our young recruit.” Recruiter: “If you get on the Internet and look up how many deaths are in Columbia, S.C., in the past year, year and a half, and then compare that to how many deaths there are in Iraq, there’s more deaths going on in Columbia, S.C., for no reason, none, over a pair of Nikes, over a jacket, people stealing people’s wallets, shooting people. There’s more deaths going on in Columbia, S.C. — I know, I just got back from there — than there was in the whole time when I was in Iraq.” Wagner: “So Target 5 called the Columbia, S.C., police department, and despite the words of our Tri-state recruit, this city is hardly a hotbed for crime.” Sgt. Thomas Thomas of Columbia, S.C., police department: “There were 16 homicides in the city of Columbia in 2004. This year to date we have five in the city.” Wagner: “And if that recruiter thinks Columbia, S.C., listen to what this GI Joe Isuzu says about the danger of driving around Dayton, Ohio.” Recruiter: “Dayton area alone, which is about four or five counties, Dayton area alone, 1,500 people died in two weeks. You know what that was from? Car wrecks. Those numbers that we get, we get from the actual highway patrol. So, I mean, all that stuff’s factual. So, you look at that way. We’ve lost 1,500 soldiers so far over in Iraq. We’ve been over there for three years. If you add it together, 1,500 people died in five counties alone within two weeks, just from car wrecks.” Wagner: “The truth is, there aren’t 1,500 deaths from car wrecks in the entire state of Ohio for an entire year.” Fisher: “Conduct unbecoming a non-commissioned officer is what those statements are. I don’t know where he came up with it. It’s just insane. Yea, yea, he could be your car salesman of the Isuzu.” Wagner: “The national spokesman for the Army recruiting command at Fort Knox tells Target 5: “I don’t know why anybody would even let that phrase even come out of their mouth. For whatever reasons, these recruiters must have found these talking points somewhere on their own. I don’t know.” Wagner: “Do you think that in the private conversations they’re having with recruits here, that they’re thinking, no one will ever check this, no one will ever know?” Fisher: “I’m sure that anyone who could tell that, I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re thinking.” Wagner: “Still to come, the pressure to fill quotas, the pressure put on recruits, more tall tales and the immediate action the military has taken in response to our Target 5 investigation. “Now, more of our Target 5 investigation into Tri-state military recruiters offering big bonuses and tall tales to Tri-state teenagers. “Since the war began, about 1,500 U.S. servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq. The violence has made military recruiting more difficult, often because parents worry about their kids’ safety. But recruiters are tracking down teens when parents aren’t around, and the pressure can be immense. As we continue our Target 5 investigation, ‘Conduct Unbecoming.'” Wagner (in Milford High School classroom): “How many of you have been approached by a military recruiter in the past year?” (Several students raise hands). Wagner: “In Mr. Jewell’s American government class …” Student: “I think they’re really biased.” Wagner: “Students are talking about military recruiters.” Student: “A recruiter called me up and told me they got a new deal going on, $5,000 to enlist now for the Army.” Student: “I was told that if I signed up for the Marines they’d give me a $10,000 signing bonus on the spot. I didn’t believe that one.” Wagner: “Signing bonuses and college cash are being used to attract fresh faces to the armed forces. But Army recruiters have missed their quotas for the past three months; the Marines, short of their goal for the past four months. When this high school senior says his parents are concerned about his safety in the military, this recruiter puts on the full-court press.” Recruiter: “Don’t hesitate. Don’t leave me hanging. Even if they really don’t want to talk about it, we can still sit down and talk, all right? Because by you walking in here, that shows that you’re interested, and I’d hate for you to be denied this United States Army opportunity. Honestly.” Fisher: “Recruiters are supposed to be at the top of their career field throughout the United States, the best infantry, the best cooks, the best medical technicians, the best, the people you want to represent your service. These are the ones you bring out on recruiting day. “There are some soldiers who are great soldiers but pitiful salesman.” Recruiter: “Of course, the news media is going to blow it way out of proportion.” Wagner: “While some recruiters blame the media for hyping the danger in Iraq, this recruiter, who served on the front lines, has a more straightforward approach.” Student: “I’m curious about how dangerous it really is over there, because in the news and everything people are dying.” Recruiter: “Yea, it’s war, you know?” Wagner: “This week in the Tri-state the realties of war are tragically clear, another goodbye for two young men who fought and died. early a third of those killed in Iraq are under the age of 22, the vast majority from the Army and Marine Corps, 111 of them from Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. As a country honors their sacrifice, these high school seniors get ready for their military service with a sendoff and straight talk from their local congressman.” Rep. Steve Chabot: “We need to make sure that those kids who are considering a military career get the true facts. They’re great young men and women, they’re serving their country or will be in the near future, and we ought to be honest with them. We ought to let the kids know the truth and what’s really happening. And there’s no question, that Iraq can be a dangerous place.” Recruiter: “I was watching the news the other day. In Cincinnati alone, as of April, there were 867 deaths in Cincinnati.” Wagner: “While some recruiters play it loose with the facts.” Recruiter: “Eighty-eight people over there have died from gunshot wounds.” Wagner: “Bill Fisher says it worked for him to play it straight.” Fisher: “We have like the greatest armed forces in the world right now. The kids are just fantastic. And to sit back and say something like this is just silly. You don’t need to. You don’t have to sway them by innuendos or lies. You just have to search for those who want to join, and there are tons of them.” Recruiter: “I can at least provide you with honest answers. OK? I can be the Honest Abe around the corner.” Wagner: “Tonight the spokesman for the U.S. Army recruiting command at Fort Knox say he believes the recruiters aren’t deliberately making false statements. “This Friday, Army recruiting will be suspended nationwide so recruiters can be retrained, and Target 5 is assured all recruiters will be told to stop making these statements without evidence to back them up.”

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on Military Recruiters Lie About Dangers In Iraq

The military’s desperation is showing

Posted on May 20, 2005 by Team VCS

The military’s desperation is showing

Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?  This flower-bedecked poster slogan from the ’60s will surely be haunting the Army’s “values stand-down” day today, when the service branch’s 7,500 recruiters and their COs take the day off for a little ethics force-feeding.

The Army’s – the whole military’s – desperation is showing. None of the four branches is meeting recruitment goals as a brutal, unpopular war drags on, and the recruiters, who are all under heavy pressure to snare two warm bodies a month for this lost cause, are getting outed in the media for appallingly unethical and illegal practices.

These include advising potential (bottom of the barrel) enlistees about how to circumvent drug-screening tests and create fake high-school diplomas, how to pass the physical (one overweight young man was given laxatives and the advice, “Don’t tell your parents”), along with blatant threats and even, apparently, abduction.

According to Mark Crispin Miller’s News from Underground blog, concerned neighbors of Ever Jandres of Encino, Calif., recently wrote a letter to U.S. Rep. Howard Berman charging recruitment malfeasance and asking him to look into the 24-year-old learning-disabled epileptic’s mysterious disappearance.

Jandres, who is Salvadoran and has a borderline low IQ, was apparently “befriended” by a local Army recruiter, who invited him to come with him to Arizona for three days to observe basic training. Five days later, his distraught mother (who speaks no English) got a phone call from her son, who told her, hysterically, that he was on a military base in South Carolina. He was in the Army, he said, and wasn’t allowed to stay on the phone longer than a minute. Family members’ and friends’ attempts to get any information from the Army have been fruitless.

We’re fighting a war the “support our troops” crowd wants no part of, personally – any more than does anyone else of sound mind and the least claim on a future – so the recruiters are battling rationality itself as they struggle to sell inner-city teenagers on the glory of serving in occupied Iraq and signing themselves over to an organization that will essentially own them, body and soul, for the duration of their hitch or longer. Small wonder the recruiters are forced to bend, break and occasionally shatter the rules to get anybody to sign up.

However much ethical restraint they’ll now be temporarily forced to incorporate into their basic spiel (no laxatives!), one thing’s for sure: They won’t begin telling prospective recruits the truth.

“We have to understand that one of the things that happens in war is, truth dies,” said Ray Parrish, a Chicago-based counselor for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who left a well-paying job with full benefits to work with GIs returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And he’s hearing the same expressions of disillusionment, anger and betrayal that he heard when he counseled Vietnam vets and battled the VA to get them their rights. He’s seeing the same shattered psyches, the same wrecked lives, the same post-traumatic stress disorder.

Values stand-down or no values stand-down, the recruiters will not begin telling teenagers anytime soon about PTSD; high vet suicide rates (among Vietnam vets, it’s triple the number of names on The Wall, and counting); or today’s equivalent of Agent Orange, depleted uranium, which, when breathed in, can devastate health over the long term and, especially cruel to young couples, cause birth defects.

Supplying this information is the job of the counter-recruiters, and the fact that they’re out there is one of the most important stories of the war. The vets themselves are the counter-recruiters, telling the truth to high school students.

This is the way back from PTSD – the way for shattered men and women to redeem themselves and rejoin the human race. “It’s part of the healing,” Parrish said. “That’s what the vets are doing – making sure the recruiters don’t sell at all.”

Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? This is what we’re witnessing, slowly, one wised-up teenager at a time.

Robert Koehler is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. Contact him at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at www.commonwonders.com.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on The military’s desperation is showing

Profile: Severe brain injuries among Iraq War Veterans

Posted on May 19, 2005 by Team VCS

A new trauma in Iraq

Severe brain injuries – and soldiers who live through them – increase in this war, creating challenges

Because more soldiers in Iraq are surviving severe brain injury, doctors are witnessing a potentially long-lasting set of medical and mental problems unique to participants in modern-day war.

“Traumatic brain injury is the signature wound of this war,” said Lt. Col. Rocco Armonda, an attending neurosurgeon at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Armonda and another neurosurgeon treated brain-injured patients in 2003, the first year of the war in Iraq. They performed 270 brain surgeries, 60 of which were for penetrating wounds. “In previous conflicts, most of these people would have died,” Armonda said.

In the following year, Armonda said, neurosurgeons doubled the number of craniectomies, in which part of the skull is removed to accommodate brain swelling. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, mortality from brain injuries in the Vietnam War was 75 percent or greater, with 12 to 14 percent of all combat casualties having a brain injury. In the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, traumatic brain injury accounted for 22 percent or higher of the injuries – a larger proportion of casualties than it has in other recent U.S. wars.

War injuries resulting from brain trauma, according to a report today in the journal, range from memory and attention problems to inability to speak or carry out cognitive tasks.

Soldiers are arriving home with headaches and thought disorders, said Dr. Susan Oakie of the journal. They forget words. They may develop new aspects of their personalities and lose aspects of their old selves. With time and therapy, Armonda said, many will recover. But some will have symptoms that never abate.

Lt. Col. Timothy Maxwell of Jacksonville, N.C., served in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and more recently, two tours in Iraq. In October, shrapnel shattered his left elbow and penetrated the left side of his brain. He couldn’t choose the right words. “He used the word ‘security’ a lot,” said his wife, Shannon. He also had difficulty writing and reading and lost peripheral vision. Labels and names eluded him for months. He also had weakness on his right side, a result of the brain trauma.

Like other patients with moderate to severe brain injuries, Maxwell underwent brain surgery right away in Iraq. His recovery has been steady, his wife said, thanks to physical, speech and vision therapy. “I couldn’t find words or understand pictures,” he said. “It is much, much better already.”

Oakie said Kevlar body armor and helmets have protected soldiers from injuries common in other wars. But these advances are giving way to unique injuries and symptoms because in previous wars, soldiers did not survive to endure them.

Helmets don’t guarantee protection against impacts that cause brain trauma. A blast can cause symptoms without signs of external injury, Armonda said.

Doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., are assessing all injured troops returning from Iraq. As many as 60 percent have brain injuries, the journal reported. Some are mild. Most are moderate to severe. “There is a good chance that they will be living with symptoms for a long time,” Oakie said.

Armonda is seeing patients who have lingering problems with memory and attention, disinhibition, irritability, anxiety and depression, he said. “If you can get to these patients in the first golden hour [after the injury] you can make a tremendous difference in their long-term outcome,” he said.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on Profile: Severe brain injuries among Iraq War Veterans

Disabled American Veterans: Veteran Affairs Funding Bill Shortchanges Nation’s Veterans

Posted on May 19, 2005 by Team VCS

Disabled American Veterans: Veteran Affairs Funding Bill Shortchanges Nation’s Veterans

To: National Desk

Contact: David E. Autry of Disabled American Veterans, 202-314-5219

WASHINGTON, May 16 /U.S. Newswire/ — The proposed funding level for veterans medical care is “a cruel pretense and an outrage,” according to the Disabled American Veterans (DAV).

Under legislation passed by the House Military and Quality of Life and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee funding for the veterans health care system would rise just 3 percent above the current level. “That is nowhere near the 13 percent or 14 percent annual funding increase needed just to treat veterans already in the system, let alone the anticipated influx of those returning from Iraq and the war on terrorism,” said DAV National Commander James E. Sursely.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) would receive a total of $68.1 billion in fiscal year 2006, up from this year’s level of $65.8 billion. VA health care funding would be $28.8 billion, up $631 million from 2005.

“The DAV and other major veterans service organizations are united in calling on Congress to provide $31.2 billion for veterans medical care,” said Commander Sursely.

That and other recommendations for funding levels and policy changes to provide VA with the necessary resources are detailed in The Independent Budget, co-authored annually by the DAV, AMVETS, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and the VFW.

“The funding situation is intolerable. Less than half way through the current fiscal year, many VA medical facilities are running out of money and face huge deficits. Their plight will only worsen as large numbers of troops returning home from the war in Iraq threaten to overwhelm already struggling facilities,” Sursely said.

“This totally inadequate funding proposal is a cruel pretense and an outrage. It is a clear indication that the men and women who have served and sacrificed for our country are not a national priority,” Sursely said. “It is disgraceful that our government is refusing to adequately fund the veterans medical system while thousands of Americans are being injured and disabled in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all across the globe.”

——

The 1.2 million-member Disabled American Veterans, a non-profit organization founded in 1920 and chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1932, represents this nation’s disabled veterans. It is dedicated to a single purpose: building better lives for our nation’s disabled veterans and their families. For more information, visit the organization’s Web site http://www.dav.org

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on Disabled American Veterans: Veteran Affairs Funding Bill Shortchanges Nation’s Veterans

Hersh Sees Democracy in Peril in US

Posted on May 18, 2005 by Team VCS

Seymour Hersh, arguably the greatest journalist of our time and certainly the most necessary, joined me last week at a University of Illinois conference that asked the question: “Can freedom of the press survive media consolidations?”

The Pulitzer-winning journalist reworked the question, asking: “Can freedom of the press survive the Bush presidency?”

No one is sharper in his rebukes of U.S. officials than Hersh, the man who exposed the My Lai massacre, CIA domestic spying, the role of the United States in the 1973 coup in Chile that deposed elected President Salvador Allende, Israel’s nuclear ambitions and, most recently, the failures of the U.S. government in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and the prison torture scandal at Abu Ghraib.

Hersh pulls no punches. “Henry Kissinger,” he says, “lies like other people breathe.”

Yet, Hersh adds, he wishes the U.S. government had a Kissinger now because then there would be “somebody (in Washington) with a scheme up his sleeve.”

The veteran journalist, who has been writing for the New Yorker since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, says the United States today is in “uncharted waters,” with leadership that does not begin to understand the world but is playing the games of geopolitics as if it did.

Of President Bush, he says, “This is really a zealot – somebody who believes in what he’s doing and has no information.”

Hersh suggests that, unlike Kissinger, who lied but did so from a basis of knowledge, Bush spreads misinformation that the president, himself, actually thinks is true.

The vacuum in which Bush operates sees him gathering information about the war constantly. Hersh has no doubt that the president and his aides knew that acts of torture were being committed by the U.S. in Iraq and elsewhere. “Did they know what was happening? Of course they did,” says the journalist, who notes the president follows the war closely, getting daily detailed briefings.

The problem, says Hersh, is that Bush gets information tailored to satisfy his biases and to mirror the warped view of public affairs peddled by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other adherents of the neoconservative line.

Reality gets lost in such a circumstance. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the administration continue to push the view that the war is going well. Yet it is not, as the rising death toll in that country illustrates. Indeed, argues Hersh, who knows a great deal about U.S. military adventures gone awry, “This war is going to reverberate in ways that we cannot begin to see. It’s going to be devastating for us all.”

Unfortunately, Hersh does not have an easy answer for the current crisis. “I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this,” he says. “We’re not going to find leadership in Congress. … The media, for the most part, is not doing its job.”

And that is what has Hersh really worried. The man whose investigative reporting was central to changing the course of the nation during the Vietnam War, the Watergate era and other critical junctures in recent American history says that it is getting harder and harder to break through the wall of entertainment “news” – Michael Jackson’s trial, the “runaway bride” – and get the country focused on critical issues such as whether Americans want Iraqis and others to be tortured in their name.

“We need to do something different,” says Hersh, who argues that it is necessary restore a measure of seriousness to mainstream media and to explore new options for alternative media.

The issue at stake is not one of administration, nor even one of war. It is not even the question of whether freedom of the press will survive in an era of media consolidation. It is a question of whether democracy, which the founders believed needed a free flow of information and honest debate, will survive.

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both,” warned James Madison. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”

In this time of tragedy in Iraq and farce in so much of our media, Hersh says, “It turns out our democracy is much more fragile than we think. We’re in peril.”

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on Hersh Sees Democracy in Peril in US

Alert for Chicago Area Veterans: You Can Question VA Chief About VA Disability Benefits

Posted on May 18, 2005 by Team VCS

Alert for Chicago Area Veterans: You Can Question VA Chief About VA Disability Benefits

Illinois veterans will have a chance to quiz Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson about the agency’s disability pay disparity on Friday at an open town hall meeting in Chicago.

Unlike previous visits to Illinois in which veterans were hand-picked by their organizations to attend Nicholson’s functions, the town hall meeting at Wilbur Wright Community College, 4300 N. Narragansett, will be open to all Illinois veterans and their family members.

Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis, starting at 1:30 p.m. The session is scheduled from 2:45 to 4 p.m. The first 250 people will be seated in the atrium with Nicholson. Others will be seated in overflow rooms with live video feeds. All will have an opportunity to submit questions to the secretary.

Hosted by Senators Dick Durbin and Barack Obama, both of Illinois, the meeting is intended to address the disability pay disparity first revealed by the Chicago Sun-Times last December.

Wounded veterans from Illinois have received among the lowest disability pay in the nation for the past 70 years.

Nicholson agreed to address Illinois veterans about the disparity in January before he was confirmed to his post in February. This will be his third visit to Illinois but the first time he has met with a large group of veterans in Chicago.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on Alert for Chicago Area Veterans: You Can Question VA Chief About VA Disability Benefits

Librarian’s brush with FBI shapes her view of the USA Patriot Act

Posted on May 18, 2005 by Team VCS

  Librarian’s brush with FBI shapes her view of the USA Patriot Act   It was a moment that librarians had been dreading.

On June 8, 2004, an FBI agent stopped at the Deming branch of the Whatcom County Library System in northwest Washington and requested a list of the people who had borrowed a biography of Osama bin Laden. We said no.

We did not take this step lightly. First, our attorney called the local FBI office and asked why the information was important. She was told that one of our patrons had sent the FBI the book after discovering these words written in the margin: “If the things I’m doing is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal. Hostility toward America is a religious duty and we hope to be rewarded by God.”

We told the FBI that it would have to follow legal channels before our board of trustees would address releasing the names of the borrowers. We also informed the FBI that, through a Google search, our attorney had discovered that the words in the margin were almost identical to a statement by bin Laden in a 1998 interview.

Undeterred, the FBI served a subpoena on the library a week later demanding a list of everyone who had borrowed the book since November 2001.

Our trustees faced a difficult decision. It is our job to protect the right of people to obtain the books and other materials they need to form and express ideas. If the government can easily obtain records of the books that our patrons are borrowing, they will not feel free to request the books they want. Who would check out a biography of bin Laden knowing that this might attract the attention of the FBI?

It is for this reason that libraries across the country have taken a strong stand against government intrusion. In the 1980s, it was revealed that the FBI had engaged in a secret “library awareness” program to track the books borrowed by patrons who had emigrated from communist countries. Determined to prevent such activities in the future, librarians helped pass laws in 48 states that bar the surrender of customer information except in compliance with a subpoena.

For our trustees, this sense of responsibility to protect libraries as institutions where people are free to explore any idea ran up against their desire to help their government fight terrorism. But they were resolute and voted unanimously to go to court to quash the FBI subpoena. Fifteen days later, the FBI withdrew its request.

But there is a shadow over our happy ending. Our experience taught us how easily the FBI could have discovered the names of the borrowers, how readily this could happen in any library in the USA. It also drove home for us the dangers that the USA Patriot Act poses to reader privacy.

Since the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001, the FBI has the power to go to a secret court to request library and bookstore records considered relevant to a national security investigation. It does not have to show that the people whose records are sought are suspected of any crime or explain why they are being investigated. In addition, librarians and booksellers are forbidden to reveal that they have received an order to surrender customer data.

Our government has always possessed the power to obtain library records, but that power has been subject to safeguards. The Patriot Act eliminated those safeguards and made it impossible for people to ask a judge to rule whether the government needs the information it is after. In the current debate over extending or amending the Patriot Act, one of the key questions is whether a library or any other institution can seek an independent review of an order. Even the attorney general conceded in a recent oversight hearing that this is a problem with the law as written.

Fortunately for our patrons, we were able to mount a successful challenge to what seems to have been a fishing expedition. If it had returned with an order from a secret court under the Patriot Act, the FBI might now know which residents in our part of Washington State had simply tried to learn more about bin Laden.

With a Patriot Act order in hand, I would have been forbidden to disclose even the fact that I had received it and would not have been able to tell this story.

Joan Airoldi, a librarian, is director of the library district in Whatcom County, Wash.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on Librarian’s brush with FBI shapes her view of the USA Patriot Act