Donald "Custer" Rumsfeld
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****a "Uprising"
Fighting continued in ****a cities across Iraq yesterday in what United
States occupation forces now admit is an uprising by forces loyal to the
radical ****a cleric Muqtada Sadr. There were renewed clashes close to two
major shrines in the ****a holy city of Karbala, as anger grew across the
****a world over damage to the Shrine of Imam Ali in nearby Najaf during
fighting on Friday.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=522042
"Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal
attacks
on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp,
an
investigation by The Observer has revealed. The disclosures, made in an
interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March,
who has been too traumatised to speak until now, prompted demands last
night
by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos
available immediately."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051704A.shtml
============
"Chief" Khamenei tells the Iran tribe:
No Muslim, particularly a ****a, can remain calm in the face of the recent
events in Najaf and Karbala...
[The US soldiers] have taken their tanks and artillery and armed forces to
the holy site of Karbala. They have shown disrespect to the sacred dome of
the Lord of the Faithful. They have fired bullets at the dome. That is not
something that faithful Muslims can tolerate or accept...
The Americans have combined stupidity with shamelessness. They are
audacious
and unrestrained. They are encroaching upon the people's sanctities and
what
the people love...
Muslim people, particularly ****a - in our own country or in Iraq, in
various
Iraqi cities or in other parts of the world - will not remain silent at
this
American encroachment and audacity...
They think they can rule Iraq without any difficulty, take Iraq's oil and
humiliate the Iraqi people. What happened at Abu Ghraib prison showed
this,
and recently it became clear that this has not happened only at Abu
Ghraib.
It has happened at all, or at least most, American prisons in Iraq...
The president and the gang ruling America say they did not know what was
going on. That is how they have apologised. They say they did not know and
that they have closed Saddam's torture chambers...
You have not closed Saddam's torture chambers. You have replaced Saddam...
They say they did not know. They are lying, because the Red Cross
explicitly
declared that it had informed senior army officers and Americans of what
was
going on a long time ago...
It was wrong for the Americans to go into Iraq. It was wrong for them to
stay. Their treatment of the people was wrong. Imposing an American ruler
on
the people was wrong. Going to Karbala and Najaf was wrong. The things
that
they did recently were especially wrong. They should realise that the
Islamic world, and particularly the ****a world, will not remain silent...
They have killed the innocent people of Najaf and Karbala. The have killed
dozens of people. The crime that they have committed is the greatest of
crimes. The Islamic world condemns it. The Iranian nation condemns it. The
world's ****a condemn it.
The Americans will fail on this path. The more they go along this path,
the
more they will sink in this bog of their own making...
The Americans are trapped. There is nothing they can do. They will fail if
they continue along this path, and they will fail if they pull out. But
continuing will be the greater defeat.
===================
Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto
Gonzales
re****tedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and
prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions, saying that 9-11 renders
the
Conventions obsolete.
"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict
limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of
its
provisions," Gonzales wrote, according to the re****t in Newsweek magazine.
Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo,
according to the account.
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/8682187.htm
=======================
As many as 22,000 Iraq, Afghan war veterans already seek care from VA
system
When Willie Buckels applied for veterans health care after returning from
Iraq, the back and knee injuries he suffered while rescuing a fuel truck
during a mortar attack were not enough to guarantee him treatment.
http://tinyurl.com/3h57t
=======
Who commands the private soldiers? Allegations of abuse have raised wider
questions about the role - and accountability - of civilian contractors
--
the new face of the privatised American army. The US military has gone
headlong for privatisation, urged on by the defence secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld. One 2002 memo from the secretary of the army, Thomas White,
suggests that as much as a third of its budget is going on private
contractors, while army numbers are falling. The rationale is to save
money
on permanent soldiers by using tem****ary ones.
But the policy has other, political ad vantages. When a mortar shell
lobbed
at Baghdad air****t earlier this year killed Cor****al Tomasi Ramatau, 41,
no
one in the US media took much notice.
Names like his do not appear on the roll-calls of US soldiers killed in
Iraq, solemnly enunciated on the daily TV shows. Ramatau was one of the
unemployed men from the Pacific island of Fiji hired in their hundreds by
another prominent private military firm, Global Risk of London, to take
the
bullets for the Pentagon.
The loose control of the 20,000-plus private-enterprise soldiers in Iraq
has
been thrown into painful relief by the accusations that hired civilian
interrogators and translators encouraged obscene tortures at Abu Ghraib
prison and that one even allegedly raped an Iraqi boy in his cell.
No senator or congressman appears to have had the least idea until the
scandal broke that the drive to privatise the military had gone so far as
to
use civilian contractors for such sensitive jobs.
Aides to Democrat congressman Ike Skelton were particularly incensed with
a
reply by Mr Rumsfeld to a demand last month for information about private
military firms in Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld produced a list of 60 companies, half
a
dozen of them British, but withheld all mention of two of the biggest and
best-connected recruiting firms alleged to be at the centre of the torture
scandal - CACI in Wa****ngton and Titan in San Diego, California.
One of the few people to have conducted a full-scale study of military
privatisation, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, said: "No
lawmakers seemed to know that they were hiring civilians as interrogators.
They had this concept that the civilians were there to mow lawns and
answer
phones." In his recent book, Cor****ate Warriors, he lists dangers in
excessively privatised soldiering, such as cutting corners to save money,
secrecy, and hollowing out the genuine military by poaching their troops.
All have duly come to pass in Iraq.
CACI, for example, placed Steve Stefanowicz, a former reservist from the
Philadelphia area who had once worked in naval intelligence, in Iraq.
According to his fellow interrogator Torin Nelson, CACI hired
interrogators
over the phone, without even meeting them.
"I was interviewed in September 2003 in a very short telephone
conversation,
which was more like a sales pitch of how great the company was, than a
typical interview for a professional job," Mr Nelson said. "I never met
anyone from CACI until I landed in Fort Bliss [an army induction centre in
Texas], and then it was some other new hires."
Frantic
CACI website entries show increasingly frantic efforts to attract
interrogators, with the qualifications required being reduced from seven
years' interrogation experience, to five years, to two.
It does not seem that CACI saved any military manpower for the US by
hiring
Mr Stefanowicz. According to naval records, he was on active duty as a
petty
officer 3rd class in the reserves already, but apparently resigned in
September 2003 to join CACI. Private companies are offering pay of up to
$115,000 (about £65,000) a year.
In Iraq, the status of the CACI interrogators was ambiguous. Mr Nelson
said
some of his colleagues went around in desert camouflage uniform. "We
contractors were often able to establish our own method of actually
implementing the chain of command's intent, which was to glean information
for intelligence purposes."
Mr Stefanowicz ended up being accused in the now-notorious leaked
classified
Taguba re****t, of telling untrained and unsupervised reservist military
policemen to abuse the Abu Ghraib prisoners.
He remains in Iraq, according to the US army on "administrative duties"
while investigations continue. The accused soldiers below him, however,
all
face courts martial, beginning this month.
Unlike the gun-toting security companies, firms like CACI seem to function
merely as recruiting postboxes. CACI, based in a Wa****ngton suburb, put
former defence officials on its board, including the former London
representative of the code-breaking National Security Agency, Barbara
McNamara. It moved seamlessly from origins as an IT firm to acquiring such
small companies last year as Premier Technology, also in Wa****ngton, which
had contracts to supply 96 analysts to US military intelligence in
Germany.
>From there it was a short step, when the call went out, to recruiting
freelance army interrogators. Similarly, firms like Blackwater and Global
have ****fted, almost unnoticed, from providing bodyguard services to
engaging in fighting.
Mr Singer points out that mercenaries are nothing new, and huge standing
national armies are a recent development.
But one former British special forces officer, recently returned to Europe
from Iraq, said: "The trouble is the private companies often have an
attitude that 'Yeah, we can do it'. Then they become overstretched. As
officers in the military, there is an integrity level we would operate
under
normally. And it just isn't there."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1218238,00.html
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