Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up.

Cuba Base Sent Its Interrogators to Iraqi Prison

Interrogation experts from the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Iraq last fall and played a major role in training American military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison there, senior military officials said Friday.

The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning “enemy combatants,” played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December, the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking place. Prisoners captured in Iraq, unlike those sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, were to be protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The teams were sent to Iraq for 90-day tours at the urging of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo. General Miller was sent to Iraq last summer to recommend improvements in the intelligence gathering and detention operations there, a defense official said.

[…]

In interviews, two military intelligence soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib as part of the 205th Brigade described the unit from Guantánamo as having played a notable role in setting up the interrogation unit in Iraq, which they said was modeled closely after the one that General Miller put in place in Cuba.

“They were sent to Iraq to set up a Gitmo-style prison at Abu Ghraib,” a military intelligence soldier said of the unit. None of the soldiers knew what military unit the group from Guantánamo had been drawn from, but one of them said he understood that it had also served earlier in a detention facility in Guantánamo.

It wasn’t a bunch of bad apples. It was at the explicit instruction of General Geoffrey D Ripper, who sent in his best leg breakers to teach ’em how to get the job done.

And then, as reports of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib were coming to light the Bush administration decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to put in charge the same guy who had recommended and implemented the abuse and torture in the first place.

How long will it take for somebody to ask, considering his history at the prison, why in the world General Ripper was brought in after the scandal broke? I’m just asking. He is, after all, an obviously sadistic freak who is one of the causes of the greatest foreign policy PR disaster in American history.

I have a suggestion as to who might replace him:

The commander of Guantánamo Bay, sacked amid charges from the Pentagon that he was too soft on detainees, said he faced constant tension from military interrogators trying to extract information from inmates.

Brigadier General Rick Baccus was removed from his post in October 2002, apparently after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal times for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates.

In one of the general’s first interviews since his dismissal, he told the Guardian: “I was mislabelled as someone who coddled detainees. In fact, what we were doing was our mission professionally.”

[…]

Eighteen months after being removed from Guantánamo, Gen Baccus, 51, and a commander of the Rhode Island National Guard, is still waiting for a new military assignment.

As for Guantanamo, I keep reading this refrain about prisoners with negligible or non-existent ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban having been “sold” for four or five thousand dollars by the Northern Alliance or others. They held the five Britons for more than two years as “unlawful combatants” and then the UK just set them free. How many other “terrorists” like that are there down in Guantanamo?

From the Frontline Documentary Son of Al-Qaeda”

What’s your impression of Guantanamo? Do a lot of people belong there? What’s your impression of the inmates?

They asked me always this question. I told them in 100 percent there is 80 percent of people that went to Afghanistan, like people that can’t do anything. They’ve had enough. If you put them back in their countries they won’t do anything. That’s in 80 percent.

Among those 80 percent there is almost 60 in those 80, 60 that are people that haven’t done anything. People that worked in a project in Pakistan, an old man that his son brought him, you know, just to sell him for $5,000. Drug dealers, people that didn’t have anything to do with Al Qaeda were put there for no reason but because someone brought them there or someone thought of getting thousands for them, whoever captured them that they were Al Qaeda.

The rest, the 20 percent from the whole 100 percent, there’s 10 percent of them that should be kept there and 10 percent of them if they go out and they catch up with Al Qaeda again they might go back to being Al Qaeda. But there’s only like 10 percent of the people that are really dangerous, that should be there and the rest are people that don’t have anything to do with it, don’t even, don’t even understand what they’re doing here.

Just explain the bounty hunting, how people ended up there. That they paid a bounty.

At the very beginning, after Americans took over Afghanistan, they needed to show the American public that you know, we have got people. So there was normal Afghans would catch normal Arabs, normal small Arabs and go to the American base and tell them, you know what, we have a big commander. The American would say yes okay and they would just buy him.

If the Americans were paying large bounties, a large amount of money they would have ended up with a lot of innocent people there, don’t you think?

Yes, a lot of innocent people. I told you the one story, I remember two, actually. One is the father that was brought by his own son. The son gave him a gun and took him up to an American base up there and took $5,000 for him. That’s one story.

The second story is a drug user, a person that was sitting next to me, not worried about being in jail, not worried about what’s going to happen to his family, not worried about what he’s going to get. All he’s worried about every time he asks the MPs to come around, asking them for a smoke, asking them for some hashish for you know, for marijuana, something like that, you know. Not even, he doesn’t even know what he’s doing here. Truly a drug addict, not Al Qaeda at all.

Yet, despite the obvious probability of corruption and error in capturing these “dangerous terrorists,” the Geneva Conventions were openly discarded because we could not take a chance that these people could be set free on a technicality if they were allowed any kind of due process. Indeed, we couldn’t even treat them humanely or eschew torture in interrogations. And when Iraq didn’t turn out to be the promised cakewalk, and the damned Iraqis refused to cooperate sufficiently in their foreign occupation, we decided we couldn’t take a chance on due process or humane treatment with them either.

And wherever the orders for endless incarceration and torture don’t get followed the way they’re supposed to, whether from the resistence of a decent, professional soldier or the inattention of a half baked reserve general, the go-to guy is General Geoffrey D. Ripper.

He Shoulda Known Better

Tristero reminds me of another reason I recoil at the very sight of Crusader Codpiece:

There was not only a new sound,’ said Al Gore, speaking about the Beatles to the editor of Rolling Stone. “There was something else that was new with the Beatles. A new sensibility…that incredible gestalt they had.” The great exception to all this is George W. Bush. He was at Yale from 1964 to 1968, and liked some of the Beatles first records. ‘Then they got a bit weird,’ he has said. ‘I didn’t like all that later stuff when they got strange.

He was too stoned on Jack and coke to unnerstand them big words. Jayzuz…

Tristero also mentions that Paul McCartney (finally) spoke out against the war.

You know, it might have helped just a little bit if Paul and others like him had shown a bit more guts a couple of years ago. I remember writing on this very blog, with a kind of naivete I haven’t seen in myself for quite some time, that we could count on the artist community to step up.

Some did. Janeane Garrofolo, Sheryl Crow, the Dixie Chicks and the already politically active lefties like Ed Begley Jr and Ed Asner. The big names played it safe. Pretty much everybody else hemmed and hawed and looked the other way when they had a chance to actually make a difference.

And the last of my ideals shattered like an old 45 record on the asphalt of my dreams….

Friendly Fire

How depressingly predictable is this?.

Pat Tillman, the former National Football League safety who left the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, was “probably” killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, the U.S. Army said today.

In a wonderful Memorial Day post, Julia has some important advice to those who might be tempted to lash out at the friends and family who might express some dismay about this — shut the fuck up.

And she makes a very important point:

Pat Tillman’s death seems to me to be tragic because he was willing to give up a great deal to do what he thought was the right thing. The main thing he put on the line was his life. This makes him one of many hundreds of young americans who gave up their lives to do what they believed to be the right thing.

I find it incredibly distasteful when supporters of the current administration try to shove him up on a pedestal because he could have been rich instead. I haven’t found any other area of political discourse where you folks think that it’s honorable and righteous and patriotic to consider anything over profits. Certainly none of your political heroes have.

If you think it’s unamerican to bitch about Halliburton taking a record rakeoff and serving our soldiers rotted food, just leave Pat Tillman’s name out of your mouth. He didn’t die for your ideology. He died to show it up.

She’s right. If there’s one thing that Republicans as a rule and the administration in particular do not represent is people who give up their fortunes to fight for what they believe is right. Indeed, they believe that the only right thing is making a fortune.

As Julia says, they need to shut the fuck up about Pat Tillman.

Look At All That Venison!

Now, this is what I call a photo-op, dammit:

So if I were John Kerry I’d go buy a grandfathered assault rifle at a gun show, then head out to the woods and mow down a few deer with my semi-automatic firing. “Some in my party,” Kerry intoned, “say that this is not a legitimate hunting weapon. To them I say: Look at all this venison.” Then grill it up, and start talking about Bush’s giveaways to the HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry, about how his determination to cram subsidies for coal, oil, and gas companies has prevented the development of alternative fuels that could revitalize the rural economy. Etc. Where there’s a will to compromise on guns, there’s a way to win.

I’ve always thought Matt should branch out into some humor writing. He often cracks me up, anyway.

His point is well taken. I think the gun thing is pretty much over as a national issue until we have another assassination or a huge rise in crime, when it will once again rear its head. Until then, the Dems would do well to pander their asses off. It would have the salutary effect of defanging the NRA, which is basically a patronage operation for the RNC. The fewer of those the better.

Ahmad, We Hardly Knew Ye

The fog is lifting a tiny bit on this story and certain outlines are becoming clearer.

First, despite Matt Yglesias’s reasonable belief that the outside-the-government Neo’s would listen to any “ix-nay on the Alabi-chay” signals they’ve been getting from the inside-the-government Neo’s, many are following Ahmad off the cliff without hesitation. The exception seems to be The Weakly Standard, which (with the exception of Fred “Nascar” Barnes) is always a bit smarter than the rest of the crew.

So, up to the White House march the perennially wrong Richard Perle, James Woolsey and Newt Gingrich to convince Condi Rice that poor Ahmad is the victim of a smear campaign. Condi is non-committal as is every single neocon in the government who obviously know that Ahmad is a traitor on a particularly egregious scale. (Not to mention that they all may very well be sitting in the same hot seat within a very short period of time.)

Meanwhile, in Jane Meyer’s new piece in the best investigative magazine in America, The New Yorker, she relates the inside story of the rise of Chalabi in Washington. He is a clever fellow:

After the fall of Communism, the neoconservatives were eager for a new cause, and Chalabi—an educated, secular Shiite who was accepting of Israel and talked about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East—capitalized on their enthusiasm. Judith Kipper, the Council on Foreign Relations director, said that, around this time, Chalabi made “a deliberate decision to turn to the right,” having realized that conservatives were more likely than liberals to back the use of force against Saddam.[read: gullible fools-ed.]

As Brooke put it, “We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were only a couple of hundred people” in Washington who were influential in shaping policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of Halliburton. According to Brooke, “From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ‘Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.’”

Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. “He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.[Oh, Jesus – ed]

Chalabi was running out of money, however, and he needed new patrons. Brooke said that he and Chalabi hit upon a notion that, he admitted, was “naked politics”: the I.N.C.’s disastrous history of foiled C.I.A. operations under the Clinton Administration could be turned into a partisan weapon for the Republicans. “Clinton gave us a huge opportunity,” Brooke said. “We took a Republican Congress and pitted it against a Democratic White House. We really hurt and embarrassed the President.” The Republican leadership in Congress, he conceded, “didn’t care that much about the ammunition. They just wanted to beat up the President.” Nonetheless, he said, senior Republican senators, including Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, “were very receptive, right away.”

So basically, Chalabi charmed the starry-eyed neocons with delusions of a Mesopotamian Monticello and handed the craven, GOP powerfucks another weapon to use against Clinton. This guy completely understood the Modern Republican Party, you have to admit.

And then there is this simply mind-blowing story about The NY Times, which they somehow forgot to mention in their “editor’s note”:

In an unusual arrangement, two months before the invasion began, the chief correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing the paper’s war coverage, hired Chalabi’s niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper’s office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi’s daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her father’s efforts while she was working for the Times.

In early April, 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving them without adequate water, food, or transportation. Once again, the assistance of the U.S. military had backfired. Chalabi used a satellite phone to call Khalil for help. According to Tamara, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C. funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s, which she herself led across the border into Iraq.

Tyler told me that he hadn’t known that Khalil had helped Chalabi get into southern Iraq. He added that Khalil had a background in journalism, and that Chalabi hadn’t been a factor in the war when he hired her. “We were covering a war, not Chalabi,” he said. The Times dismissed Khalil on May 20, 2003, when word of her employment reached editors in New York. During the five months that Khalil was employed, Tyler published nine pieces that mentioned Chalabi. When asked about Khalil’s rescue of Chalabi, William Schmidt, an associate managing editor of the Times, said, “The Times is not aware of any such story, or whether it happened. If so, it was out of bounds.”

Out of bounds. Goodness gracious, I hope they suspend his milk money for at least a week. But, it begs the question. Was there any reporter on the Iraq story for The NY Times who wasn’t in Chalabi’s pocket?

Spoonfed journalists and spoonfed presidents alike all got what they wanted. (And the Chayefskys, Hellers and Kubricks of tomorrow have a veritable feast of material to draw from):

Francis Brooke said that nobody had ordered the I.N.C. to focus solely on W.M.D.s. “I’m a smart man,” he said. “I saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy.”

[…]

As a result, the war was largely marketed domestically as a scare campaign, and the I.N.C. was enlisted to promote the danger posed by Saddam’s regime. Brooke said, “I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, ‘Look, guys, get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get stuff on W.M.D., send it!’”

As Chalabi’s little scam unravels, the marks are struggling to understand what’s happened to them:

Jack Blum, a former lawyer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me that the Administration compromised its vision from the start, by relying on dubious partners such as Chalabi. He said, “We ruined what could have had some promise by dealing with all the wrong people.”

Hahaha. The “vision” was Chalabi’s from the get-go. He just made the neocon fools think it was theirs. As his daughter said:

[her father’s problems could be traced to the fact that] “a foreigner, and an Arab, had beaten the Administration at their own game, in their own back yard.”

Ooops, He Did It Again

I am reliably informed that Dana Rohrabacher is once more blaming the Clinton administration for the Taliban and al Qaeda, this time on Crossfire. Looks like it’s time to dig into the Dana files again:

Hello?

Rohrabacher’s post-Sept. 11 finger-pointing was a fraud designed to distract attention from his own ongoing meddling in the foreign-policy nightmare. Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a “dual tract” policy with the Taliban.

I mean, this is getting ridiculous. Isn’t there any “journalist” in Washington who has the cojones to call this asshole on his little “friendship” with the Taliban? What in Gawd’s name is it going to take to get these people to actually, you know, do their jobs? There are pictures, ferchristsake!

Thanks Wendel for the heads up.

Just Because You’re Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean That People Aren’t Out To Get You

Rush told his listeners this week, “There’s something going on. I mean, every day now somebody is out there trashing me and mentioning my name from someplace.These comments are two weeks old. Now they’ve even got Gore mouthing these comments

There’s something going on, all right, hop-head. You’re having to answer for the vomitous lies you’ve been spewing for the last 10 years. Nobody has to say anything bad about you. All they have to do is wrap your own words around your neck and let them hang you.

Guess what, Rush. You’re becoming a liability.

What Was Your First Clue?

The one and only time I interviewed Mr. Bush, when he was running in 2000, he called me by the wrong name several times, which was no big deal, and I didn’t correct him. But after this went on for a while, his adviser Karen Hughes, who was sitting in on the interview, finally said: “Governor, her name’s not Alison, it’s Melinda.”

“I think I know what her name is; we just had lunch last week,” Bush responded. “Your name IS still Melinda, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t changed it since last week?”

“No.”

“OK, then. Glad we got that cleared up.”

Hughes persisted, though. “Governor, you were calling her Alison.”

“I wasn’t calling HER Alison,” he said, with apparent conviction. “I was calling YOU Alison.”

At the time, I thought this was very funny. But now I’m not so sure. I keep wondering what has become of the “humble” foreign policy Bush talked about during the 2000 campaign. Yes, 9/11 has changed our president’s view of the world and given him a new sense of mission, of “crusade” as he once said. Yet it has not altered just-war theory or the rule of law—which in the absence of personal humility, or any doubts about right action, seem particularly useful guideposts.

Ya think?

So, now we find out that the intellectually deficient inbred son has always had a messianic complex, has always believed he’s omnipotent and has always insisted that those who surround him maintain his version of reality.

Remind you of anyone?

Another great catch from Kevin at Catch.com

Classic Charles Pierce:

Yesterday, prior to watching the Sox get vivisected by Oakland at Fenway last night, I was listening to The Radio Factor on my way home from work. Now, I’ve followed Bill O’Reilly’s career since he was just a baby megalomaniac on Boston TV. It would not now surprise me in the least if, one night on TV, right there during The Memo, O’Reilly declared himself to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.

Such Total Losers, Dude

If you read this article by Michael Crowley in Slate, you’ll soon realize that not only is Kerry a charisma deficient loser, but anyone he could possibly pick as his running mate is even worse.

What’s really fun about it is that it contains every single GOP talking point ever devised to insult and demean Democrats. It will make you feel all kewl ‘n stuff when you read it because then you’ll know what to say to be above it all like the totally, like, smart dudes who write for, like, totally awesome online zines.