The Rag Blog

Soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Charlie 1-26 stage a ‘mutiny’ that pulls the unit apart

Spc. Gerry DeNardi stood at the on-base Burger King, just a few miles from downtown Baghdad, hoping for a quick taste of home.

Camp Taji encompasses miles of scrapped Iraqi tanks, a busy U.S. airstrip and thousands of soldiers living in row upon row of identical trailers. Several fast-food stands, a PX and a dining facility the size of a football field compose Taji’s social hub. The base had been struck by an occasional mortar round, and a rocket had hit the airfield two weeks before and killed an American helicopter pilot. But the quiet base brought on a sense of being far from roadside bombs, far from rocket-propelled grenades and far from the daily gunfire that rained down on the soldiers of Charlie 1-26 as they patrolled Adhamiya, a violent Sunni neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.

Just two weeks earlier, the 20-year-old DeNardi had lost five good friends, killed together as they rode in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that rolled over a powerful roadside bomb.

As DeNardi walked up the three wood steps to the outdoor stand to pick up his burger, the siren wailed.

Wah! Wah! Wah! “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”

The alarms went off all the time — often after the mortar round or rocket had struck nothing but sand, miles from anything important. Many soldiers and others at Taji had taken to ignoring the warnings. DeNardi glanced around at the picnic tables to make sure everyone was still eating. They were. The foreign nationals who worked the fast-food stands hadn’t left; so he went back to get the burger he had paid for.

The mortar round hit before he could pick up his order.

“I turned around and all of Burger King and me went flying,” DeNardi said.

He’d lived through daily explosions in 11 months with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, at nearby Combat Outpost Apache, a no-frills fortress smack in the middle of Adhamiya’s hostile streets. He had rushed through flames to try to save friends and carried others to the aide station only to watch them die.

“I’m not getting killed at Burger King,” he thought, and he dived for a concrete bunker. People were screaming. DeNardi saw a worker from Cinnabon hobbling around, so he climbed out of the bunker, pulled shrapnel out of the man’s leg and bandaged him. The Pizza Hut manager was crying and said two more foreign workers were injured behind her stand — near the Burger King.

“Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” DeNardi said, “so I went back. But there were body parts everywhere.” The first man’s leg had been blown off, his other leg was barely attached and he had a chest wound. “He was going to die,” DeNardi said.

The other wounded man had shrapnel to his neck. DeNardi peeled off his own shirt and fashioned a bandage out of it as other soldiers started streaming in to help.

Then, “all clear” sounded over the loudspeakers as medics arrived and took over.

“I’m covered in blood, but I still have my hamburger receipt,” DeNardi said. “I went back to Burger King the next day, but they wouldn’t give me my burger.”

For all his dark humor, the “Hero of Burger King,” as fellow soldiers teasingly called him, was deeply rattled by the carnage of the explosion at the fast-food court. At Apache, he expected trouble. But not at Burger King.

“That affected me,” he said. For the next few days, he said, he slept in the open-ended concrete bunkers positioned between the housing units.

It was just another bad day to add to many — and DeNardi’s platoon had already faced misery that seemed unbearable. When five soldiers with 2nd Platoon were trapped June 21 after a deep-buried roadside bomb flipped their Bradley upside-down, several men rushed to save the gunner, Spc. Daniel Agami, pinned beneath the 30-ton vehicle. But they could only watch — and listen to him scream — as he burned alive. The Bradley was far too heavy to lift, and the flames were too high to even get close. The four others died inside the vehicle. Second Platoon already had lost four of its 45 men since deploying to Adhamiya 11 months before. June 21 shattered them.

Though their commanders moved them from the combat outpost to safer quarters, members of 2nd Platoon would stage a revolt they viewed as a life-or-death act of defiance. With all they had done and all they had seen, they now were consumed with an anger that ate at the memory of the good men they were when they arrived in Iraq.

Primed for revenge

After June 21, most of Charlie Company moved out of COP Apache, their makeshift home on the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein’s son’s palaces. At Taji, the company would try to recover for a new mission.

Sgt. 1st Class Tim Ybay, 38, served as 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, but also its father figure. The former drill sergeant teased constantly and tried to treat his men like family. At memorial services for lost soldiers, he cried the loudest. He’d been on patrol June 21 when the five 2nd Platoon soldiers died in the Bradley. When he came back, his grieving platoon circled him as the weight of the loss forced him to his knees in the sand. He’d promised to bring all his boys home.

Now he would concentrate on the ones that remained.

“I knew after losing those five guys, my platoon had to get out of there,” he said. “These were the guys they slept with, joked with, worked out with. I don’t think they’d be able to accomplish the mission.”

the tears came again as he spoke, and he looked away.

“And I was having a hard time losing my guys.”

At Taji, the company had a week off. DeNardi looked more surfer than soldier after a couple of days at the pool. Ybay and his sergeants sat at the picnic tables drinking frozen coffee concoctions. The guys bought Persian carpets and brass lamps to send home as souvenirs — as if Taji were a vacation spot. But the anger over Adhamiya emerged even poolside, and erupted at the mental health clinic, which they visited in groups.

“You never really get over the anger,” said Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, a member of Charlie’s scout platoon who had been especially close to Agami. “It just kind of becomes everything you are. You become pissed off at everything. We wanted to destroy everything in our paths, but they wanted us to keep building sewer systems and handing out teddy bears.”

Some of the younger members of the platoon were particularly disillusioned.

Spc. Armando Cardenas, 21, had taken honors classes in high school but feared college would bore him. He wanted something challenging and found it in the Army, in Iraq. As a soldier, he was the guy who leaped out of a truck to chase an insurgent, or instantly returned fire with an uncanny ability to tell where the rounds came from. When a friend, Pfc. Ryan Hill, was killed in battle, Cardenas helped carry him back.

But Cardenas’ anger was just as quick as his heroics.

He said the platoon had been waiting for June 21 — that they had known they would eventually hit a big IED and have a catastrophic loss.

Cardenas wanted revenge. “But they don’t let us take care of the people responsible,” he said. “It was a slap in the face.”

Adhamiya remained under the control of 1-26, but the brass moved Charlie 1-26 to another combat outpost, Old Mod — so called because it used to house Iraq’s Ministry of Defense — in a calmer area on the outskirts of Adhamiya. From there, they patrolled Kadhamiya.

“If my guys had stayed at Adhamiya, they would have taken the gloves off,” said Capt. Cecil Strickland, Charlie’s company commander. “We were afraid somebody was going to get in trouble.”

There had been close calls before. DeNardi had to fight back a strong desire to kill an Iraqi — accused of triggering an IED that killed two Charlie Company soldiers — as he held a 9mm Glock handgun to the man’s eye socket.

And Cardenas and Staff Sgt. John Gregory had been ordered to the Green Zone to talk to an investigator after they roughed up two insurgents. A week after Pfc. Ross McGinnis fatally threw himself on a grenade to save four friends, Cardenas and Gregory had chased a couple of guys on a scooter and managed to stop them. Cardenas kicked over a wooden box the two Iraqis stood next to.

“There was a grenade full of nails,” Cardenas said. “We had to go see a major about detainee abuse. We told him [the Iraqis] didn’t want to get in the Bradley.”

Nothing came of the investigation.

Such incidents belied the squared-away record Charlie 1-26 posted during its deployment to Iraq. In 15 months, they had one incident when two soldiers were caught with alcohol, Strickland said, but that was all.

“I think the performance comes from the level of discipline,” Strickland said. “And the discipline comes from the hardship. They’re a little bit more mature than a lot of other units.”

In Shiite Kadhamiya, Charlie Company found paved, clean streets. In Sunni Adhamiya, so many garbage collectors had been killed that the Shiite government workers refused to go there. “It was one road and one river away from Adhamiya,” DeNardi said. “But there was civilization on one side and chaos on the other.”

Suicide and a twist of fate

Lt. Col. John Reynolds replaced Lt. Col. Eric Schacht as battalion commander July 8. Schacht left after his son died of a heart condition in Germany, the same day Charlie Company lost five men in the Bradley. Even with the high operations tempo and the loss of so many men, Reynolds called the changeover “easy.”

“It was the best transition you could get,” he said.

But within days, he would lose five men, including a respected senior non-commissioned officer. Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney, Alpha Company’s first sergeant, was known as a family man and as a good leader because he was intelligent and could explain things well. But Staff Sgt. Jeremy Rausch of Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, a good friend of McKinney’s, said McKinney told him he felt he was letting his men down in Adhamiya.

“First Sergeant McKinney was kind of a perfectionist and this was bothering him very much,” Rausch said. On July 11, McKinney was ordered to lead his men on a foot patrol to clear the roads of IEDs. Everyone at Apache heard the call come in from Adhamiya, where Alpha Company had picked up the same streets Charlie had left. Charlie’s 1st Platoon had also remained behind, and Rausch said he would never forget the fear he heard in McKinney’s driver’s voice:

“This is Apache seven delta,” McKinney’s driver said in a panicked voice over the radio. “Apache seven just shot himself. He just shot himself. Apache seven shot himself.”

Rausch said there was no misunderstanding what had happened.

According to Charlie Company soldiers, McKinney said, “I can’t take it anymore,” and fired a round. Then he pointed his M4 under his chin and killed himself in front of three of his men.

At Old Mod, Charlie Company was called back in for weapons training, DeNardi said. They were told it was an accident. Then they were told it was under investigation. And then they were told it was a suicide. Reynolds confirmed that McKinney took his own life.

A week later, without their beloved first sergeant, Alpha Company would experience its first catastrophic loss on a mission that, but for a change in weather, was supposed to go to Charlie Company.

On July 17, Charlie’s 2nd Platoon was refitting at Taji when they got a call to go back to Adhamiya. They were to patrol Route Southern Comfort, which had been black — off-limits — for months. Charlie Company knew a 500-pound bomb lay on that route, and they’d been ordered not to travel it. “Will there be route clearance?” 2nd Platoon asked. “Yes,” they were told. “Then we’ll go.”

But the mission was canceled. The medevac crews couldn’t fly because of a dust storm, and the Iraqi Army wasn’t ready for the mission. Second Platoon went to bed.

They woke to the news that Alpha Company had gone on the mission instead and one of their Bradleys rolled over the 500-pound IED. The Bradley flipped. The explosion and flames killed everybody inside. Alpha Company lost four soldiers: Spc. Zachary Clouser, Spc. Richard Gilmore, Spc. Daniel Gomez and Sgt. 1st Class Luis Gutierrez-Rosales.

“There was no chance,” said Johnson, whose scouts remained at Apache and served as the quick-reaction force that day. “It was eerily the same as June 21. You roll up on that, and it looked the same.”

The guys from Charlie Company couldn’t help but think about the similarities — and that it could have been them.

“Just the fact that there was another Bradley incident mentally screwed up 2nd Platoon,” Strickland said. “It was almost like it had happened to them.”

The battalion gave 2nd Platoon the day to recover. then they were scheduled to go back out on patrol in Adhamiya on July 18.

But when Strickland returned from a mission, he learned 2nd Platoon had failed to roll.

“A scheduled patrol is a direct order from me,” Strickland said.

“‘They’re not coming,’” Strickland said he was told. “So I called the platoon sergeant and talked to him. ‘Remind your guys: These are some of the things that could happen if they refuse to go out.’ I was irritated they were thumbing their noses. I was determined to get them down there.”

But, he said, he didn’t know the whole platoon, except for Ybay, had taken sleeping medications prescribed by mental health that day, according to Ybay.

Strickland didn’t know mental health leaders had talked to 2nd Platoon about “doing the right thing.”

He didn’t know 2nd Platoon had gathered for a meeting and determined they could no longer function professionally in Adhamiya — that several platoon members were afraid their anger could set loose a massacre.

“We said, ‘No.’ If you make us go there, we’re going to light up everything,” DeNardi said. “There’s a thousand platoons. Not us. We’re not going.”

They decided as a platoon that they were done, DeNardi and Cardenas said, as did several other members of 2nd Platoon. At mental health, guys had told the therapist, “I’m going to murder someone.” And the therapist said, “There comes a time when you have to stand up,” 2nd Platoon members remembered. For the sake of not going to jail, the platoon decided they had to be “unplugged.”

Ybay had gone to battalion to speak up for his guys and ask for more time. But when he came back, it was with orders to report to Old Mod.

Ybay said he tried to persuade his men to go out, but he could see they were not ready.

“It was like a scab that wouldn’t heal up,” Ybay said. “I couldn’t force them to go out. Listening to them in the mental health session, I could hear they’re not ready.”

At 2 a.m, Ybay said, he’d found his men sitting outside smoking cigarettes. They could not sleep. Some of them were taking as many as 10 sleeping pills and still could not rest. The images of their dead friends haunted them. The need for revenge ravaged them.

But Ybay was still disappointed in his men. “I had a mission,” he said. “The company had a mission. We still had to execute. But I understood their side, too.”

Somehow, the full course of events didn’t make it to Strickland. All he knew, the commander said, was his men had refused an order, and he was determined to get them to Apache.

“When you’re given an order, you’ve got to execute,” Strickland said. “Being told, ‘They’re not coming,’ versus, ‘They’re taking meds and went to mental health,’ are different things. It was just this weird situation where almost nothing connected.”

A revolt in the ranks

“They called it an act of mutiny,” Cardenas said, still enraged that the men he considered heroes were, in his mind, slandered. “The sergeant major and the battalion commander said we were unprofessional. They said they were disappointed in us and would never forget our actions for the rest of their lives.”

But no judicial action ever came of it.

“Captain Strickland read us our rights,” DeNardi said. “We had 15 yes-or-no questions, and no matter how you answered them, it looked like you disobeyed an order. No one asked what happened. And there’s no record — no article 15. Nothing to show it happened.”

After the members of 2nd Platoon had spent a year fighting for each other and watching their buddies die, battalion leaders began breaking up the platoon. Seven noncommissioned officers were told they were being relieved for cause and moved out of the unit. Three noncommissioned officers stayed at Old Mod. Two, including Sgt. Derrick Jorcke, would remain in Iraq for one month after 2nd Platoon went home in October because they had been moved to different battalions in different areas of Iraq.

“In a way, they were put someplace where they wouldn’t have to go out again,” Johnson said. “But as an NCO, they took these guys’ leaders away and put them with people they didn’t know and trust. You knew 2nd Platoon would die for you without a second’s hesitation. That’s what made them so great. These guys need each other.”

Then, they were all flagged: No promotions. No awards. No favorable actions.

“We had PFCs miss [promotion to] specialist for two months,” DeNardi said. “Bronze Stars and [Army Commendation Medals] were put on hold. You’re talking about heroes like Cardenas. These are guys who save lives and they can’t get awards.”

“I didn’t want to punish them,” Strickland said. “I understood what was going on. But they had to understand you couldn’t do something like that and have nothing happen.”

And things could not continue as they had. Strickland could not operate for three more months with a platoon that refused to go out.

“Within the company, we made some adjustments,” Strickland said. “They needed a fresh start. After looking into it, I didn’t feel the need to punish anybody.” However, he left the flags in place.

“If anything was going to be punishment, that was it,” he said. For at least one soldier, that meant going through a promotion board again. Jorcke lost his promotion table status, but Strickland signed a memo re-establishing it. “I’ve tried to fix those issues. Almost everybody else has been promoted except one guy.” Jorcke made his E-6 on Nov. 1.

Even after the “mutiny,” Strickland said, he had a great deal of admiration for his soldiers.

“I understood why they did what they did,” he said. “Some of the NCOs, I was disappointed in them because they failed to lead their soldiers through difficult times. They let their soldiers influence their decisions. But on a personal level, I applauded their decision because they stood behind their soldiers. I was disappointed, but I thought they had great courage. It was truly a Jekyll/Hyde moment for me.”

And though they were horrified at being torn away from each other, the soldiers themselves were conflicted about the outcome.

“For us being disbanded, now we definitely had unfinished business,” Jorcke said. “If we’d cleared Adhamiya, we could have said, ‘I left Iraq and my buddies didn’t die in vain.

The following is an excerpt from Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed edited by Vandana Shiva (South End, 2007).

I am not a scientist, journalist, or other specialist. I sell food. I help run a family-owned and operated neighborhood market and cafe that buys and sells predominantly local, clean, and sustainable food. I cannot speak about the reality of our food supply around most of the world. I can only can speak of what is happening in the first world, where, unfortunately, only the privileged elite can choose to put real food on their dinner tables.

Lately it seems every mass media newspaper or magazine, from the New York Times to Rolling Stone, has an article digging into the true filth that most food in the U.S. really is. Some people are actually questioning mass produced and monoculture organic food. Even Time magazine proclaimed “Local Is the New Organic” on its cover. Everywhere I turn people tell me that there is a new wind in the U.S.; that people are now concerned about eating local, clean, and sustainable food. From my vantage point in the market, behind the counter, I just don’t see it. Yes, in Massachusetts there are more farms today than in the last 20 or so years, but fewer total acres than ever recorded. Farmers markets are becoming popular or perhaps trendy. Chain supermarkets are “listening to their customers” and capitalizing on cheap “organic” food. But the chain-supermarket owners are some of the same people who screwed up our food supply in the first place. How can we trust them?

Outdoor food markets are a mainstay in most cultures in the world and were once a given in our culture. Now most people go there to shop for the luxury food treats (locally grown food) and get their staples at the supermarket. I think that because of the Depression (when there was no money to spend on food) and World War II (when there was rationing and everyone was focused on the war effort) Americans lost their taste-buds. Along came the mass-produced foods of the 1950s at cheap prices. Supermarkets were a “progressive” thing, as suburban living was progressive. Rural culture and production was frowned upon as old-fashioned and primitive. Food from all over the world suddenly became available and at prices lower than local food. Protecting America’s foreign interest, the beginning of what we now call globalization, became a new form of colonialism. Foreign resources, raw materials as well as labor, were now easily exploitable by the nation’s new superpower status. As the economy grew, money filtered down to the managerial and to some of the working class and was coupled with an influx of cheap products made cheaply and available to most classes of the U.S. Consumerism took off. Our food changed as well, especially with faster transport and technologies trickery to extend the shelf life of food. Seasonal produce became available year round; exotic food (such as bananas and oranges in Boston) became readily available and affordable. Everything was cheaper, the shopping was more convenient, and exotic foods became staples in our diet. Small and local farms shut down or were forced into monoculture farming. A disconnect sprouted between our diets and our food sources. An orange, once a special and rare treat, became an everyday commodity.

Supermarkets are part of mainstream America’s identity. Working-class people have little choice but to shop at conventional supermarkets. Middle-class people can shop at places like Whole Foods and appease their consciences with the notion that that food is safer and tastier than conventional supermarket food. And those of the flat earth society — middle- and upper-class people who do not believe that their climate is changing, that a global market is a bad thing, or that our food systems are in trouble — favor the conventional supermarket. However, both conventional and progressive supermarkets operate on the same model: mass-produced foods, made cheaply, and sold at cheap prices.

Supermarkets sell commodities. They buy mass-produced food from big business. This model of efficiency, which mirrored the production of things like automobiles and VCRs, is what created the mess our food supply is in. Efficient ordering and deliveries, no seasonal variety of stock, little to no blemishes (whether natural or from human error), significant quantities — enough to keep all those shelves constantly filled with whatever the customer might want. I describe this model as “I want what I want when I want it,” and it goes against everything about food that is local, clean, and sustainable. It cannot be done at a mass level. […]

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move “Beyond Petroleum” by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its “green sheen” by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the “biggest global warming crime” in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called “oil sands” that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK’s entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers – up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

Mike Hudema, the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in Canada, told The Independent: “BP has done a very good job in recent years of promoting its green objectives. By jumping into tar sands extraction it is taking part in the biggest global warming crime ever seen and BP’s green sheen is gone.

“It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. For BP to be involved in this trade not only flies in the face of their rhetoric but in the era of climate change it should not be being developed at all. You cannot call yourself ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and involve yourself in tar sands extraction.” Mr Hudema said Greenpeace was planning a direct action campaign against BP, which could disrupt its activities as its starts construction work in Alberta next year.

The company had shied away from involvement oil sands, until recently regarded as economically unviable and environmentally unpleasant. Lord Browne of Madingley, who was BP’s chief executive until May, sold its remaining Canadian tar sands interests in 1999 and declared as recently as 2004 that there were “tons of opportunities” beyond the sector. But as oil prices hover around the $100-per-barrel mark, Lord Browne’s successor, Tony Hayward, announced that BP has entered a joint venture with Husky Energy, owned by the Hong Kong based billionaire Li Ka-Shing, to develop a tar sands facility which will be capable of producing 200,000 barrels of crude a day by 2020. In return for a half share of Husky’s Sunrise field in the Athabasca region of Alberta, the epicentre of the tar sands industry, BP has sold its partner a 50 per cent stake in its Toledo oil refinery in Ohio. The companies will invest $5.5bn (£2.7) in the project, making BP one of the biggest players in tar sands extraction.

Mr Hayward made it clear that BP considered its investment was the start of a long-term presence in Alberta. He said: “BP’s move into oil sands is an opportunity to build a strategic, material position and the huge potential of Sunrise is the ideal entry point for BP into Canadian oil sands.”

Canada claims that it has 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil in Alberta, making the province second only to Saudi Arabia in proved oil riches and sparking a £50bn “oil rush” as American, Chinese and European investors rush to profit from high oil prices. Despite production costs per barrel of up to £15, compared to £1 per barrel in Saudi Arabia, the Canadian province expects to be pumping five million barrels of crude a day by 2030.

BP said it will be using a technology that pumps steam heated by natural gas into vertical wells to liquefy the solidified oil sands and pump it to the surface in a way that is less damaging than open cast mining. But campaigners said this method requires 1,000 cubic feet of gas to produce one barrel of unrefined bitumen – the same required to heat an average British home for 5.5 days.

A spokesman for BP added: “These are resources that would have been developed anyway.”

Licenses have been issued by the Albertan government to extract 350 million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca River every year. But the water used in the extraction process, say campaigners, is so contaminated that it cannot be returned to the eco-system and must instead be stored in vast “tailings ponds” that cover up to 20 square miles and there is evidence of increased rates of cancer and multiple sclerosis in down-river communities.

WASHINGTON (Dec. 12) – The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.

Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.

While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.

The CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a nearly identical order that July.

At the time, that seemed to cover all detainees in U.S. custody. But Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the terrorism suspects whose interrogations were videotaped and then destroyed, weren’t at Guantanamo Bay. They were prisoners that existed off the books – and apparently beyond the scope of the court’s order.

Attorneys say that might not matter. David H. Remes, a lawyer for Yemeni citizen Mahmoad Abdah and others, asked Kennedy this week to schedule a hearing on the issue.

Though Remes acknowledged the tapes might not be covered by Kennedy’s order, he said, “It is still unlawful for the government to destroy evidence, and it had every reason to believe that these interrogation records would be relevant to pending litigation concerning our client.”

In legal documents filed in January 2005, Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler assured Kennedy that government officials were “well aware of their obligation not to destroy evidence that may be relevant in pending litigation.”

For just that reason, officials inside and outside of the CIA advised against destroying the interrogation tapes, according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is under investigation.

Exactly who signed off on the decision is unclear, but CIA director Michael Hayden told the agency in an e-mail this week that internal reviewers found the tapes were not relevant to any court case.

Remes said that decision raises questions about whether other evidence was destroyed. Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation helped lead investigators to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Remes said Abu Zubaydah may also have been questioned about other detainees. Such evidence might have been relevant in their court cases.

“It’s logical to infer that the documents were destroyed in order to obstruct any inquiry into the means by which statements were obtained,” Remes said.

He stopped short, however, of accusing the government of obstruction. That’s just one of the legal issues that could come up in court. A judge could also raise questions about contempt of court or spoliation, a legal term for the destruction of evidence in “pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation.”

DETROIT — The stunned reaction of so many to the intelligence report that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 frankly stuns me. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their legions of neoconservative warmongers use lies and deceptions so routinely, I’ve learned to anticipate them.

The mainstream media trumpeted the assessment in a National Intelligence Estimate as a “bombshell,” a “major reversal” and a “shocking development.” Where have these people been? Don’t they remember the serial lies used to sell the war in Iraq? “Mushroom cloud” Condi Rice told us we had to invade Iraq to avoid nuclear annihilation. Cheney declared with sober certainty that Saddam Hussein had “reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

The script is predictable. Describe a doomsday scenario, scare the hell out of people and get the compliant media to serve as the echo chamber for the inflamed, lie-laced rhetoric. CNN, determined to challenge the Fox News Channel as the “We Love War” network, already had produced a piece aimed at ramping up the propaganda for war with Iran. Originally slated to air this Wednesday on “CNN Presents,” the program dubbed “We Were Warned — Iran Goes Nuclear” was billed as a “speculative documentary” (read: fiction).

The shameless shills at CNN had actors and former government officials playing the roles of government leaders discussing how to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat. The special has been postponed because, as CNN Vice President Mark Nelson told Variety, it was “based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions,” noting the NIE report “changed everything.”

What’s changed? Bush still insists Iran remains “dangerous,” especially “if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” which Iranian scientists certainly have. The executives at CNN are still hucksters and whores. So let’s go on with the show.

In October — long after learning Iran had no nuclear weapons program — Bush was warning us that we needed to confront Iran “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III.” Norman Podhoretz, the neocon nut and Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy adviser, had been urging Bush to launch an attack on Iran as soon as possible — an event Podhoretz says he and his ilk “pray every day” for.

The “bad news” of the NIE had the neocons rattled for a few minutes, but they quickly spun a new set of lies to try to twist the truth, threatening their march to yet another disastrous war.

Remember, all the manly men — including Podhoretz — who signed the Project for a New American Century’s manifesto in 1999 wanted to confront Iraq and Iran with or without those nations possessing nuclear weapons.

The neocon goal, which Bush dutifully pursues, is to position the United States and Israel as the only significant military powers in the Middle East, and thus control the petroleum reserves and dominate the region economically. The “war on terror” and fabricated “threats” from Iraq and Iran are ruses to justify permanent U.S. military bases in the neighborhood.

Podhoretz sees a plot and another intelligence community move to undermine Bush. “This time, the purpose is to head off the possibility that the president may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installation,” Podhoretz writes.

Think Progress reports a Podhoretz rant in which he argued the “intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view … that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.”

The godfather of the neocons declared that, “having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.”

Podhoretz, upon whom Bush conferred a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, sees a conspiracy: “The intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again.” Mercy me! Call in the National Guard! It’s another “intelligence failure.” The bastards are out to get Bush and are shaping the facts to thwart the next neocon-planned war.

Cheney is a master leaker. Just ask Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame Wilson. Big Dick told Politico.com that the NIE on Iran was released because the administration wanted to be “upfront with what we know.” Pure crap. Cheney would have deep-sixed the report if he’d thought he could get away with it.

Later, in a lapse into honesty, Cheney admitted one reason the report was made public was because “everything leaks.” Cheney and Bush kept the NIE under wraps for as long as they could, releasing it only when they feared the anticipated leak would show they are even bigger lying sons of bitches than is recognized.

Juan Cole of the University of Michigan offers a penetrating analysis on how the NIE became public. Cole is a scholar and seeker of the truth. I have interviewed him several times at his Ann Arbor home. His living room is lined with the kind of books you know Cheney and Bush would never read.

Cole is a realist and he has been right on the keys issues in the Middle East as often as Podhoretz has been wrong. On his blog, Informed Comment, Cole presented this view on the release of the NIE: “My guess is that Admiral William J. Fallon, the CENTCOM commander, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, may well have cooperated with figures in the intelligence world to get the report written and some of it released, especially since Congress had mandated that it be completed and its findings conveyed by a date certain.”

Fallon has reportedly said privately an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch.” Cole writes Mullen “has worried that the way the U.S. is bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq will prevent Washington from replying decisively to any other foe or crisis.”

Cole sees the Irish sailors skillfully outmaneuvering the vice president in alerting the world about Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program: “Cheney clearly was making a push for war on Iran his fall. The real puzzle is how the NIE got past his team of plumbers, which still includes convicted perjurer Scooter Libby. That’s why I say there was more moxie behind the NIE, of the sort an admiral has, or better two admirals.”

Two years after Iran abandoned its nuclear program, Cheney proclaimed just the opposite with his typical certitude and ominous tones. Tehran was a threat to world peace, sponsoring terrorism and building a “fairly robust nuclear program,” Cheney said on the “Imus in the Morning” show on Jan. 21, 2005, a few hours before Bush’s second inaugural address. In the same interview, Cheney suggested a surrogate for violence: “Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”

Cheney was doing more than thinking out loud. In September, “Newsweek” magazine reported Cheney was pressing the Israelis to launch missile strikes on Iran. According to the report, Cheney’s former Middle East adviser David Wurmser told a small group that Cheney wanted to ask Israel to do the dirty work.

Two-thirds of Israelis oppose an attack on Iran, a new poll shows. The Israelis, like the American people, are far more restrained than their political leaders. I would suggest that if Israel bombs Iran, special arrangements should be made for Cheney and Podhoretz to participate. They can take on the role of Major T.J. “King” Kong, the Slim Pickens character in the film “Dr. Strangelove.” They can put on their cowboys hats and mount the bombs they love, riding them to glory and oblivion.

But, silly me, I should know desiccated chickenhawks like Cheney and Podhoretz never get their own vile feathers ruffled.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq will never allow the United States to have permanent military bases on its soil, the government’s national security adviser said, calling the issue a “red line” that cannot be crossed.

“We need the United States in our war against terrorism, we need them to guard our border sometimes, we need them for economic support and we need them for diplomatic and political support,” Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said.

“But I say one thing, permanent forces or bases in Iraq for any foreign forces is a red line that cannot be accepted by any nationalist Iraqi,” he told Dubai-based al Arabiya television.

Rubaie’s comments, in an interview first broadcast late on Monday night, were the clearest sign yet that Iraq’s leaders are looking ahead to the days when they have full responsibility for the country’s defence.

The United States has around 160,000 troops in Iraq, officially under a United Nations mandate enacted after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Iraq formally asked the United Nations on Monday to renew that mandate for a year until the end of 2008. It made clear it would not extend the mandate beyond next year and the mandate could be revoked sooner at Iraq’s request.

U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki signed a declaration of principles last month agreeing to friendly long-term ties. Arrangements for U.S. troops to stay beyond next year will be negotiated in early 2008.

8-year-old girl was separated from her mother for four days in detention facility meant to keep families together

DALLAS — Immigrant advocates have filed complaints over an 8-year-old girl who was separated from her pregnant mother by immigration authorities and left without her for four days at a detention center established to hold families together.

Attorneys with the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law sent a complaint on Monday to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees detention of immigrants. They also made a complaint to the Texas Department of Protective Services on Nov. 29, said Barbara Hines, a law professor who helps oversee the clinic.

After being caught in South Texas in August, the child and her mother were sent to the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former Central Texas prison where noncriminal immigrant families are held while their cases are processed. They were awaiting a decision on a bid for asylum, which they eventually lost.

When agents attempted to deport the woman in October, she wouldn’t comply. As a result, she was considered a high risk for disruptive behavior and moved to a South Texas detention center in Pearsall on Oct. 18., according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Guards and ICE staff watched over the child for four days and the pair were reunited when they were deported, ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said.

ICE officials have previously said detaining families at the facility is meant to help “children remain with parents, their best caregivers” while they are processed for deportation. They also told the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services that parents would be at the facility with their children and would be responsible for their care, so state regulation wasn’t needed.

But if the state’s child care licensing division receives a complaint indicating child care is being provided, it could investigate, said Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services.

As of Monday afternoon, the child care licensing division had received no complaints about the facility. Complaints made to Child Protective Services about a child being abused or neglected are confidential by state law, so officials could not say if one was received or not, Crimmins said.

Forget homo-, bi- or even metro-: the latest prefix in sexuality is vegan-, as in “vegansexual.” In a study released in May, Annie Potts, a researcher at the University of Canterbury and a director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, surveyed 157 vegans and vegetarians (120 of them women) on the topic of cruelty-free living. The questions ranged from attitudes about eating meat to keeping pets to wearing possum fur to, yes, “cruelty-free sex” — that is, “rejecting meat eaters as intimate partners.”

Some of the survey respondents volunteered their reluctance to kiss meat eaters. “I couldn’t think of kissing lips that allow dead animal pieces to pass between them,” a 49-year-old vegan woman from Auckland said. For some, the resistance is the squeamishness factor.

“Nonvegetarian bodies smell different to me,” a 41-year-old Christchurch vegan woman said. “They are, after all, literally sustained through carcasses — the murdered flesh of others.”

For some, it is a question of finding a like-minded life partner. An Auckland ovo-vegetarian had tried a relationship with a carnivore, but reported that despite the sexual attraction, the gulf in “shared values and moral codes” was just too wide.

Potts, who coined the term vegansexuality, says the “negative response of omnivores” to her study has surprised her. Even some fellow animal lovers question the wisdom of vegansexuality. A blog for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals noted that sleeping with only fellow vegans means forgoing the opportunity to turn carnivores into vegans by the most powerful recruiting tool available — sex.

PETA’s founder and president, Ingrid Newkirk, agrees that vegans smell fresher. (“There’s science to prove it,” she says.) But Newkirk is all about the recruiting, even if it means one convert at a time. “When my staff members come to me and say: ‘Guess what? My boyfriend, now he’s a vegan,’ I say, half-jokingly: ‘Well, it is time to ditch him and get another. You’ve done your work; move on.’ “

A NATO air attack on Nov. 28 dropped two bombs on tents where workers were sleeping in Nuristan, a rugged province in eastern Afghanistan. The bombs killed 14 workers, with no survivors. These workers had been building a road for the NATO occupation forces.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) admitted it conducted air strikes against Taliban fighters in the area but denied any workers were killed. ISAF spokesman Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco claimed at a news conference a few days later that a “Taliban leader” was targeted and that “there were no civilian casualties.”

While it may be no surprise that Gen. Branco denied the bombing, it wouldn’t be the first time NATO forces in Afghanistan have caused heavy civilian casualties. According to United Nations reports, NATO and Afghan government forces killed 314 civilians in the first six months of this year. The same source says 279 civilians were killed by the Afghan resistance.

Mark Herold, a well-respected economist at the University of New Hampshire, estimates that U.S. forces killed 3,767 civilians in Afghanistan—and that’s only between October and December of 2001, during the initial bombing. Many more have been killed in the six years since. The U.S. Department of Defense admits to 401 military fatalities as of July 2007. Another 278 from other NATO countries have also been killed. Many more Afghan civilians than NATO troops have been killed, and most have been killed by NATO troops.

Past examples indicate that even if it were clearly established that the ISAF air and helicopter attack was aimed the road workers, it is highly unlikely that any serious charges would be brought against the forces involved, especially if they are from the U.S. or other big imperialist powers.

U.S. Marines’ impunity

During a routine patrol last March 4, U.S. Marines were attacked by a suicide bomber. They responded by killing at least 50 civilians and seriously injuring an unspecified number more. Three weeks later, after large, angry protests, Marine commanders agreed to open an investigation and announced that they would keep the platoon implicated in the massacre in Afghanistan even though they were sending the company involved out of the country.

On May 9, Col. John Nicholson, who commanded the brigade to which the Marine Special Forces were attached, apologized to the families of the 69 civilians who were killed or wounded. Nicholson said he was “deeply, deeply ashamed” about this “terrible, terrible mistake.” On behalf of the U.S. government, he turned over $2,000 as compensation for the deaths and injuries.

A few weeks later, the Marine Corp’s top general said that Nicholson was wrong to apologize because investigators had yet to determine whether any wrongdoing occurred. As of the middle of November, the Defense Department was saying that a formal investigation would be opened sometime in December.

Polish troops jailed

The Polish military reacted differently. When the military prosecutors in Poznan, Poland, became aware that Polish soldiers, who were operating together with U.S. troops, mortared the Afghan town of Nangar Khel on Aug. 16, killing six civilians including women and children, they jailed the troops on Nov. 15. The authorities are holding the Polish troops in separate cells, to avoid collusion. The investigating judge has held that it is established that the killings took place.

Poland currently has about 1,200 troops in Afghanistan and 900 in Iraq. The new prime minister, Donald Tusk, appointed at the end of October after his Civic Platform party won the parliamentary elections, had run on a platform of withdrawing from Iraq by the summer of 2008. His platform also included trying to strengthen Poland’s ties to the U.S. Tusk says he will continue to keep a significant Polish force in Afghanistan.

According to a recent public opinion poll, 72 percent of Poles want Poland out of Afghanistan.

The Polish edition of Newsweek ran a front-page headline, “Blood on the uniform,” the week the news broke of the Aug. 16 massacre. The Polish Business News Agency raised the charge that Polish army commanders knew about the massacre and the cover up.

Tusk announced that if the charges were proven, he would apologize to the Afghani people. The Polish military prosecutor intends to try the soldiers early in the spring of 2008.

Washington, the imperialist capital with the most powerful military, has insisted its soldiers be exempt from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and that the actions of its occupation troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are virtually unpunished. Poland is a poor neo-colony of U.S. and Western European imperialism.

More than two million of Poland’s young workers have left for Western Europe in the past three years. Though Poland’s youths are also acceptable as cannon fodder for imperialist wars and occupations, they don’t get the same arrogant protection as the imperialist troops when they commit war crimes.

Amid the idyllic Americana setting in a small Texas town is a place where young children lived surrounded by razor wire fence with the threat of separation from their parents. They and their families—none of whom were charged with crimes—had been kept in prison cells with limited access to medical care, education and even food. You likely wouldn’t have found the typical colorful drawings found in most homes with children, because they weren’t allowed to have even paper and crayons in their cells.

While Taylor, Texas, advertises itself as a “a vibrant, growing community of…friendly people living the good life,” something it doesn’t promote is the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former medium security prison that now is a detention center for immigrant families, including children, awaiting decisions about asylum in the U.S. or other immigration-related issues.

When Barbara Hines, director of the School of Law’s Immigration Clinic, first visited the facility in fall 2006, she discovered life has been anything but idyllic for the children detained there. The facility was surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. No direct sunlight entered the building. During detentions that lasted as long as a year, the children were kept in cells at least 12 hours a day, required to wear prison uniforms, given 20 minutes to eat their meals (with no additional nutrition available beyond what was served at mealtimes), and provided about one hour a day of education.

Hines, who has worked on immigration law issues for three decades, said she was stunned by the conditions she encountered at Hutto, run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a for-profit company. CCA is the fifth-largest operator of corrections facilities in the nation—behind only the federal government’s prison system and those of three states.

“I have seen a lot in many years of doing immigration law that disturbed me,” she said, “but this is the most disturbed I’ve been about any immigration policy in a really long time. I just couldn’t believe that there were children in prison uniforms behind barbed wire. Imprisoning families who have fled their home countries under fear of persecution from their own governments, and detaining them in jail-like conditions, was an indescribable trauma for many of the children.”

Elise Harriger, a third-year law student in the Immigration Clinic who also visited Hutto to work on cases there, was similarly distressed by what she saw.

“It was a prison, plain and simple. Children wore prison uniforms and lived in cells with narrow slits for windows. I had to keep reminding myself that I really was in the United States. It seemed so terribly wrong,” Harriger recalled.

According to advocates, there was little or no privacy in bathrooms or showers at Hutto. Many of the children said that they were threatened with being separated from their parents if they did not respond immediately to the orders of their uniformed guards. There was no pediatrician onsite, and many children’s medical conditions worsened while they were in custody. Advocates say the children had almost no toys or age-appropriate books and were not allowed to keep writing implements and paper in their cells. In many cases, the children’s mental health deteriorated substantially.
None of the detainees was charged with crimes, and none had violent histories. Among them were families from Lithuania, Romania, Iraq, Somalia and several Latin American countries.

Calls for assistance

The Hutto facility opened in May 2006. Frances Valdez, a 2005 Law School graduate, who was then the clinic’s Clinical Fellow, began receiving calls for assistance in August. Because the detainees have no right to a publicly funded lawyer, the clinic fields many such requests—it is one of very few organizations with expertise in this area that provides free legal services.

“The first call I got was from a frantic Nicaraguan woman in the Valley saying her daughter and her daughter’s baby were being held at a prison in Taylor,” Valdez recalled. “That was when we first learned families were being detained at Hutto.”

As clinic students began meeting with Hutto detainees to help them with their asylum claims and other cases, Valdez also worked to raise public awareness of those detainees’ circumstances. At an Austin meeting convened by the national organization Detention Watch Network to discuss general detention issues, she asked those in attendance to focus on Hutto, and the group Texans United for Families was formed as a result. In December 2006, Valdez and others organized a vigil at Hutto, and that event ignited media attention.

“Suddenly we were receiving calls from everywhere,” Valdez said, “not just Texas media but national media, too.”

With 12 students, the Immigration Clinic could handle only a relatively small number of cases for individual Hutto detainees.

“We were overwhelmed,” Hines said. “We realized that we were going to need more help.”

Other organizations providing individual services, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, were also finding their resources barely sufficient to meet the needs of individuals there.

The litigation

In March of this year, the Immigration Clinic, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and the international law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, filed lawsuits on behalf of 26 children detained at Hutto against Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and six officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The lawsuits charged that the children were being imprisoned under inhumane conditions, and in contravention of a 1997 federal settlement agreement, Flores v. Meese, that requires immigration authorities to house children in the least restrictive conditions possible and to meet certain basic standards in their care and treatment. All 12 students from the Immigration Clinic participated in developing the case.

In an April ruling consolidating the 26 cases into one trial, the District Court Judge hearing the case—1963 Law School graduate Sam Sparks—warned the defendants that they faced an uphill struggle to justify their actions, writing: “The Court finds it inexplicable that defendants have spent untold amounts of time, effort, and taxpayer dollars to establish the Hutto family detention program, knowing all the while that Flores is still in effect.”

In an apparent response to the suit, ICE accelerated the process of issuing bonds for asylum seekers who passed interviews regarding their credible fear of harm or repression if they returned to their native countries. Those bonds freed some of the detainees and their children from the facility.

Other changes also began taking place at Hutto after the suit was filed, changes that former clinic student Elizabeth Wagoner, a 2007 Law School graduate, described as nearly farcical.

“It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic,” Wagoner recounted. “For example, they painted a big mural on one wall, with castles and happy dragons and blue skies and puffy clouds, and it said Bienvenidos a Hutto—Welcome to Hutto—as though this would bring some sort of pleasure to children who were, in my view, being cruelly mistreated and many of whose parents were experiencing serious distress as a result of their penal confinement and the confinement of their children.”

The settlement

As the trial was about to begin in August, a settlement was reached. All 26 of the plaintiff children had been released before the trial date—six of them just days earlier. They are still in the U.S., now living with family members who are U.S. citizens and/or legal permanent residents while their asylum claims are being pursued.

The defendants agreed to ensure that living conditions at Hutto—where, as of the writing of this article, about 200 people are still detained—met appropriate standards. U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin, a 1985 Law School graduate, was assigned to monitor those conditions, pursuant to a 127-item checklist included in the settlement.

“In my opinion, Hutto should be shut down,” Valdez said. “But at least now the children can wear regular clothes instead of prison uniforms, they can go outside, and there are no more clanging iron cellblock gates.”

Hines and her students still provide legal services to individuals detained at Hutto. Even with the settlement in place and changes beginning to occur, Hines said that it is still very difficult to go there and see families held in such confinement.
“The conditions at Hutto are not just distressing,” she said. “They are fundamentally in conflict with what Congress intended as a proper way to deal with detained families.”

The policy

Before 2001, apprehended immigrant families (a category that includes asylum seekers, who are placed under arrest and considered to be in the U.S. illegally until their status is determined) typically were released with an assigned date to appear in court. After 2001, in an environment that placed heightened emphasis on security, government policy called for the detention of more apprehended immigrants, including those accompanied by children, to provide a greater likelihood that they would appear for their court dates.

The first facility to house detained immigrant families was established in a former nursing home in Berks County, Pa., in 2001. With about 84 beds, it is run by the county. The much larger Hutto is the only other facility used to detain families.

In a joint report published earlier this year, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, while declaring “the system of family detention is overwhelmingly inappropriate for families,” observed that children at the Berks County institution were generally treated more humanely than those held at Hutto.

The House committee overseeing the budget for the Department of Homeland Security has regularly described detention of families as a last resort. In 2005 it wrote: “The Committee expects DHS to release families or use alternatives to detention such as the Intensive Supervised [sic] Appearance Program whenever possible. When detention of family units is necessary, the committee directs DHS to use appropriate detention space to house them together.” In the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, under way in nine American cities, immigrants are generally equipped with electronic bracelets and supervised by caseworkers to ensure compliance with the terms of their release.

In 2006 the committee reiterated its expectation that “if detention is necessary,” DHS should “house these families together in non-penal, homelike environments until the conclusion of their immigration proceedings.”

Hines and her students take pride in the services they provide to individual Hutto detainees, and in their substantial part in obtaining the settlement that is changing the conditions of detention there. But many feel strongly that detention of families is an inappropriate policy and that even if detention must be used, the Hutto facility is the wrong place to do it.

When the U.S. Air Force Southern Command’s 10-year usage rights for Ecuador’s Manta air base expire in 2009, they can expect to be evicted in favor of China.

President Jamil Mahuad signed a 10-year lease agreement with the US Military’s Forward Operating Location (FOL) in 1999. The Manta base is not geopolitically important for US national security, but Southern Command (South Com) currently uses it to combat illegal cocaine trade in the “source zone” of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. The Air Base shares a common runway with Manta’s Eloy Alfaro International Airport terminal, but the airbase has a separate office for cargo, while the airport handles passengers. About 475 US military personnel are stationed at the air base under a under a 10-year agreement signed with Quito in November 1999 and due to expire in 24 months.

Acording to Latin Americanist Marc Becker, the agreement with the US military “has proved to be unpopular and some argue unconstitutional. The purported purpose of the FOL was to help interdict drug shipments from neighboring Colombia, but opponents contend that the U.S. government has . . . move[d] well beyond that mandate into counter-insurgency and anti-immigrant activities.” There are also complaints that the base was consolidated by expropriating land from indigenous groups and small farmers, and that is being used by Colombian pilots and as a center of anti-guerilla intelligence as a part of Plan Colombia, and for the targeting of alleged terrorist groups. From March 5 to 9 of 2007, more than 400 activists gathered in Manta for the first International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases. They chose Manta due to the new government’s stance against continued US presence.

When Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa was campaigning in 2006, he promised to make the contract renewal with the US contingent on a reciprocal agreement allowing Ecuador to build or station military on an airbase in Miami, Florida. The US rejected this idea, and Correa offered the base to the Terminales del Ecuador, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Port Holdings [HPH] during to Beijing on Nov. 21. China would be most likely to use the base for cargo transit in trade, rather than security purposes. Strategic Forecasting [STRATFOR] predicts that Correa’s offer is “aimed partly at maintaining domestic support, partly at extracting preferential trade access to U.S. markets (something Washington probably will cave in and deliver), and partly at securing Chinese capital for fulfilling Manta’s future role as the largest Sino-Latin American trade transshipment hub on the South American west coast.”

Correa’s presidential campaign also focused on the need to improve regional transport and trade in order to compete with ports in Peru, Colombia and Chile and to link to industry in Brazil. Some of the roads planned between the Andean countries would also connect waterways linking Ecuador and Brazil. The agreement will create profits for Brazil as well as Ecuador, as the two countries recently signed an agreement to link Manta to the city of Manaus by railway or highway corridor. According to the government, the details of this project have already been discussed with other interested Chinese investment firms. This corridor project is a key part of IIRSA, the South American regional infrastructure integration initiative.

Since before his election, Correa has also emphasized the necessity of attracting Asian investment in order to upgrade infrastructure and therefore expand regional and international trade. In offering the Manta base to HPH, he said that he was offering Chinese investors a “geopolitical window,” which would make Ecuador a bridge for accessing markets in South America.

Chinese Investment and US Relations

Chinese investment in Manta began when Chinese, Chilean, Singaporean, Japanese, and US port companies expressed interest in the Manta port (not the air force base). In October, HPH gave a $1 million bond to the MPA . In November, 2006, HPH was the only final bidder and the Manta Port Authority (MPA) gave HPH operating concessions in exchange for $486 million (added to $55 million promised by the MPA) to upgrade facilities over the next 30 years.

According to Business News Americas, Hutchinson Port Holdings [HPH] is the port-operating subsidiary of Hong Kong’s Hutchison-Whampoa. The company focuses “on trans-Pacific/Atlantic corridor cargo trade” and has a portfolio of ports in Latin America. “In 2001 it bought out Philippines-based port operator ICTSI, which had various Latin American interests in Argentina, Mexico and the Bahamas. In Panama, HPH’s Panama Port Company operates the ports of Cristobal and Balboa. Manta is the closest port to Asia on South America’s west coast.” Manta is a desirable port for HPH as it is the closest port to Asia on Latin America’s west coast. The Manta deal could also help smooth out a disagreement between Ecuador and China’s major state energy players over the October increase of Ecuador’s oil taxes from 50 percent to 99 percent.

The next steps would involve HPH accepting the post 2009 concession for Manta’s air force base (it already controls the sea port), and another Chinese investment firm’s participation in financing the road/rail network between Manta and Manaus, Brazil.

According to STRATFOR, “while this is not the first time China has been made such an offer by a Latin American nation, it is the first time U.S. geopolitical interests in the region have been so closely brushed up against.” They forecast that “from a security perspective, a Chinese military presence in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed by the United States as a hostile move, and would almost inevitably invite the Pentagon’s ire.” They predict that Beijing and especially the People’s Liberation Army will try to maintain good relations with the US to prevent remunerative trade policies such as tariffs.

“It’s ironic that it is China, not a European power, that would challenge the Monroe Doctrine. The irony is doubled as China turns the original US Open Door Policy of 1900 (designed to allow US access to Chinese markets) back on the US to get better access to Latin American markets,” comments Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies.