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Pentagon eyes sending hundreds of troops to Afghanistan

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

AP | WASHINGTON - Top Pentagon leaders are expected to recommend soon that Defense Secretary Robert Gates order hundreds of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the next month or so, according to a senior military official.

The units are likely small and could include engineers, ordnance disposal troops and other support forces for fighting needs and training of Afghan forces. Officials have not ruled out a larger, brigade-sized unit before the end of the year that could be shifted to Afghanistan from a planned deployment to Iraq or moved from some other location.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have been asking for three combat brigades, or roughly 10,000 more troops, to help quash rising violence there.

The senior official, who requested anonymity because the proposals are not public, said the recommendations have not yet been approved by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or delivered to Gates. The Joint Chiefs and military commanders are reviewing a number of options.

Yesterday, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said any sizable increase in troop levels in Afghanistan may not come until the new administration. Any decision to shift large units into Afghanistan after they’ve been preparing to go to Iraq would take additional training and time, Morrell said. “You can’t snap your fingers and make this happen,” he said.

He added later the Pentagon is not kicking any future decisions to the next White House. Rather, he said, decisions made now may require months to execute.

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ACLU Obtains Key Memos Authorizing CIA Torture Methods

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Memo Instructed CIA To Document Both Torture Techniques And Agents Participating In Interrogations

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today obtained three redacted documents related to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation policies, including a previously withheld Justice Department memo authorizing the CIA’s use of torture. The government was ordered to turn over the documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought in 2004 by the ACLU and other organizations seeking records on the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.

“These documents supply further evidence, if any were needed, that the Justice Department authorized the CIA to torture prisoners in its custody,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The Justice Department twisted the law, and in some cases ignored it altogether, in order to permit interrogators to use barbaric methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes.”

One of the documents obtained by the ACLU today is a redacted version of a previously undisclosed Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion from August 2002 that authorizes the CIA to use specific interrogation methods, including waterboarding. The memo states that interrogation methods that cause severe mental pain do not amount to torture under U.S. law unless they cause “harm lasting months or even years after the acts were inflicted upon the prisoners.” Initially, the CIA took the position that it could not confirm or deny the existence of this memo; it dropped that position after President Bush disclosed in September 2006 that the CIA had been operating detention centers overseas.

The other two documents, from 2003 and 2004, are memos from the CIA related to requests for legal advice from the Justice Department. The 2003 memo shows that CIA interrogators were authorized by OLC to use torture practices known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The memo also indicates that, for each session in which these techniques were used, the CIA documented, among other things, “the nature and duration of each such technique employed” and “the identities of those present.” The documentation relating to the CIA’s torture sessions, including the names of agents who participated, is still being withheld.

The 2004 memo shows that CIA interrogators were told that the Justice Department had concluded that certain interrogation techniques, including “the waterboard,” did not constitute torture. The document also indicates that, after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that courts can decide whether foreign nationals held in Guantánamo Bay were rightfully imprisoned, CIA interrogators were told to take into account the possibility their actions would ultimately be subject to judicial review.

“While the documents released today do provide more information about the development and implementation of the Bush administration’s torture policies, even a cursory glance at the documents shows that the administration continues to use ‘national security’ as a shield to protect government officials from embarrassment, criticism and possible criminal prosecution,” said Jaffer. “Far too much information is still being withheld.”

In May, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York overruled some of the CIA’s claims that the documents released today were exempt from disclosure under the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit. The judge is still considering the ACLU’s motion to hold the CIA in contempt of court for destroying hundreds of hours of videotape depicting the abusive interrogations of two detainees in its custody.

The documents released today are available online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/36104res20080724.html

To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit. They are available online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia

Many of these documents are also compiled and analyzed in “Administration of Torture,” a recently published book by Jaffer and ACLU attorney Amrit Singh. More information is available online at: www.aclu.org/administrationoftorture

In addition to Jaffer and Singh, attorneys on the case are Alexa Kolbi-Molinas and Judy Rabinovitz of the national ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union; Lawrence S. Lustberg and Melanca D. Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons P.C.; and Shayana Kadidal and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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Driver told FBI agents U.S. could have killed bin Laden

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

By Carol Rosenberg | GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — In his seventh of month of U.S. captivity, Osama bin Laden’s driver told a pair of FBI agents that it was America’s fault that the al Qaida leader was alive.

The message was, ”You had these opportunities, America. You didn’t do anything,” FBI agent George Crouch Jr. testified Friday at Salim Hamdan’s war crimes trial.

The United States could have killed bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, before he moved to Afghanistan in 1996, Hamdan told his interrogators. They could have killed him after al Qaida’s 1998 twin bombings at the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Or after the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, at the port of Aden in Yemen, which left 17 U.S. sailors dead.

Instead, ”Bin Laden was emboldened.” So he struck with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leaving nearly 3,000 dead.

Crouch was paraphrasing a portion of a nearly two-week interrogation he conducted here at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in June 2002, around the time that an Arabic-speaking FBI agent, Ali Soufan, arranged Hamdan’s first call home.

The agents let the Yemeni captive make the five-to 10-minute call with a satellite phone outside an interrogator trailer at Camp Delta. For the first time, he told his wife that he was alive. Then he cried.

Through much of Friday’s testimony, the driver watched rapt.

Thursday’s session had ended 30 minutes early because guards passed a note to the military judge that Hamdan was running a fever. He went from the court to the prison camps’ hospital where he was found ”in good health, with no acute medical conditions,” said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, a Pentagon spokeswoman. Then he was returned for the night to his solitary steel and cement cell.

Crouch cast the June 2002 telephone call as a turning point.

Hamdan, who’s accused of providing material support for terror and conspiracy in a six-year string of terror attacks, was captured at a Northern Alliance roadblock in Takt-a-pol, Afghanistan in November 2001.

In U.S. custody, according to testimony, he was shuttled to the Pansjhir Valley, Bagram and Kandahar, all in Afghanistan, and interrogated by an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies — the FBI, NYPD, NCIS, and OGA — and other government agencies, usually the CIA.

Then he came to Guantanamo in late April 2002. But never saw lawyer, or got a telephone call.

Afterward, ”he cried quite a bit,” the FBI agent testified,and the information flowed more freely, particularly with the Lebanese-born Soufan.

”Mr. Hamdan gave us a lot of good information,” Crouch said, and was consistently ”polite” and “respectful.”

Interrogations became so congenial, Crouch said, that they brought him pizza and subs and he learned something every adolescent in America knows: McDonald’s French Fries “are not good cold.”

Through testimony in the first week of the up-to month-long military commission, defense attorneys this week sought to cast Hamdan as a cooperative captive who’d helped the United States in its war on terror at a time when hard core terrorists were resisting.

As though to accentuate their point, they got onto the court record through cross-examination that the chief bodyguard in Bin Laden’s security detail was held at Guantanamo, defiant of his interrogators and sent home to Morocco in 2004.

Prosecutors dispute the notion that Hamdan was a small fry, and have cast him as not only a driver and sometime bodyguard but also a Taliban-al Qaida weapons runner.

Moreover, Justice Department prosecutor John Murphy, on loan to the Pentagon, sought to shift the blame back on the Yemeni father of two with a fourth grade education facing the first U.S. crimes trial since World War II.

Of al Qaida, he asked Crouch: “Does its success rest upon certain members doing certain tasks?”

”Without people willing to do logistics and more menial tasks,” he replied, “al Qaida as we know it couldn’t exist. Without people like Mr. Hamdan, Bin Laden would enjoy no support. He would not enjoy protection, and he would probably not have been able to elude capture to this point.”

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Iraq war’s total cost nearing Vietnam’s price tag

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

The total cost of the Iraq war is approaching the Vietnam War’s expense, a congressional report estimates, while spending for military operations after 9/11 has exceeded it.

The new report by the Congressional Research Service estimates the U.S. has spent $648 billion on Iraq war operations, putting it in range with the $686 billion, in 2008 dollars, spent on the Vietnam War, the second most expensive war behind World War II. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. has doled out almost $860 billion for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world.

All estimates, adjusted for inflation, are based on the costs of military operations and don’t include expenses for veterans benefits, interest on war-related debts or assistance to war allies, according to the nonpartisan CRS.

The report underscores how the price tag has been gradually rising for the war in Iraq, which began in March 2003. In late 2002, then-White House budget director Mitch Daniels estimated the Iraq war would cost $50 billion to $60 billion. A year later, L. Paul Bremer, then-chief of the U.S. occupation government in Iraq, said the war would cost $100 billion.

Yet the Iraq war has consumed less of the nation’s gross domestic product than other pricey conflicts. The Iraq war’s costs represented 1 percent of GDP in the peak year of the war. World War II, with a $4.1 trillion price tag in 2008 dollars, was nearly 36 percent of GDP and the Vietnam War was 2.3 percent of GDP in that wars’ peak years.

The report says comparisons of war expenses over hundreds of years “are inherently problematic” because of varying definitions of war costs. For example, the report’s figures for the Vietnam War are Defense Department estimates of the incremental costs of military operations — the costs of war activities more than the normal, day-to-day costs of a standing military force. The costs for post 9/11 military operations are estimated from Congress-appropriated amounts and Defense Department reports.

The CRS report warns that comparisons of costs in inflation-adjusted prices are a “very rough exercise.”

“It is difficult to know what it really means to compare costs of the American Revolution to costs of military operations in Iraq when, 230 years ago, the most sophisticated weaponry was a 36-gun frigate that is hardly comparable to a modern $3.5 billion destroyer,” researchers wrote.

Here are the report’s estimated costs of major wars, in 2008 dollars, and their costs as a percentage of GDP in each of their peak years:

_American Revolution: $1.8 billion; GDP figure not available

_War of 1812: $1.2 billion; 2.2 percent

_Civil War, Union: $45.2 billion; 11.3 percent

_Civil War, Confederacy: $15.2 billion; GDP figure not available

_World War I: $253 billion; 13.6 percent

_World War II: $4.1 trillion; 35.8 percent

_Korean War: $320 billion; 4.2 percent

_Vietnam War: $686 billion; 2.3 percent

_Gulf War: $96 billion; 0.3 percent

_Iraq war: $648 billion; 1 percent

_Afghanstian/Global war on terror: $171 billion; 0.3 percent

_Post 9/11 domestic security: $33 billion; 0.1 percent

_Post 9/11 operations: $859 billion; 1.2 percent

___

On the Net:

Congressional Research Service: http://www.crs.gov

Source: AP News

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Time To Exit The Empire Game

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

By Patrick J. Buchanan | As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Lee’s retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur’s retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947 – and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued.

France’s departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds of thousands of faithful Algerians to the FALN disgraceful. Few American can forget the humiliation of Saigon ‘75, or the boat people, or the Cambodian holocaust.

Strategic retreats that turn into routs are often the result of what Lord Salisbury called “the commonest error in politics … sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”

From 1989 to 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the USSR, America had an opportunity to lay down its global burden and become again what Jeane Kirkpatrick called “a normal country in a normal time.”

We let the opportunity pass by, opting instead to use our wealth and power to convert the world to democratic capitalism. And we have reaped the reward of all the other empires that went before: a sinking currency, relative decline, universal enmity, a series of what Rudyard Kipling called “the savage wars of peace.”

Yet, opportunity has come anew for America to shed its imperial burden and become again the republic of our fathers.

The chairman of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Party has just been hosted for six days by Beijing. Commercial flights have begun between Taipei and the mainland. Is not the time ripe for America to declare our job done, that the relationship between China and Taiwan is no longer a vital interest of the United States?

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government wants a status of forces agreement with a timetable for full withdrawal of U.S. troops. Is it not time to say yes, to declare that full withdrawal is our goal as well, that the United States seeks no permanent bases in Iraq?

On July 4, Reuters, in a story headlined “Poland rejects U.S. missile offer,” reported from Warsaw: “Poland spurned as insufficient on Friday a U.S. offer to boost its air defenses in return for basing anti-missile interceptors on its soil. …

“‘We have not reached a satisfactory result on the issue of increasing the level of Polish security,’ Prime Minister Donald Tusk told a news conference after studying the latest U.S. proposal.”

Tusk is demanding that America “provide billions of dollars worth of U.S. investment to upgrade Polish air defenses in return for hosting 10 two-stage missile interceptors,” said Reuters.

Reflect if you will on what is going on here.

By bringing Poland into NATO, we agreed to defend her against the world’s largest nation, Russia, with thousands of nuclear weapons. Now, the Polish regime is refusing us permission to site 10 anti-missile missiles on Polish soil, unless we pay Poland billions for the privilege.

Has Uncle Sam gone senile?

No. Tusk has Sam figured out. The old boy is so desperate to continue in his Cold War role as world’s Defender of Democracy he will even pay the Europeans – to defend Europe.

Why not tell Tusk that if he wants an air defense system, he can buy it; that we Americans are no longer willing to pay Poland for the privilege of defending Poland; that the anti-missile missile deal is off. And use cancellation of the missile shield to repair relations with a far larger and more important power, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Consider, too, the opening South Korea is giving us to end our 60-year commitment to defend her against the North. For weeks, Seoul hosted anti-American protests against a trade deal that allows U.S. beef into South Korea. Koreans say they fear mad-cow disease.

Yet, when a new deal was cut to limit imports to U.S. beef from cattle less than 30 months old, that too was rejected by the protesters. Behind the demonstrations lies a sentiment of anti-Americanism.

In 2002, a Pew Research Center survey of 42 nations found 44 percent of South Koreans, second highest number of any country, holding an unfavorable view of the United States. A Korean survey put the figure at 53 percent, with 80 percent of youth holding a negative view. By 39 percent to 35 percent, South Koreans saw the United States as a greater threat than North Korea.

Can someone explain why we keep 30,000 troops on the DMZ of a nation whose people do not even like us?

The raison d’etre for NATO was the Red Army on the Elbe. It disappeared two decades ago. The Chinese army left North Korea 50 years ago. Yet NATO endures and the U.S. Army stands on the DMZ. Why?

Because, if all U.S. troops were brought home from Europe and Korea, 10,000 rice bowls would be broken. They are the rice bowls of politicians, diplomats, generals, journalists and think tanks who would all have to find another line of work.

And that is why the Empire will endure until disaster befalls it, as it did all the others.

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.

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