The Rag Blog

09/08/07 “ICH” — – The overwhelming majority of the American people are not breaking any laws.

We cannot say that about the government.

It looks increasingly hypocritical when the government insists that it must break the law in order to save us. It’s become the government’s mantra that it cannot protect us unless it breaks the law at will, without oversight, and without our knowledge or consent. It’s been openly stated that unless our basic rights are fully yielded to the government, further terrorist attacks will come, and because of our failure to yield what literally defines us, those attacks will be our own fault.

The implications of this illogic are chilling. Our reticence to allow the government to break the law at will makes us complicit with terrorists.

As revolting a notion as that is, and as obviously untrue as it is, nevertheless, Congress has systematically passed laws forcing us to lie down and take it, in the name of security.

Several of the amendments to the constitution, our basic inalienable rights, have been thoroughly and systematically undermined due to government urging and incessant claims that they need our rights in order to do their jobs.

Every shred of our privacy has become a thing of the past, as we now know that every electronic communication in this country is collected, scanned and archived even though it is patently illegal and clearly unjustified. A real time national surveillance grid is being established and interconnected with every possible government and private interest that can utilize our most personal information against us, or for it’s own benefit and profit. This is further darkened by the concerted efforts of government to refuse to allow us the ability to look into these situations, much less reject them.

The sweeping banner of national security is always unfurled when we are alarmed by bizarre government activity, and seems to be all it takes to prevent the people from obtaining the truths we need to be able to discern whether government activity is warranted. The people need to know whether what the government is doing is in our own best interest or not. That can never become something that is too much to ask. To the extent that it has, we have been seriously diminished, undermined and disempowered.

Why is the focus of government activity regarding national security so widespread when they obviously need to be focused only where needed? Why look at 100% of the grid when only a small fraction of it is of actual pertinence to their efforts to provide security to the nation? Not only does this spread their efforts incredibly thin, it wastes time and energy and man-hours, and it dilutes whatever successful outcomes this unprecedented microscopic surveillance could ostensibly turn up.

Why are they making their own jobs so much harder and so much less successful by looking in all of the places that will never bear fruit?

It’s time to ask for clarification of the term ‘national security’. Exactly what do they mean when they say those words? Because we as a nation have never felt less secure, in fact we have never been less secure than we are right now.

It’s really no wonder that there’s been little in the way of turning up actual terrorists in our own country. There are simple facts like, there aren’t many terrorists here to begin with, if any. As of yet, all these years after 9-11, not a single credible terrorist has been discovered and taken out of operation. No one has been held accountable for 9-11 and of course, the infamous Osama Bin Laden, an intelligence operative, has vanished into thin air, and is all but forgotten. He seems only to turn up at those times when his prerecorded threats against us seem to serve the government’s will to a “T”, supporting their assertions and plans, providing justification for the continuing need for their uncomfortable way of doing things.

Why does the government suddenly find our rule of law so inconvenient? It seems to severely burden the highest office in the land to be confined to operating inside of the law. What is the law for then if it is not good enough for the government to believe in? Why have laws at all? Again, the hypocrisy is unsettling. It is the president’s responsibility to uphold the law, yet it’s now a situation where he decides the law, rejecting and redefining it at will. As no one in America is above the law, at what point does the president deem himself beyond it’s confines? More importantly, why would he want to?

Why would our president find the law to be so repellent? Does he not believe in the value of the rule of law? The questions are left to answer themselves. The government no longer feels compelled to answer to us.

We have seen abuses of citizens here and of hundreds of private individuals abroad who have been arrested and imprisoned without charges being filed. Certainly if there is sufficient cause to deprive someone of their freedom, there could be no problem filing charges at the time of their arrest. An arrest can only come because of specific charges. It remains seriously difficult to understand why charges are not filed, and those imprisonments continue for years. The right to know what one is being charged with, the right to defend oneself and call witnesses and provide exonerating evidence, even the right to a lawyer, a phone call, or to contact one’s family, all of these rights have been stricken, and are bitterly fought against by the very government charged with upholding these very laws.

One is left to conclude there are no charges to be made against these arrestees, and what follows is that the reasons for those arrests don’t truly exist. Why the arrests then? Why the torture? Why the refusal to provide the legal protections that define our beliefs?

All of it is wholly frightening and valid reason to worry.

The bill of rights defines our values. We don’t look at those rights as something unusual or optional or arbitrarily reserved for ourselves. On the contrary, we believe our bill of rights represents what we deeply believe is right, not just for ourselves but for everyone on this earth. That is why anyone who comes here is entitled to the same legal protections that we are. We believe this is the right thing to do for everyone.

For that reason one is deeply concerned when our president, attorney general, and our military heads feel compelled to deprive people of the rights we live by, on the grounds that people in other countries are not us. Or, that people anywhere who they deem to be suspect, without evidence to support that assertion, should immediately be deprived of due process. This is exactly the time and reason for due process. These are not grounds to mistreat anyone. If our government believed in our principles would they not take our principles with them everywhere they went on the planet? Would they not uphold them here at home? It seems outsourcing is confined only to our jobs and futures, not our human values. What a shame. What an inconceivable, perplexing shame.

I am no longer sure of what our government stands for. It seems completely opposed to everything we treasure most. It lusts for wars of aggression, it dismisses our laws, it disrespects our rights and contends they keep them from doing their jobs. They use the law against us, to tie our hands and keep us from knowing what they’re doing, and worse, to prevent us from stopping them from doing things we abhor.

The endless string of abuses of law and human rights, the invasions of our privacy, the heavy handed treatment of law abiding people at airports and by police, the exorbitant costs of their visions and philosophies, their refusal to consider the people while granting corporations every accommodation and benefit, the dollar in it’s death throws, the perversions exposed in official after official, all combine to paint an obvious picture. These are not people who deserve to be trusted. These are not people who have our security in mind. These are not people we should hand the reigns of the nation to as they are driving us directly to our own demise.

Why is our Congress complicit in allowing this? Where is the belief that our nation is good, and the recollection that the people are paying for everything, and the knowledge that we don’t want the country to be changed into a fascist dictatorship? We don’t want to be bankrupt and jobless and homeless and hopeless. Does that really need to be said? Is that not self evident to our elected representatives?

When we have to make a case for justice, freedom, prosperity, privacy, human rights and peace, then we have lost them already.

When we are forced to beg for what supposedly defines us and keep hearing those requests denied for our own “security”, we must face the reality that everything we once had is gone, and is not coming back.

Government has separated itself from us. It has abandoned the people and now seeks only to exert unlimited control over us, and to do with us as it will. Just as it can dismiss the law, it has dismissed the notion of the people being of consequence. This country has become their own property to do with as they choose, and we seem only to be standing in their way, along with our rights and the laws we once had that protected us.

Does anyone really believe that we willingly gave it all away believing it would make us safe? The painful truth of it is, that’s exactly what we did. It could not be any more clear. Americans are the stupidest people on earth.

St. Louis.

His government broke his heart but it could not break Air Force veteran Charles Powell’s spirit. Fighting back tears, the 64 year-old vet stood tall and resolute in front of 400 of his comrades, describing in verse the final steps of a painful disillusionment.

Each summer during the national convention of Veterans For Peace, time is reserved for a Veterans’ Speakout, where any member can rise to say whatever is on their mind.

When the veterans gathered in 2002, prior to the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and the hawks of Washington were pounding away on the war drums. That year, Powell, who had served on a Titan ICBM launch crew during the Cuban missile crisis, read his poem titled, “I Won’t Let Them Take My Flag.” He noted the warmongers were “again waving my flag” as a buildup to invasion, and he countered what he felt was a manipulation of the national symbol with the following lines reminiscent of the great Langston Hughes.

But to me ‘Old Glory’ still stands for the liberty, justice and solidarity yet to come. So I still wave it too. I wave it for health care, education, housing and food for all. I wave it for peace and love and I wave it for hope. Most of all, I wave it for the America yet to be.

After four and a half years of war in Iraq, Veterans For Peace convened again this summer and Charles Powell was there as always. As his turn came at the Speakout microphone he struggled a few seconds to compose himself. Then, in a clear voice growing more determined as he spoke, Powell mirrored the pain, regret and anger in the hearts of so many who listened.

I WILL SALUTE NO MORE FOREVER

As a child I learned to Worship that piece of colored cloth.

My family, my school, the movies, TV taught me to believe that fragment of fabric stood for good things.

I watched my father, a World War II Army veteran, give homage to that wad of material.

As an airman I saluted that banner for the four years I served in the Air Force where I stood ready to help launch Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles on command.

Then I became aware that the wonderful things for which that clump of colors is suppose to represent, have not been achieved.

I came to know that awful, unlawful, unwise and immoral acts have occurred under the stars and stripes.

But I still clung onto the belief and hope that someday, somehow conditions would change and the good things for which that rag is still supposed to stand would yet be realized.

However, I’ve been forced to come to my senses.

Now we have: preemptive war, the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, stop loss, neglect of returning veterans, ignored infrastructure, billions of dollars squandered on war and occupation, extraordinary rendition, secret imprisonment, warrantless domestic spying, disenfranchisement of voters, stolen elections, torture, suspension of habeas corpus and denial of due process.

So, even though hearing “America The Beautiful” still increases my heartbeat.

Although seeing those stripes still brings a lump to my throat.

Even though the sight of those stars continues to bring tears to my eyes.

I won’t pledge to it anymore.

I won’t remove my cap.

I won’t stand in respect.

I won’t wave it.

I will salute no more forever.

Around 50 people have bared their bottoms in protest against APEC and the visiting US President George W Bush.

A group calling themselves ‘Bums for Bush’ exposed themselves in Sydney’s Hyde Park during a protest rally this afternoon.

Organiser Will Saunders says it’s a fun and Australian way to get the anti-Iraq war message across.

“It may be the strength of feeling about George Bush, that protest doesn’t need to be all doom and gloom and shooting slogans,” he said.

“Just because you feel strongly about an issue doesn’t mean you can’t have a laugh about it as well.”

Mr Saunders says it was hoped a world record for mooning would be broken, but fewer than expected numbers actually turned up.

One of the people to bare her bottom, Jo, said it was worth it for her despite the cold weather.

“We all have a bit of joke don’t we, but although we can have a bit of a joke by dropping our pants today we are deadly serious about how this deadly war has to end in Iraq,” she said.

Meanwhile, around 200 people protested on Elizabeth street near St James station to demonstrate against any passing motorcades belonging to APEC.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers.

Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science.

“I’ve been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they’re saying to me, ‘We’re seeing things we’ve never seen before,”‘ said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University’s brain injury rehabilitation program.

Doctors also are realizing that symptoms overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that both must be treated. Odd as it may seem, brain injury can protect against PTSD by blurring awareness of what happened.

But as memory improves, emotional problems can emerge: One of the first “graduates” of Vanderbilt’s program committed suicide three weeks later.

“Of all the ones here, he would not have been the one we would have thought,” Schneider said. “They called him the Michelangelo of Fort Campbell” – a guy who planned to go to art school.

As more troops return from the war, brain injuries are a growing burden – for them, for the few programs to treat them, and for taxpayers who pay for their care and disability if they cannot hold jobs.

GENEVA, Sept 7 (Reuters) – Most of Iraq’s provinces are severely restricting entry to people fleeing violence and lawlessness, leaving some displaced families “without a place to go”, an international aid agency said on Friday.

The restrictions in 11 of Iraq’s 18 governorates make it harder for Iraqis fleeing violence to move within the country to seek safety, the International Organisation for Migration said.

Many of the more than 2.2 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) within Iraq cannot access shelter and other basic services, while neighbouring Syria is joining Jordan in imposing tighter visa restrictions, the IOM said.

“The vast majority of (Iraqi) governorates have now closed their doors to newly displaced persons… Their fate is more and more difficult,” spokesman Jean-Philippe Chauzy told a briefing.

Rafiq Tschannen, IOM’s Iraq chief of mission, said: “Entry and registration restrictions imposed by most governorates and stricter visa restrictions said to soon be imposed by Syria and Jordan for Iraqi refugees could mean Iraqis who remain inside the country will be effectively marooned without a place to go.”

Many provinces or governorates — ranging from Babylon in largely Sunni Muslim central Iraq to Kerbala, Najaf and Basra in the largely Shi’ite Muslim south and all three semi-autonomous Kurdish provinces in the north — have restricted entry and registration, according to the IOM’s latest report.

In the southern governorates, entry is “increasingly restricted due to security concerns and the strain displacement is placing on local capacities,” it said.

People entering these southern provinces are frequently only registered if they originate from there or can prove family ties to the area, it said. Inability to register prevents people from transferring their food cards and accessing basic services.

In the western Anbar province there are no official restrictions but “the intensity of inter-tribal conflict requires IDPs to have tribal ties to an area in order to stay there”, the IOM said.

More than a million of the 2.2 million internal refugees have been uprooted since the bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in the town of Samarra in early 2006, which sparked a wave of sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.

IOM’s report was based on an assessment of more than 111,000 displaced families, or some 670,000 people, who had fled since the bombing. Some 70 percent of the displaced had fled Baghdad.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sep 5 (IPS) – The head of the U.S. federal government agency that doles out benefits to disabled veterans is under fire for saying Bible study is “more important than doing [my] job.”

Two organisations, Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), demanded an investigation Tuesday of Daniel Cooper, President George W. Bush’s undersecretary for benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Their complaint stems from an appearance Cooper made in a fundraising video for the evangelical group Christian Embassy, which carries out missionary work among the Washington elite as part of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, “it’s not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that’s more important than doing the job — the job’s going to be there, whether I’m there or not.”

Veterans for Common Sense and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation believe Cooper violated the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits government officials from advocating a particular religion while on the job.

They also believe Cooper violated ethics rules that prohibit government officials from using their name, picture, or title for proselytising or fundraising.

“We’re very concerned about this because hundreds of thousands of veterans are waiting for their benefits while Cooper himself says that promoting his religion is more important than helping the veterans,” Veterans for Common Sense’s Paul Sullivan told IPS.

Since Cooper was appointed the head of the Veterans Benefits Administration, the number of veterans waiting on their disability claims has increased dramatically, from 325,000 in 2002 to 600,000 today.

On average, a U.S. war veteran must wait six months for an answer to their application. If a vet decides to appeal a denial, the process often drags on as long as three years.

In addition, Veterans Administration hospitals, clinics and counseling centres report that more than 52,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But under Cooper’s leadership, only 19,000 of those veterans were approved for service-connected disability compensation for PTSD, a significant discrepancy.

The groups are also upset that Cooper gave his top aid, Ronald Aument, the deputy secretary for benefits, a 33,000-dollar cash bonus while the claims backlog grew larger.

“He’s prostituting his position,” argued Mikey Weinstein, the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. “We could have done just as poorly as he’s done by sticking a German Shepard or a cactus in that job.”

Sullivan and Weinstein turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the Veterans Administration’s own inspector general cleared Cooper of any wrongdoing.

“We made a referral to the designated agency ethics official,” said Cathy Gromek, a spokeswoman for the VA inspector general’s office. “He reviewed the video, and he determined that conduct portrayed in the video did not violate federal laws or regulations.”

When asked to provide a copy of the inspector’s report, Gromek told IPS it was not readily available. A request would need to be made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), she said — a bureaucratic process that often takes weeks, or even months. Veterans for Common Sense has already filed a formal request for the report, but whatever it shows, the organisation’s director Paul Sullivan told IPS the FBI still needs to get involved.

“It’s like the fox guarding the henhouse,” Sullivan said. “VA’s Inspector General, who is a political appointee, should not be investigating other political appointees within his own department.”

Daniel Cooper wasn’t the only high ranking official in the Christian Embassy video. The video also featured Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson and a slew of current and retired Pentagon officials, including Army brigadier generals Vincent Brooks and Robert Caslen, retired Army Chaplain Col. Ralph Benson, and Air Force major generals Peter Sutton and John Catton.

Long time observers of the religious right say the controversy surrounding Daniel Cooper is part of a pattern.

“Evangelicals have been working through the military and government agencies since the Cold War as part of the fight against ‘Godless Communism’, but they tried to follow certain boundaries” said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst of Political Research Associates in Boston. “With the Bush administration we’ve seen many egregious examples of officials stepping way out of line of any kind of boundary, of which this promotional video is a particularly notable example.”

In 2005, for example, the group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State issued a report accusing officials at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs of religious discrimination.

We live with an administration whose concept of domestic “freedom” went out with those “freedom fries,” briefly sold at the cafeterias of the House of Representatives. The Bush team has quite literally been a force for darkness. For those who remember the “memory hole” down which the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Truth dumped all uncomfortable or inconvenient documents in Orwell’s famed dystopian novel 1984, this administration has created its functional equivalent. Just since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has removed from open shelves and sequestered from public view more than one million pages of “historical government documents — a stack taller than the U.S. Capitol.” According to the Associated Press, “some of these documents are more than a century old.” What we are seeing in many cases is “declassification in reverse.” For example, the CIA and other federal agencies “have secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration.” These have even included half-century-old documents already published in a State Department historical series. In many cases, there is simply no way of knowing what has been removed, because the removals have largely not been catalogued.

Even the Pentagon phone book, on sale at the Government Printing Office bookstore until 2001, is gone. There’s little way for a citizen to know who occupy offices that may determine the course of his or her life. In a sense, there are no longer “public servants,” only private ones, beholden to the President, not Americans. This is what “national security,” Bush-style, really means. Similarly, as Robert Dreyfuss discovered when he tried to chart out who was working in Vice President Cheney’s office while researching a piece, no information could be revealed to a curious reporter, not even the names and positions of those who worked for the Vice President, those who, theoretically, were working for us. Cheney’s office would not even publicly acknowledge its own employees, no less let them be interviewed.

In this same period, as Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists (who produces the invaluable Secrecy News each day), pointed out in Slate, “[T]he pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent” in the Bush years. The Information Security Oversight Office, which supervises the government’s classification system, recorded “a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004.”

Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam’s WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell’s speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods.

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam’s WMD programs. “The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissile material, which they didn’t, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons,” one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri’s appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam’s case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a “cutout” who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was “excited” about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri’s information was at odds with “our best source.” That source was code-named “Curveball,” later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. “Tenet told me he briefed the president personally,” said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush’s response was to call the information “the same old thing.” Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. “The president had no interest in the intelligence,” said the CIA officer. The other officer said, “Bush didn’t give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.”

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. “We checked on everything he told us.” French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps “validated” Sabri’s claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. “They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war,” said one of the CIA officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri’s information, but one of Tenet’s deputies told them, “You haven’t figured this out yet. This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about regime change.”

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. “It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what the king wanted,” one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was “aggressively and covertly developing” nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. “Totally out of whack,” said one of the CIA officers. “The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report.” He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. “That’s not what the original memo said.”

The report with the misleading introduction was given to Dearlove of MI6, who briefed the prime minister. “They were given a scaled-down version of the report,” said one of the CIA officers. “It was a summary given for liaison, with the sourcing taken out. They showed the British the statement Saddam was pursuing an aggressive program, and rewrote the report to attempt to support that statement. It was insidious. Blair bought it.” “Blair was duped,” said the other CIA officer. “He was shown the altered report.”

Fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq is the last big argument for keeping U.S. troops in the country. But the military’s estimation of the threat is alarmingly wrong.

In March 2007, a pair of truck bombs tore through the Shiite marketplace in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing more than 150 people. The blast reduced the ancient city center to rubble, leaving body parts and charred vegetables scattered amid pools of blood. It was among the most lethal attacks to date in the five-year-old Iraq War. Within hours, Iraqi officials in Baghdad had pinned the bombing on al-Qaeda, and news reports from Reuters, the BBC, MSNBC, and others carried those remarks around the world. An Internet posting by the terrorist group known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) took credit for the destruction. Within a few days, U.S. Army General David Petraeus publicly blamed AQI for the carnage, accusing the group of trying to foment sectarian violence and ignite a civil war. Back in Washington, pundits latched on to the attack with special interest, as President Bush had previously touted a period of calm in Tal Afar as evidence that the military’s retooled counterinsurgency doctrine was working. For days, reporters and bloggers debated whether the attacks signaled a “resurgence” of al-Qaeda in the city.

Yet there’s reason to doubt that AQI had any role in the bombing. In the weeks before the attack, sectarian tensions had been simmering after a local Sunni woman told Al Jazeera television that she had been gang-raped by a group of Shiite Iraqi army soldiers. Multiple insurgent groups called for violence to avenge the woman’s honor. Immediately after the blast, some in uniform expressed doubts about al- Qaeda’s alleged role and suggested that homegrown sectarian strife was more likely at work. “It’s really not al-Qaeda who has infiltrated so much as the fact [of] what happened in 2003,” said Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who served as an Army political adviser to the 3rd Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar until shortly before the bombing. “The formerly dominant Sunni Turkmen majority there,” he told PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer soon after the bombing, “suddenly … felt themselves having been thrown out of power. And this is essentially their revenge.”

Subscribe Online & Save 33%A week later, Iraqi security forces raided a home outside Tal Afar andarrested two men suspected of orchestrating the bombing. Yet when the U.S. military issued a press release about the arrests, there was no mention of an al-Qaeda connection. The suspects were never formally charged, and nearly six months later neither the U.S. military nor Iraqi police are certain of the source of the attacks. In recent public statements, the military has backed off its former allegations that al-Qaeda was responsible, instead asserting, as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Donnelly wrote in response to an inquiry from the Washington Monthly, that “the tactics used in this attack are consistent with al-Qaeda.”

This scenario has become common. After a strike, the military rushes to point the finger at al-Qaeda, even when the actual evidence remains hazy and an alternative explanation—raw hatred between local Sunnis and Shiites—might fit the circumstances just as well. The press blasts such dubious conclusions back to American citizens and policy makers in Washington, and the incidents get tallied and quantified in official reports, cited by the military in briefings in Baghdad. The White House then takes the reports and crafts sound bites depicting AQI as the number one threat to peace and stability in Iraq. (In July, for instance, at Charleston Air Force Base, the president gave a speech about Iraq that mentioned al-Qaeda ninety-five times.)

By now, many in Washington have learned to discount the president’s rhetorical excesses when it comes to the war. But even some of his harshest critics take at face value the estimates provided by the military about AQI’s presence. Politicians of both parties point to such figures when forming their positions on the war. All of the top three Democratic presidential candidates have argued for keeping some American forces in Iraq or the region, citing among other reasons the continued threat from al-Qaeda.

But what if official military estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further, al-Qaeda’s presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated.

Having been led astray by flawed prewar intelligence about WMDs, official Washington wants to believe it takes a more skeptical view of the administration’s information now. Yet Beltway insiders seem to be making almost precisely the same mistakes in sizing up al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Despite President Bush’s near-singular focus on al-Qaeda in Iraq, most in Washington understand that instability on the ground stems from multiple sources. Numerous attacks on both U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians have been the handiwork of Shiite militants, often connected to, or even part of, the Iraqi government. Opportunistic criminal gangs engage in some of the same heinous tactics.

The Sunni resistance is also comprised of multiple groups. The first consists of so-called “former regime elements.” These include thousands of ex-officers from Saddam’s old intelligence agency, the Mukabarat, and from the elite paramilitary unit Saddam Fedayeen. Their primary goal is to drive out the U.S. occupation and install a Sunni-led government hostile to Iranian influence. Some within this broad group support reconciliation with the current government or negotiations with the United States, under the condition that American forces set a timetable for a troop withdrawal.

The second category consists of homegrown Iraqi Sunni religious groups, such as the Mujahadeen Army of Iraq. These are native Iraqis who aim to install a religious-based government in Baghdad, similar to the regime in Tehran. These groups use religious rhetoric and terrorist tactics but are essentially nationalistic in their aims.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq comprises the third group. The terrorist network was founded in 2003 by the now-dead Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (The extent of the group’s organizational ties to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda is hotly debated, but the organizations share a worldview and set of objectives.) AQI is believed to have the most non-Iraqis in its ranks, particularly among its leadership. However, most recent assessments say the rank and file are mostly radicalized Iraqis. AQI, which calls itself the “Islamic State of Iraq,” espouses the most radical form of Islam and calls for the imposition of strict sharia, or Islamic law. The group has no plans for a future Iraqi government and instead hopes to create a new Islamic caliphate with borders reaching far beyond Mesopotamia.

The essential questions are: How large is the presence of AQI, in terms of manpower and attacks instigated, and what role does the group play in catalyzing further violence? For the first question, the military has produced an estimate. In a background briefing this July in Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq. That figure was also cited in the military intelligence report during final preparations for a National Intelligence Estimate in July.

This is the number on which many military experts inside the Beltway rely. Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution who attended the Baghdad background briefing, explained that he thought the estimate derived from a comprehensive analysis by teams of local intelligence agents who examine the type and location of daily attacks, and their intended targets, and crosscheck that with reports from Iraqi informants and other data, such as intercepted phone calls. “It’s a fairly detailed kind of assessment,” O’Hanlon said. “Obviously you can’t always know who is behind an attack, but there is a fairly systematic way of looking at the attacks where they can begin to make a pretty informed guess.”

Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view. Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. “It was kind of a running joke in our office,” he recalls. “We would sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda.”

To describe AQI’s presence, intelligence experts cite a spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent. The fact that such “a big window” exists, says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, indicates that “[those experts] really don’t have a very good perception of what is going on.”

It’s notable that military intelligence reports have opted to cite a figure at the very top of that range. But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement, if you consider some of the government’s own statistics.

The first instructive set of data comes from the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In March, the organization analyzed the online postings of eleven prominent Sunni insurgent groups, including AQI, tallying how many attacks each group claimed. AQI took credit for 10 percent of attacks on Iraqi security forces and Shiite militias (forty-three out of 439 attacks), and less than 4 percent of attacks on U.S. troops (seventeen out of 357). Although these Internet postings should not be taken as proof positive of the culprits, it’s instructive to remember that PR-conscious al- Qaeda operatives are far more likely to overstate than understate their role.

When turning to the question of manpower, military officials told the New York Times in August that of the roughly 24,500 prisoners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq (nearly all of whom are Sunni), just 1,800—about 7 percent—claim allegiance to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Moreover, the composition of inmates does not support the assumption that large numbers of foreign terrorists, long believed to be the leaders and most hard-core elements of AQI, are operating inside Iraq. In August, American forces held in custody 280 foreign nationals—slightly more than 1 percent of total inmates.

The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which arguably has the best track record for producing accurate intelligence assessments, last year estimated that AQI’s membership was in a range of “more than 1,000.” When compared with the military’s estimate for the total size of the insurgency—between 20,000 and 30,000 full-time fighters—this figure puts AQI forces at around 5 percent. When compared with Iraqi intelligence’s much larger estimates of the insurgency—200,000 fighters—INR’s estimate would put AQI forces at less than 1 percent. This year, the State Department dropped even its base-level estimate, because, as an official explained, “the information is too disparate to come up with a consensus number.”

Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by United States soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released today by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 cases. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.

In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man’s head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a “stress position” they said was an approved technique.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent homicide in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush after a January 2006 court-martial that received wide attention because of possible C.I.A. involvement in the interrogation.

But even after his conviction, Mr. Welshofer insisted his actions were appropriate and standard, documents show.

“The simple fact of the matter is, interrogation is supposed to be stressful or you will get no information,” he wrote in a letter to the court asking for clemency. “To put it another way, an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation — it is a conversation.”

The documents were obtained through a federal Freedom of Information Act request the A.C.L.U. filed with the military more than a year ago asking for all documents relevant to American military involvement in the deaths of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only the Army responded.

Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the A.C.L.U.’s National Security Project, said the documents show that “the government has gone out of its way to hide the human cost of this war.”

The lawsuit seeks to compel the military to produce all documents related to all civilian deaths since January 2005. The A.C.L.U. contends that the materials may be released under federal law.

The Defense Department declined to comment on the lawsuit until it could review its claims.

Among the files released were the court-martial records for two soldiers convicted of assault in the drowning and three soldiers convicted in the “mercy killing” of an injured teenager in Sadr City.

The boy had been severely injured; one soldier explained that he shot and killed him “to take him out of his misery.”

Baghdad, Sept 5, (VOI)- U.S. forces stormed on Wednesday the headquarters of Radio Ahad station in eastern Baghdad, holding all journalists and technicians and stopped broadcasting for more than two hours, the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory said.

“U.S. forces surprisingly raided the radio station building and destroyed its furniture,” a JFO’s statement quoted Radio Ahad public relations manager Qassim Numan as saying.

Numan, according to the statement, said “the forces held all those present at the building and confiscated the guards’ arms.”

“The soldiers also beat some of the radio journalists and switched off the broadcast for more than two hours,” it added.

The statement also quoted Numan as saying “the U.S. force also took photos to all the workers who were present in the building during the raid.”

This is the second time the U.S. forces raided the Radio Ahad station in as many days.

The Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, a non-governmental organization established after 2003 to defend the rights of journalists in Iraq, criticized the conduct of the U.S. forces towards Iraqi media institutions and journalists regardless of political trends urging the forces to stop such practices.