Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

By David Barstow / NY Times

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

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Justice Dept. Details Program for Collecting DNA From People in Federal Custody

By Randal C. Archibold / NY Times

The Bush administration moved forward on Friday with a program to expand collecting DNA samples from people in federal custody.

But it was unclear how federal laboratories would be able to handle the added work.

The Justice Department formally proposed regulations for collecting the samples, a technique that essentially mirrors taking the fingerprints of people arrested for federal offenses, as well as illegal immigrants detained by federal authorities.

The government now collects DNA just from felons. DNA, the genetic marker found in hair and blood and other body fluids, can provide a more concrete link to a crime than fingerprints, which often are not left at a crime scene or are difficult to collect.

For the new effort to succeed, the samples, most collected by swabbing an inside cheek, have to be entered into the DNA database of the F.B.I.

A spokeswoman for the bureau’s laboratory, Ann Todd, said it already had a backlog of 225,000 samples to be processed, a more complex procedure than entering fingerprints.

If Justice Department estimates are accurate, work at the laboratory would increase twelvefold, Ms. Todd said.

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America's Secret Plan To Nuke Vietnam & Laos

By Richard S. Ehrlich

The U.S. Air Force wanted to use "nuclear weapons" against Vietnam in 1959 and 1968, and Laos in 1961, to obliterate communist guerrillas, according to newly declassified secret U.S. Air Force documents.

In 1959, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Thomas D. White chose several targets in northern Vietnam, but other military officials blocked his demand to nuke the Southeast Asian nation.

"White wanted to cripple the insurgents and their supply lines by attacking selected targets in North Vietnam, either with conventional or nuclear weapons," one declassified Air Force document said. "Although White's paper called for giving the North Vietnamese a pre-attack warning, the other chiefs tabled it, possibly due to the inclusion of nuclear weapons. Seven months later, the proposal was withdrawn," it said.

The 400-page document, titled, "The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The War in Northern Laos 1954-1973," was written in 1993 by the Center for Air Force History in Washington and "classified by multiple sources."

It was made public -- along with several other previously secret, war-era Air Force documents -- on April 9 by the National Security Archive in Washington, after extensive Freedom of Information Act litigation.

The Archive is an independent, non-governmental research institute in George Washington University.

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Our Reign of Terror, by the Israeli Army

By Donald Macintyre

The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten "to a pulp" when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty.

But his frequent, if nervous, grins and giggles occasionally show just a hint of the bravado he might have displayed if boasting of his exploits to his mates in a bar.

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America's Allies in Iraq Under Pressure as Civil War Breaks Out Among Sunni

"God is Great," screamed a man seconds before he blew himself up, killing 10 people in a restaurant in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq. A series of suicide bombings have shown over the past week that al-Qa'ida in Iraq, though battered by defections over the past year, is striking back remorselessly at Sunni Arab leaders who ally themselves to the US.

In another attack in the village of Albu Mohammed, south of Kirkuk, an elderly man thought by guards to be too old to be a bomber, walked unsearched into a tent filled with mourners attending the funeral of two Sunni tribesmen who had been killed after they joined al-Sahwa, the Awakening Council, as the pro-US Sunni group is called. The man detonated the explosives hidden under his long Arab robes, killing at least 50 people.

A vicious civil war is now being fought within Iraq's Sunni Arab community between al-Qa'ida in Iraq and al-Sahwa while other groups continue to attack American forces. In Baghdad on a single day the head of al-Sahwa in the southern district of Dora was killed in his car by gunmen and seven others died by bombs and bullets in al-Adhamiya district.

US spokesmen speak of a "spike" in violence in recent weeks but in reality security in Sunni and Shia parts of Iraq has been deteriorating since January. The official daily death toll of civilians reached a low of 20 killed a day in that month and has since more than doubled to 41 a day in March. The US and the Iraqi government are now facing a war on two fronts.

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9/11 Publication in a Peer-reviewed Civil Engineering Journal!

By Prof Jones

Finally! After submitting a half-dozen papers to established peer-reviewed technical journals over a period of nearly a year, we have two papers which have passed peer-review and have been accepted for publication. One of these was published on 4-18-08! In science, we say that we have “published in the literature,” a major step in a nascent line of scientific inquiry.

And many thanks to the editors for their courage and adherence to science in allowing us to follow the evidence and publish in their journal. (Indeed, expressions of thanks along these lines to the editors will be appreciated, as they will probably get a few letters chastising them… )

The paper is here:
http://www.bentham.org/open/index.htm (our paper is listed on top at the moment, the most recently entered paper); or go here:
http://www.bentham.org/open/tociej/openaccess2.htm
(Click on “year 2008” then scroll down to the paper and click on it.)

---

Jones earned his bachelor's degree in physics, magna cum laude, from Brigham Young University in 1973, and his Ph.D. in physics from Vanderbilt University in 1978. Jones conducted his Ph.D. research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (from 1974 to 1977), and post-doctoral research at Cornell University and the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.

Top U.S. General 'Hoodwinked' Over Aggressive Interrogation

The US's most senior general was "hoodwinked" by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques for terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian can reveal.

The development led to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture.

The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington - who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date - is disclosed in a devastating account of their role, extracts from which will be published in tomorrow's Guardian.

In his new book, Torture Team, Philippe Sands QC, a professor of law at University College London, reveals:

• Senior figures in the Bush administration pushed through previously outlawed measures with the help of unqualified and inexperienced military officials at Guantánamo.

• Myers believes he was a victim of "intrigue" by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of the vice president, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld's defence department.

• Myers wrongly believed interrogation techniques had been taken from the army's field manual.

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The Pentagon's $1 Trillion Problem

On a winter afternoon in Indianapolis, Jessica Hilligoss, a young Defense Department worker, types long strings of numbers and letters into a computer, helping the United States armed forces transfer the billions of dollars it draws each week from the Federal Reserve to contractors, vendors, and military and civilian personnel.

Her job is to review invoices for everything from construction projects to lawnmowing, and to approve payment. Within a few days, another computer system—behind locked doors in the building's basement—deposits the money in the recipients' bank accounts.

The size of nearly 28 football fields, with a facade of alternating red stucco and white cement tiles, the three-story operations center is the federal government's third-largest office building, after the Pentagon and the Ronald Reagan Building, and the place where a big chunk of the Iraq war's soaring price is paid. The center doles out more than $104 billion annually, making it Defense's largest disburser.

Theoretically, when Hilligoss authorizes a payment, the department should be able to instantly track where the money goes and which program it was spent on, in order to make sure the right amounts are paid to the right recipients at the right times. But it doesn't work that way.

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Pope Criticizes U.S. For Shunning Iraq Diplomacy

Pope Benedict XVI made a veiled attack on the United States for failing to listen to the international community before starting the war in Iraq.

In a carefully-worded speech to the United Nations' General Assembly, the Pope underlined the need for diplomacy.

"Multilateral consensus continues to be in crisis because it is still subordinated to the decisions of a few, whereas the world's problems call for interventions in the form of collective action," he said, adding that international rules must be "binding".

He continued: "There have been painful lessons for the US, the UN and other member states.

"I think in the end everybody's concluded it's best to work together with our allies and through the UN."

Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican's UN representative, said the Pope wanted to attack "the false notion that might makes right".

The Pope also called for "a deeper search for ways of managing conflicts by exploring every possible diplomatic avenue, and giving attention and encouragement to even the faintest sign of dialogue or desire for reconciliation".

He urged the international community to intervene in cases where countries are unable to protect their people from "grave and sustained violations of human rights".

He added: "It is indifference or non-intervention which causes the real harm."

Gordon Brown has also said that he wants the UN to become more effective in preventing and resolving conflicts.

Pentagon, FBI Probing Air Force Contracts

Federal authorities have begun investigating a contracting arrangement between the Air Force and an intelligence firm called Commonwealth Research Institute, according to documents and people familiar with the case.

Agents from the FBI and the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service in recent weeks have delivered subpoenas seeking details about how Commonwealth, or CRI, a little-known nonprofit organization in Pennsylvania, received work from the Air Force through a sole-source deal.

The investigators want to know whether Air Force officials followed appropriate procedures in granting work to CRI. They also want to know whether work was performed primarily by CRI or by more established corporations serving as subcontractors, according to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the case.

The investigation appears to be in an early stage and related in part to a five-year contract worth up to $45 million that was awarded to CRI without competition in 2006, according to people familiar with the investigation. That contract is for consulting, analysis and management support services for the Air Force, National Security Agency, CIA and other intelligence agencies, documents show.

Investigators are also seeking information about contracts involving CRI's parent, Concurrent Technologies, some of them dating to 2005, according to people familiar with the probe.

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Pentagon Institute: Iraq War 'A Major Debacle' With Outcome 'In Doubt'

The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush 's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins , a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies , a Defense Department research center.

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.

At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion.

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NYT’s Lichtblau: Bush Torture Program And CIA Tape Destruction ‘Could Lead To Criminal Action’

ABC News recently revealed that President Bush’s most senior advisers convened in 2002 and approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics. Days later, Bush told ABC he “approved” of the tactics.

Questions have been raised as to whether senior officials, including Bush, could be prosecuted for approving torture. ThinkProgress discussed the issue with The New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Jeffrey Rosen, law professor at George Washington University. Lichtblau won the Pullitzer Prize for his December 2005 story breaking the news that Bush was illegally spying on Americans after 9/11. As legal affairs editor of The New Republic, Rosen is considered “the nation’s most widely read and influential legal commentator.”

Discussing the potential for criminal prosecution against senior advisers, Lichtblau argued that a more probable scenario is that low-level officers who executed the interrogation orders face prosecution:

I certainly don’t think it’s likely that you would see international war crimes or, even in a Democratic administration, criminal prosecutions. … I think more likely, if you’re looking at criminal action, the more likely scenario is against the low level case officers who may have actually been carrying out interrogations and using severe interrogation tactics bordering on torture. … If that could be established or of course we have now the destruction of the CIA tapes, and that cover-up could very well lead to, conceivably, I should say, lead to criminal action if it were found that that were done to withhold evidence from the courts or 9/11 Commission.

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Oversight of Teams In Iraq, Afghanistan Faulted in Hill Report

The U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan through local reconstruction teams lacks clear goals, organizational structure and lines of command, according to a new congressional report.

Funding for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which President Bush has called the leading edge of stabilization efforts in the two nations, is ad hoc and comes from so many sources that congressional investigators were unable to determine how much has been spent on the joint military-civilian teams, the report by the House Armed Services oversight and investigations subcommittee says.

The subcommittee, which conducted a six-month investigation, recommends that the State and Defense departments develop a "unity of command" for the PRTs, as they are known, along with specific objectives and ways to ascertain whether they have been met. It also urges more intense and streamlined congressional oversight.

The United States has been in Iraq for five years "and in Afghanistan even longer," the subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), said yesterday. "If the current [PRT] structure was working well, we should have a smooth operation now. But we don't."

Rep. Todd Akin (Mo.), the subcommittee's ranking Republican, agreed. "The organizational structure is a little goofy," he said, adding that it had been "put together with glue and baling wire."

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U.S. Lacks Plan to Operate in Pakistani Tribal Areas, GAO Says

By Dan Eggen / Washington Post

The Bush administration has no comprehensive plan for dealing with the threat posed by Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, where Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding, according to a new report released yesterday from the research arm of Congress.

The Government Accountability Office also said "the United States has not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven" provided by the tribal areas, despite having spent more than $10 billion for Pakistani military operations in the mountainous border region."

GAO staff members interviewed experts inside and outside the government, and "we found broad agreement . . . that al-Qaida had regenerated its ability to attack the United States and had succeeded in establishing a safe haven" in the unpoliced region, the report says.

U.S. intelligence officials have previously portrayed the proliferation of fighters in the Pakistani tribal areas as a central threat to U.S. security and have expressed frustration at the lack of progress there by Pakistan forces.

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Japanese Court Says Iraq Deployment Violates Constitution

Also see: Keep Article 9 in Constitution

A Japanese court said in a non-binding ruling Thursday(4-17-08) that the country's dispatch of air force troops to Iraq was unconstitutional, but the government said the deployment would proceed anyway.

Japan has about 210 air force personnel in Kuwait, from which they air lift supplies to U.S. led forces in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

The Nagoya High Court dismissed the case, saying that it could not rule on the plaintiff's demand for suspension of the deployment, but that the dispatch violated Article 9 of Japan's 1947 constitution.

Iranians Give U.S. Democrats Their Vote

Iran may be knee-deep in its own parliamentary elections but the contest taking place in the US is proving much more compelling for many locals, as they hope for an end to the policies that saw them labelled part of an “axis of evil”.

“In the US they have real democracy, not like here,” says Mehdi, sipping tea in his fabric stall in Tehran’s bustling bazaar. “So I’m very interested in watching their democratic process.”

For many Iranians, their parliamentary elections – which took place last month and will go to a second round on April 25 – are boring. With mass disqualifications of reformist candidates, it was a foregone conclusion that power would remain in conservative hands.

The US election, on the other hand, is anything but pre-ordained. Iran arguably has the most to gain from a Democratic victory: the Bush administration has targeted Tehran’s authorities, instigating a financial crackdown aimed at shutting them out of the international banking system, and the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is also considered an Iran hawk.

“The Democrats are much better than the Republicans – they have a softer policy towards Iran and they are more rational,” says Reza, a middle-aged man selling leather belts in the bazaar who like most Iranians did not want to give his full name because of sensitivities about political debate. “But the Republicans are all liars. They said they were bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq, but all they brought was death.”

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Netanyahu: Won't Honor Peace Deal If Elected

Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu has said if he is elected prime minister, he won't carry out any peace deal with the Palestinians reached by current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a newspaper reported Thursday.

Netanyahu told the Makor Rishon daily that he would regard the election as a referendum on any such accord.

If Olmert doesn't win, "then you cannot cynically and manipulatively force upon the people a move they do not want," Netanyahu said.

Polls show that if elections were held today, Netanyahu would handily beat both Olmert and the Labor Party's chairman, Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Earlier Olmert had hinted at his strategy in the event of a future election by suggesting that a merger between the Knesset's two largest factions, Kadima and Labor, would be possible, the Israeli daily, Ma'ariv reported on Thursday.

In excerpts from the interview, Olmert said he did "not rule out" such unification.

On Saturday a Labor official said that such a merger was being negotiated, with the aim of blocking Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu from becoming Israel's next prime minister.

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Mental Health Injuries Scar 300,000 U.S. Troops

Some 300,000 U.S. troops are suffering from major depression or post traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 received brain injuries, a new study estimates.

Only about half have sought treatment, said the study released Thursday by the RAND Corporation.

“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Terri Tanielian, the project’s co-leader and a researcher at the nonprofit RAND.

“Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The 500-page study is the first large-scale, private assessment of its kind — including a survey of 1,965 service members across the country, from all branches of the armed forces and including those still in the military as well veterans who have left the services.

Its results appear consistent with a number of mental health reports from within the government, though the Defense Department has not released the number of people it has diagnosed or who are being treated for mental problems. The Department of Veterans Affairs said this month that its records show about 120,000 who served in the two wars and are no longer in the military have been diagnosed with mental health problems. Of the 120,000, approximately 60,000 are suffering from PTSD, the VA said.

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FBI Email says Bush Signed Exec Order Authorizing Torture

President George W. Bush’s comment to ABC News -- that he approved discussions that his top aides held about harsh interrogation techniques -- adds credence to claims from senior FBI agents in Iraq in 2004 that Bush had signed an executive order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.

When the American Civil Liberties Union released the FBI e-mail in December 2004 -- after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit -- the White House emphatically denied that any such presidential executive order existed, calling the unnamed FBI official who wrote the e-mail “mistaken.”

President Bush and his representatives also have denied repeatedly that the administration condones “torture,” although senior administration officials have acknowledged subjecting “high-value” terror suspects to aggressive interrogation techniques, including the “waterboarding” -- or simulated drowning -- of three al-Qaeda detainees.

But the emerging public evidence suggests that Bush’s denials about “torture” amount to a semantic argument, with the administration applying a narrow definition that contradicts widely accepted standards contained in international law, including Geneva and other human rights conventions.

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Big Companies to Compete for Iraq's Oil

Iraq, which pre-qualified international oil companies this week for the bidding, will open the southern fields of Rumaila North, Rumaila South, West Qurna and Zubair for exploration, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said in an interview in Brussels yesterday. In the north, international oil companies will be invited to develop the Kirkuk oil field and the Akkaz gas field.

"At least six giant fields will be included, including some gas fields," Shahristani said. "There will be other bid rounds next year, and more companies will be qualified as we go along."

Iraq aims to nearly double oil production to 4 million barrels a day in the coming years with the help of international companies, many of which have refused to invest in the country because of a lack of security and the lack of a federal energy law. No legislation has been passed because of disagreements over revenue sharing and oil-field development.

Iraq pre-qualified 35 of 120 U.S., European and Asian companies that submitted documents between Jan. 9 and Feb. 18 to participate in the licensing round, Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad said Monday.

Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, and Europe's two biggest, Royal Dutch Shell and BP, were among the 35, as were ConocoPhillips, Chevron and Total.

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