Tag: iraq

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Open-Source Intelligence

One of the ways in which the United States was and is woefully unprepared for a war anywhere in the Middle East is its lack of Arabic linguists in the ranks of the intelligence and military services. (What I know about Arabic: You read it from right to left. And by the way, salaam aleikum.)

When we invaded Iraq, we came into possession of what’s technically known as a boatload of government papers. Thirty-five thousand boxes’ worth. Millions of pages. And all classified. There may be some amazing stuff in those papers. But having so few people on our side who both read Arabic and have security clearances, there’s no way we’ll ever find out what’s in all those boxes. So instead of an archive that if nothing else might document how Iraq was run in the Saddam era, we have a mountain of worthless paper warehoused in Qatar.

Now, a congressman from Michigan has had a sort of intelligent idea about how to find out what’s in the papers. Open up the entire collection, declassify everything, and put the whole mess online so that all comers — or at least the Arabic readers — can tell what’s in there.

It has the potential to be untidy, but it’s worth a try.

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Fallujah, a Year Later

It was a year ago this week that the Marines and Army went into Fallujah to kill off the insurgency there. Since the fighting ended, Fallujah has mostly disappeared from the news. There was some fitful coverage of the resettlement and rebuilding effort after the battle. Every once in a while, the city’s name shows up in a casualty report when an insurgent bomb goes off there.

One attention-getting episode of the Fallujah offensive involved journalist/blogger Kevin Sites. Shooting video for NBC, he got footage of a Marine killing an apparently helpless and perhaps already mortally wounded insurgent (Navy investigators later found the Marine acted in self-defense and within the rules of war when he shot the Iraqi). Many on the right denounced Sites as a traitor. He soon left Iraq.

Where is Sites today? Well, he’s got a fancy new blog site on Yahoo! called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. A tad on the Geraldo side, title-wise, maybe, but I always found Sites to be painstakingly honest in his attempt to balance his own personal reactions to what he sees against his duty to report what’s happening and letting his subjects — especially the U.S. troops he spends time with — say their piece.

This week, he’s back in Fallujah, taking stock of the city a year after the battle. Upon entering the city, the Marine unit he’s with is warned of a possible bomb nearby:

“The threat of a roadside bomb seems to reinforce the memories I have of the city, and so do the many shattered facades of buildings neither demolished nor rebuilt an entire year later.

“Yet while many signs of the battle’s ferocity remain, I also notice something else: the streets are filled with people.

“Shops are open, some operating out of buildings with just three walls or partial roofs. Cars and trucks travel the road alongside children coming from school. There is here a sense of normalcy as well.

“The Marines cannot provide precise figures on how many people returned to their homes in Fallujah after last year’s battle, but some estimates have it as high as two-thirds of the population.”

It’s a glimpse, anyway, of what the rebuilding of Iraq looks like.

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‘Spectator Patriotism’

By way of my brother John:

Christopher Dickey, a Newsweek columnist and thoughtful critic of the Iraq war (translation: I agree with him) has a good piece this week reflecting on John Gregory Dunne and Dunne’s interest in patriotism:

“John was interested in patriotism. He was fascinated by the real substance of it, which he saw as diametrically opposed to what he called “the spectator patriotism” exploited by the Bush administration as it went looking for wars. There was something (it took a while for John to put his finger on it) in the fact that several people he knew had children on active duty: historian Doris Kearns had a son, John himself had a nephew, I had a son. We had people we loved in uniform doing what they saw, and we understood, imperfectly perhaps, as their duty to defend the values and the dreams that are the United States of America. But why were there so few from this circle of acquaintances if the cause was so great?

“John would rage. He was articulate and funny then and always, but such was his passion that I remember him as almost inchoate when he talked about the bastards who wouldn’t end their Global War on Terror, which was conceived in rhetoric and dedicated to their re-election, yet would send America’s sons and daughters on futile errands of suffering and slaughter.

From past experience, I’ve seen evidence that Dickey actually reads the responses to his columns. So I spent some time writing one. The inequity of sending our military volunteers to suffer the consequences of their leaders’ ineptitude and dishonesty is an unresolved problem for the entire society and one we’ll be living with for decades (just as we’re still living with the legacy of having sacrificed so many conscripted soldiers in Vietnam). My “answer” to Dickey:

“I think Dunne’s sense of this issue, and yours, is spot on as far as it goes. Sacrifices must be shared. We must not fight wars to which we’re not fully committed (though bear in mind that that standard kept us out of World War I for nearly three years and, absent Pearl Harbor, probably would have kept us out of World War II indefinitely).

“But what do we do with that knowledge? Do we get behind people like John Conyers and Charles Rangel and demand the draft be reinstated? There’s an attractive school of thought that a universal draft — if one were started, I’d hope that women would be conscripted, too — would give everyone a personal stake in the war in Iraq and make the civilians who launched this thing more accountable. I’m not sure I buy that — more than half the Americans who died in Vietnam were killed *after* the Tet offensive, when the anti-war movement was already rolling along. Yet, a fair draft, perhaps with a national service alternative, *could* democratize the war and perhaps counter a tendency, which Bush encourages with no shame or sense of irony, to lionize the warriors, cozen up to them, and cast those who don’t support his military adventure as fifth columnists.

“Here’s the thing: I have two draft-age sons. I don’t know how I’d sleep if they and their friends were under arms now and their commanders were as casually deceitful and incompetent as the crew we have in charge now. For me, the principle of the thing — that it’s unfair and undemocratic to impose the war sacrifice on a small slice of society, even if they volunteered for service — is at war with my personal horror at the further ruin of young lives to so little apparent purpose. I also wonder about the equity of codgers like me (my draft number was supposed to come up in 1972, but it was never called) sending the young ones off to kill and be killed. If there’s going to be a national sacrifice, all the non-retired generations should be made to play a part beyond our penchant for uttering fine phrases.”

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WAYGTB-MOYOE* Update No. 99

Bush in Washington yesterday: “We’re seeing progress on the ground. And we’re also seeing political progress on the ground. The constitution has been written; folks will have a chance to vote it up or down here this month. And then there will be elections, if the constitution is approved, for a permanent government.”

Here’s how that progress looks to a Knight-Ridder reporter from the ground Bush is talking about:

“1 p.m. – On phone with the major, who’s apologizing for being late when a car bomb explodes at Checkpoint 3 entrance. Gunfire ensues.

“1-3 p.m. – Locked down in National Assembly building with legislators while bomb debris and bodies are cleared from the street.

“3:15 p.m. – The major calls back. Come on out, he says. I join him walking to Checkpoint 3.

3:25 p.m. – We step around football-sized chunks of bomber hanging like gruesome Christmas ornaments from the razor wire. I point out the journalists’ security fears, being forced to walk through a dangerous area to get to Iraqi government and U.S. Embassy briefings. He is concerned. “Wow, that’s dangerous,” he says, pushing aside a smoking piece of car interior with a booted toe. …”

*Who are you going to believe — me, or your own eyes?

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Over There

If you’re like me — and thank goodness you’re not — you look at pictures from Iraq and say, I helped make that happen. I mean by helping pay for it, or more accurately, by chipping in on the interest for the big credit-card bill we’re running up to turn the Saddam-ruled wasteland into a wasteland ruled by someone else.

Thanks to my brother John, I see that we all have another government-sponsored opportunity to contribute cash to the effort of building the new Iraq. It’s a new Web effort from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) called Iraqpartnership.org. USAID has partnered with a celebrated and well supported online philanthropy outfit called GlobalGiving to allow Americans to give money directly to Iraqi redevelopment needs: water pumps for farmers, desks and blackboards for classrooms and the like.

You know — this should be a good thing. If nothing else, checking out the USAID site on Iraq actually does give an alternative view of what our awesome national resources might be used for. Of course, it also makes you wonder about our schizophrenic feelings about Saddam-land. It’s not so long ago that we loved the Iraqi people so much that the only way we could find to express our emotions was through a decade-plus embargo that managed to enrich their unappointed tyrant and his cronies while inflicting a sort of collective punishment on the population. But that’s all water over the dam, which I think has been blown up, anyway.

Iraqpartnership.org launched at a rather unfortunate moment — just after Hurricane Katrina, when governments at all levels were proving they were incapable of taking care of people in Louisiana and Mississippi, let alone along the Tigris and Euphrates. Americans were called on to step up and give whatever they could to storm relief. Maybe that accounts for the news that in its first two or three weeks, the Iraqpartnership campaign raised all of $600. That’s the claim published Sunday by the British paper The Guardian, which noted that the amount raised was roughly equivalent to what it would take to buy a couple of iPods.

So, put together this $600 in citizen money to help Iraq and combine it with the 400 people who showed up the for the pro-war protest in Washington the other day. What do you have? I’m not sure, but I think it would be pretty hard to spin it as an American public willing to “bear any burden, meet any sacrifice” to sort out the hornet’s nest we’ve stirred up, Times have changed. We will be back before it’s over over there.

Even the USAID flack quoted by The Guardian doesn’t sound like she’s got her heart in the thing: “USAID’s Heather Layman denied it was disappointed with the meagre sum raised after a fortnight. ‘Every little helps,’ she said.”

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Today’s Good News from Iraq

By way of Iraq Coalition Casualties, I note this press release from the U.S. Central Command about an incident in Operation Fight ‘Em Over There:

TWO KILLED DURING INCIDENT AT ALI BASE

The release describes an incident in which U.S. troops shot and killed two apparent intruders at a U.S. base in Iraq; a third person was wounded. Nothing unusual there — I hear there’s a war on. But the release goes on to say:

“The professionalism of the men and women, who quickly responded to this incident, prevented any harm to the more than 9,000 Air Force, Army and Coalition members on and around this installation,” said Col. Michael J. Nowak, 407th Air Expeditionary Group commander.

“Security forces personnel flawlessly executed their job in service to the nation and met the challenge of providing force protection of the installation’s perimeter,” he added.

It’s nice that, while war is still hell, the boss takes time out to give the troops a pat on the back for a job well done. I wonder if this is a first in glowing media alerts for well executed killings. I wonder if, in the same spirit of tellin’ the folks back home about the job we’re doin’, Central Command will tell us more about shootings like this one. And this one.

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Berkeley Vigil

Vigil

About 8:30 tonight, corner of Solano and The Alameda. (Yes, auslanders, The Alameda.) The MoveOn site said 500 people had signed up to join the vigil at this location. We got there about an hour after it started, and there might have been a total of 250 or 300 on the four corners of the intersection, though I’m a big crowd overestimator from way back. It was a social occasion for lots of people. I ran into an old colleague from The Examiner, and Kate met up with a group of her Oakland teacher buddies.

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Plainclothes Torturers

Excellent story this week in The Legal Times (subscription required) about newly declassified memos by military lawyers on the subject of stretching the legal definition of torture to allow more pressure to be put on our Global War on Terrorism prisoners. Civilian lawyers in the Justice Department (including a faculty member at my current workplace, Boalt Hall) advised our commander-in-chief he was standing on firm legal ground in allowing the military to take the gloves off.

How did the civilians’ counterparts in the armed forces — the judge advocates general — feel about expanding the definition of torture to allow more rough stuff and, presumably, get more actionable intelligence (Interrogator: “How does that feel?” Prisoner: “Aiyee! That really hurts!” Interrogator: “Captain, he says it hurts.”)?

In a word, they were against. According to The Legal Times story:

“… The military lawyers predicted that adopting more aggressive interrogation techniques to fight the war on terror would undermine America’s relationships with allies, hurt the reputation of the military, and possibly put U.S. troops in harm’s way. …

“… ‘Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values? How would such perceptions affect our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism?’ wrote Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, then-judge advocate general of the Navy.

“The new documents reveal deep disagreement between top uniformed lawyers in the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps and the administration’s civilian attorneys at the Pentagon and the Justice Department. The JAGs’ memos blast legal positions taken by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and point to a secret memo from OLC lawyers that appears to have given the green light for U.S. troops to use interrogation

tactics in violation of military law.”

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In Iraq

Word, first of all that 14 Marines were killed by a bomb in a place called Haditha. Six more were killed there the day before yesterday. So far, 22 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq in the first three days of August.

Then there’s this: Steven Vincent, a freelance writer and blogger who had an op-ed piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times describing Basra’s police force and its growing allegiance to religious parties rather than the national government (or citizens), has been killed. He and his interpreter were kidnapped and shot, and the thinking is that he was assassinated because of his recent reporting. I haven’t read a lot of his stuff — his blog, occasionally, but not his Iraq book, “In the Red Zone” — but he struck me as a meticulously honest observer who was trying to look at the war in terms of the people we say we’re trying to help. Someone capable of seeing what is at stake for ordinary citizens in this struggle and the big gap between our declared ideals and goals and our execution. For instance, one of his last posts, “The Naive American.”

[Later: The New York Times did a nice short profile on Vincent. Among other things, turns out he was a Bay Area kid who went to Cal.]

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‘The Victim and the Killer’

What I think is a great piece of reporting from Salon.com’s correspondent in Baghdad: The story (subscription required) of how a U.S. Army sniper killed Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi doctor working as a journalist for the Knight-Ridder News Service. Salon’s reporter, Phillip Robertson, had gotten to know Salihee and his family and decided to find the soldier who killed his friend and find out his version of what happened. Since our military maintains a strict and nearly complete silence about the civilian casualties it has inflicted in Iraq, and since it couldn’t be expected to cooperate with a journalistic investigation into Salihee’s death, Robertson took it upon himself to see if he could find the American unit involved and get embedded with it. He did it, and eventually met the unit’s sniper, identified only as “Joe,” who showed him pictures he had stored on a laptop of his tour of duty in Iraq.

“Then he brought up a photograph of a white Daewoo Espero sedan on a Baghdad street. The sedan had a single bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield. Behind the wheel there was a lifeless man, slumped in the seat with a shattered skull and a torrent of blood staining his shirt. The image carried a sudden shock of recognition and despair. The dead man behind the wheel of the car was my friend and colleague, Yasser Salihee.

“The sniper lowered his voice when he talked about the pictures of the car and the man inside it. His self-assured manner disappeared and he became nervous. ‘Here is one of ours. I really hope he was a bad guy. Do you know anything about him?’ Then he said, ‘See, I don’t know if I should be talking about this.’

” ‘Did you fire the shot that killed him?’ I asked.

” ‘I don’t know.’

“Joe said that it was true that he fired the shot through the Espero’s windshield, but he wasn’t positive if it was the lethal shot. There was no doubt that it was, but Joe seemed to be genuinely uncertain about it. It was clear that he did not want it to be true.”

I didn’t hear about it or read about it when Salihee was killed. After reading Robertson’s piece, I went looking and found a couple of tributes to him from colleagues: One from the Knight Ridder bureau chief in Baghdad, another from an NPR reporter for whom Salihee served as translator.

An awful irony: Reading about Salihee, he is just the kind of person one might hope could flourish in a land rid of dictatorship and fear, by all accounts a dazzlingly intelligent, giving, brave and daring soul. Yet his life was consumed by what we’ve set loose in Iraq. Among his wife’s comments, a few weeks after the shooting: “I want the Americans to go back to America, but I know they won’t go.”