← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 13573 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-05-06
2004-05-06 16:19 | User Profile
*A 40% Guard and Reserve commitment should be absolute proof that the neocon hawks had no idea what they were getting into, and didn't care. Their rush to war was in service of the [URL=http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm]agenda[/URL] specifically outlined by the PNAC and "A Clean Break". There can be no other conclusion, yet this knowledge seems to evade the American public.
If the media would stop lionizing ex-NFL stars long enough to focus on this story, massive public support could be gained for what will be the inevitable dismissal and- one can hope, eventual prosecution- of government neocons like Wolfowitz, Wurmser and Feith along with the shadowy quasi-government advisers like Perle and Ledeen. *
[url]http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000503029[/url]
Why Media Missed Iraq Prison Abuse Scandal Embedded editor says more reporting on the role of reservists and contractors is needed.
By Dennis Anderson
(May 05, 2004) -- Journalists are always on the hunt for "the big story" and the "next story" and sometimes we just get there too late.
Any journalist must applaud Seymour M. Hersh for his thorough and dreadful examination in The New Yorker of lives ruined behind the walls at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The journalist who brought the My Lai massacre before the American public has not faltered this time either. Americans need to know when their fellow countrymen are behaving in a way that brings shame on the very ideals that we say define us as Americans.
What do I mean by saying that sometimes we just get there too late for the big story? In the aftermath of the invasion and guerrilla war that continues to make Iraq our first and worst news story -- which I've covered on two occasions as an embedded reporter -- serious questions about the role of the National Guard and the so-called private "contractor" war have eluded large-scale media scrutiny. These stories were near at hand, but war is hectic and it's easy to miss one.
There have been a few contrarians and hair shirts. Retired Col. David Hackworth, for example, was a tireless pundit who continuously asserted that the Guard and reserves were generally ill-used and unready for this war. From my front-row seat, embedded with the California National Guard on its way to war in Iraq last spring, I often took issue with Hackworth's assertions that "weekend warriors" could not, and should not, carry the same burden as the regulars. The Guard troops I saw, in the main, were serious about their training, and took their responsibility with gravitas.
I moved into Iraq last spring with a California Guard combat support truck company that logged more than 2 million miles hauling tanks, ammo and rockets where they were needed, including with the 4th Infantry Division that captured Saddam Hussein; and then this spring with the Marines during the siege of Fallujah and Ramadi. These second-line defense soldiers were simply first-class GIs -- good troops who knew how to do their job of combat trucking support. National Guard soldiers not ready to do their job often were parked in "medical hold" units stateside. And because their ranks were thinned, the Guard truckers would have their ranks bolstered by "contractor" drivers such as Thomas Hamill, who was taken prisoner and escaped this past weekend. My friends and sources in the Guard called this conflict, with some irony, "the contractor war."
What about the reserve MPs at Abu Ghraib? The top secret report gathered by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba and aired by The New Yorker this week cites a few terse and ugly facts that should have been apparent to any of the others who lifted the veil on Abu Ghraib -- and blinked.
Among his major findings were that there were too few guards for too many thousand prisoners (and the guards, of course, found their safety at risk on a daily basis). Next, Taguba's report cited that the MP reservists who arrived to provide checkpoint security and traffic direction in Baghdad had no previous training as jailers. Finally, Taguba reported that that the reservist in charge of the Abu Ghraib command, Gen. Janis Karpinski, was rarely seen at the prison -- a leader absent from command, leadership and direct supervision.
There is a convergence of ugly facts meeting like a collision in a four-way intersection. Too few soldiers -- that has been the understood truth by virtually all troops on the ground since soon after the fall of Baghdad. And to maintain the numbers of soldiers with which we have unsuccessfully tried to secure Iraq, the Pentagon resorted to massive commitment of the National Guard and the reserves. Such troops generally were prepared to provide homeland security duties, to fight fires and calm civil disorders. They prepared for battle with the regulars, but were given little to no preparation for a postwar occupation that turned into a 21st century major conflict.
In the Guard company that I covered, the average age of soldier was 38, and many soldiers were in their late forties and a good number in their fifties. Some were Vietnam retreads. A woman staff sergeant in the unit who rode convoy on Iraq's dangerous supply routes was a grandmother, nearly 60. Somebody finally cried "wait a minute!" and put her in a headquarters job. Did America know full well that much of the weight in its war in Iraq was borne by grandfathers, and even a few grandmothers, some old enough to be grandparents of the front-line regulars?
As to the training issue: Isn't there something fishy about putting reservists in charge of a prison intended to hold not only criminals retrieved from Saddam's day, but also "threats to the coalition" and "high value prisoners"? Don't you think someone would want the regulars handling that, and that there would be specific training protocols for running a place that is the combat zone equivalent of Guantanamo? Where does this buck stop?
President Bush has told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to hold the guilty accountable. Who is accountable for stationing too few guards, with too little training, from a reserve of troops who do not ply their profession on a full-time basis? It is also implied they fell under the control of military intelligence, or even "civilian contractors" working on interrogation.
As for the private spooks and hired guns, little was heard about these private sector shadow warriors until the four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and desecrated, strung from a bridge in the flashpoint city of Fallujah. But they can be seen like ants at a picnic in the Green Zone and at Baghdad International Airport. Although these "contractors" are providing valuable security services, they also have no defined training, no set "rules of engagement," and apparently no ties to the Geneva Convention, which puts those on active duty at peril of their freedom if they wantonly ignore its sensible and humane requirements for prisoner handling.
The media, on the national and global scale, certainly knows how to pounce on the "big story" and how to follow "the next story." But the story of how supporting the war in Iraq with a 40% Guard and reserve contingent, many of whom were not well prepared for this harrowing ordeal -- that story eluded the media until a Specialist had the nerve to turn over that disc with the horrible photos at Abu Ghraib and until Seymour Hersh and "60 Minutes II" found their way to the "big story."
The "next story" resides in a multitude of stories that were nearby, close at hand, but were simply missed because it is customary to be entranced by awful events and miss the underlying causes that led to them.
Dennis Anderson was the only editor of a daily U.S. newspaper to be embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. He edits the Antelope Valley Press of Palmdale, Calif.
2004-05-08 12:08 | User Profile
[url]http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=2825[/url]
**US Atrocities: Zionist-Inspired Black Ops? ** Posted on: 2004-05-07 22:35:13
Evidence has surfaced that photos recently published of Americans torturing Ba'athist prisoners in Iraq are part of a Zionist-inspired psychological warfare operation aimed at undermining Iraqi and Arab resistance.
A Jewish "psychologist" (David Leo Gutmann) has detailed the "Arab psyche," which Israel uses in humiliating and murdering Palestinians, and which is apparently played out in the torture photos.
The soldiers in the photos are patsies -- immature and sadistic patsies -- with little apparent life experience, poorly developed instincts. Their lawyers state that they were "following orders" of unnamed people who also took the photos, telling the soldiers they were "softening up" prisoners for interrogation.
The "unnamed" photographers picked fine stooges. One soldier, a prison guard in the US, has had restraining orders put out on him for alleged spousal abuse, and the US prison where he worked was investigated for abuse of inmates recently. A female soldier implicated reportedly was sent home to the US after getting pregnant in Iraq, and grew up in appalling poverty and social backwardness.
The Washington Post and wire services report:
[I]Lawyers representing two of the accused soldiers, and some soldiers' relatives, have said the pictures were ordered up by military intelligence officials who were trying to humiliate the detainees and coerce other prisoners into cooperating.
''It is clear that the intelligence community dictated that these photographs be taken,'' said Guy Womack, a Houston lawyer representing Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr., 35, one of the soldiers charged.
The father of another soldier facing charges, Spc. Jeremy Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., also said his son was following orders. ''He was asked to take pictures, and he did what he was told,'' Daniel Sivits said in a telephone interview.
Wednesday, in Fort Ashby, W.Va., two siblings and a friend identified Pfc. Lynndie England, 21, as the soldier appearing in a picture holding a leash tied to the neck of a man on the floor. England, a member of the 372nd, has also been identified in published reports as one of the soldiers in the earlier set of pictures that were made public, which her relatives also confirmed Wednesday. The military has not charged her in the case.
The pictures obtained by The Post include shots of soldiers simulating sexual acts with one another and shots of a cow being skinned and gutted and soldiers posing with its severed head. There are dozens of pictures of a cat's severed head.
Other photographs show wounded men and dead bodies. In one, a dead man is lying in the back of a truck, his shirt, face and left arm covered in blood. His right arm is missing.
Another photograph shows a dead body, gray and decomposing. A young soldier is leaning over the corpse, smiling broadly and giving the ''thumbs-up'' sign.[/I]
Now that the patsies have served their purpose they are thrown to the wolves as "lone nuts" while the real purpose of the photos -- psychological warfare against Israel's enemies -- is served.
[url]http://antiwar.com/justin/[/url]
[URL=http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/8610374.htm?1c]new photo gallery of horrors revealed [/URL]
[URL=http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10489]David Leo Gutmann [/URL]
[URL=http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/Iraqi%20Insurgent%20Movement.pdf]http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/Iraqi%20Insurgent%20Movement.pdf[/URL]
Snip from the above antiwar link in reference to Gutmannââ¬Ës Paper:
The conception of shame as a key element of Arab warfare was explored in a paper on "the Arab mind," by David Leo Gutmann, emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Medical School, in Chicago, purporting to describe "Arab psychology" ââ¬â just as a Nazi theoretician might explore "Jewish psychology." Writes Gutmann:
[I]"The traditional Bedouin created a nearly pure ''Shame'' culture, whose goal was to avoid humiliation, and to acquire [/I]sharraf[I] ââ¬â honor. Thus, the goal of the Bedouin raid is not to finally win a war, for such inter-tribal conflict is part of the honorable way of life, and should never really end. The essential goals of the raid are to take wealth ââ¬â not only in goods, but also in honor - and to impose shame on the enemy. Any opponent worth fighting is by definition honorable, and pieces of his honor can be ripped from him in a successful raid, to be replaced by figments of the attacker's shame. The successful attacker has 'exported' some personal shame to the enemy, and the enemy's lost honor has been added to the raider's store."[/I]
A "calculus of shame" and [I]sharraf[/I] seems to be at work in this business of the photos: by projecting these shameful images of powerless, feminized Arab men, the balance of [I]sharraf[/I] tips in favor of the counterinsurgency. As Gutmann theorizes:
[I]"This calculus of shame and[/I] sharraf[I] is an important element in all Arab warfare, whether waged by Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat, or a Bedouin sheik. In particular, that same dynamic drives the Arab preference for irregular over conventional war. Irregular tactics - spiced with Terror ââ¬â have on occasion defeated regular armies; but win, lose, or draw in the military sense, terror tactics can be a far more efficient means of meeting psychological goals - i.e., shedding shame and capturing honor - than all-out war."[/I]
So the way to crush such an insurgency is to make humiliation unavoidable, and so load the Arabs down with shame that they will be rendered pacific psychologically. If you think this is too far out to be taken seriously, the authors of this study, published last year by the American military, don't seem to think so, since they cite Gutmann's calculus of shame as a key element in their analysis.
In describing the tactics of "the enemy," the following passage from Gutmann's piece weirdly prefigured the appearance of the porno-photos:
[I]"The terrorist's actions have the effect of imposing shame on the same enemy whose people he kills. A major aim of terrorist operations is to bring about the symbolic emasculation of the enemy's military and civilian populations. Thus, as the enemy non-combatants give in to their fear of terror attacks and huddle passively at home, they become vulnerable to the terrorist's boast, recently broadcast by Hamas: 'We will win, because the Jews love life too much, while we love death." At this point, the terrorist has succeeded in multiple ways: Insult has been added to injury, and his enemies have been psychologically castrated, symbolically re-gendered into women."[/I]
If those photos represent anything, symbolic emasculation certainly fits the bill. Forced to wear women's clothing, simulate homosexual acts, and undergo other forms of degradation, it looks like the calculus of shame is being turned back on the Iraqis. Is someone utilizing Gutmann's theories to turn the terrorist equation on its head? By using "the leverage of the Arab shame dynamic," as Gutmann puts it, against the insurgents ââ¬â and the pool of possible recruits, i.e. the entire Iraqi population ââ¬â the Coalition can psychologically castrate and "re-gender" them into women, thus effectively pacifying the country (and, eventually, the entire region).
I fully realize that this sounds more than a bit farfetched ââ¬â but, then again, this whole matter is so completely bonkers that no other explanation makes much sense. It is all too imaginable that some in positions of power latched on to Gutmann's cockamamie theory, or a reasonable facsimile, and ran with it ââ¬â all the way to the lower rungs of Hell. It's just the kind of "scientific" lunacy that naturally enthralls the bureaucratic-military mind, and, with all Gutmann's talk of "genetic" and "hardwired" tendencies in the Arab mentality, has enormous appeal for the neocons. As the investigation proceeds, and the legal cogs begin to turn, I won't be at all surprised to learn that, far from representing random acts by troubled individuals, what the Abu Ghraib photos document is a sickness that runs deeper, and reaches higher, than any now imagine.