Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib. He spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
SEYMOUR HERSH: About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he¹s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don¹t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren¹t voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.
It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can¹t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. ³They did it to us. We¹ve got to do it to them.² That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with.
I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word ³insurgency². It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.
There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been ³diminish the agency.² I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.
On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can¹t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we¹re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There¹s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a ³free-fire zone² right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.¹s, and he picked up the phone and he said, ³Welcome to Stalingrad.² We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.
We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, ³Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it,² as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, ³well, we don't do torture.² We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what¹s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven ³bad seeds², enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They¹ve gotten away with it.
So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, ³Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away.² There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had -- for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because It's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're ³rag-heads². They're less than human. The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting having the K rations -- that¹s what they called them -- MRE¹s now -- the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, ³Plug him,² he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac¹d out. As he was being medevac¹d out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, ³God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too.²
So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, ³I¹m coming to see you. I don¹t remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Grizzled, old. Way old hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then she said, one of these great -- she said to me, ³I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer.² So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these -- some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, ³Were you there?² She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She doesn¹t know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked ³Iraq². She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn¹t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's another story.
For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in ³macro² in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, ³Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?² Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he¹s going to do between then and now is enormous. We¹re going to have some very bad months ahead.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Unpatriotic Scumbags Skip Supporting America...
Because America is such an incredible country these companies make billions each year in profit. Yet in a time of unprecedented government debt and while American soldiers are dying in a war, they are not asked to share the burden, in fact, they are given a "holiday" from fighting terrorism, poverty, injustice, etc.
January 30, 2005
NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Corporate Welfare Runs Amok
Earlier this month, Johnson & Johnson became one of the first major American corporations to sign on for a one-year "tax holiday" - a government-sponsored opportunity for American multinationals to bring their foreign profits back to the United States at a puny tax rate of 5.25 percent, compared with the normal corporate rate of 35 percent. Johnson & Johnson intends to repatriate $11 billion. And that is just the beginning of what is shaping up to be an unprecedented government giveaway.
The drug giant Schering-Plough has announced a coming $9.4 billion repatriation, and Eli Lilly has announced one for $8 billion. Many other cash-rich companies, especially in pharmaceuticals and technology, are expected to follow suit. Pfizer is considering whether to repatriate $29 billion in untaxed foreign profits; Hewlett-Packard has $14.5 billion eligible for repatriation; Intel has $6 billion. By the end of 2005, an estimated $100 billion to $500 billion will have found its way home. Over the long run, Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation projects that the holiday will allow companies to avoid $3.3 billion in taxes, an estimate that many tax experts think is low.
The nation's corporate tax rules - combined with spotty enforcement by an underfunded and outmuscled Internal Revenue Service - provide strong incentives for American companies to shift their profits from the United States to low-tax havens, such as Ireland and Luxembourg. Once there, the profits are allowed to grow untaxed by the United States until they are repatriated. That tax deferral is a hugely munificent gesture - as if the country's biggest businesses had been granted their own special I.R.A.'s.
But it wasn't enough for many companies that have piled up excess cash abroad. The Homeland Investment Coalition, a roster of dozens of America's largest corporations, lobbied vigorously - and successfully - for a tax holiday before deigning to repatriate their overseas profits.
Congress's ostensible purpose for allowing the holiday is to unleash a flood of money for job creation, hence the name of the law that includes the holiday - the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. But few of the approved uses for the repatriated funds - such as debt redemption, advertising and a catchall category of "financial stabilization" - will lead directly, if at all, to more jobs. One approved use - the ability to spend the money to buy other companies - would be more likely to create layoffs, as corporate acquisitions usually do.
Companies can also use the money to help pay legal liabilities, which could prove to be a big boon for companies like the drug maker Merck, which is sitting on some $15 billion in untaxed foreign profits and faces an estimated $18 billion in potential claims arising from the Vioxx debacle. Multinationals cannot use the repatriated profits to pay dividends to shareholders, buy back their own stock or pay executives. But because companies have a lot of flexibility in financing their activities, they will generally be able to use the money as they see fit while still meeting the letter of the law.
So the tax holiday blesses rather than curbs tax avoidance and is structured to encourage little if any new domestic economic activity. It establishes a horrible precedent by encouraging companies to leave profits abroad in anticipation of future holidays. It makes fools of companies that have routinely repatriated foreign profits at the full corporate tax rate. And it disadvantages American companies that have no foreign presence and thus no opportunity to reap profits at a discounted tax rate.
All it will really do is what the drafters probably intended all along - further erode the nation's corporate tax base and impugn the system's integrity, in that way building a case for eliminating corporate taxes altogether. That is a lousy way to make policy. Reforms to the corporate tax system must be debated on their merits, not under cover of some phony label like "job creation."
January 30, 2005
NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Corporate Welfare Runs Amok
Earlier this month, Johnson & Johnson became one of the first major American corporations to sign on for a one-year "tax holiday" - a government-sponsored opportunity for American multinationals to bring their foreign profits back to the United States at a puny tax rate of 5.25 percent, compared with the normal corporate rate of 35 percent. Johnson & Johnson intends to repatriate $11 billion. And that is just the beginning of what is shaping up to be an unprecedented government giveaway.
The drug giant Schering-Plough has announced a coming $9.4 billion repatriation, and Eli Lilly has announced one for $8 billion. Many other cash-rich companies, especially in pharmaceuticals and technology, are expected to follow suit. Pfizer is considering whether to repatriate $29 billion in untaxed foreign profits; Hewlett-Packard has $14.5 billion eligible for repatriation; Intel has $6 billion. By the end of 2005, an estimated $100 billion to $500 billion will have found its way home. Over the long run, Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation projects that the holiday will allow companies to avoid $3.3 billion in taxes, an estimate that many tax experts think is low.
The nation's corporate tax rules - combined with spotty enforcement by an underfunded and outmuscled Internal Revenue Service - provide strong incentives for American companies to shift their profits from the United States to low-tax havens, such as Ireland and Luxembourg. Once there, the profits are allowed to grow untaxed by the United States until they are repatriated. That tax deferral is a hugely munificent gesture - as if the country's biggest businesses had been granted their own special I.R.A.'s.
But it wasn't enough for many companies that have piled up excess cash abroad. The Homeland Investment Coalition, a roster of dozens of America's largest corporations, lobbied vigorously - and successfully - for a tax holiday before deigning to repatriate their overseas profits.
Congress's ostensible purpose for allowing the holiday is to unleash a flood of money for job creation, hence the name of the law that includes the holiday - the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. But few of the approved uses for the repatriated funds - such as debt redemption, advertising and a catchall category of "financial stabilization" - will lead directly, if at all, to more jobs. One approved use - the ability to spend the money to buy other companies - would be more likely to create layoffs, as corporate acquisitions usually do.
Companies can also use the money to help pay legal liabilities, which could prove to be a big boon for companies like the drug maker Merck, which is sitting on some $15 billion in untaxed foreign profits and faces an estimated $18 billion in potential claims arising from the Vioxx debacle. Multinationals cannot use the repatriated profits to pay dividends to shareholders, buy back their own stock or pay executives. But because companies have a lot of flexibility in financing their activities, they will generally be able to use the money as they see fit while still meeting the letter of the law.
So the tax holiday blesses rather than curbs tax avoidance and is structured to encourage little if any new domestic economic activity. It establishes a horrible precedent by encouraging companies to leave profits abroad in anticipation of future holidays. It makes fools of companies that have routinely repatriated foreign profits at the full corporate tax rate. And it disadvantages American companies that have no foreign presence and thus no opportunity to reap profits at a discounted tax rate.
All it will really do is what the drafters probably intended all along - further erode the nation's corporate tax base and impugn the system's integrity, in that way building a case for eliminating corporate taxes altogether. That is a lousy way to make policy. Reforms to the corporate tax system must be debated on their merits, not under cover of some phony label like "job creation."
Senator Clinton's Values Lesson
January 30, 2005
NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Senator Clinton's Values Lesson
People in the Democratic Party who have been focused on social issues like abortion and gay rights were devastated by the results of the November election, and they have been wondering how to pursue their concerns in the inhospitable environment of the new Bush administration. Last week, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped define a promising path.
Speaking on Monday to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters in Albany, Mrs. Clinton did two important things. First, at a moment when women's reproductive freedom is under severe assault, she firmly restated her support for Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. What made Mrs. Clinton's speech noteworthy, however, was her second, complementary tack. Without retreating on principle, she deftly shifted the focus of the abortion discussion to where there is the broadest agreement, and where President Bush's policy failure is most apparent - namely, abortion prevention. Echoing her husband's call to make abortion "safe, legal and rare," the senator said that abortion "represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women," and that "the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place."
This is sensitive political terrain, and Mrs. Clinton surprised, even offended some in her audience by voicing respect for those who oppose legalized abortion based on sincere religious or moral beliefs. Her critics argued that while the sentiment sounded fine, the reality is that most organized abortion opponents also oppose greater access to birth control, including backup emergency contraception. Even if that is true, it misses the point. The target of Mrs. Clinton's argument is not anti-abortion activists, but the broader public. Without giving ground on basic principles, she was appropriating the values issue for Democrats who support abortion rights - challenging "people of good faith" on both sides of the debate to find "common ground" in pursuing the shared goal of reducing the number of abortions.
The anti-abortion movement began gaining political traction when it focused on fairly narrow issues that most Americans find troubling - like parental notification and so-called partial-birth abortion. Meanwhile, it shifted attention away from President Bush's opposition to things that Americans almost universally favor and which are most critical for women trying to control their reproductive destiny, like ready access to birth control and comprehensive family planning. Mrs. Clinton wisely seeks to turn the argument around.
On the same day Mrs. Clinton spoke, the new Democratic minority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, introduced the Prevention First Act, a modestly revised version of a bill introduced in the last session, which sets forth a detailed agenda for addressing the problem of unintended pregnancies. It calls for medically accurate sex education, including but not limited to abstinence counseling; expanded access to family planning services for low-income women; easing the availability of morning-after emergency contraception for all women, including victims of sexual assault; and putting an end to the discriminatory practice of health care plans of covering prescription drugs like Viagra, but not prescription contraceptives for women.
These are practical steps for cutting the nation's abortion rate. Perversely, they are also steps President Bush refuses to take. Thanks to Mrs. Clinton's frank talk, now everyone should know that.
NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Senator Clinton's Values Lesson
People in the Democratic Party who have been focused on social issues like abortion and gay rights were devastated by the results of the November election, and they have been wondering how to pursue their concerns in the inhospitable environment of the new Bush administration. Last week, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped define a promising path.
Speaking on Monday to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters in Albany, Mrs. Clinton did two important things. First, at a moment when women's reproductive freedom is under severe assault, she firmly restated her support for Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. What made Mrs. Clinton's speech noteworthy, however, was her second, complementary tack. Without retreating on principle, she deftly shifted the focus of the abortion discussion to where there is the broadest agreement, and where President Bush's policy failure is most apparent - namely, abortion prevention. Echoing her husband's call to make abortion "safe, legal and rare," the senator said that abortion "represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women," and that "the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place."
This is sensitive political terrain, and Mrs. Clinton surprised, even offended some in her audience by voicing respect for those who oppose legalized abortion based on sincere religious or moral beliefs. Her critics argued that while the sentiment sounded fine, the reality is that most organized abortion opponents also oppose greater access to birth control, including backup emergency contraception. Even if that is true, it misses the point. The target of Mrs. Clinton's argument is not anti-abortion activists, but the broader public. Without giving ground on basic principles, she was appropriating the values issue for Democrats who support abortion rights - challenging "people of good faith" on both sides of the debate to find "common ground" in pursuing the shared goal of reducing the number of abortions.
The anti-abortion movement began gaining political traction when it focused on fairly narrow issues that most Americans find troubling - like parental notification and so-called partial-birth abortion. Meanwhile, it shifted attention away from President Bush's opposition to things that Americans almost universally favor and which are most critical for women trying to control their reproductive destiny, like ready access to birth control and comprehensive family planning. Mrs. Clinton wisely seeks to turn the argument around.
On the same day Mrs. Clinton spoke, the new Democratic minority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, introduced the Prevention First Act, a modestly revised version of a bill introduced in the last session, which sets forth a detailed agenda for addressing the problem of unintended pregnancies. It calls for medically accurate sex education, including but not limited to abstinence counseling; expanded access to family planning services for low-income women; easing the availability of morning-after emergency contraception for all women, including victims of sexual assault; and putting an end to the discriminatory practice of health care plans of covering prescription drugs like Viagra, but not prescription contraceptives for women.
These are practical steps for cutting the nation's abortion rate. Perversely, they are also steps President Bush refuses to take. Thanks to Mrs. Clinton's frank talk, now everyone should know that.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Bush & GOP Care Nothing For The National Guard
California pays out more in federal taxes than states like Mississippi and Misouri yet those two states like most other Red States takes in a huge amount MORE of federal money than they pay out. Of course California doesn't receive federal funds back into the state to even come close to what they put into the system. Which is a shame as California, a Blue State, has also paid the HIGHEST bloody price for Bush's Iraq War with 25% of the soldiers dying there.
The Bush administration will do ANYTHING rather than actually tell the truth and will sell out anyone to push its far-right agenda. Here's how they are screwing our National Guard.
Who's Dying in Our War?
Times Staff Writer
January 30, 2005
CAMP ANACONDA — Some months after the Americans took over the sprawling Balad Air Base, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, someone posted an enigmatic sign on the main gate asking: "Is Today the Day?" Soldiers at the base, which the U.S. military renamed Logistics Support Area Anaconda, or Camp Anaconda, take turns speculating about what the sign means. In the tense months leading up to today's planned national elections in Iraq, the population at the base has swollen to more than 22,000 soldiers and civilian contractors. Some Camp Anaconda residents—installed in relative comfort inside the 15-square-mile compound that now features four dining halls, two swimming pools, a first-run movie theater and a Burger King franchise—have concluded that the sign is a military safety message: "Stay Alert!"
For the 90 California National Guard soldiers who make up Alpha Company, a Petaluma-based arm of the 579th Engineer Battalion of Santa Rosa, and regularly venture outside the base to patrol the treacherous canal-veined perimeter, the sign carries a more ominous meaning. The soldiers are part of one of the most star-crossed National Guard units in Iraq. Since arriving at Anaconda last March, one out of five in Alpha Company has been killed or wounded. Three of the nine California National Guardsmen killed in Iraq by the end of 2004 were from Alpha Company.
"A lot of the guys hate the sign," says Alpha Company Sgt. Timothy "T.J." McClurg, a 27-year-old welder from Chico sent home to recover after shrapnel from a roadside bomb ripped into his foot on Nov. 11. "They think it means today is the day we get hit, or today is the day we die."
For Patrick Ryan McCaffrey, a 34-year-old father of two from the Bay Area suburb of Tracy, the day was June 22, 2004. McCaffrey, a rising auto-body shop manager in Palo Alto, signed up for the National Guard during the wave of patriotism that swept the country after Sept. 11, 2001. "Can you believe what's happening?" McCaffrey asked Marlene Cather, one of his co-workers at Akins Collision Repair. "We need to do something."
Exactly one month after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, McCaffrey joined a National Guard unit with a mission statement that emphasizes its engineering support role to "provide mobility, counter-mobility and survivability support to a combat arms brigade" as well as "providing manpower and engineering expertise" during stateside crises. In the troubling days after Sept. 11, National Guard units across the land reported hundreds of similar enlistments. But like many of the other 50,000-plus National Guard soldiers now serving alongside about 20,000 Army Reserve troops in Iraq, McCaffrey didn't foresee that he would one day find himself in deadly combat on the other side of the world. McCaffrey's unit had not been in overseas combat since World War II.
In the half century before Iraq, the engineers had been deployed on missions ranging from forest fires to the 1965 Watts riots. Their duties included temporary assignments to search for weapons in state prisons, remove snow from blocked mountain passes and, in May 1993, to bury a gray whale that had washed up on the beach near Eureka. McCaffrey told friends when he enlisted that he expected to be assigned to homeland security duties, such as guarding the Golden Gate Bridge or Shasta Dam.
"Patrick thought by joining the engineers he would be doing something constructive to fight terrorism on the West Coast," recalls his father, Bob McCaffrey.
But as the U.S. campaign in Iraq bogged down in the summer of 2003, the Pentagon turned to its legions of "citizen soldiers," serving mostly weekend duty in crumbling state armories, and ordered them to relieve exhausted regular Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Authorized by a presidential emergency order issued only two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the historic deployment took place with relatively little public notice or fanfare. It wasn't until later, when the Guard and reserve troops began dying and getting injured in Iraq, that presidential candidate John Kerry and others began describing their overseas service as a "backdoor draft." Today more than 40% of the 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq are either National Guardsmen or reserves. By the end of the spring, that percentage is expected to rise to more than 50%.
Despite McCaffrey's expectations as a National Guard engineer, his marching orders were quite different. Once the U.S. moved into Iraq, he was converted into an infantryman and sent into combat, one of more than 5,000 California National Guard soldiers mustered for service in the war. As the Pentagon scrambled to adjust to long-term military occupation, similarly abrupt job reclassifications became widespread. After years of developing caste pride as engineers, their transformation into foot soldiers was unsettling.
"It's like telling the Lakers that they are not going to play basketball but are now going to be Ping-Pong champs," says retired Army Col. David H. Hackworth, a critic of the current National Guard policy.
It also meant that some of the soldiers got less training than the regular Army infantry they were replacing. Army infantrymen receive 14 weeks of training in their specialty. A National Guard engineer normally undergoes eight weeks of basic infantry training and six weeks in engineering school, where they learn how to plant mines, detonate explosives and lay concertina wire, among other skills.
McCaffrey's company was called to active duty on Jan. 17, 2004, after a month of refresher training in Ft. Lewis, Wash., followed by another month of more Iraq-specific maneuvers at Ft. Irwin, Calif. Problems occurred at both training camps. The Ft. Lewis routine was disrupted by the arrest of a Washington National Guardsman, a member of the same 81st Brigade as the Californians, for attempting to sell military secrets to undercover federal agents posing as members of Al Qaeda. The Ft. Irwin training came to an unpleasant conclusion after someone stole the 9-millimeter handguns of a California battalion commander and his first sergeant, setting off a security crisis.
After the inauspicious start, the 579th Alpha Company, under the command of Capt. William C. Turner, a computer chip designer from Mountain View, arrived in Iraq in early April 2004. McCaffrey was initially gung-ho about the assignment. He regularly wrote to his family about the children he met in the villages and often asked for hard candy or soccer balls to distribute to the Iraqi kids. But after only a month of daily patrols along the dangerous periphery of the base, McCaffrey confided to family and friends that he had become disillusioned with the American war effort, particularly after the revelations of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib. In a May 16 e-mail to his mother, Nadia McCaffrey, he described how the abuse scandal had inflamed anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.
McCaffrey also was troubled by the behavior of the Iraqi national guard units, then called the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, that he and his fellow soldiers had been assigned to train. The line between friend and foe had become increasingly blurred in a country where brown-and-tan camouflage Iraqi uniforms are for sale in many markets. On April 20, McCaffrey and other members of the 2nd platoon, 2nd squad—nicknamed "Double-Deuce"—were called out in the middle of the night to find the source of a rocket that had hit inside the base. McCaffrey's unit stopped two Iraqis on a motorcycle, one of whom McCaffrey recognized as a man he had been training earlier in the day at Camp Anaconda.
The two Iraqis were "swiped" for explosives and tested positive for TNT and another explosive known as RDX. Suspected of participating in the rocket attack, both were arrested as insurgents. When McCaffrey called home the day after the arrests, he told his father how distressed he was about the incident.
"That episode cut Patrick and all the soldiers right to the quick," says his father, a San Jose building contractor. "It made them all realize that things were not going the way they were supposed to be going. It also made him mad as hell because now they not only had to look in front of them, but they had to look behind as well."
The incident now seems a precursor of what happened later at the military base in Mosul. On Dec. 21, a suicide bomber wearing an Iraqi national guard uniform blew himself up in a crowded mess tent, killing 22 people, including 14 U.S. soldiers. Four of the dead were National Guardsmen from Maine and Virginia. For McCaffrey, the arrest of the two Iraqis also foreshadowed a devastating reality that would come two months later, on a narrow asphalt road surrounded by cotton fields outside Camp Anaconda.
THE GUARD GOES TO WAR
While the use of guard units in combat theaters has a long history in the U.S., they were almost always asked to play a supporting role. In addition, much of its combat service history faded from memory during the last 50 years as the National Guard was rarely called upon to fight. In the end, only 7,000 National Guard troops—only a handful from California—served among the 2.6 million military men and women who went to Vietnam. The last time large numbers of guardsmen were sent into long-term combat was during the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, when, for example, the California National Guard's 40th Infantry Division, based in Los Alamitos, participated in many bloody battles, including those at Chorwon, Heartbreak Ridge and Sandbag Castle. Three of its soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
But President Lyndon B. Johnson rejected advice to send the reserve components to Vietnam, and his reasons were political. The president felt that calling up the reserves would endanger his ambitious Great Society domestic agenda. To many military leaders, Johnson's decision not to call up the reserves was the greatest mistake of that war. The exclusion demoralized National Guard units and left the Guard with a reputation as an alternative for those hoping to avoid dangerous duty. As the 2004 presidential election demonstrated, resentment still runs deep over the Guard-as-safe-haven issue.
After Vietnam, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. vowed that the reserves would play an active role in all future conflicts. Since then, virtually all American military action has included the National Guard.
Sending the Guard into extended combat is a different story. Currently, National Guard soldiers deployed in Iraq account for nearly one-third of the U.S. ground forces. By the end of 2004, 154 National Guard soldiers had been killed and more than 1,000 wounded in the conflict. The first days of 2005 were even bloodier. Ten National Guardsmen were killed during the first week of this year.
Johnson, the visceral Texas politician, knew by intuition what Bush administration officials are learning today: In an unpopular war, National Guard troops and reserve soldiers represent a potential political land mine. They tend to be older, and are more likely married with children. They're also much more entrenched in their civilian communities than the regular military. In Iraq, for example, the average age of U.S. Marines killed in action is 21; the average age of guardsmen lost in combat is 10 years older.
Richard H. Kohn, history professor and chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, argues that the Iraq deployment violates the "citizen soldier" concept at the heart of the National Guard. "By transforming them into a very different armed force, you are robbing these people of a substantial part of their civilian lives, warping their careers and changing the kinds of people who can afford to be part-time soldiers," Kohn says. He adds that because many guardsmen are civilian police, fire and emergency medical workers, the deployment "steals people from very important civilian functions" while depriving state governors of crucial emergency forces.
As the military occupation of Iraq approaches its third year, morale and recruitment issues have begun to surface. A 2004 battlefield survey conducted in Iraq for the Secretary of the Army showed that morale among the National Guard soldiers was "markedly lower" than that of active-duty soldiers. At the heart of the complaints, the survey results said, is the feeling among guardsmen that they are "treated like second-class citizens in the Army." More recently in New Mexico, where the California National Guard's 184th Infantry Regiment was preparing to be deployed to Iraq, soldiers complained to a Los Angeles Times reporter about poor training and inadequate equipment. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one said.
In a celebrated incident on Dec. 8 in Kuwait, Tennessee National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson surprised Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld during an impromptu press conference, asking why Guard units were being sent into Iraq with inadequate armor on their vehicles. Cheered by his fellow soldiers, Wilson claimed that his unit was forced to rummage through local landfills for "rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass . . . to put on our vehicles to take into combat."
"I call it the 'question heard 'round the world,' " says military historian Col. Mike Doubler, a Tennessee native who served 14 years in the Army and nine years in the Guard. "There is a growing perception—among guardsmen and reservists—that there are two armies in Iraq."
It's likely no coincidence that on Dec. 17, National Guard Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum announced that, because of declining recruitment during the Iraq war, the service now will offer inducements to make reenlistment more attractive. Among the incentives: tripling retention bonuses from $5,000 to $15,000. Blum also announced that the number of Guard recruiters would be increased nationally from 2,700 to 4,100.
Experts predict that the first real test of the war's impact on the National Guard will come this spring, when soldiers returning from Iraq have their first opportunity to quit. "The fact is," says Kohn, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill professor, "we have worn these people out [and] taken advantage of their patriotism and service. Many of them are going to quit as soon as they get a chance."
A SUNNYVALE CHILDHOOD
At Camp Anaconda, Patrick McCaffrey battled his own morale problems as well as those of his overworked unit. He had excellent people skills developed during a civilian career of dealing with emotional car owners. Because of his talent for calming customers, McCaffrey's desk was the closest to the front door at Akins Collision.
McCaffrey practiced a kind of holistic collision repair, caring for the client as well as the car. "People would come in a panic mood after an accident, hurting and wanting their cars fixed," says colleague Marline Cather. "Patrick would say, 'You know, we can fix your car quickly, but it takes longer to fix people.' "
McCaffrey grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula in Sunnyvale in Santa Clara County. For most of his childhood it was a relatively sleepy Bay Area suburb and agricultural processing center. His parents, Bob and Nadia, met in Paris in 1966. Bob was a U.S. Army cryptographer and Nadia, a French citizen, was a cafe waitress. The couple married at Nadia's family farm in Auvergne in 1968 and moved to California, where Bob landed a construction job.
The young McCaffreys rented a two-bedroom wood-frame duplex in a working-class neighborhood known to longtime residents as "the lowlands." Compared to the mansions in the coastal hills, the homes there are modest. After his son was born on May 26, 1970, Bob McCaffrey built him a sandbox and, a few years later, installed an aboveground pool in the backyard. "It was a paradise for kids," recalls Nadia McCaffrey. "Our house was the center of the neighborhood."
But McCaffrey's happy childhood took a turn after Bob and Nadia separated when their son was 11. Nadia took a job as a receptionist at a resort hotel on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia. Patrick spent the school years with his father in Sunnyvale and summers with his mother on the island. The separation was hard on the boy. He developed anorexia during his early teens and became so thin that his parents feared he might die. Nadia recalls him arriving one summer at the Moorea airport.
"When I saw him come off the plane I just burst into tears," she says. "He was 15 years old and he weighed less than 80 pounds."
Alarmed, Nadia returned to Sunnyvale. Patrick began gaining weight, and later enrolled in a YMCA weight-lifting program. By his senior year at Homestead High School, McCaffrey was big and strong enough to play cornerback on the football team. According to parents and friends, though, he spent the rest of his life trying to overcome a self-image as the proverbial weakling at the beach, and some say that may have played a role in his decision to join the National Guard.
McCaffrey's other passions in high school were cars and the Washington Redskins. He developed his Redskins devotion because he admired powerful Washington running back John Riggins, who starred for the team in the 1970s and '80s. He was hooked after watching Riggins break free for a 43-yard winning touchdown over the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII. As an adult, McCaffrey turned the den in his Tracy home into a Redskins shrine. In the will he prepared before leaving for Iraq, McCaffrey asked to be buried with a Redskins pennant and beneath a gravestone inscribed "Redskins Forever."
High school was followed by a brief stint at a local junior college and an entry-level job as a detailer at Akins Collision Repair, where he impressed the owners with his management potential. He continued his regular workouts at Gold's Gym until his body grew solid and powerfully packed on his 5-foot-11-inch frame. An early marriage ended in divorce, but it produced his first child, Patrick Jr., now 10, who lives with his mother in Mountain View.
In 1999, on a trip with friends in Rosarito, Baja California, McCaffrey met Sylvia Aguilar, a Mexican citizen who grew up and attended high school in Oceanside. McCaffrey was captivated after spending a romantic evening on the beach holding hands and talking. Aguilar liked that McCaffrey talked so lovingly and openly about his son, and the pain he felt when he was separated from him. Later, Aguilar, now 27, was charmed when McCaffrey drove from Palo Alto to Oceanside to meet her family.
Since his career was thriving, he bought a ranch-style home in Tracy, a San Joaquin Valley exurb that caters to first-time homeowners. The couple married in 2000, and daughter Janessa, now 3, was born two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. Many were puzzled that McCaffrey risked it all by joining the National Guard.
At work, Akins owner Sharon Rupp was one of the most surprised. "We had plans to expand our business and [McCaffrey] was key," Rupp says. She planned to name him general manager of his own shop. McCaffrey did not consult his father, with whom he discussed most important things in his life. "If he had asked me I would have advised him against it," Bob McCaffrey says. Nadia McCaffrey, who now operates a nonprofit grief counseling program and has become a leader in the Northern California antiwar movement, has been a lifelong pacifist and opposed her son's enlistment from the beginning. She says, though, that she was powerless to stop it. "He was like a lion in a cage," she recalls of her son's reaction to watching the terrorist attacks on television. "He just wanted to do something."
Longtime friend Romulo Rimando says McCaffrey "told me that he wanted to set an example for his son." When McCaffrey left for Iraq, he put pictures of Sylvia, Patrick Jr. and Janessa in a pendant and wore it constantly around his neck.
The management skills McCaffrey developed in the auto-body shop soon proved useful in Iraq. At Ft. Irwin and later in Iraq, McCaffrey quickly emerged as a leader, receiving a battlefield promotion to corporal only a few days after arriving at Camp Anaconda and a recommendation for promotion to sergeant not long after. When other soldiers were feeling down, McCaffrey buoyed them.
"He had this way of coming up and rubbing my shoulders when I would get stressed out," says Spc. Chris Murphy, a 22-year-old Lake County rock musician who quickly bonded with the older McCaffrey during training at Ft. Irwin. "He'd say, 'Hey man, relax. Calm down.' " McCaffrey was one of the strongest men in Alpha Company and always one of the first to volunteer for extra duties. If soldiers had problems with an officer, McCaffrey often intervened on their behalf.
After the incident in April, when McCaffrey learned that his Iraqi trainee was among those suspected of attacking the base, he went to his superiors. "Patrick told them they needed to change the way they operated with these people because they couldn't be trusted," Bob McCaffrey recalls from one of his frequent phone conversations with his son. "But nothing happened. He was very disillusioned with the command structure."
Then there was the matter of the heavy workload. The long missions outside the razor wire in the mounting heat of summer took a toll. McCaffrey, trained as a combat lifesaver, felt that the officers were working the men too hard. The soldiers complained that the 579th, along with the two other California and Washington State National Guard companies assigned to patrol the base perimeter, represented less than 3% of the soldiers at Camp Anaconda but bore the brunt of the danger while other regular military units seemed to enjoy relative safety inside the base.
McCaffrey called his wife on June 21, the eve of an early-morning mission to search for weapons outside the base. "Usually when he called he would reassure me," Sylvia says. "But this time he said, 'Babe, I'm just so tired. They don't let us sleep at night. I just wanted to call and say I love you.' "
DOUBLE-DEUCE DOWN
By June 2004, nerves were on edge at Camp Anaconda. Temperatures during the day approached 125 degrees. Inside the circus-style tents where the soldiers slept, the thermometer seldom fell below 105 degrees. Electricity to run the few air conditioners was erratic. Some took turns sleeping in the generator-powered, air-conditioned computer rooms. On June 16, insurgents launched a heavy mortar attack against the base that hit the post exchange, killing three soldiers and wounding 25 others. With typical dark humor, the soldiers began calling the base "Mortaritaville." No one had had a day off in more than two weeks.
McCaffrey's squad received orders late on June 21 to go on patrol before dawn the next morning. To the weary troops, the squad's nickname of "Double-Deuce" was starting to sound like a bad poker hand. The commander woke them at 3 a.m. By 5, the men were "outside the wire," trudging through the high brush and farmers' crops, using metal detectors to hunt for weapons caches and other signs of insurgent activities.
The squad regrouped at 10:30, and by then several were showing signs of heat exhaustion. One of the first to fall out was Sgt. Dennis Sarla. McCaffrey administered a saline IV to the sergeant, who then was transported back to base. McCaffrey, wearing a bandana to keep the sweat from dripping into his eyes, took over carrying Sarla's heavy radio, an older model that weighed nearly 75 pounds. No one was surprised that he took the radio in addition to his M-16, grenades and body armor. "McCaffrey always took care of that little bit of slack for other people," says best pal T.J. McClurg. He wanted to carry his team like Riggins had carried the Redskins.
When another soldier fell out, he was replaced by Spc. Bruce Himelright, a 27-year-old native Texan who had been manning the .50-caliber machine gun on one of the transport vehicles parked a mile or so away. After a 20-minute break, the officer leading the patrol, 2nd Lt. Andre Tyson, huddled with the troops. Through a translator, several members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps complained that the patrol was wasting its time looking for weapons in the farmlands. Tyson, a 34-year-old Costco manager from Riverside who was fresh out of officer candidate school when sent to Iraq, decided to split the patrol into two squads and follow a roughly parallel course through the brush and overgrown fields.
McCaffrey, who had the only radio, went with the lieutenant. He was joined by Himelright, as well as the Iraqi translator and three Iraqi trainees. McClurg, who was manning one of the Humvees on higher ground closer to the base, stayed in touch with McCaffrey over the radio. McClurg's radio handle was "2-2 Bravo." McCaffrey's was "2-2 Dismount." At one point McCaffrey called to report that his group was near an abandoned Iraqi military police checkpoint near Bakr Village. Before the war, the village was off-base housing for Iraqi air force officers. Now the 400 or so middle-class houses were mostly occupied by squatters.
What happened next is still under investigation by the Department of Army, Criminal Investigation Division. "To protect the integrity of the investigation we won't be able to provide you any details at this time," says Criminal Investigation spokesman Chris Grey, a Pentagon civilian. However, interviews in Iraq and in the U.S. with several Alpha Company soldiers, including Capt. Turner, the company commander and Mountain View computer chip designer, produced the following reconstruction of events:
Walking on the narrow asphalt road near Bakr Village, Tyson and McCaffrey stopped to confer and use the radio. On the village side of the road was a crumbling mud wall, about 5 feet tall. On the other side was a deep, dry irrigation canal. Himelright, trailing behind, knelt on the road with his rifle in ready position facing the village. As he turned slightly to see what Tyson and McCaffrey were doing, he noticed that two of the Iraqi trainees, looking nervous, had detached themselves 10 yards away from the group, leaving the Americans and the Iraqi translator alone on the road.
Himelright sensed something was wrong, but before he could react he heard a burst of gunfire and felt himself hit in the left hip. According to Capt. Turner, at least one of the Iraqi trainees opened fire on the three Americans from close range. The bullets struck Tyson several times in the neck and head and hit McCaffrey in the legs and unprotected areas of his upper body.
Wounded, Himelright ended up on his back at the bottom of the dry canal. Looking up into the bright sun, he saw the unidentifiable silhouette of a man standing on the rim of the road. The man leveled his gun at Himelright and fired another burst at the prostrate American. Three AK-47 armor-piercing bullets lodged in Himelright's Kevlar vest. Another round hit his ammunition magazine. Himelright was knocked unconscious by the bullets, but not wounded again. When he revived, adrenaline pumping, he was able to climb the canal wall. He saw the bodies of Tyson and McCaffrey. The radio was broken, so Himelright fired several rounds from his M-16 into the air to call for help.
"I started worrying and calling out on the radio: '2-2 Dismount this is 2-2 Bravo. 2-2 Dismount this is 2-2 Bravo,' but there was no answer," says McClurg, who was sitting atop his Humvee a half-mile away. He became more concerned when he saw military vehicles, including a medic Humvee, headed toward the Bakr Village road. Someone on the radio blurted out that they had found one dead and two wounded. At the time, they apparently thought that one of the downed men was still alive. McClurg listened with dread for the battle roster numbers of the fallen soldiers. "Right off the bat I heard McCaffrey's number," he recalls.
The three Iraqi soldiers who were with the Americans fled the scene. Two of them eventually wandered back into the American base, but the third, reportedly a skilled Russian-trained sniper who served in the Iraqi army, has not been found despite an ongoing search by American forces. It's still not known if other attackers participated in the ambush, perhaps from behind the wall where Tyson and McCaffrey stopped. One villager claims to have seen a blue farm van parked nearby.
So far, military authorities have denied requests for an official report on the incident, including the disposition of the two Iraqi trainees on the patrol who returned to Camp Anaconda. Citing the ongoing investigation, the military also has declined a request from McCaffrey's father and wife for a formal autopsy report.
Chris Murphy, one of McCaffrey's best friends in Alpha Company, wrote an account of the ambush that was picked up by several soldier Internet blogs. Murphy also was on the patrol that day, but went with the other group after Tyson split up the unit. In his account, he recalls coming upon McCaffrey's lifeless body sprawled on the asphalt road. In the distance, near the village, curious Iraqi civilians had begun to gather.
"We were supposed to meet back up where the palm trees were," Murphy says. "I remember McCaffrey saying, 'This is [crazy], man. They're not going to stop pushing us until someone gets hurt or killed. Then maybe they'll let up.' That was the last thing I remember him saying."
McCaffrey is buried in Oceanside, his wife's family home, in a cemetery that looks out over the Pacific Ocean. On his headstone, as he requested, are the words "Redskins Forever."
The killed and wounded of Alpha Company
Killed in Action
Sgt. Patrick McCaffrey, 34, Tracy (promoted posthumously)
Sgt. First Class Michael Ottolini, 45, Petaluma
2nd Lt. Andre Tyson, 33, Riverside
Wounded in Action
Sgt. Michael Gilmore, 36, Livermore
Spc. Charles Hayes, 24, San Jacinto
Staff Sgt. Adam Henson, 36, El Centro
Bruce Himelright, 27, Chico
Sgt. Paul Hoffman, 44, Fair Oaks
Sgt. Timothy "T.J." McClurg, 27, Chico
Spc. Anthony Melendez, 29, San Francisco
Staff Sgt. Daniel Nevins, 32, Windsor
Sgt. Frank Papworth, 44, Sonoma
Spc. Harold Parker, 19, Long Beach
Spc. Albert Poindexter, 27, Ukiah
Spc. Jason Rivera, 19, Perris
Spc. Robert Sales, 42, Santa Rosa
Sgt. First Class Norman Valdez, 42, Upper Lake
2nd Lt. Christopher Coles, 26, Maple Valley, Wash.
1st Lt. Matthew Doxey, 28, Seattle, Wash.
Spc. James Huff, 19, Lakewood, Wash.
Rone Tempest is a Times staff writer and longtime foreign correspondent. He was helped on this story by UC Berkeley graduate journalism students Jeff Nachtigal, Melissa Nix and Adam Raney, reporting as part of The Times' ongoing series on the California National Guard, "The Guard Goes to War." Previous stories in the series and other materials can be viewed at http://www.latimes.com/guardgoes . Staff writers Monte Morin, reporting from Iraq, and Scott Gold, reporting from New Mexico, also contributed to this story.
The Bush administration will do ANYTHING rather than actually tell the truth and will sell out anyone to push its far-right agenda. Here's how they are screwing our National Guard.
Who's Dying in Our War?
L.A. TIMES COVER STORY
The answer is Army Reservists and National Guardsmen such as Californian Patrick McCaffrey.
By Rone TempestTimes Staff Writer
January 30, 2005
CAMP ANACONDA — Some months after the Americans took over the sprawling Balad Air Base, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, someone posted an enigmatic sign on the main gate asking: "Is Today the Day?" Soldiers at the base, which the U.S. military renamed Logistics Support Area Anaconda, or Camp Anaconda, take turns speculating about what the sign means. In the tense months leading up to today's planned national elections in Iraq, the population at the base has swollen to more than 22,000 soldiers and civilian contractors. Some Camp Anaconda residents—installed in relative comfort inside the 15-square-mile compound that now features four dining halls, two swimming pools, a first-run movie theater and a Burger King franchise—have concluded that the sign is a military safety message: "Stay Alert!"
For the 90 California National Guard soldiers who make up Alpha Company, a Petaluma-based arm of the 579th Engineer Battalion of Santa Rosa, and regularly venture outside the base to patrol the treacherous canal-veined perimeter, the sign carries a more ominous meaning. The soldiers are part of one of the most star-crossed National Guard units in Iraq. Since arriving at Anaconda last March, one out of five in Alpha Company has been killed or wounded. Three of the nine California National Guardsmen killed in Iraq by the end of 2004 were from Alpha Company.
"A lot of the guys hate the sign," says Alpha Company Sgt. Timothy "T.J." McClurg, a 27-year-old welder from Chico sent home to recover after shrapnel from a roadside bomb ripped into his foot on Nov. 11. "They think it means today is the day we get hit, or today is the day we die."
For Patrick Ryan McCaffrey, a 34-year-old father of two from the Bay Area suburb of Tracy, the day was June 22, 2004. McCaffrey, a rising auto-body shop manager in Palo Alto, signed up for the National Guard during the wave of patriotism that swept the country after Sept. 11, 2001. "Can you believe what's happening?" McCaffrey asked Marlene Cather, one of his co-workers at Akins Collision Repair. "We need to do something."
Exactly one month after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, McCaffrey joined a National Guard unit with a mission statement that emphasizes its engineering support role to "provide mobility, counter-mobility and survivability support to a combat arms brigade" as well as "providing manpower and engineering expertise" during stateside crises. In the troubling days after Sept. 11, National Guard units across the land reported hundreds of similar enlistments. But like many of the other 50,000-plus National Guard soldiers now serving alongside about 20,000 Army Reserve troops in Iraq, McCaffrey didn't foresee that he would one day find himself in deadly combat on the other side of the world. McCaffrey's unit had not been in overseas combat since World War II.
In the half century before Iraq, the engineers had been deployed on missions ranging from forest fires to the 1965 Watts riots. Their duties included temporary assignments to search for weapons in state prisons, remove snow from blocked mountain passes and, in May 1993, to bury a gray whale that had washed up on the beach near Eureka. McCaffrey told friends when he enlisted that he expected to be assigned to homeland security duties, such as guarding the Golden Gate Bridge or Shasta Dam.
"Patrick thought by joining the engineers he would be doing something constructive to fight terrorism on the West Coast," recalls his father, Bob McCaffrey.
But as the U.S. campaign in Iraq bogged down in the summer of 2003, the Pentagon turned to its legions of "citizen soldiers," serving mostly weekend duty in crumbling state armories, and ordered them to relieve exhausted regular Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Authorized by a presidential emergency order issued only two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the historic deployment took place with relatively little public notice or fanfare. It wasn't until later, when the Guard and reserve troops began dying and getting injured in Iraq, that presidential candidate John Kerry and others began describing their overseas service as a "backdoor draft." Today more than 40% of the 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq are either National Guardsmen or reserves. By the end of the spring, that percentage is expected to rise to more than 50%.
Despite McCaffrey's expectations as a National Guard engineer, his marching orders were quite different. Once the U.S. moved into Iraq, he was converted into an infantryman and sent into combat, one of more than 5,000 California National Guard soldiers mustered for service in the war. As the Pentagon scrambled to adjust to long-term military occupation, similarly abrupt job reclassifications became widespread. After years of developing caste pride as engineers, their transformation into foot soldiers was unsettling.
"It's like telling the Lakers that they are not going to play basketball but are now going to be Ping-Pong champs," says retired Army Col. David H. Hackworth, a critic of the current National Guard policy.
It also meant that some of the soldiers got less training than the regular Army infantry they were replacing. Army infantrymen receive 14 weeks of training in their specialty. A National Guard engineer normally undergoes eight weeks of basic infantry training and six weeks in engineering school, where they learn how to plant mines, detonate explosives and lay concertina wire, among other skills.
McCaffrey's company was called to active duty on Jan. 17, 2004, after a month of refresher training in Ft. Lewis, Wash., followed by another month of more Iraq-specific maneuvers at Ft. Irwin, Calif. Problems occurred at both training camps. The Ft. Lewis routine was disrupted by the arrest of a Washington National Guardsman, a member of the same 81st Brigade as the Californians, for attempting to sell military secrets to undercover federal agents posing as members of Al Qaeda. The Ft. Irwin training came to an unpleasant conclusion after someone stole the 9-millimeter handguns of a California battalion commander and his first sergeant, setting off a security crisis.
After the inauspicious start, the 579th Alpha Company, under the command of Capt. William C. Turner, a computer chip designer from Mountain View, arrived in Iraq in early April 2004. McCaffrey was initially gung-ho about the assignment. He regularly wrote to his family about the children he met in the villages and often asked for hard candy or soccer balls to distribute to the Iraqi kids. But after only a month of daily patrols along the dangerous periphery of the base, McCaffrey confided to family and friends that he had become disillusioned with the American war effort, particularly after the revelations of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib. In a May 16 e-mail to his mother, Nadia McCaffrey, he described how the abuse scandal had inflamed anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.
McCaffrey also was troubled by the behavior of the Iraqi national guard units, then called the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, that he and his fellow soldiers had been assigned to train. The line between friend and foe had become increasingly blurred in a country where brown-and-tan camouflage Iraqi uniforms are for sale in many markets. On April 20, McCaffrey and other members of the 2nd platoon, 2nd squad—nicknamed "Double-Deuce"—were called out in the middle of the night to find the source of a rocket that had hit inside the base. McCaffrey's unit stopped two Iraqis on a motorcycle, one of whom McCaffrey recognized as a man he had been training earlier in the day at Camp Anaconda.
The two Iraqis were "swiped" for explosives and tested positive for TNT and another explosive known as RDX. Suspected of participating in the rocket attack, both were arrested as insurgents. When McCaffrey called home the day after the arrests, he told his father how distressed he was about the incident.
"That episode cut Patrick and all the soldiers right to the quick," says his father, a San Jose building contractor. "It made them all realize that things were not going the way they were supposed to be going. It also made him mad as hell because now they not only had to look in front of them, but they had to look behind as well."
The incident now seems a precursor of what happened later at the military base in Mosul. On Dec. 21, a suicide bomber wearing an Iraqi national guard uniform blew himself up in a crowded mess tent, killing 22 people, including 14 U.S. soldiers. Four of the dead were National Guardsmen from Maine and Virginia. For McCaffrey, the arrest of the two Iraqis also foreshadowed a devastating reality that would come two months later, on a narrow asphalt road surrounded by cotton fields outside Camp Anaconda.
THE GUARD GOES TO WAR
While the use of guard units in combat theaters has a long history in the U.S., they were almost always asked to play a supporting role. In addition, much of its combat service history faded from memory during the last 50 years as the National Guard was rarely called upon to fight. In the end, only 7,000 National Guard troops—only a handful from California—served among the 2.6 million military men and women who went to Vietnam. The last time large numbers of guardsmen were sent into long-term combat was during the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, when, for example, the California National Guard's 40th Infantry Division, based in Los Alamitos, participated in many bloody battles, including those at Chorwon, Heartbreak Ridge and Sandbag Castle. Three of its soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
But President Lyndon B. Johnson rejected advice to send the reserve components to Vietnam, and his reasons were political. The president felt that calling up the reserves would endanger his ambitious Great Society domestic agenda. To many military leaders, Johnson's decision not to call up the reserves was the greatest mistake of that war. The exclusion demoralized National Guard units and left the Guard with a reputation as an alternative for those hoping to avoid dangerous duty. As the 2004 presidential election demonstrated, resentment still runs deep over the Guard-as-safe-haven issue.
After Vietnam, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. vowed that the reserves would play an active role in all future conflicts. Since then, virtually all American military action has included the National Guard.
Sending the Guard into extended combat is a different story. Currently, National Guard soldiers deployed in Iraq account for nearly one-third of the U.S. ground forces. By the end of 2004, 154 National Guard soldiers had been killed and more than 1,000 wounded in the conflict. The first days of 2005 were even bloodier. Ten National Guardsmen were killed during the first week of this year.
Johnson, the visceral Texas politician, knew by intuition what Bush administration officials are learning today: In an unpopular war, National Guard troops and reserve soldiers represent a potential political land mine. They tend to be older, and are more likely married with children. They're also much more entrenched in their civilian communities than the regular military. In Iraq, for example, the average age of U.S. Marines killed in action is 21; the average age of guardsmen lost in combat is 10 years older.
Richard H. Kohn, history professor and chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, argues that the Iraq deployment violates the "citizen soldier" concept at the heart of the National Guard. "By transforming them into a very different armed force, you are robbing these people of a substantial part of their civilian lives, warping their careers and changing the kinds of people who can afford to be part-time soldiers," Kohn says. He adds that because many guardsmen are civilian police, fire and emergency medical workers, the deployment "steals people from very important civilian functions" while depriving state governors of crucial emergency forces.
As the military occupation of Iraq approaches its third year, morale and recruitment issues have begun to surface. A 2004 battlefield survey conducted in Iraq for the Secretary of the Army showed that morale among the National Guard soldiers was "markedly lower" than that of active-duty soldiers. At the heart of the complaints, the survey results said, is the feeling among guardsmen that they are "treated like second-class citizens in the Army." More recently in New Mexico, where the California National Guard's 184th Infantry Regiment was preparing to be deployed to Iraq, soldiers complained to a Los Angeles Times reporter about poor training and inadequate equipment. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one said.
In a celebrated incident on Dec. 8 in Kuwait, Tennessee National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson surprised Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld during an impromptu press conference, asking why Guard units were being sent into Iraq with inadequate armor on their vehicles. Cheered by his fellow soldiers, Wilson claimed that his unit was forced to rummage through local landfills for "rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass . . . to put on our vehicles to take into combat."
"I call it the 'question heard 'round the world,' " says military historian Col. Mike Doubler, a Tennessee native who served 14 years in the Army and nine years in the Guard. "There is a growing perception—among guardsmen and reservists—that there are two armies in Iraq."
It's likely no coincidence that on Dec. 17, National Guard Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum announced that, because of declining recruitment during the Iraq war, the service now will offer inducements to make reenlistment more attractive. Among the incentives: tripling retention bonuses from $5,000 to $15,000. Blum also announced that the number of Guard recruiters would be increased nationally from 2,700 to 4,100.
Experts predict that the first real test of the war's impact on the National Guard will come this spring, when soldiers returning from Iraq have their first opportunity to quit. "The fact is," says Kohn, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill professor, "we have worn these people out [and] taken advantage of their patriotism and service. Many of them are going to quit as soon as they get a chance."
A SUNNYVALE CHILDHOOD
At Camp Anaconda, Patrick McCaffrey battled his own morale problems as well as those of his overworked unit. He had excellent people skills developed during a civilian career of dealing with emotional car owners. Because of his talent for calming customers, McCaffrey's desk was the closest to the front door at Akins Collision.
McCaffrey practiced a kind of holistic collision repair, caring for the client as well as the car. "People would come in a panic mood after an accident, hurting and wanting their cars fixed," says colleague Marline Cather. "Patrick would say, 'You know, we can fix your car quickly, but it takes longer to fix people.' "
McCaffrey grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula in Sunnyvale in Santa Clara County. For most of his childhood it was a relatively sleepy Bay Area suburb and agricultural processing center. His parents, Bob and Nadia, met in Paris in 1966. Bob was a U.S. Army cryptographer and Nadia, a French citizen, was a cafe waitress. The couple married at Nadia's family farm in Auvergne in 1968 and moved to California, where Bob landed a construction job.
The young McCaffreys rented a two-bedroom wood-frame duplex in a working-class neighborhood known to longtime residents as "the lowlands." Compared to the mansions in the coastal hills, the homes there are modest. After his son was born on May 26, 1970, Bob McCaffrey built him a sandbox and, a few years later, installed an aboveground pool in the backyard. "It was a paradise for kids," recalls Nadia McCaffrey. "Our house was the center of the neighborhood."
But McCaffrey's happy childhood took a turn after Bob and Nadia separated when their son was 11. Nadia took a job as a receptionist at a resort hotel on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia. Patrick spent the school years with his father in Sunnyvale and summers with his mother on the island. The separation was hard on the boy. He developed anorexia during his early teens and became so thin that his parents feared he might die. Nadia recalls him arriving one summer at the Moorea airport.
"When I saw him come off the plane I just burst into tears," she says. "He was 15 years old and he weighed less than 80 pounds."
Alarmed, Nadia returned to Sunnyvale. Patrick began gaining weight, and later enrolled in a YMCA weight-lifting program. By his senior year at Homestead High School, McCaffrey was big and strong enough to play cornerback on the football team. According to parents and friends, though, he spent the rest of his life trying to overcome a self-image as the proverbial weakling at the beach, and some say that may have played a role in his decision to join the National Guard.
McCaffrey's other passions in high school were cars and the Washington Redskins. He developed his Redskins devotion because he admired powerful Washington running back John Riggins, who starred for the team in the 1970s and '80s. He was hooked after watching Riggins break free for a 43-yard winning touchdown over the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII. As an adult, McCaffrey turned the den in his Tracy home into a Redskins shrine. In the will he prepared before leaving for Iraq, McCaffrey asked to be buried with a Redskins pennant and beneath a gravestone inscribed "Redskins Forever."
High school was followed by a brief stint at a local junior college and an entry-level job as a detailer at Akins Collision Repair, where he impressed the owners with his management potential. He continued his regular workouts at Gold's Gym until his body grew solid and powerfully packed on his 5-foot-11-inch frame. An early marriage ended in divorce, but it produced his first child, Patrick Jr., now 10, who lives with his mother in Mountain View.
In 1999, on a trip with friends in Rosarito, Baja California, McCaffrey met Sylvia Aguilar, a Mexican citizen who grew up and attended high school in Oceanside. McCaffrey was captivated after spending a romantic evening on the beach holding hands and talking. Aguilar liked that McCaffrey talked so lovingly and openly about his son, and the pain he felt when he was separated from him. Later, Aguilar, now 27, was charmed when McCaffrey drove from Palo Alto to Oceanside to meet her family.
Since his career was thriving, he bought a ranch-style home in Tracy, a San Joaquin Valley exurb that caters to first-time homeowners. The couple married in 2000, and daughter Janessa, now 3, was born two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. Many were puzzled that McCaffrey risked it all by joining the National Guard.
At work, Akins owner Sharon Rupp was one of the most surprised. "We had plans to expand our business and [McCaffrey] was key," Rupp says. She planned to name him general manager of his own shop. McCaffrey did not consult his father, with whom he discussed most important things in his life. "If he had asked me I would have advised him against it," Bob McCaffrey says. Nadia McCaffrey, who now operates a nonprofit grief counseling program and has become a leader in the Northern California antiwar movement, has been a lifelong pacifist and opposed her son's enlistment from the beginning. She says, though, that she was powerless to stop it. "He was like a lion in a cage," she recalls of her son's reaction to watching the terrorist attacks on television. "He just wanted to do something."
Longtime friend Romulo Rimando says McCaffrey "told me that he wanted to set an example for his son." When McCaffrey left for Iraq, he put pictures of Sylvia, Patrick Jr. and Janessa in a pendant and wore it constantly around his neck.
The management skills McCaffrey developed in the auto-body shop soon proved useful in Iraq. At Ft. Irwin and later in Iraq, McCaffrey quickly emerged as a leader, receiving a battlefield promotion to corporal only a few days after arriving at Camp Anaconda and a recommendation for promotion to sergeant not long after. When other soldiers were feeling down, McCaffrey buoyed them.
"He had this way of coming up and rubbing my shoulders when I would get stressed out," says Spc. Chris Murphy, a 22-year-old Lake County rock musician who quickly bonded with the older McCaffrey during training at Ft. Irwin. "He'd say, 'Hey man, relax. Calm down.' " McCaffrey was one of the strongest men in Alpha Company and always one of the first to volunteer for extra duties. If soldiers had problems with an officer, McCaffrey often intervened on their behalf.
After the incident in April, when McCaffrey learned that his Iraqi trainee was among those suspected of attacking the base, he went to his superiors. "Patrick told them they needed to change the way they operated with these people because they couldn't be trusted," Bob McCaffrey recalls from one of his frequent phone conversations with his son. "But nothing happened. He was very disillusioned with the command structure."
Then there was the matter of the heavy workload. The long missions outside the razor wire in the mounting heat of summer took a toll. McCaffrey, trained as a combat lifesaver, felt that the officers were working the men too hard. The soldiers complained that the 579th, along with the two other California and Washington State National Guard companies assigned to patrol the base perimeter, represented less than 3% of the soldiers at Camp Anaconda but bore the brunt of the danger while other regular military units seemed to enjoy relative safety inside the base.
McCaffrey called his wife on June 21, the eve of an early-morning mission to search for weapons outside the base. "Usually when he called he would reassure me," Sylvia says. "But this time he said, 'Babe, I'm just so tired. They don't let us sleep at night. I just wanted to call and say I love you.' "
DOUBLE-DEUCE DOWN
By June 2004, nerves were on edge at Camp Anaconda. Temperatures during the day approached 125 degrees. Inside the circus-style tents where the soldiers slept, the thermometer seldom fell below 105 degrees. Electricity to run the few air conditioners was erratic. Some took turns sleeping in the generator-powered, air-conditioned computer rooms. On June 16, insurgents launched a heavy mortar attack against the base that hit the post exchange, killing three soldiers and wounding 25 others. With typical dark humor, the soldiers began calling the base "Mortaritaville." No one had had a day off in more than two weeks.
McCaffrey's squad received orders late on June 21 to go on patrol before dawn the next morning. To the weary troops, the squad's nickname of "Double-Deuce" was starting to sound like a bad poker hand. The commander woke them at 3 a.m. By 5, the men were "outside the wire," trudging through the high brush and farmers' crops, using metal detectors to hunt for weapons caches and other signs of insurgent activities.
The squad regrouped at 10:30, and by then several were showing signs of heat exhaustion. One of the first to fall out was Sgt. Dennis Sarla. McCaffrey administered a saline IV to the sergeant, who then was transported back to base. McCaffrey, wearing a bandana to keep the sweat from dripping into his eyes, took over carrying Sarla's heavy radio, an older model that weighed nearly 75 pounds. No one was surprised that he took the radio in addition to his M-16, grenades and body armor. "McCaffrey always took care of that little bit of slack for other people," says best pal T.J. McClurg. He wanted to carry his team like Riggins had carried the Redskins.
When another soldier fell out, he was replaced by Spc. Bruce Himelright, a 27-year-old native Texan who had been manning the .50-caliber machine gun on one of the transport vehicles parked a mile or so away. After a 20-minute break, the officer leading the patrol, 2nd Lt. Andre Tyson, huddled with the troops. Through a translator, several members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps complained that the patrol was wasting its time looking for weapons in the farmlands. Tyson, a 34-year-old Costco manager from Riverside who was fresh out of officer candidate school when sent to Iraq, decided to split the patrol into two squads and follow a roughly parallel course through the brush and overgrown fields.
McCaffrey, who had the only radio, went with the lieutenant. He was joined by Himelright, as well as the Iraqi translator and three Iraqi trainees. McClurg, who was manning one of the Humvees on higher ground closer to the base, stayed in touch with McCaffrey over the radio. McClurg's radio handle was "2-2 Bravo." McCaffrey's was "2-2 Dismount." At one point McCaffrey called to report that his group was near an abandoned Iraqi military police checkpoint near Bakr Village. Before the war, the village was off-base housing for Iraqi air force officers. Now the 400 or so middle-class houses were mostly occupied by squatters.
What happened next is still under investigation by the Department of Army, Criminal Investigation Division. "To protect the integrity of the investigation we won't be able to provide you any details at this time," says Criminal Investigation spokesman Chris Grey, a Pentagon civilian. However, interviews in Iraq and in the U.S. with several Alpha Company soldiers, including Capt. Turner, the company commander and Mountain View computer chip designer, produced the following reconstruction of events:
Walking on the narrow asphalt road near Bakr Village, Tyson and McCaffrey stopped to confer and use the radio. On the village side of the road was a crumbling mud wall, about 5 feet tall. On the other side was a deep, dry irrigation canal. Himelright, trailing behind, knelt on the road with his rifle in ready position facing the village. As he turned slightly to see what Tyson and McCaffrey were doing, he noticed that two of the Iraqi trainees, looking nervous, had detached themselves 10 yards away from the group, leaving the Americans and the Iraqi translator alone on the road.
Himelright sensed something was wrong, but before he could react he heard a burst of gunfire and felt himself hit in the left hip. According to Capt. Turner, at least one of the Iraqi trainees opened fire on the three Americans from close range. The bullets struck Tyson several times in the neck and head and hit McCaffrey in the legs and unprotected areas of his upper body.
Wounded, Himelright ended up on his back at the bottom of the dry canal. Looking up into the bright sun, he saw the unidentifiable silhouette of a man standing on the rim of the road. The man leveled his gun at Himelright and fired another burst at the prostrate American. Three AK-47 armor-piercing bullets lodged in Himelright's Kevlar vest. Another round hit his ammunition magazine. Himelright was knocked unconscious by the bullets, but not wounded again. When he revived, adrenaline pumping, he was able to climb the canal wall. He saw the bodies of Tyson and McCaffrey. The radio was broken, so Himelright fired several rounds from his M-16 into the air to call for help.
"I started worrying and calling out on the radio: '2-2 Dismount this is 2-2 Bravo. 2-2 Dismount this is 2-2 Bravo,' but there was no answer," says McClurg, who was sitting atop his Humvee a half-mile away. He became more concerned when he saw military vehicles, including a medic Humvee, headed toward the Bakr Village road. Someone on the radio blurted out that they had found one dead and two wounded. At the time, they apparently thought that one of the downed men was still alive. McClurg listened with dread for the battle roster numbers of the fallen soldiers. "Right off the bat I heard McCaffrey's number," he recalls.
The three Iraqi soldiers who were with the Americans fled the scene. Two of them eventually wandered back into the American base, but the third, reportedly a skilled Russian-trained sniper who served in the Iraqi army, has not been found despite an ongoing search by American forces. It's still not known if other attackers participated in the ambush, perhaps from behind the wall where Tyson and McCaffrey stopped. One villager claims to have seen a blue farm van parked nearby.
So far, military authorities have denied requests for an official report on the incident, including the disposition of the two Iraqi trainees on the patrol who returned to Camp Anaconda. Citing the ongoing investigation, the military also has declined a request from McCaffrey's father and wife for a formal autopsy report.
Chris Murphy, one of McCaffrey's best friends in Alpha Company, wrote an account of the ambush that was picked up by several soldier Internet blogs. Murphy also was on the patrol that day, but went with the other group after Tyson split up the unit. In his account, he recalls coming upon McCaffrey's lifeless body sprawled on the asphalt road. In the distance, near the village, curious Iraqi civilians had begun to gather.
"We were supposed to meet back up where the palm trees were," Murphy says. "I remember McCaffrey saying, 'This is [crazy], man. They're not going to stop pushing us until someone gets hurt or killed. Then maybe they'll let up.' That was the last thing I remember him saying."
McCaffrey is buried in Oceanside, his wife's family home, in a cemetery that looks out over the Pacific Ocean. On his headstone, as he requested, are the words "Redskins Forever."
The killed and wounded of Alpha Company
Killed in Action
Sgt. Patrick McCaffrey, 34, Tracy (promoted posthumously)
Sgt. First Class Michael Ottolini, 45, Petaluma
2nd Lt. Andre Tyson, 33, Riverside
Wounded in Action
Sgt. Michael Gilmore, 36, Livermore
Spc. Charles Hayes, 24, San Jacinto
Staff Sgt. Adam Henson, 36, El Centro
Bruce Himelright, 27, Chico
Sgt. Paul Hoffman, 44, Fair Oaks
Sgt. Timothy "T.J." McClurg, 27, Chico
Spc. Anthony Melendez, 29, San Francisco
Staff Sgt. Daniel Nevins, 32, Windsor
Sgt. Frank Papworth, 44, Sonoma
Spc. Harold Parker, 19, Long Beach
Spc. Albert Poindexter, 27, Ukiah
Spc. Jason Rivera, 19, Perris
Spc. Robert Sales, 42, Santa Rosa
Sgt. First Class Norman Valdez, 42, Upper Lake
2nd Lt. Christopher Coles, 26, Maple Valley, Wash.
1st Lt. Matthew Doxey, 28, Seattle, Wash.
Spc. James Huff, 19, Lakewood, Wash.
Rone Tempest is a Times staff writer and longtime foreign correspondent. He was helped on this story by UC Berkeley graduate journalism students Jeff Nachtigal, Melissa Nix and Adam Raney, reporting as part of The Times' ongoing series on the California National Guard, "The Guard Goes to War." Previous stories in the series and other materials can be viewed at http://www.latimes.com/guardgoes . Staff writers Monte Morin, reporting from Iraq, and Scott Gold, reporting from New Mexico, also contributed to this story.
Bush Can Always Pay A Black Journalist To Lie
January 28, 2005
Little Black Lies
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ocial Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or the Iraq war: the administration keeps on coming up with new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President Bush's claim that we must privatize Social Security to avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So now he's playing the race card.
This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans, Mr. Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that "African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people." In other words, blacks don't live long enough to collect their fair share of benefits.
This isn't a new argument; privatizers have been making it for years. But the claim that blacks get a bad deal from Social Security is false. And Mr. Bush's use of that false argument is doubly shameful, because he's exploiting the tragedy of high black mortality for political gain instead of treating it as a problem we should solve.
Let's start with the facts. Mr. Bush's argument goes back at least seven years, to a report issued by the Heritage Foundation - a report so badly misleading that the deputy chief actuary (now the chief actuary) of the Social Security Administration wrote a memo pointing out "major errors in the methodology." That's actuary-speak for "damned lies."
In fact, the actuary said, "careful research reflecting actual work histories for workers by race indicate that the nonwhite population actually enjoys the same or better expected rates of return from Social Security" as whites.
Here's why. First, Mr. Bush's remarks on African-Americans perpetuate a crude misunderstanding about what life expectancy means. It's true that the current life expectancy for black males at birth is only 68.8 years - but that doesn't mean that a black man who has worked all his life can expect to die after collecting only a few years' worth of Social Security benefits. Blacks' low life expectancy is largely due to high death rates in childhood and young adulthood. African-American men who make it to age 65 can expect to live, and collect benefits, for an additional 14.6 years - not that far short of the 16.6-year figure for white men.
Second, the formula determining Social Security benefits is progressive: it provides more benefits, as a percentage of earnings, to low-income workers than to high-income workers. Since African-Americans are paid much less, on average, than whites, this works to their advantage.
Finally, Social Security isn't just a retirement program; it's also a disability insurance program. And blacks are much more likely than whites to receive disability benefits.
Put it all together, and the deal African-Americans get from Social Security turns out, according to various calculations, to be either about the same as that for whites or somewhat better. Hispanics, by the way, clearly do better than either.
So the claim that Social Security is unfair to blacks is just false. And the fact that privatizers keep making that claim, after their calculations have repeatedly been shown to be wrong, is yet another indicator of the fundamental dishonesty of their sales pitch.
What's really shameful about Mr. Bush's exploitation of the black death rate, however, is what it takes for granted.
The persistent gap in life expectancy between African-Americans and whites is one measure of the deep inequalities that remain in our society - including highly unequal access to good-quality health care. We ought to be trying to diminish that gap, especially given the fact that black infants are two and half times as likely as white babies to die in their first year.
Now nobody can expect instant progress in reducing health inequalities. But the benefits of Social Security privatization, if any, won't materialize for many decades. By using blacks' low life expectancy as an argument for privatization, Mr. Bush is in effect taking it as a given that 40 or 50 years from now, large numbers of African-Americans will still be dying before their time.
Is this an example of what Mr. Bush famously called "the soft bigotry of low expectations?" Maybe not: it isn't particularly soft to treat premature black deaths not as a tragedy we must end but as just another way to push your ideological agenda. But bigotry - yes, that sounds like the right word.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Bush Says He's NOT Accountable For His Actions Nor His Mistakes
Guess what? Bush says that he and his administration are NOT ACCOUNTABLE for mistakes made that led up to the war in Iraq? Why? Because those that voted him back into office have made the decision that his policies are best sooooo that means it's THE REPUBLICAN VOTERS' FAULT.
Do you remember in the first election campaign how Bush said over and over that he was bringing accountability back to the White House? Oh, he did all right. He just didn't tell his supporters that THEY were the ones that were accountable for his mistakes. I'd ask if you could believe the gall of this man but why? The gall lies with his supporters, NOT him!
Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy
No U.S. Troop Withdrawal Date Is Set
By Jim VandeHei and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 16, 2005
President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.
"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."
[Sam note: I guess this means Bush's voters should pay for the war and that they have the innocent and American blood on their hands. We can't stop paying taxes but I'm reminding my conservative friends that the blood and the war's aftermath is ALL FOR THEM."]
With the Iraq elections two weeks away and no signs of the deadly insurgency abating, Bush set no timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops and twice declined to endorse Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's recent statement that the number of Americans serving in Iraq could be reduced by year's end. Bush said he will not ask Congress to expand the size of the National Guard or regular Army, as some lawmakers and military experts have proposed.
In a wide-ranging, 35-minute interview aboard Air Force One on Friday, Bush laid out new details of his second-term plans for both foreign and domestic policy. For the first time, Bush said he will not press senators to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, the top priority for many social conservative groups. And he said he has no plans to cut benefits for the approximately 40 percent of Social Security recipients who collect monthly disability and survivor payments as he prepares his plan for partial privatization.
Bush was relaxed, often direct and occasionally expansive when discussing his second-term agenda, Iraq and lessons he has learned as president. Sitting at the head of a long conference table in a cabin at the front of the presidential plane, Bush wore a blue Air Force One flight jacket with a red tie and crisp white shirt. Three aides, including his new communications adviser, Nicolle Devenish, accompanied him.
With his inauguration days away, Bush defended the administration's decision to force the District of Columbia to spend $12 million of its homeland security budget to provide tighter security for this week's festivities. He also warned that the ceremony could make the city "an attractive target for terrorists."
"By providing security, hopefully that will provide comfort to people who are coming from all around the country to come and stay in the hotels in Washington and to be able to watch the different festivities in Washington, and eat the food in Washington," Bush said. "I think it provides them great comfort to know that all levels of government are working closely to make this event as secure as possible."
The president's inaugural speech Thursday will focus on his vision for spreading democracy around the world, one of his top foreign policy goals for the new term. But it will be Iraq that dominates White House deliberations off stage. Over the next two weeks, Bush will be monitoring closely Iraq's plan to hold elections for a 275-member national assembly. He must also deliver his State of the Union address with a message of resolve on Iraq, and he will need to seek congressional approval for about $100 billion in emergency spending, much of it for the war.
In the interview, the president urged Americans to show patience as Iraq moves slowly toward creating a democratic nation where a dictatorship once stood. But the relentless optimism that dominated Bush's speeches before the U.S. election was sometimes replaced by pragmatism and caution.
"On a complicated matter such as removing a dictator from power and trying to help achieve democracy, sometimes the unexpected will happen, both good and bad," he said. "I am realistic about how quickly a society that has been dominated by a tyrant can become a democracy. . . . I am more patient than some."
Last week, Powell said U.S. troop levels could be reduced this year, but Bush said it is premature to judge how many U.S. men and women will be needed to defeat the insurgency and plant a new and sustainable government. He also declined to pledge to significantly reduce U.S. troop levels before the end of his second term in January 2009.
"The sooner the Iraqis are . . . better prepared, better equipped to fight, the sooner our troops can start coming home," he said. Bush did rule out asking Congress to increase the size of the National Guard and regular army, as many lawmakers, including the president's 2004 opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), are urging. "What we're going to do is make sure that the missions of the National Guard and the reserves closely dovetail with active army units, so that the pressure . . . is eased."
A new report released last week by U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the war in Iraq has created a training ground for terrorists. Bush called the report "somewhat speculative" but acknowledged "this could happen. And I agree. If we are not diligent and firm, there will be parts of the world that become pockets for terrorists to find safe haven and to train. And we have a duty to disrupt that."
As for perhaps the most notorious terrorist, Osama bin Laden, the administration has so far been unsuccessful in its attempt to locate the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Asked why, Bush said, "Because he's hiding." While some terrorism experts complain U.S. allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, could do more to help capture the al Qaeda leader, Bush said he could not name a single U.S. ally that is not doing everything possible to assist U.S. efforts.
"I am pleased about the hunt, and I am pleased he's isolated," Bush said. "I will be more pleased when he's brought to justice, and I think he will be."
Bush acknowledged that the United States' standing has diminished in some parts of the world and said he has asked Condoleezza Rice, his nominee to replace Powell at the State Department, to embark on a public diplomacy campaign that "explains our motives and explains our intentions."
Bush acknowledged that "some of the decisions I've made up to now have affected our standing in parts of the world," but predicted that most Muslims will eventually see America as a beacon of freedom and democracy.
"There's no question we've got to continue to do a better job of explaining what America is all about," he said.
On the domestic front, Bush said he would not lobby the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage.
While seeking reelection, Bush voiced strong support for such a ban, and many political analysts credit this position for inspiring record turnout among evangelical Christians, who are fighting same-sex marriage at every juncture. Groups such as the Family Research Council have made the marriage amendment their top priority for the next four years.
The president said there is no reason to press for the amendment because so many senators are convinced that the Defense of Marriage Act -- which says states that outlaw same-sex unions do not have to recognize such marriages conducted outside their borders -- is sufficient. "Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously. . . . Until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate."
Bush's position is likely to infuriate some of his socially conservative supporters, but congressional officials say it will be impossible to secure the 67 votes needed to pass the amendment in the Senate.
Yesterday morning, the day after the interview, White House spokesman Scott McClellan called to say the president wished to clarify his position, saying Bush was "willing to spend political capital" but believes it will be virtually impossible to overcome Senate resistance until the courts render a verdict on DOMA.
On the subject of revamping Social Security, Bush said he has no intention of making changes that would affect the approximately 40 percent of Social Security recipients who receive disability or survivor benefits. The Bush administration has privately told Republicans that the White House plan to restructure Social Security will include a reduction in benefits for future retirees. The interview marked the first time Bush strongly suggested disability and survivor benefits would be shielded.
"Frankly, our discussions in terms of reform have not centered on the survivor-disability aspect of Social Security," Bush said. "We're talking about the retirement system of Social Security."
Bush has put an overhaul of Social Security at the top of his domestic priorities. He has revealed few details of his reform proposal, except to say he wants to enable young workers to voluntarily divert a portion of their taxes to private accounts. Program participants could then pass the accounts to their heirs.
Bush said it is imperative that the White House and Congress deal with the "baby boomer bulge" that is threatening the long-term solvency of Medicare as well. Medicare faces the same demographic crunch imperiling Social Security in coming decades, as the population grows older and more money is taken out of the system to pay benefits than is put in by younger Americans funding it. Many lawmakers and policy experts say Medicare is in much bigger trouble than Social Security because of skyrocketing health care costs and the added expense of the prescription drug benefit signed into law by Bush in his first term.
"The difference, of course, is that in Medicare, we began a reform system [in the first term] that hopefully will take some of the pressures off" the system by preventing illnesses and streamlining the program, he said. Social Security and Medicare trustees estimate that the cost of Bush's prescription drug plan will top $8 trillion by 2075 -- more than twice the projected shortfall in Social Security.
On the election Bush said he was puzzled that he received only about 11 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls, about a 2 percentage point increase over his 2000 total.
"I did my best to reach out, and I will continue to do so as the president," Bush said. "It's important for people to know that I'm the president of everybody."
Do you remember in the first election campaign how Bush said over and over that he was bringing accountability back to the White House? Oh, he did all right. He just didn't tell his supporters that THEY were the ones that were accountable for his mistakes. I'd ask if you could believe the gall of this man but why? The gall lies with his supporters, NOT him!
Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy
No U.S. Troop Withdrawal Date Is Set
By Jim VandeHei and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 16, 2005
President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.
"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."
[Sam note: I guess this means Bush's voters should pay for the war and that they have the innocent and American blood on their hands. We can't stop paying taxes but I'm reminding my conservative friends that the blood and the war's aftermath is ALL FOR THEM."]
With the Iraq elections two weeks away and no signs of the deadly insurgency abating, Bush set no timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops and twice declined to endorse Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's recent statement that the number of Americans serving in Iraq could be reduced by year's end. Bush said he will not ask Congress to expand the size of the National Guard or regular Army, as some lawmakers and military experts have proposed.
In a wide-ranging, 35-minute interview aboard Air Force One on Friday, Bush laid out new details of his second-term plans for both foreign and domestic policy. For the first time, Bush said he will not press senators to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, the top priority for many social conservative groups. And he said he has no plans to cut benefits for the approximately 40 percent of Social Security recipients who collect monthly disability and survivor payments as he prepares his plan for partial privatization.
Bush was relaxed, often direct and occasionally expansive when discussing his second-term agenda, Iraq and lessons he has learned as president. Sitting at the head of a long conference table in a cabin at the front of the presidential plane, Bush wore a blue Air Force One flight jacket with a red tie and crisp white shirt. Three aides, including his new communications adviser, Nicolle Devenish, accompanied him.
With his inauguration days away, Bush defended the administration's decision to force the District of Columbia to spend $12 million of its homeland security budget to provide tighter security for this week's festivities. He also warned that the ceremony could make the city "an attractive target for terrorists."
"By providing security, hopefully that will provide comfort to people who are coming from all around the country to come and stay in the hotels in Washington and to be able to watch the different festivities in Washington, and eat the food in Washington," Bush said. "I think it provides them great comfort to know that all levels of government are working closely to make this event as secure as possible."
The president's inaugural speech Thursday will focus on his vision for spreading democracy around the world, one of his top foreign policy goals for the new term. But it will be Iraq that dominates White House deliberations off stage. Over the next two weeks, Bush will be monitoring closely Iraq's plan to hold elections for a 275-member national assembly. He must also deliver his State of the Union address with a message of resolve on Iraq, and he will need to seek congressional approval for about $100 billion in emergency spending, much of it for the war.
In the interview, the president urged Americans to show patience as Iraq moves slowly toward creating a democratic nation where a dictatorship once stood. But the relentless optimism that dominated Bush's speeches before the U.S. election was sometimes replaced by pragmatism and caution.
"On a complicated matter such as removing a dictator from power and trying to help achieve democracy, sometimes the unexpected will happen, both good and bad," he said. "I am realistic about how quickly a society that has been dominated by a tyrant can become a democracy. . . . I am more patient than some."
Last week, Powell said U.S. troop levels could be reduced this year, but Bush said it is premature to judge how many U.S. men and women will be needed to defeat the insurgency and plant a new and sustainable government. He also declined to pledge to significantly reduce U.S. troop levels before the end of his second term in January 2009.
"The sooner the Iraqis are . . . better prepared, better equipped to fight, the sooner our troops can start coming home," he said. Bush did rule out asking Congress to increase the size of the National Guard and regular army, as many lawmakers, including the president's 2004 opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), are urging. "What we're going to do is make sure that the missions of the National Guard and the reserves closely dovetail with active army units, so that the pressure . . . is eased."
A new report released last week by U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the war in Iraq has created a training ground for terrorists. Bush called the report "somewhat speculative" but acknowledged "this could happen. And I agree. If we are not diligent and firm, there will be parts of the world that become pockets for terrorists to find safe haven and to train. And we have a duty to disrupt that."
As for perhaps the most notorious terrorist, Osama bin Laden, the administration has so far been unsuccessful in its attempt to locate the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Asked why, Bush said, "Because he's hiding." While some terrorism experts complain U.S. allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, could do more to help capture the al Qaeda leader, Bush said he could not name a single U.S. ally that is not doing everything possible to assist U.S. efforts.
"I am pleased about the hunt, and I am pleased he's isolated," Bush said. "I will be more pleased when he's brought to justice, and I think he will be."
Bush acknowledged that the United States' standing has diminished in some parts of the world and said he has asked Condoleezza Rice, his nominee to replace Powell at the State Department, to embark on a public diplomacy campaign that "explains our motives and explains our intentions."
Bush acknowledged that "some of the decisions I've made up to now have affected our standing in parts of the world," but predicted that most Muslims will eventually see America as a beacon of freedom and democracy.
"There's no question we've got to continue to do a better job of explaining what America is all about," he said.
On the domestic front, Bush said he would not lobby the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage.
While seeking reelection, Bush voiced strong support for such a ban, and many political analysts credit this position for inspiring record turnout among evangelical Christians, who are fighting same-sex marriage at every juncture. Groups such as the Family Research Council have made the marriage amendment their top priority for the next four years.
The president said there is no reason to press for the amendment because so many senators are convinced that the Defense of Marriage Act -- which says states that outlaw same-sex unions do not have to recognize such marriages conducted outside their borders -- is sufficient. "Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously. . . . Until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate."
Bush's position is likely to infuriate some of his socially conservative supporters, but congressional officials say it will be impossible to secure the 67 votes needed to pass the amendment in the Senate.
Yesterday morning, the day after the interview, White House spokesman Scott McClellan called to say the president wished to clarify his position, saying Bush was "willing to spend political capital" but believes it will be virtually impossible to overcome Senate resistance until the courts render a verdict on DOMA.
On the subject of revamping Social Security, Bush said he has no intention of making changes that would affect the approximately 40 percent of Social Security recipients who receive disability or survivor benefits. The Bush administration has privately told Republicans that the White House plan to restructure Social Security will include a reduction in benefits for future retirees. The interview marked the first time Bush strongly suggested disability and survivor benefits would be shielded.
"Frankly, our discussions in terms of reform have not centered on the survivor-disability aspect of Social Security," Bush said. "We're talking about the retirement system of Social Security."
Bush has put an overhaul of Social Security at the top of his domestic priorities. He has revealed few details of his reform proposal, except to say he wants to enable young workers to voluntarily divert a portion of their taxes to private accounts. Program participants could then pass the accounts to their heirs.
Bush said it is imperative that the White House and Congress deal with the "baby boomer bulge" that is threatening the long-term solvency of Medicare as well. Medicare faces the same demographic crunch imperiling Social Security in coming decades, as the population grows older and more money is taken out of the system to pay benefits than is put in by younger Americans funding it. Many lawmakers and policy experts say Medicare is in much bigger trouble than Social Security because of skyrocketing health care costs and the added expense of the prescription drug benefit signed into law by Bush in his first term.
"The difference, of course, is that in Medicare, we began a reform system [in the first term] that hopefully will take some of the pressures off" the system by preventing illnesses and streamlining the program, he said. Social Security and Medicare trustees estimate that the cost of Bush's prescription drug plan will top $8 trillion by 2075 -- more than twice the projected shortfall in Social Security.
On the election Bush said he was puzzled that he received only about 11 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls, about a 2 percentage point increase over his 2000 total.
"I did my best to reach out, and I will continue to do so as the president," Bush said. "It's important for people to know that I'm the president of everybody."
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Bush's Enron Friends Cheat Shareholders Out of Billions
January 17, 2005
What's $13 Million Among Friends?
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ambridge, Mass. — TEN former directors of Enron have agreed to pay $13 million from their own pockets to settle a class action suit stemming from Enron's collapse in 2001, which wiped out some $60 billion in shareholder value. Because directors almost never have to pay even a penny in such suits, the Enron settlement - announced just days after several former WorldCom directors agreed to a similar deal - was widely viewed as a significant development that could discourage potential directors from serving on corporate boards.
This view is mistaken. A close look at the settlement shows that Enron's directors have still not been held accountable in any meaningful way.
Of the 18 former directors who were defendants in the Enron case, only 10 have to pay under the settlement. More important, according to the complaint against them, these 10 sold Enron shares worth more than $250 million during the period in which Enron was misreporting its financial affairs. According to the lawyer for the lead plaintiffs, the settlement requires each of these 10 to pay an amount equal to 10 percent of his or her pretax profits. They will be able to keep the other 90 percent - which amounts to $117 million - while investors who held their Enron stock lost their shirts.
The other eight Enron directors will not pay a penny but nonetheless have all claims against them settled. These directors did not sell shares before their value evaporated, which is presumably why they are not contributing. But they played important roles in the board's oversight failure. They include three of the six members of Enron's audit committee as well as six of the eight members of the finance committee, which reviewed many transactions that Enron used to deceive investors. Despite their role in the oversight failure, these eight directors emerge from Enron's ruins without having to pay a cent.
In a 2002 report, a Senate subcommittee concluded that by failing to protect shareholders' interests and ignoring questionable business practices, the Enron board "contributed to the company's collapse and bears a share of the responsibility for it." With the cases against them settled without any admission of wrongdoing, determining the directors' precise share of responsibility will be left to the judgment of history. But one thing will be clear: their share of the cost will be trivial.
One reason for the directors' ability to walk away relatively scot-free lies in the incentives for the other parties in the litigation. Plaintiffs' lawyers naturally focus on maximizing the total recovery to the class - and therefore on the defendants with the deepest pockets - and not on what portion will be paid by individual directors. Insurance companies are in the business of providing broad protection to directors, who pay for it in advance with shareholders' money.
For these reasons, as well as for various legal rules and charter provisions that protect directors from liability, failing directors practically never have to pay personally for violations of their fiduciary duties. Although these duties are in theory a foundation of the corporate system, their practical significance is far more limited than most investors appreciate.
With Enron, the failure of the board had disastrous consequences, leading to the second largest bankruptcy in American history and shaking investor confidence. It is difficult to envision a stronger case for imposing a meaningful financial penalty on directors. Yet the settlement fails to do so.
The settlement hardly heralds a new era in which directors who fail to act in shareholders' interests pay the price. If even Enron's board members are treated this gently, then other corporate directors can rest easy.
Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the co-author of "Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation."
"These [Iraq] elections are a joke" - Middle East Expert
U.S. Lowers Expectations for Once-Heralded Iraq Vote
| Sun Jan 16, 8:08 AM ET |
By Saul Hudson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Unable to deliver on its lofty goal of bringing democracy to Iraq (news - web sites) through the Jan. 30 elections, the Bush administration is pressing a damage-control campaign to lower expectations for the vote.
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With fears for a low voter turnout among Sunni Arabs due to a boycott and insurgents' intimidation, the administration no longer touts the elections as a catalyst to spread democracy across the Arab world.
Instead, U.S. officials now emphasize the political process that will follow the vote.
"Clearly, we don't see the election itself as a pivotal point," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told NPR on Friday. "It's the beginning of a process, the process where Iraqis will write a constitution and at the end of the year will actually vote for a permanent government."
Almost two years after Operation Iraqi Freedom, a raging insurgency across mainly Sunni areas forced the White House this week to prepare the American public for elections it called "less than perfect."
For months, the Bush administration has been steadily lowering expectations over the vote, beginning with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in September warning violent areas of the country might be excluded.
And with just two weeks to go, the administration acknowledges that despite military offensives meant to provide security for the vote, the fear of bullets and bombs will keep many for the 20 percent Sunni minority away from the ballot box.
Rather than ushering in Iraq's first free and fair national elections for decades, the Bush administration has now limited its ambition for a vote it refuses to postpone.
"I think a successful election will be an election where most of the population has gotten a chance to vote, and even though we may not get the same kind of numbers in the Sunni area, we're going to have to go forward and use the results of this election to build on," Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) told PBS.
Powell has lobbied the Shi'ites, who were oppressed under former President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) by the dominant Sunnis, to include the disenfranchised Sunnis in the government after they overwhelmingly win the skewed vote.
But the top U.S. diplomat acknowledged such maneuvering also risked inflaming the insurgency.
"The insurgency is not going away as a result of this election. In fact, perhaps, the insurgents might become more emboldened," Powell said.
GIVING DEMOCRACY A BAD NAME
Critics of the administration's Iraq policy complain the elections for a 275-member assembly that should draw up a constitution and pick a transitional government are so flawed they will be illegitimate -- and counterproductive for democracy in the region.
"These elections are a joke," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan.
"The Bush administration has created the worst possible advertisement for democracy because the perception across the Middle East is that democracy means you get a country where everything is out of control," he said.
Before the vote, the administration "has definitely gone into damage-control mode," Stephen Zunes, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco said.
"Once their original rationale (to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction) fell apart, they created very high expectations for democracy to be able to justify their takeover," he said. "Now that they have ended up with a not particularly good demonstration of democracy, they are forced to lower the public's expectations for these elections."
BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S ROLE SWEPT UNDER THE RUG
NEWS ANALYSIS
Higher Officials Unlikely to Be Tried
By Jonathan Peterson
L.A. Times Staff Writer
January 16, 2005
WASHINGTON — The jail term meted out to Army Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison may prove to be the stiffest criminal punishment that emerges from the entire scandal, according to experts on military justice.
To some, the low-level Army reservist may look like the fall guy in a debacle that embarrassed the United States throughout the world and tainted the image of American forces in Iraq. Yet analysts said that for now, at least, it was doubtful that higher-level officials would be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal wrongdoing at the Iraqi prison where Graner ran a notorious, late-night guard shift.
"This is the guy that it seems easiest for us to blame," said Beth Hillman, a specialist on military justice at Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, N.J., of the low-level reservist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison. "That doesn't mean there aren't other people who should pay a price for their role in making this possible."
The question of responsibility for sadistic behavior at Abu Ghraib leads to murky distinctions between foot soldiers such as Graner, who committed the abuses, and senior officials who failed to prevent them and denied specific knowledge.
More broadly, some point out, the crimes at Abu Ghraib occurred as U.S. policy became increasingly tolerant of rough interrogation practices that were previously forbidden. Approved practices, such as forcing detainees to wear hoods or creating extreme physical discomfort — though controversial — did not include the sexual humiliation and other tactics captured in photographs.
"I've seen no convincing evidence that higher-ups authorized the forms of abuse that made Abu Ghraib the story it is," said Peter D. Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University and author of "Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight and Civil-Military Relations."
"That doesn't mean there aren't failures up the chain of command," he said.
To be sure, the saga continues to unfold, and it is too soon to predict with certainty where ongoing investigations might lead and who might face future punishment. The Justice Department recently began investigating FBI reports of abusive interrogations by the military of prisoners at the naval facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq.
Brig. Gen. Richard Formica, meanwhile, has been conducting a Pentagon investigation of abuse of prisoners by U.S. Special Forces in Iraq. Three other soldiers at Abu Ghraib — including Pfc. Lynndie R. England who was photographed holding an Iraqi prisoner on a leash — have yet to face court-martial proceedings.
Another four have pleaded guilty and been sentenced for crimes at Abu Ghraib.
Although the United States has little tradition of holding senior commanders criminally accountable for abuses committed by their subordinates, one example involved an enemy general.
U.S. officials charged Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita with failing in his duty as a commander to prevent atrocities committed by Japanese troops in the Philippines in 1944 and 1945. Yamashita was executed in 1946.
"It was never clear — at least in my mind — that Yamashita ordered the things that went wrong," Hillman said Saturday.
In the case of Abu Ghraib, some observers say that the acts for which Graner and other soldiers are being held accountable should be understood in the context of broader U.S. policy directives. Starting in Afghanistan, American officials established new rules for interrogation designed to soften up prisoners more harshly than in the past.
The approach continued at Guantanamo Bay, where for example, the use of intimidating guard dogs was among approved procedures.
In August 2004, a report by an independent panel headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger found that such practices "migrated" to Iraq. While finding institutional and personal responsibility "at higher levels," the report stopped short of accusing top military and civilian leaders of condoning the abuses committed by Graner and others.
There has been little indication that the White House plans to hold top civilian officials in the Defense Department responsible for abuses at the prison.
"Stuff like this doesn't happen in a prison in Iraq out of the blue," said Kevin J. Barry, a retired military judge and co-founder of the National Institute of Military Justice. "Surely, you can throw Graner in jail. But it would be a horrible injustice if Graner goes to jail for a long period of time and nobody higher than him is ever held accountable."
In an attempt to ease his sentence, Graner on Saturday sought to make a similar point, noting that military intelligence officials had been given authority over Abu Ghraib and arguing that he was abiding by their instructions.
"If [military intelligence] asks you to do this, it needs to be done," he said during the sentencing hearing at Ft. Hood, Texas. "They're in charge. Follow their orders."
Although the low-level guards so far have faced the brunt of criminal charges, higher-level officials may be paying a less severe, if personally painful, price.
For example, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, whose responsibilities included detention facilities in Iraq, was cruising toward a prestigious fourth star until revelations about Abu Ghraib stalled his rise and jeopardized any future promotion.
"The military has various ways to punish people," said Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington lawyer and expert on military justice. It may be different for a senior officer than for a junior one. "An admiral or general may be forced into retirement or lose a pay grade," he said.
To many, such an allocation of justice may seem less than satisfying. But given the high burden of proof for criminal convictions, it may be what is in store.
"Are we asking the system to undo the public relations disaster of Abu Ghraib? That can't happen," Feaver said. "But we can ask the system to demonstrate that when U.S. soldiers misbehave there are consequences. That goal is achievable."
14 Days in Iraq
January 16, 2005
14 Days in Iraq
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n the first two weeks of January, at least 202 people died as a result of the insurgency in Iraq. The killings have been indiscriminate. The dead include Iraqi officials, police officers, civilians and, of course, Iraqi, American and coalition soldiers. The attacks shown here took place across the country, but there is a clear concentration in the so-called Sunni Triangle, which stretches from Tikrit in the north to Baghdad in the east and to Falluja and Ramadi in the west.
While the daily toll is noted by the news media in headlines and video clips, many Americans have a hard time incorporating these individual pieces of information into a coherent image over time. This map, based on Pentagon data and news reports, shows the number killed and wounded since Jan. 1. Because of the limits placed on reporters and the military's need to inform families, there may have been additional casualties during this period that are not noted here. The map also does not include Iraqi civilians accidentally killed by coalition forces. Still, it is our attempt to visually depict the human cost of a fortnight in an embattled land.
Adriana Lins de Albuquerque is a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Alicia Cheng is a graphic designer at mgmt. design in Brooklyn.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Sinking Deeper Into the Quagmire
January 14, 2005
Out of Iraq
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kraine became the latest dropout from the "coalition of the willing" when President Leonid Kuchma formally ordered his generals on Monday to start pulling his country's roughly 1,600 troops out of Iraq. That was not a surprise because Ukraine has been heading for the door for some time. Still, given that Ukraine has been much in the news and that its contingent was the fifth-largest in Iraq (after the United States, Britain, Italy and Poland), the exit is worth noting.
It's the end of a cynical marriage of convenience. From the outset, there was an assumption that President Kuchma joined the coalition largely to buy slack from Washington over his notoriously corrupt rule. Then, in the recent brutal elections, the reformist and West-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, who defeated Mr. Kuchma's candidate, made pulling out of Iraq one of his issues. Mr. Kuchma, on the verge of leaving office, evidently saw no point in letting Mr. Yushchenko reap the plaudits from Ukrainians, who overwhelmingly oppose the war.
Ukraine's withdrawal punches a major and potentially fatal hole in the much-ballyhooed multinational division that Poland volunteered to lead in Iraq. Spain was the first to drop out, and Ukraine had the second-largest contingent after Poland itself. The coalition has also lost Hungary, the Philippines and Honduras, among others, while Poland itself, long regarded as second only to Britain in its fealty to the United States, is talking of cutting back. Several other countries intend to reduce their participation in the next few months.
Most of these countries provided token forces of a few dozen or less. But the Bush administration expended considerable political capital to beg or bully governments into joining the campaign to give it the semblance of an international operation in the absence of a credible international endorsement. Washington was especially keen to underscore the support of young democracies, which were supposed to be better capable of appreciating the blessings that Iraq was about to reap.
But in Ukraine, neither bad old dictators nor promising new democrats ever really backed the Iraq war. Like many other coalition members, the government weighed the potential benefits of making nice to Washington against the potential costs of not doing so and hoped it would all be over soon. Now that doesn't look likely, the exodus is on. When you go for facade, facade is what you get.
The Liar's Liars
Excuse me, but is that smoke in your ear?
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas
January 11th 2005
I wouldn't go calling anyone a liar, but as we say in our quaint Texas fashion, this administration is stuffed with people who are on a first-name basis with the bottom of the deck. They've been telling us only four out of the 18 provinces in Iraq will be too unsafe to vote in. Doesn't sound that bad, does it? Unless you happen to know that about 50 percent of the population lives in those four provinces.
Will someone explain to me what earthly good they expect to do by misleading us? If, God forbid, the Iraqi election turns out to be a disaster, will we be better off for not having expected it? How long are Bush and Cheney going to sit there pretending the problem is that the media won't report the "good news" out of Iraq? Be a lot more useful if they paid attention to some of the bad news.
Resigned to the fact that Social Security will have to be dismantled because it's in such terrible, awful trouble, headed toward bankruptcy the day after tomorrow? Well, the $10 trillion in unfunded liabilities they keep talking about sure sounds like a load of trouble. Except that it's a completely phony number. Not based on what will happen in 25 years or 50 or 75, but on infinity. Forever and ever.
President Bush says "the crisis is now" and Social Security will go into the red as of 2018. Eeek, just 13 years from now -- we might actually live that long. Except ... nobody else says that. The Social Security trustees, paid to be professional gloom-mongers on this subject, say it's good until 2042, and the conservative estimate by the Congressional Budget Office is 2052 -- not before Social Security goes broke, but before Social Security has to dip into its trust fund. Get a grip.
Now, in addition to the regular misleading, fudging, distorting and phony statistics games, we're getting actual covert propaganda, and dammittohell, they're making us pay for it. A quarter of a million bucks to a right-wing commentator to talk up No Child Left Behind. Why? Distributing video "news" releases to television stations made and paid for by the government, but not identified as such. It's not enough that Bush has the bulliest pulpit on earth, he has to sneak his message across with government propaganda? What the hell is this?
According to Bush, we're also having a lawsuit crisis. He got so exercised over it last week, he used the word "crisis" four times in one speech. In Texas, we have had tort deform up to our ears. Med-mal, as medical malpractice insurance is known in legislative circles, has been tort-deformed out the wazoo here -- $250,000 award caps, the whole ball of wax. Net result? Proposed rate increases for three of the state's largest med mal carriers up 16.6 percent to 35.2 percent. In Oklahoma, up 83 percent over three years for the largest med mal provider. Ohio, 10 percent to 40 percent is the range of expected rate increases by the five major carriers, etc. Doesn't work worth a damn.
Here in the National Laboratory for Bad Government, we are happy to help out by showing everyone else how not to solve problems, but it's really annoying when Bush insists on taking what didn't work here and making it nationwide.
More fun with numbers. The Bushies are crowing that their job forecast for last year was right on target. Um, which forecast? They predicted total job growth of 3.8 million, and it was actually 2.2 million. That's the difference between the total jobs in December versus the number at the beginning of the year. They also predicted the average number of jobs to increase by 2.6 million, when in fact it turned out to be 1.3 million higher than in 2003 -- that being difference between the average number of jobs in 2003 and 2004.
Too fast for you? If something goes up to eight from six, that's plus two, but the average of eight and six is seven, up one. The Bushies took the 2.2 million they predicted for last year's average job growth and pretended it was their prediction for total job growth, then said they were right when actual growth came in at 2.6 million. In other words, they were off again. (I am entirely indebted to bloggers Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum for this mathematical distinction.)
Also in the "you can't trust a word they say" category, the Natural Resources Defense Council has just released papers showing that the Defense Department and defense contractors collaborated in a backroom campaign to manipulate a federal report on the health threat of perchlorate, a toxic rocket fuel ingredient, in the water. The National Academy of Sciences is to release the report this week. What the NRDC has is evidence that pressure was put on the Academy of Sciences. Again, what good does it do to misinform people?
Not that I'm accusing anyone of lying, of course, but these people are slicker than bus station chili. Count your change when dealing with Bushies.
by Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas
January 11th 2005
I wouldn't go calling anyone a liar, but as we say in our quaint Texas fashion, this administration is stuffed with people who are on a first-name basis with the bottom of the deck. They've been telling us only four out of the 18 provinces in Iraq will be too unsafe to vote in. Doesn't sound that bad, does it? Unless you happen to know that about 50 percent of the population lives in those four provinces.
Will someone explain to me what earthly good they expect to do by misleading us? If, God forbid, the Iraqi election turns out to be a disaster, will we be better off for not having expected it? How long are Bush and Cheney going to sit there pretending the problem is that the media won't report the "good news" out of Iraq? Be a lot more useful if they paid attention to some of the bad news.
Resigned to the fact that Social Security will have to be dismantled because it's in such terrible, awful trouble, headed toward bankruptcy the day after tomorrow? Well, the $10 trillion in unfunded liabilities they keep talking about sure sounds like a load of trouble. Except that it's a completely phony number. Not based on what will happen in 25 years or 50 or 75, but on infinity. Forever and ever.
President Bush says "the crisis is now" and Social Security will go into the red as of 2018. Eeek, just 13 years from now -- we might actually live that long. Except ... nobody else says that. The Social Security trustees, paid to be professional gloom-mongers on this subject, say it's good until 2042, and the conservative estimate by the Congressional Budget Office is 2052 -- not before Social Security goes broke, but before Social Security has to dip into its trust fund. Get a grip.
Now, in addition to the regular misleading, fudging, distorting and phony statistics games, we're getting actual covert propaganda, and dammittohell, they're making us pay for it. A quarter of a million bucks to a right-wing commentator to talk up No Child Left Behind. Why? Distributing video "news" releases to television stations made and paid for by the government, but not identified as such. It's not enough that Bush has the bulliest pulpit on earth, he has to sneak his message across with government propaganda? What the hell is this?
According to Bush, we're also having a lawsuit crisis. He got so exercised over it last week, he used the word "crisis" four times in one speech. In Texas, we have had tort deform up to our ears. Med-mal, as medical malpractice insurance is known in legislative circles, has been tort-deformed out the wazoo here -- $250,000 award caps, the whole ball of wax. Net result? Proposed rate increases for three of the state's largest med mal carriers up 16.6 percent to 35.2 percent. In Oklahoma, up 83 percent over three years for the largest med mal provider. Ohio, 10 percent to 40 percent is the range of expected rate increases by the five major carriers, etc. Doesn't work worth a damn.
Here in the National Laboratory for Bad Government, we are happy to help out by showing everyone else how not to solve problems, but it's really annoying when Bush insists on taking what didn't work here and making it nationwide.
More fun with numbers. The Bushies are crowing that their job forecast for last year was right on target. Um, which forecast? They predicted total job growth of 3.8 million, and it was actually 2.2 million. That's the difference between the total jobs in December versus the number at the beginning of the year. They also predicted the average number of jobs to increase by 2.6 million, when in fact it turned out to be 1.3 million higher than in 2003 -- that being difference between the average number of jobs in 2003 and 2004.
Too fast for you? If something goes up to eight from six, that's plus two, but the average of eight and six is seven, up one. The Bushies took the 2.2 million they predicted for last year's average job growth and pretended it was their prediction for total job growth, then said they were right when actual growth came in at 2.6 million. In other words, they were off again. (I am entirely indebted to bloggers Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum for this mathematical distinction.)
Also in the "you can't trust a word they say" category, the Natural Resources Defense Council has just released papers showing that the Defense Department and defense contractors collaborated in a backroom campaign to manipulate a federal report on the health threat of perchlorate, a toxic rocket fuel ingredient, in the water. The National Academy of Sciences is to release the report this week. What the NRDC has is evidence that pressure was put on the Academy of Sciences. Again, what good does it do to misinform people?
Not that I'm accusing anyone of lying, of course, but these people are slicker than bus station chili. Count your change when dealing with Bushies.
Bush Makes Nixon Look Like An Eagle Scout
The Truth Shall Set You Back
Lying is no sin for Bush's minions.
Margaret Carlson - L.A. TIMES
January 13, 2005
At CBS, four high-level people (five, if you count Dan Rather giving up his anchor chair) have been fired for being taken in by phony documents. You may not think that's enough, but what strikes me is how rare such firings are. When there's lying, cheating and stealing on Wall Street, a prosecutor has to have the corporate executive dead to rights — at Fannie Mae, at Marsh & McLennan, at Sanford Weill's Citigroup — before heads roll. And even then the dismissals are generally accompanied by a payday so lavish it would make Croesus blush.
It is not surprising that an administration that rose so directly from corporate America would operate the same way. Has anyone, for instance, lost his job for being wrong about weapons of mass destruction or for failing to put enough troops in place to secure Iraq before a deadly insurgency could take hold?
In the Bush administration, you lose your job not for lying but for telling the truth, as the axing of Gen. Eric Shinseki and economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey shows. No wonder most government officials wait until they're former officials before speaking out, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke did.
Those who speak in real time are soon gone. Consider the case of the Department of Homeland Security's former inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin. When Ervin, a Republican and a Harvard Law School graduate, reported that only 6% of oceangoing cargo was being inspected, that known felons were operating airport checkpoints, that no consolidated terrorist watch list had been compiled and that the managers responsible for these failures had been feted at a lavish awards ceremony that cost half a million dollars, the White House allowed his appointment to lapse, costing him his job, according to Susan Collins (R-Maine), the Senate Government Affairs Committee chairwoman.
The opposite happened over at the inspector general's office at the Department of Health and Human Services. The IG there decided it was perfectly fine for former Medicare chief Thomas Scully to repeatedly threaten to fire a subordinate if he dared tell Congress (which had asked) that the prescription drug bill would cost nearly $200 billion more than the president was letting on. The subordinate's silence carried the day. It wasn't until after the bill passed with the vote of 13 Republican deficit hawks (who had sworn they couldn't vote for a bill costing more than $400 billion) that President Bush said, oops, the price was $534 billion after all.
Then there's poor Dr. David Graham, who wouldn't keep silent over at the Food and Drug Administration. When Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) called him to Congress to testify, the Yale-trained physician said Merck and the FDA had ignored studies that showed Vioxx doubling the risk of heart attack. Graham estimated that 55,000 people had died as a result. Dr. Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs, insisted nonetheless that "our system works very well." Protected by civil service laws, Graham still has his job, but he says he has been made to feel "that I'm an enemy, a traitor, a pariah."
Graham shouldn't be a pariah. He should get the Medal of Freedom. Unfortunately, Bush gives those medals to people who keep their mouths shut, like L. Paul Bremer III, who got one for not saying until he retired that Bush hadn't sent enough troops to Iraq. Another went to former CIA Director George Tenet, who provided on request the "slam-dunk" pretext for the war Bush was determined to wage. With that medal around his neck, will Tenet also be a less-than-forthcoming memoirist in the book for which he reportedly got a $4-million advance?
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales has put off telling the truth, perhaps forever. He went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and pretended he didn't mean the things he wrote in his memo calling the Geneva Convention "quaint" and "obsolete," and that, in any event, he just hates torture. However, when asked whether torture could be used by U.S. personnel under any circumstances, he said he didn't think so, but "I'd want to get back to you on that."
Like Tenet and other architects of the war in Iraq, Gonzales gave the president what he wanted and is now being rewarded for it. Abu Ghraib was indeed a rogue operation, but as the female private with the leash heads to trial, we shouldn't forget for a minute that the real rogues who let it happen are in the administration. For his counsel, Gonzales will be elevated to attorney general, a post where he will be the symbol of justice in this country. He's lucky he doesn't work at CBS.
Lying is no sin for Bush's minions.
Margaret Carlson - L.A. TIMES
January 13, 2005
At CBS, four high-level people (five, if you count Dan Rather giving up his anchor chair) have been fired for being taken in by phony documents. You may not think that's enough, but what strikes me is how rare such firings are. When there's lying, cheating and stealing on Wall Street, a prosecutor has to have the corporate executive dead to rights — at Fannie Mae, at Marsh & McLennan, at Sanford Weill's Citigroup — before heads roll. And even then the dismissals are generally accompanied by a payday so lavish it would make Croesus blush.
It is not surprising that an administration that rose so directly from corporate America would operate the same way. Has anyone, for instance, lost his job for being wrong about weapons of mass destruction or for failing to put enough troops in place to secure Iraq before a deadly insurgency could take hold?
In the Bush administration, you lose your job not for lying but for telling the truth, as the axing of Gen. Eric Shinseki and economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey shows. No wonder most government officials wait until they're former officials before speaking out, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke did.
Those who speak in real time are soon gone. Consider the case of the Department of Homeland Security's former inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin. When Ervin, a Republican and a Harvard Law School graduate, reported that only 6% of oceangoing cargo was being inspected, that known felons were operating airport checkpoints, that no consolidated terrorist watch list had been compiled and that the managers responsible for these failures had been feted at a lavish awards ceremony that cost half a million dollars, the White House allowed his appointment to lapse, costing him his job, according to Susan Collins (R-Maine), the Senate Government Affairs Committee chairwoman.
The opposite happened over at the inspector general's office at the Department of Health and Human Services. The IG there decided it was perfectly fine for former Medicare chief Thomas Scully to repeatedly threaten to fire a subordinate if he dared tell Congress (which had asked) that the prescription drug bill would cost nearly $200 billion more than the president was letting on. The subordinate's silence carried the day. It wasn't until after the bill passed with the vote of 13 Republican deficit hawks (who had sworn they couldn't vote for a bill costing more than $400 billion) that President Bush said, oops, the price was $534 billion after all.
Then there's poor Dr. David Graham, who wouldn't keep silent over at the Food and Drug Administration. When Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) called him to Congress to testify, the Yale-trained physician said Merck and the FDA had ignored studies that showed Vioxx doubling the risk of heart attack. Graham estimated that 55,000 people had died as a result. Dr. Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs, insisted nonetheless that "our system works very well." Protected by civil service laws, Graham still has his job, but he says he has been made to feel "that I'm an enemy, a traitor, a pariah."
Graham shouldn't be a pariah. He should get the Medal of Freedom. Unfortunately, Bush gives those medals to people who keep their mouths shut, like L. Paul Bremer III, who got one for not saying until he retired that Bush hadn't sent enough troops to Iraq. Another went to former CIA Director George Tenet, who provided on request the "slam-dunk" pretext for the war Bush was determined to wage. With that medal around his neck, will Tenet also be a less-than-forthcoming memoirist in the book for which he reportedly got a $4-million advance?
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales has put off telling the truth, perhaps forever. He went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and pretended he didn't mean the things he wrote in his memo calling the Geneva Convention "quaint" and "obsolete," and that, in any event, he just hates torture. However, when asked whether torture could be used by U.S. personnel under any circumstances, he said he didn't think so, but "I'd want to get back to you on that."
Like Tenet and other architects of the war in Iraq, Gonzales gave the president what he wanted and is now being rewarded for it. Abu Ghraib was indeed a rogue operation, but as the female private with the leash heads to trial, we shouldn't forget for a minute that the real rogues who let it happen are in the administration. For his counsel, Gonzales will be elevated to attorney general, a post where he will be the symbol of justice in this country. He's lucky he doesn't work at CBS.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
BUSH CUTS TAXES, GUARD SOLDIERS' WEAPONS DON'T WORK
AWOL Soldier Cites Army Inadequacies
Wed Jan 12, 7:55 AM ET
By Scott Gold Times Staff Writer
HOUSTON — An Army National Guard soldier said Tuesday that the inadequate training and equipment he received had led him to abandon his unit rather than face deployment to Iraq.
"I guess I'm AWOL right now," Spc. Joseph Jacobo, 46, said in a telephone interview from the Los Angeles area.
Among his concerns, Jacobo said, was that he had been unable to find anyone at his Texas training base who could fix his M-4 assault rifle, the primary weapon he would carry in Iraq. The weapon jams, he said.
"They try to put old parts in new rifles," he said. "It doesn't work. We're having all kinds of problems with our automatic weapons."
Soldiers in Jacobo's Modesto-based National Guard unit — the 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment — went public late last month with concerns that they would suffer needlessly high casualty rates in Iraq because of poor training. Military officials have denied the soldiers' charges, voiced in an article in the Los Angeles Times.
Similar tensions have arisen in other units as the military, short on active-duty personnel, has given National Guard and Reserve soldiers increased combat responsibilities and lengthy overseas assignments.
The soldiers, who trained at the Army's Ft. Bliss Training Complex, said there were equipment problems, including trucks without adequate armor and a shortage of night-vision goggles. They also said they had received very little "theater specific" training to prepare them for conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers said they had learned nothing about convoy protection or guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs.
Airing their concerns publicly, Jacobo said, only seems to have made matters worse. He said soldiers who were suspected of having spoken to the newspaper were called "cowards" and "yellow-bellies" by their supervisors. Equipment woes were not addressed, commanders became more strict and morale reached new lows, he said.
"They didn't change anything," Jacobo said. "How are we supposed to have any pride?"
His unit is scheduled to deploy to Kuwait soon, possibly by the end of the week, and then onto Iraq. Jacobo said he has been absent without permission since Jan. 2, when the soldiers were supposed to return from a brief holiday leave.
Jacobo, who is married with two grown children, said he was staying with relatives. He has spent much of his adult life in the military, he said, including a six-year stint in the Marines that took him to Nicaragua. The message on his cellphone voicemail concludes, "Semper fi" — the Marine motto that is shorthand for semper fidelis, or "always faithful."
Jacobo said he decided to rejoin the National Guard last year because he believed in the Iraq mission.
"I just thought it was the right thing to do," he said.
Jacobo faces a range of possible punishments. If he rejoins his unit soon, he probably would face "nonjudicial" punishment that could include extra duties and a reduction in rank, said Lt. Col. Coennie Woods, a National Guard spokeswoman in Washington. Jacobo also could be declared a deserter because his unit was preparing to go into combat when he disappeared. In that case, Woods said, he could be court-martialed, imprisoned for five years and dishonorably discharged.
Woods said she could not comment further on the situation. Military officials at Ft. Bliss did not return calls seeking comment.
Wed Jan 12, 7:55 AM ET
By Scott Gold Times Staff Writer
HOUSTON — An Army National Guard soldier said Tuesday that the inadequate training and equipment he received had led him to abandon his unit rather than face deployment to Iraq.
"I guess I'm AWOL right now," Spc. Joseph Jacobo, 46, said in a telephone interview from the Los Angeles area.
Among his concerns, Jacobo said, was that he had been unable to find anyone at his Texas training base who could fix his M-4 assault rifle, the primary weapon he would carry in Iraq. The weapon jams, he said.
"They try to put old parts in new rifles," he said. "It doesn't work. We're having all kinds of problems with our automatic weapons."
Soldiers in Jacobo's Modesto-based National Guard unit — the 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment — went public late last month with concerns that they would suffer needlessly high casualty rates in Iraq because of poor training. Military officials have denied the soldiers' charges, voiced in an article in the Los Angeles Times.
Similar tensions have arisen in other units as the military, short on active-duty personnel, has given National Guard and Reserve soldiers increased combat responsibilities and lengthy overseas assignments.
The soldiers, who trained at the Army's Ft. Bliss Training Complex, said there were equipment problems, including trucks without adequate armor and a shortage of night-vision goggles. They also said they had received very little "theater specific" training to prepare them for conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers said they had learned nothing about convoy protection or guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs.
Airing their concerns publicly, Jacobo said, only seems to have made matters worse. He said soldiers who were suspected of having spoken to the newspaper were called "cowards" and "yellow-bellies" by their supervisors. Equipment woes were not addressed, commanders became more strict and morale reached new lows, he said.
"They didn't change anything," Jacobo said. "How are we supposed to have any pride?"
His unit is scheduled to deploy to Kuwait soon, possibly by the end of the week, and then onto Iraq. Jacobo said he has been absent without permission since Jan. 2, when the soldiers were supposed to return from a brief holiday leave.
Jacobo, who is married with two grown children, said he was staying with relatives. He has spent much of his adult life in the military, he said, including a six-year stint in the Marines that took him to Nicaragua. The message on his cellphone voicemail concludes, "Semper fi" — the Marine motto that is shorthand for semper fidelis, or "always faithful."
Jacobo said he decided to rejoin the National Guard last year because he believed in the Iraq mission.
"I just thought it was the right thing to do," he said.
Jacobo faces a range of possible punishments. If he rejoins his unit soon, he probably would face "nonjudicial" punishment that could include extra duties and a reduction in rank, said Lt. Col. Coennie Woods, a National Guard spokeswoman in Washington. Jacobo also could be declared a deserter because his unit was preparing to go into combat when he disappeared. In that case, Woods said, he could be court-martialed, imprisoned for five years and dishonorably discharged.
Woods said she could not comment further on the situation. Military officials at Ft. Bliss did not return calls seeking comment.
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