US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

Ican: I think you offered a very good question, one that deserves a question in return. I see you think it has been wise, been a wise policy, been a good course for the US to attack, pre-emptively if it felt necessary, any nation it felt was harboring Al Queda, but here is the question, my question to you :

Does Al Queda need any country to harbor it? Can, in other words, Al Queda exist, , make it's plans, train it's warriors, pursue it's goals without the assistance of any country?

If the answer is yes (and it is) What does that mean for the nation-centered policy of the Bush Administration?

Joe(There are more AlQueda in Milwaukee than Beruit)Nation

HE SHOOTS, HE SCORES ! ! !


Great one, Ges . . .

Indeed, Ge - a good one.


here is an interesting article from Al Jazeera re Abu Ghraib, btw:

Karpinski: General behind Iraq abuse

Friday 13 May 2005, 8:10 Makka Time, 5:10 GMT

Karpinski said she was unaware of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.

The former commander of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has blamed a ranking officer for prisoner abuses.



Colonel Janis Karpinski said General Geoffrey Miller introduced the use of human pyramids and dog leashes in the abuse of detainees and said in an interview on Thursday that abuse may still be continuing there.



Karpinski, a former one-star Army Reserve general who was punished in the scandal, said she had no idea what was going on at the prison and blamed Miller for the methods that were used to humiliate detainees.



Miller headed the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and was sent to Iraq to recommend improvements in intelligence gathering and detention operations there.



"I believe that General Miller gave them the ideas, gave them the instruction on what techniques to use," she said in excerpts from an interview on the ABC News Nightline programme.



Prisoner abuse



Asked if she was referring to the positioning of prisoners in human pyramids and putting dog leashes on detainees, Karpinski said: "I can tell you with certainty that the MPs (military police) certainly did not design those techniques, they certainly did not come to Abu Ghraib or to Iraq with dog collars and dog leashes."




Miller (C) has been blamed for
introducing abuse to Abu Ghraib

Karpinski, who has made similar allegations in the past, was the first high-level military officer to be punished in the abuse scandal. She was demoted from brigadier-general to colonel on 5 May.



The demotion was announced 13 days after army officials disclosed that the army had exonerated Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top US commander in Iraq, as well as three other senior officers.



Army Colonel Thomas Pappas, the former US military intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, was reprimanded and removed from his command as part of a punishment over the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, the army said on Wednesday.



The publication a year ago of photographs depicting US forces abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib triggered international criticism of the United States. Numerous additional cases of detainee abuse have since surfaced.



Abuse continuing



In the ABC interview, Karpinski suggested that abuse might still be occurring at the prison.



"For several months after I first became aware of the pictures, I said: 'Well at least the photographs will stop this.' I'm not convinced," she said.




Karpinski said Rumsfeld knew
about the abuse at Abu Ghraib

Karpinski had commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade at the heart of the Abu Ghraib abuse. Previous investigations found Karpinski feuded with Pappas, contributing to an atmosphere of chaos.



Karpinski told ABC she believes officials up the chain of command knew or should have known what was going on at Abu Ghraib.



Asked if that included Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, she said: "Well absolutely. And I would say that it is consistent with his direction for the military."



Karpinski said her superiors bore responsibility but reiterated her contention that it was convenient for the military to blame her because of her status as a reservist.



"All the way up to the top of the Pentagon, they have a long-standing mind-set about reservists and National Guard soldiers," she said. "And we are considered disposable."



http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CD18AC08-3434-487B-AA1D-8C3AF8ECBDDB.htm

What would be his legacy had he found WMDs, how would the outcome of the war be different .... or would it ?

I've always thought the wmd issue was a red herring.

i.e. they knew Saddam had very little if any illegal weapons, but the invasion had to go ahead for other reasons.

However had it been a success, that is saddam gone, Ba'athists gone, terrorism eliminated, Iraq making great strides to reconstruction and democracy i.e. all the things that the neocons promised would happen as soon as USUK troops moved in, then the lack of wmd finds would be seen as irrelevant, and Bush and Blair would undoubtedly be seen as heros.

But, as ever its not gone according to plan. Its a quagmire from which we dont know how to get out, and people are furious that we were misled on the way in.

Scapegoats (Kaminsky, maybe) are more useful if they are kept in the dark. I am not suggesting that this is how it happened, but given this country's (and its' military) love of Machiavellian tactics in secrecy, and since we know that military intelligence and not regular army were the real bosses of the place - it could well have happened that way.

Great cartoon, ge.

May 16, 2005
Newsweek Got Gitmo Right
by Calgacus*

Contrary to White House spin, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo published by Newsweek on May 9, 2005, are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States. Several former detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram prisons have reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing on the Koran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it. Prior to the Newsweek article, the New York Times reported a Guantanamo insider asserting that the commander of the facility was compelled by prisoner protests to address the problem and issue an apology.

One such incident (during which the Koran was allegedly thrown in a pile and stepped on) prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in March 2002. Regarding this, the New York Times in a May 1, 2005, article interviewed a former detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said the protest ended with a senior officer delivering an apology to the entire camp. And the Times reports: "A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public _expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans." (Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt, "Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantanamo Bay," New York Times, May 1, 2005.)

The hunger strike and apology story is also confirmed by another former detainee, Shafiq Rasul, interviewed by the UK Guardian in 2003 (James Meek, "The People the Law Forgot," Dec. 3, 2003). It was also confirmed by former prisoner Jamal al-Harith in an interview with the Daily Mirror (Rosa Prince and Gary Jones, "My Hell in Camp X-Ray," Daily Mirror, March 12, 2004).

The toilet incident was reported in the Washington Post in a 2003 interview with a former detainee from Afghanistan:

"Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet. 'It was a very bad situation for us,' said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. 'We cried so much and shouted, "Please do not do that to the Holy Koran."' (Marc Kaufman and April Witt, "Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment," Washington Post, March 26, 2003.)

Also citing the toilet incident is testimony by Asif Iqbal, a former Guantanamo detainee who was released to British custody in March 2004 and subsequently freed without charge:

"The behavior of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet, and generally disrespect it." (Center for Constitutional Rights [.pdf], Aug. 4, 2004.)

The claim that U.S. troops at Bagram prison in Afghanistan urinated on the Koran was made by former detainee Mohamed Mazouz, a Moroccan, as reported in the Moroccan newspaper, La Gazette du Maroc. (Abdelhak Najib, "Les Américains pissaient sur le Coran et abusaient de nous sexuellement," April 12, 2005.) An English translation is available on the Cage Prisoners site (which describes itself as a "nonsectarian Islamic human rights Web site").

Tarek Derghoul, another of the British detainees, similarly cites instances of Koran desecration in an interview with Cage Prisoners.

Desecration of the Koran was also mentioned by former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and reported by the BBC in early May 2005. (Haroon Rashid, "Ex-Inmates Share Guantanamo Ordeal," May 2, 2005.)

*Calgacus has been employed as a researcher in the national security field for 20 years.

From NYT:

U.S. Presses Newsweek to 'Repair' Damage From Flawed Report


By DAVID STOUT
Published: May 17, 2005
WASHINGTON, May 17 - The Bush administration kept up the pressure today on Newsweek magazine to do something beyond retracting an article asserting that investigators had confirmed the desecration of a Koran by American interrogators trying to unsettle Muslim detainees.

I suspect you would like to recommend a different approach than Bush&Adm's approach. I hope you do. Please do!

I wasn't misled by the WMD red herring. I wasn't even distracted by the alleged WMD. My acquaintenances were not misled or distracted either. We all realized we had to invade Iraq when we learned al Qaeda had re-established itself in December 2001 from Afghanistan to Iraq. None of us are astro-physicists, yet we are fully capable of understanding that al Qaeda is just as capable of growing mass murderers in Iraq as it was in Afghanistan. We didn't wish to wait until they developed terrorists capable of destroying another 3,000 lives in the US. We all finally got al Qaeda's message the second time it hit America:
...
2. 2/1993 WTC in NYC--6 dead Americans;
...
7. 9/2001 WTC in NYC, Pentagon, Pennsylvania Field--approx. 1500 dead American citizens, 1500 dead citizens of other countries.

We really didn't need a third time to wise up. Nor do any of us think anyone else should need a third time to wise up.

As to our progress or lack of progress in helping the Iraqis secure a democracy of their own design, President Bush and members of his administration repeatedly said and say it was going to be a difficult and slow process. Estimates ran and run from 5 to 10 years. Those of us who lived through WWII and the reconstruction of Japan and Germany and their democratization, judge our rate of progress against subverters in Iraq and in Afghanistan to be slow but as expected.

Ican, I imagine AQ spread out all over the place over there in that part of the world. Some of them just stayed in Afghanistan in the hills and caves. Why do you keep assuming that they came to Iraq in such large masses in 2001 as to warrant a war for that reason alone? Why not Syria or any other number of likely places that AQ could have went to?

Excellent questions. Thank you for asking.

I agree that some al Qaeda probably exist in the hills of Afghanistan despite our on going efforts to eradicate them from there. Also some are alleged to have fled not only to Iraq, but also to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. Both Saudi Arabian and Pakistani governments have been killing or incarcerating al Qaeda by the hundreds. Al Qaeda represents serious problems in Syria and Iran, because (to the best of my knowledge) neither country's governments are trying to eradicate or incarcerate al Qaeda in their countries.

I do not think that al Qaeda came to Iraq in large numbers. My guess is that it was probably less than a thousand, since only several hundred were killed by our invasion of northeastern Iraq and not by our subsequent pacification (still going on) of northeastern Iraq.

I do not think that large numbers of al Qaeda are required to murder thousands more in the US. Remember only 19 are responsible for killing 3,000 in the US. Had they had the fifth guy (he was delayed entrance into the US), the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania may have hit its target in D.C., killing who knows how many more besides those aboard.

Al Qaeda was re-established in Afghanistan in 1996. Only five years later, 9/11/2001, they killed 3,000 of us. After our invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, several hundred al Qaeda re-established themselves in Iraq in December 2001. I think it highly probable that that Iraq bunch would have trained another 20 suicidal terrorists to take out 3,000 or more of us in or before 2006. I for one didn't want to wait to see if that was actually going to happen. If Saddam wouldn't extradite them, then we had to do it in a way that made it probable al Qaeda would not re-establish in Iraq some time later. The solution was to replace the Saddam regime with a democracy for the same reason we sought to replace the Taliban regime with a democracy: to reduce the probability that al Qaeda would be re-established in either country.

I think you once asked: why not invade Iran in addition to Iraq; both appeared equally dangerous. We lacked the resources to do Iran plus Iraq and Afghanistan, so we picked the ones we thought would give us the most immediate results. We were right about Afghanistan in 2001. We shall see whether we were right about Irag. Remember our efforts in Iraq began in March 2003. That's 17 months after we invaded Afghanistan. Let's see how things look in Iraq in 12 months. As for Iran and Syria, it's probable that our success in Iraq and Afghanistan will serve to sober up the Iranians and the Syrians and get them to eradicate or incarcerate the al Qaeda in their midst.

Quote, "...our success in Iraq..." is the oxymoron statement of the year~! LOL

I highly doubt that, Ican.

AQ is a mindset, not an organized group. WE invented Al Qaeda. It doesn't take a huge amount of organization to get stuff done from there POV.

For example,

Osama Bin Laden (the only one who matters, btw, and one who isn't in Iraq) can spread instructions out to 5 people, who recruit 10 people each in 5 different countries that they go to. We certainly can't go around invading every single country with AQ recruits in it. There is a large amount of terrorism that can be accomplished with very little or no training. ESPECIALLY if the 'cell' method is repeated a few times. THen you are talking about hundreds of operatives spread across dozens of states. And the vast majority of this can be done 'black,' that is, with no outward signs whatsoever that anything is happening to the respective gov'ts of the places they are in.

Why, again, is there the need for a state sponsor? For a safe haven? It certainly makes things easier for AQ but it isn't neccessary in the slightest.

Cycloptichorn

All you need to remember is that Mohammed Atta trained for his mission in his Florida apartment.

...at an American flight school.

Yep. The previous administration really blew that one, huh? You guys shouldn't be so hard on Bubba though.

Sheesh

We ALL blew that one.

Can't ever pass up a chance to take a shot at the guy who completely owns ya tho, can ya?

Cycloptichorn

I do find it hilarious that the right are still so obsessed with Slick Willy--it still just drives them nuts that they couldn't nail him down on any charge.