One of Ours

A former officer in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard should not have been named to lead a military brigade in the tense Iraqi city of Fallujah, Pentagon officials said Tuesday...

...Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at a news conference that "public vetting" has been used for many Iraqi officials.

"You try to vet against a list, a database. But the real vetting comes when someone's head pops up. People look at him and say, `No, no.'" he said...

...Rumsfeld said he was told that Saleh had been recommended by someone on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. U.S. Central Command asked Saleh to begin organizing Iraqis in Fallujah, Rumsfeld said. "He had some success."

But concerns about Saleh's past led to his removal as commander. He will likely be replaced by Maj. Gen. Mohammed Abdul-Latif, a former military intelligence officer who was imprisoned by Saddam...

...Col. John Coleman, chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the western Anbar province that includes Fallujah, said Saleh will be part of the 1,000-member Fallujah Brigade.

Rumsfeld said U.S. forces "intend to take back the city and conduct joint patrols in the immediate future." He said that could happen "by force by the U.S. Marines" or through peaceful means, "but one way or another it will be done."

The following is the text of the Taguba report with only the names of the witnesses removed for the sake of privacy.

The report was prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba on alleged abuse of prisoners by members of the 800th Military Police Brigade at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad.

It was ordered by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of Joint Task Force-7, the senior U.S. military official in Iraq, following persistent allegations of human rights abuses at the prison.

The official name of the report is:

ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE

...The third and final act that is within the Army's power is to disband the 372nd Military Police Company. Dissolve it entirely; never resurrect the unit designation; strip it of its citations; bury the guidon in disgrace in front of all its soldiers and an Iraqi delegation in Iraq; scatter its alumni to the four corners of the Army. Cruel? Yes. Harsh? You bet. Salutary? Absolutely. The Army is a closed society that treasures its hierarchy and its heritage: institutional oblivion is therefore among its most dreaded fates. This ought to be the fate of the 372nd, with all the public humiliation and display that can be mustered. To the soldiers, it will say that there will be little mercy and no mitigation for crimes in America's service; to Iraqis, it will say that we have excised our cancer and are moving decisively forward. To Americans, it will say that we have the courage to be the best, not by comparison, but as an end in itself.

One of his friends was dead, 12 others lay wounded and the four soldiers still left standing were surrounded and out of ammunition. So Salvadoran Cpl. Samuel Toloza said a prayer, whipped out his knife and charged the Iraqi gunmen.

In one of the only known instances of hand-to-hand combat in the Iraq conflict, Cpl. Toloza stabbed several attackers swarming around a comrade. The stunned assailants backed away momentarily, just as a relief column came to the unit's rescue.



"We never considered surrender. I was trained to fight until the end," said the 25-year-old corporal, one of 380 soldiers from El Salvador whose heroism is being cited...

...Phil Kosnett, who leads the Coalition Provisional Authority office in this holy Shi'ite city, says he owes his life to Salvadorans who repelled a well-executed insurgent attack on his three-car convoy in March. He has nominated six of them for the U.S. Army's Bronze Star medal.

"You hear this snotty phrase 'coalition of the billing' for some of the smaller contingents," said Mr. Kosnett, referring to the apparent eagerness of some nations to charge their Iraq operations to Washington. "The El Sals? No way. These guys are punching way above their weight. They're probably the bravest and most professional troops I've every worked with."...

...When Cpl. Toloza and 16 other soldiers arrived that morning at a low-walled compound of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, about a mile from their camp, they found that its 350 occupants had melted away. They also found themselves trapped by Sheik al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

Lt. Col. Francisco Flores, the battalion's operations officer, said the surrounded soldiers held their fire for nearly a half-hour, fearful of inflicting civilian casualties, even as 10 of their number were wounded by rocket-propelled grenades and bullets from assault rifles and machine guns.

After several hours of combat, the besieged unit ran out of ammunition, having come with only 300 rounds for each of their M-16 rifles. Pvt. Natividad Mendez, Cpl. Toloza's friend for three years, lay dead, shot twice probably by a sniper. Two more were wounded as the close-quarters fighting intensified.

"I thought, 'This is the end.' But, at the same time, I asked the Lord to protect and save me," Cpl. Toloza recalled.

The wounded were placed on a truck while Cpl. Toloza and the three other soldiers moved on the ground, trying to make their way back to the base. They were soon confronted with Sheik al-Sadr's fighters, about 10 of whom tried to seize one of the soldiers.

"My immediate reaction was that I had to defend my friend, and the only thing I had in my hands was a knife," Cpl. Toloza said.

As reinforcements arrived to save Cpl. Toloza's unit, the two camps were under attack, with the Salvadorans and a small U.S. contingent of soldiers and civilian security personnel trying to protect the perimeter and retake an adjoining seven-story hospital captured by the insurgents.

The Spaniards didn't fight and only after a long delay agreed to send armored vehicles to help evacuate the wounded. Col. Flores said he cannot question the Spanish decisions that day, but added that the Spaniards "could have helped us sooner."

U.S. troops have replaced the Spaniards. Salvadoran officers, many of whom were trained at military schools in the United States, say they're pleased to be working with the Americans.

...In some ways, this war is more important to the U.S. than was WWII. Hitler wasn’t a threat to the U.S. mainland, after all. But we live in a much different social climate. We’re much more cynical and much less deferential to presidential authority. Today, the actions of a Pat Tillman are virtually unfathomable to most Americans; in 1941, they were the norm. Even single digit losses of volunteer soldiers causes a panic. We lost more people in the first few minutes at Omaha Beach than we’ve lost in the entire thirteen months plus in Iraq.

For whatever reason, Bush and Co. made a decision after 9/11 that the war was going to be handled by the professionals and that ordinary Americans should simply go about their lives as if nothing has happened. Tom Friedman and others made passionate arguments that this was a mistake; that war should require across-the-board sacrifices from everyone. I’m of mixed minds on the issue. Modern warfare can’t be fought using the mass mobilization techniques of the past, making a WWII-style effort both unnecessary and counterproductive. Still, societal buy-in to the war effort is crucial. The president has been asiduous in reminding us that a war is on, that it will be a long one, and that there will be much sacrifice. I’m just not sure most people believe it or really understand what that means anymore.

Could we sustain 400,000 battle deaths in an “optional” war today? I tend to doubt it. At a minimum, it would take another 9/11 to provide the opportunity to mobilize that support. The last one is too distant a memory already.

The United Nations yesterday threw up a stone wall in the oil-for-food scandal, insisting that contracts between the world body and private companies should not be turned over to investigators.

In a defiant move that has infuriated probers, Secretary-General Kofi Annan threw his support behind a letter from former oil-for-food head Benon Sevan to officials of a Dutch company that inspected Iraqi oil shipments. The letter directed the company not to hand over documents to congressional committees and other "governmental authorities."

Twenty-five prisoners have died while being held by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and two of them were murdered in Iraq by Americans, U.S. Army officials said on Tuesday.

An Army official said one soldier was convicted of murder in the U.S. military justice system for shooting a prisoner to death in September 2003 at a detention center in Iraq, and another prisoner was killed at the Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad in November 2003 by a private contractor who worked as an interrogator for the CIA.

The soldier was reduced in rank to private and thrown out of the service but did not serve any jail time, the official said. The official said the soldier shot the prisoner after the prisoner had thrown rocks at the soldier, and the soldier was found to have used excessive force.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said because the CIA contractor was not in the U.S. military no legal action was taken because of lack of jurisdiction, but Army officials referred the case to the Justice Department for possible action. The official did not offer details of this killing.

The official did not identify the Americans involved in the murders or the victims. Most of the deaths took place in Iraq.

...Powell was finished, they'd said. Exhausted. Frustrated. Bitter. He was uncomfortable with the president's agenda and fatigued from his battles with the Pentagon. His reputation had been stained by his speech at the U.N. in February 2003, when he insisted that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and as the journalist Bob Woodward has noted in Plan of Attack, he was despondent about being cut out of the war plan in Iraq. In the months since those humiliations, as the body count mounted and the WMDs never appeared, his enthusiasm for the job had waned. His enthusiasm for the whole administration had waned. As his mentor from the National War College, Harlan Ullman, described it, "This is, in many ways, the most ideological administration Powell's ever had to work for. Not only is it very ideological, but they have a vision. And I think Powell is inherently uncomfortable with grand visions like that." Or as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said of Powell's disastrous speech at the U.N. last year, "It's a source of great distress for the secretary." Or as Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, put it, "He's tired. Mentally and physically."...

...the schism between the State Department and the Pentagon has become increasingly venomous and personal, the White House has been scrambling to keep the whole mess under wraps, to maintain the illusion that the president's "dream team" is still very dreamy—or, at the very least, a team...

...Rice sat prim and pretty beneath an Impressionist painting in a black business suit and bright red lipstick, smiling politely as she lied through her teeth about the war between the State Department and the Pentagon, as though no such conflict could possibly exist, not in her immaculate White House...

...The notion that the departments of State and Defense are "always in concert" is not only false; it has never been true and isn't supposed to be. If anything, a certain level of tension between the two departments is a good sign, a reflection of a working government, of the push and pull between diverging interests, the balance of power between military might and diplomatic maneuvering...

...the chasm that has emerged between State and Defense over the past three years is wider than it has been at any point in recent history...It is no longer just a difference of strategy and logistics but of fundamental values, principles, and philosophy...National War College's Harlan Ullman on Powell’s relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney: “I can tell you firsthand that there is a tremendous barrier between Cheney and Powell, and there has been for a long time…It’s like McCain saying that his relations with the president are ‘congenial,’ meaning McCain doesn’t tell the president to go fuck himself every time.” Then he added, "Condi's a jerk." Or as Larry Wilkerson described his boss's role in the cabinet, "He has spent as much time doing damage control and, shall we say, apologizing around the world for some less-than-graceful actions as he has anything else."...

..."Some in the administration wanted a much tougher position vis-à-vis North Korea and Iran. And he prevailed. Some wanted a tougher position vis-à-vis China. He prevailed. The fact of the matter is that Powell has been able to prevail over foreign policy in much of the world, and Iraq has been kind of an odd man out."...

..."I call them utopians," [Wilkerson] said. "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it."...

...if the president were to ask him to stay on—if the president is reelected and the president were to ask him to stay on, he might for a transitional period, but I don't think he'd want to do another four years."

Wilkerson fell silent again.

"He seems tired," he said.

A Wonkette operative tells us that Al Gore plans to annouce at noon CST today that he and partner Joel Hyatt have successfully acquired the Newsworld International cable channel from Vivendi. Gore will make news of the sale to his company, "IndTV" (clever!), public at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters [I'm an idiot. That was last week.] National Association of Cable & Telecommunications ("The National Show"). The content of channel will not change, says our operative, "They bought a full-functioning network. . . they're probably gradually going to change it." (Well, someone's learned something from Air America. . . )

...As for some of the questions regarding the detainee abuse case. I'm not involved, in any way, in the case so I haven't seen what evidence the government has against the accused. Don't know about how admissible the pictures will be or anything about their validity. Just what I've seen on the news.

I don't know what the soldiers are being charged with but, based on what I've seen, they are possibly facing multiple counts of assault and dereliction of duty. The max punishments will likely be dishonorable discharge, reduction to lowest enlisted grade, forfeiture of all pay and allowances and many, many years in prison. Now, the reality of this is that there will likely be pre-trial wrangling and deals made between the defense and prosecution that may reduce or change what the soldiers are charged with. I'd bet the reality is that they may face between 5 and 15 years in prison. But again, that's all just speculation.

...In an effort to keep the dust down, the engineers have brought in tons and tons of rock to cover the dry ground. It seems to work, but there is still a good amount of dust. The rocks, however, range in sizes from a marble to softballs which makes for difficulties in walking on them to say the least. To date we've had 4 casualties attributed to the rocks. A couple of badly sprained ankles, a broken thumb and a shattered elbow. Nevermind the threat the Taliban poses, the rocks have become my enemy.

A feeble attempt at a rocket attack fell well short of the perimeter the other night and a couple of zealous, perhaps suicidal, enemy forces attempted to storm one of the FOBs with small arms. They won't be trying that again- too busy with the 72 vestial virgins.

I've mentioned before that we have it pretty good here with showers set up that usually provide hot water- not bad for a desert. Its always nice to get a hot shower, when there isn't a water shortage. Apparently we're in danger of losing the showers to a drought and a plan is currently being developed to ration the water. I've been beating Soldiers up about not showering so long and not leaving the water run when they shave and brush their teeth. Afghanistan went through a pretty bad drought several years ago, anybody know a good rain dance?

We had another BBQ this past weekend, thanks again to the generosity of all those who have hit the Morale Fund button. Getting the meat to grill is turning into a challenge, but I'm working a deal witht he supply sergeant so that we can keep on grilling. Unfortunately, there just isn't a day that we aren't flying missions so the whole unit doesn't always get to enjoy a grilled meal, but it'll work out...