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| 7/9 |
| 2006/3/19-21 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:42315 Activity:high |
3/19 Supporter of Bush and Iraq War: I would like to hear your opinion
on this one. Thanks http://csua.org/u/fam (ny times)
\_ Look, this is a war. I guess you never studied history about
how you never play fair. No one ever does. That's how you win.
You should get back to drinking your latte and your naive world
where everyone "can just get along" Life is not that way.
\_ If you think you know how to win this war, I suggest you let
the white house know right away. 'Cause in case you hadn't
noticed, they're not winning it. But don't let that stop you
from supporting the invasion of Iran. Dumb redneck fuck.
\_ It's also naive to think that the purpose of the invasion
was ever really about WMD, it's about fighting terrorist on
their lands, not in the streets of America.
\_ Too bad Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism. -tom
\_ If Terrorism is a real concern, then, Bush, Co. will
use terrorism to justify for the War. Instead, Bush & Co.
knew terrorism won't sell in general public... except
few dumb ass such as you.
\_ Actually, they seem to be doing fine, liberal moron.
\_ Aren't you supposed to be in church all day today, asshole?
It's Sunday, after all.
\_ Why are you wasting do much of your mother earth's
resources to spew your drivel on this evil
military-funded computer network? Shouldn't you be
out protesting for better state-funded meantal
out protesting for better state-funded mental
hospitals for you and your moonbat friends?
\_ You're still here? Isn't it time for you to
molest your sister?
\_ This is *EXACTLY* how Japanese justifies slaughter of 20-30
million Chinese as well.
\_ You should really take your meds more
regularly.
\_ You guys are hilarious! Thanks MOTD!
\_ I am actually curious how you come about the assessment
that "they seem to be doing fine." Do you have any evidence
to back up this position? Because you know that it is in
the extreme minority now. You do know that, right?
Without resorting to insults, please explain to me
how you have come to believe that the US is doing well
in Iraq.
\_ This about covers it: http://csua.org/u/faw (CBS)
Basically, people who are actually on the ground
and have a clue do not say the same things as the
journalists hiding in the green zone searching
through military dispatches for bad news. I was
being a little trollish when I said, "doing well",
but I think they are currently doing about as well
as can be expected.
\_ I really wouldn't call Ralph Peters unbiased in any
circumstance. He was in the Army for a while and
probably has more knowledge of military strategy
than a lot of reporters, but I think most of Iraq's
firefights are guerilla battles that the Army he
was in has a hard time finding. Also, just go read
some of his other columns, there are gems like
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14321
\_ uh, so why do you think Ralph Peters, New York Post
reporter, who is an ardent supporter of Bush and the
war in Iraq, "has a clue"? I think the answer is
in the question. -tom
\_ In this case, "about as well as can be expected"
seems to translate to "haven't been forced out in
helicopters a la Saigon."
\_ Thank you for the link. I am not sure a war supporter
should be bringing up colonialism but there he did.
Do you ever look at the Iraq Index, buy the Brookings
Institute? It is the closest thing to an unbiased
set of observable facts that I have run across. I
did notice that electricity production is up, which
is a good sign.
\_ why we tried people for war crime, then? I am talking about
those who uses gas chambers? are you admiting that we also
uses torture chambers and not that different from Saddam?
And in case you forgot, we STARTED the war.
\_ Don't forget about "get back to driving your Volvo" and other
cliches.
\_ So in other words, any cost is worth it when we're talking about
saving <a measureable number of> American lives. Think about
that |
| 7/9 |
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| csua.org/u/fam -> www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?hp&ex=1142830800&en=d312add1d360187e&ei=5094&partner=homepage Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. Enlarge This Image In June 2004, Stephen A Cambone, a top Pentagon official, ordered his deputy, Lt. William G Boykin, to look into allegations of detainee abuse at Camp Nama. In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations. The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away. Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses. Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world. The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib. The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The CIA was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August. It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp. For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005. Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit. The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. Donald H Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct. Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years. Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives. Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from FBI agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq. |
| csua.org/u/faw -> www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/opinion/main1416194.shtml The Arab genius for failure could still spoil everything. Still, it's difficult to understand how any first-hand observer could declare that Iraq's been irrevocably "lost." During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines. No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country's in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress. I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq's future. The Arab genius for failure could still spoil everything. Still, it's difficult to understand how any first-hand observer could declare that Iraq's been irrevocably "lost." Consider just a few of the inaccuracies served up by the media: Claims of civil war. In the wake of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a flurry of sectarian attacks inspired wild media claims of a collapse into civil war. Driving and walking the streets of Baghdad, I found children playing and, in most neighborhoods, business as usual. Factional differences are real, but overblown in the reporting. After the Samarra bombing, only rogue militias and criminals responded to the demagogues' calls for vengeance. Iraqis refused to play along, staging an unrecognized triumph of passive resistance. On the contrary, foreign terrorists, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have lost ground. Iraqis regard the foreigners as murderers, wreckers and blasphemers, and they want them gone. The Samarra attack may, indeed, have been a tipping point against the terrorists. If anything surprised me in the streets of Baghdad, it was the surge in the popularity of US troops among both Shias and Sunnis. In one slum, amid friendly adult waves, children and teenagers cheered a US Army patrol as we passed. Instead of being viewed as occupiers, we're increasingly seen as impartial and well-intentioned. Instead, the past month saw a major milestone in the maturation of Iraq's military. During the mini-crisis that followed the Samarra bombing, the Iraqi army put over 100,000 soldiers into the country's streets. They defused budding confrontations and calmed the situation without killing a single civilian. And Iraqis were proud to have their own army protecting them. The Iraqi army's morale soared as a result of its success. The American goal was never to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure in its entirety. Meanwhile, slum-dwellers utterly neglected by Saddam Hussein's regime are getting running water and sewage systems for the first time. The Baathist regime left the country in a desolate state while Saddam built palaces. The condition of the electric grid under the old regime was appalling. Yet, despite insurgent attacks, the newly revamped system produced 5,300 megawatts last summer a full thousand megawatts more than the peak under Saddam Hussein. Shortages continue because demand soared newly free Iraqis went on a buying spree, filling their homes with air conditioners, appliances and the new national symbol, the satellite dish. Nonetheless, satellite photos taken during the hours of darkness show Baghdad as bright as Damascus. Plenty of serious problems remain in Iraq, from bloodthirsty terrorism to the unreliability of the police. The infrastructure lags generations behind the country's needs. Nonetheless, the real story of the civil-war-that-wasn't is one of the dog that didn't bark. After a day and a half of squabbling, the political factions returned to the negotiating table. Iraqis increasingly take responsibility for their own security, easing the burden on US forces. And the people of Iraq want peace, not a reign of terror. But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines. To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other "boys" might lie and steal, our house-boy's a faithful servant. The result is that we're being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what's actually happening. While there are and have been any number of courageous, ethical journalists reporting from Iraq, others know little more of the reality of the streets than you do. They report what they are told by others, not what they have seen themselves. The result is a distorted, unfair and disheartening picture of a country struggling to rise above its miserable history. Ralph Peters is a retired US Army officer and the author of 20 books, including the recent "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy." Iraq Operation Seizes Weapons Only On The Web: Lara Logan reports on the largest US-led operation in Iraq since 2003. So far, US and Afghani troops have detained about 50 suspects and have seized a number of weapons. |
| www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14321 com | July 21, 2004 August will mark the anniversary of the needless death of tens of thousands of innocents, of callous disregard for the widespread suffering of the weak on the part of imperious governments. No, the anniversary has nothing to do with Iraq: It will have been one year since a heat wave swept Europe, killing more than 25,000 of the elderly and unprotected (15,000 in glorious France alone). The death toll wrought by nonchalant neglect in Europe last August remains considerably higher than the total number of fatalities in Iraq since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedomfriendly, enemy and civilian combined. The American Left never blinked as the real old Europe perished in the multitudes. There wasnt a whisper of criticism of those more humane European governments whose apparatchiks refused to interrupt their summer vacations to respond to the mass dying among Europes pensioners. Those admirable European health-care systems failed horrendouslyyet they remain, of course, the models to which we should aspire (no matter that every European I know prefers private care, if they can afford it). Had the Bush administration allowed over 25,000 elderly Americans to die while our president cut brush at his ranch, howls of outrage would have shaken the heavens. The Left would have reminded us all of the virtues of Euro-socialism and the evils of a marketplace society. No matter that, with far higher temperatures routine in the US, such a massacre-by-neglect has never happened here and never will. Reality has no weight for the ideologues who cannot live without the conviction that only the United States is ever guilty. The silence of the Left in the face of uncomfortable truths is a hallowed tradition, of course, dating back to the earliest crimes of the Soviet Union. When the reality confronting the Left contradicts the theory, the theory must be preserved at any cost. And theres no sign of improvement, not a glimmer of the least scrap of conscience or integrity on the Left. Its all about revenge against a democratic system that gives a blue-collar worker a vote equal to that of a university professors ballot, about hatred for the free market for providing better lives for the great majority while Marxism drowned in the bile of its victims. Theres no one the new American Left so despises as the working man or woman who continues to believe in the United States. Had Bill Clinton invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam, the Left would have cheered their throats raw, praising him as one of historys greatest liberators. The rhetoric about Iraq isnt about justice, or the Iraqi people, or even about the horrors of war. And it certainly isnt about the welfare of our troops (there are few things more disgusting to a soldier than a campus coward speaking on his behalf). The global Left never cared about the Iraqi people until they became American victims. As Saddam Hussein slaughtered more Muslims through campaigns of oppression and wars of aggression than any tyrant since Tamerlane, the Left remained silent. But now that Saddam himself might face the death penalty, Leftists everywhere are wringing their hands at the thought of such injustice. Where were they when the screams of torture victims pierced the prison walls under Saddam? Where were the celebrity journalists when Iraqs mass graves were being opened over the past fifteen months? Where are the reports of the fierce joy of the Kurds, free at last, free at last? Now, in late July of 2004, where is the Left as the Sudanese government conducts a campaign of genocide against the wretched of the earth in Darfur Province? Oh, yes, there have been a few crocodile tearsbut where are the demands for intervention? Where are the campus demonstrations against that great liberator, Robert Mugabe, who destroyed Zimbabwe, terrorized its peopleand is using scarce reserves of food as a weapon while his citizens slowly starve? Where is the American Lefts sense of justice in the face of European anti-semitism? Of course, the spreading hate-crimes against Jews, synagogues and cemeteries are all Israels faultthats been explained to us. Then where are the protests against the corruption and repression used as tools of control by the Palestinian Authority? The self-respecting Leftist whispers, Its their culture As are suicide bombers, no doubt. Why doesnt the Left complain about the hate speech spewed in mosques and madrassahs around the world? Are calls to exterminate Jews and butcher Christians just part of their culture, too? When will we see mass demonstrations demanding rights for women in the Islamic world? Are womens rights only for middle-class whites with college degrees? Where is the Lefts passionate sense of humanity when Islamic extremists behead the innocentand videotape the event, to the glee of the Muslim world? Of course, those decapitations are really Americas faultweve driven them to it, you see. The truth is that our Left is so intellectually decrepit, so infected by dishonesty, so morally feeble that it has only breath enough to condemn American actions. No matter how many brown or black human beings suffer around the worldstarved, ethnically cleansed, raped, tortured, murderedit doesnt count unless you can blame America. By obsessing about Iraqwhere the United States and its allies performed a great and noble deed, however imperfect the day-to-day detailsthe Left has tacitly agreed to let the rest of the world rot. Intervention to stymie tyrants couldnt be right in Bosnia or Kosovo when Democrats owned the White House, but automatically wrong with Republican sponsors. The blood of al Qaedas victims is on the hands of terrors apologists, whether in Cairo or in Cambridge. The domestic tragedy in all this hysterical propagandizing by the Left isnt just the election-year divisivenessits that our country needs a conscientious Left, with robust ideas to challenge those of the Right and the integrity to defend humankind, not just the rulings of an informal politburo. Conservatives should rue the moral and intellectual weakness of the contemporary Left. With honest competition, we all perform at a higher level. Its a sad day for our country when the Lefts philosophy comes from Michael Moore. Meanwhile, another August looms in that Leftists fairy-tale world across the Atlantic. What measures have those humane Europeans put in place to protect the elderly against a return of high temperatures? That paragon of virtues, the French government, informed its elderly citizens that they need to figure out where they can go to stay cool. Ralph Peters is the author, most recently, of Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace. |