Another Bush Cover-Up - Dissension in the Upper Ranks

This is the song I've been singing for days now. I'll let my throat heal and let this Ted Lang writer sing the tune. All together now:

Who was in Charge?


ANOTHER BUSH COVER-UP
DISSENSION IN THE UPPER RANKS

By: Ted Lang

It never fails to astound when simple, straightforward, facts are processed through the Beltway insiders and their corporate media, and is then regurgitated back in a form that is totally disconnected from any modicum of truth or reality. Nowhere has this become more obvious than in the botchery of the reported events surrounding the Iraqi POW scandal our troops were involved in.

Here are some examples. First, whether or not every American soldier in Iraq was or was not involved is not the issue. The focus should be on those involved – period, end of discussion. And the focus should be on those who elected to be involved in placing themselves in photos while still partially in the uniform of the United States military. Not concerning oneself with the possibility that such photos could eventually fall into the wrong hands, as they have, demonstrates both stupidity as well as a reckless disregard for the possibility of disgracing the military of the United States of America. And please, enough already with 99.99 percent of our military being offered as serving correctly – how was this statistic derived at and via what collection of actual, documented facts and evidence? This situation does not equate to an Ivory Soap commercial.

Secondly, extensive facts and information abound via the real press, specifically the foreign press and the Internet, which assert that these "interrogation" procedures were ordered via the highest levels within the Pentagon – again, period and end of discussion. The Pentagon specifically transferred the general, a two-star major general, who was formerly in charge of Camp X-ray at Guantanamo, to Abu Ghraib to "soften up" Iraqi prisoners of war that had been detained there.

Now for those individuals who are unfamiliar with the chain of command and military rank, rank in all services, except the Navy, progresses grade-wise at the general officer level as follows: second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, and then general. Five-star generals are a rarity, but usually appear during major conflicts. Starting with a one-star brigadier general, the stars and rank proceed as follows: two-star, major general; three-star, lieutenant general; and four-star is simply termed "general." A five-star general is designated as "General of the Army."

Even a two-star major general, such as Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, must follow orders, and those orders usually come from a three-star lieutenant general, one star and one immediate rank below that of Generals Lance Smith and Richard Myers, both of whom had just testified along with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before the United States Senate. What I am saying, is that the transfer of Maj. Gen Miller from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib was decided at the highest levels, and was decided for a specific reason.

The obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this is that Secretary Rumsfeld was indeed involved in this decision before the revelation of prisoner abuse and the now-infamous photos that have been displayed on TV and the Internet. Secretary Rumsfeld has intimated that he didn’t know about these events until January, but that might be limited only to his knowledge concerning the existence of those photographs.

What does this all mean? It means that Rumsfeld not only knew beforehand what was going on at BOTH Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but his delaying action on such publicly released information occurred because he was trying to figure out how to suppress or at least contain the photographic evidence of abuse. Containing the abuse investigation, therefore, has two motives; first, blame will be upon just the low-level participants offering their behavior as having just been bad, isolated incidents; and second, to prevent an investigation from spiraling upward to Pentagon leaders.

Rush Limbaugh and other Bush administration sycophants will point out that the torture of Iraqi prisoners was either staged and therefore fake, or not at all that bad when compared to what the Japanese did to American prisoners of war at Bataan and during World War II, or what the North Koreans did to American POWs. And if the North Koreans violated the Geneva Convention, and the North Vietnamese did likewise, is that justification for US to do the same, even on a much milder basis? And in all likelihood, the Geneva Convention was drawn up specifically to address the ill treatment of prisoners during WW II.

Suddenly, there are new standards for the treatment of prisoners of war. And if that’s the way things ought to be, why change the rules now during a military action? Why weren’t these rules changed sometime during the last 55 years since they’ve been in effect?

Already, the Bush spin-doctors are weaving their magic. In a Washington Post article evaluating the cover-up machinations now in progress, a May 12th article entitled "Leadership Failure is Blamed in Abuse," staff writers Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks relate, "The Army general who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad said yesterday that he had found no evidence the misconduct was based on orders from high-ranking officers or involved a deliberate policy to stretch legal limits on extracting information from detainees." Notice how there is no actual denial – only that "no evidence was found" that the misconduct was based on improper orders generated from higher-ups. But shouldn’t the question be: Did such orders exist?

The Army officer referred to in the Post article was of course Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who was neither investigating Abu Ghraib nor intelligence methods. His report and investigation concerned military police control of prisons and detention centers, and that did not include Abu Ghraib specifically. Why has this report come up, and why is it now being used as a standard for the Baghdad prison?

Actually, the only viable investigative and independent monitoring authority in this sordid affair is the International Committee of the Red Cross, or the ICRC. This is the independent organization specified in the terms and conditions entered into by the 191 nations that signed the Geneva Convention in August 1949.

In another article on the subject on the same day, and also writing for the Post, R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White come closer in their assessment, offering "The U.S. general who was in charge of running prisons in Iraq told Army investigators earlier this year that she had resisted decisions by superior officers to hand over control of the prisons to military intelligence officials and to authorize the use of lethal force as a first step in keeping order – command decisions that have come in for heavy criticism in the Iraq prison abuse scandal." Now how does that square with the Bush sycophants saying that our prison troops were just clowning around and the Abu scandal is much ado about nothing? These are the Army’s own reports!

The article entitled "General Asserts She Was Overruled on Prison Moves," goes on to state: "Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, head of the 800th Military Police Brigade, spoke of her resistance to the decisions in a detailed account of her tenure furnished to Army investigators. It places two of the highest-ranking Army officers now in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, at the heart of the decision-making on both matters."

Now consider these revelations against what has been offered by the Bush administration as reported by the Post’s Graham and Ricks article: "Instead, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba attributed the scandal to the willful actions of a small group of soldiers and to ‘a failure of leadership’ and supervision by brigade and lower-level commanders. Similarly, the Army's top intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, sought to portray the abuse as the deeds of a handful of military police soldiers, with the peripheral involvement of U.S. military intelligence personnel in Iraq."

See what’s going on? The military police command is accusing the intelligence command, and vice versa. And that’s good --nothing like competition to root out the incompetent and the product failures. It will be interesting to see how the Bush administration solves this dissension in the higher ranks. In all likelihood, the Bush cover-up machinery will figure out the best way to b.s. US and get away with yet another unconscionable crime against the people of America and the United States Constitution.

The Smith and White article provides even more insight on how this POW disgrace came to be: " Karpinski said the decision about transferring control of the prison to military intelligence officials was broached at a September 2003 meeting with Miller, who was then in charge of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known colloquially as ‘Gitmo.’ Miller had come to Iraq at the insistence of top political officials in the Pentagon, who were frustrated by the meager intelligence coming from prisoners. Two weeks ago, he was appointed to reform the U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. Karpinski, the first female general officer to lead U.S. soldiers in combat, was a beleaguered field commander trying to cope with what she and others have described as constantly shifting assignments, poor living conditions and near-daily mortar attacks on Abu Ghraib. Karpinski recalled that Miller told her he wanted to ‘Gitmo-ize’ the prison -- a concept that critics have said opened the door to the use of aggressive interrogation techniques suited to loosening the tongues of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, not Iraqis in a common jail. Miller said through a military spokesman yesterday that he does not recall using the word ‘Gitmo-ize.’"

I think we can all safely assume, that whether Miller used the term or not, that term describes precisely his intent and the Pentagon’s mission for him. In a previous article, I cited only a handful of the Geneva Convention rules violated by this high-ranking Bush bunch that have disgraced America in the eyes of the world. And the idiotic neoconservative ploy to compare our level of compassion in terms of degrees of torture to the brutal and disgusting savagery that was the Nick Berg murder, has absolutely nothing to do with this POW scandal. Those five masked killers do not necessarily represent all Muslims, but the responsible high-ranking generals, the Pentagon and the President of the United States do represent ALL the American people.

http://etherzone.com/2004/lang051304.shtml


"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact." http://www.etherzone.com/

Ted Lang is a columnist for the The Patriotist and the Sierra Times. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone


Me Book

and it can only get WORSE, so SAVE it any lurking neoCONs.

who gave the ORDER i wonder to PULL OUT of Fal­luja :shrug:

my MONEY is on the PRO's winning this 'GAME'

peace

:shrug:

peace

A diverse group to say the least, but all former Army professionals, agree that the civilian leadership is the problem:

They expressed it different ways:

Hackworth says it goes all the way to the top and that the evidence is such as you have laid out above.

Meagues says that the Civilian leadership, Carbone or whatever his name is doesn't even have a clear idea of the facts or what the law is on the Geneva conventions. The civilian leadership is factually wrong and the question is, "why are they factually wrong?" Why don't they listen to their professional military advisors?

McCaffrey says the chain of command is inexplicably all screwed up and there is a reasonable suspicion of whether these legal violations originated at the Secretarial level and that the investigation needs to go as high as it needs to go because it is absurd to believe that these soldiers came up with this conduct on their own. (this is going out on a limb for him)

The Army is circling the wagons in a attempt to get rid of the civilian leadership at the Pentagon.

On edit: we don't even know who Berg's killers are. They could be anybody. The tape is psy-war. Qui bono?

than with the structure that mandates civilian leadership there.

The election of George Bush and Dick Cheney was a watershed for the military corporations. Both had been stalwart supporters of the multibillion dollar military industry; Bush in his home state and Cheney, wherever he could exploit his tenure as defense secretary during the first Iraq war, and build on his past deal-making with the coalition members.

During the 2000 campaign Cheney complained that "developments of new military technologies (had) reached all-time lows." But that would only be a concern to the industry, not to the average American. The U.S. arsenal is full of high-tech weapons that don't work or that they don't use.

This call for a new generation of weapons is intended to facilitate the agendas of Bush administration hawks who would project U.S. influence around the globe like mercenary carpetbaggers; through intimidation from the force of our weaponry; with our soldiers; and through the supplying of ‘commercial’ armies whenever a commitment of our forces is politically difficult, or prohibited by Congress.

Rumsfeld was chosen as defense chief to usher in the next cash cow for the military industry: Space-Based Weaponry. He chaired the Rumsfeld Commission a.k.a.: "Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States"

Wolfowitz was on the board, and Iraq reconstruction's Gen. Jay Garner was there too.

The Bush league plans to scatter our forces around the globe in order to preempt terrorist groups from attacking.

"We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge," President Bush told cadets in June 2002 at a graduation address he gave at the United States Military Academy.

There are many reasons why Bush's strategy of preemption is misguided and wrong. It is a licence to release the aggressor nation from their responsibility to pursue - to the rejection of their last reasonable admonition - a peaceful resolution to any perceived threat.

And, with a deft flex of military and political muscle the presumption of innocence, even in the face of a clear absence of proof, is a conquered victim of the tainted consensus of a cabal of purchased adversaries.

Preemption is a corrosive example for those countries who may feel threatened enough by their neighbors to move to resolve their fears militarily instead of engaging in the long-established enterprise of diplomacy and negotiation.

The appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of State, our nation's top diplomat - the general who's army's killing of Iraqi innocents is rivaled in this century only by the enemy he sought to capture - is a discouraging message for those in the region who had hoped the hunger to divide the region militarily had waned with the end of the first war that he had helped wage.

Generals as diplomats. Ha!

...the issue here is the circumvention of the chain of command by three methods, all involving parallel structures from the top down, two inside the military command structure and two without. And of course I am speaking on a legal basis. Internally, the confusion about who was in command within the Army at Abu Ghraid facilitated a lack of accountability.

Worse than this obvious problem, which is inexcusable in itself, was the civilian interference with the chain of command by the external parallel authority of the CIA and civilian contractors, who are totally unaccountable for their actions, by design.

The proliferation of parallel sources of authority, some of which deliberately outside of UCMJ jurisdiction provided the means and the cover to deliberately violate the Geneva Conventions as a matter of policy and leave uniformed troops holding the bag.

The existence of the peculiar medusa like proliferation of non command agency in a military compound undermining the authority and the chain of command is a characteristic assumed by armed forces of totalitarian states. Just thought I mention that.

The soldiers actions, under command, to hold these Iraqis, is a part of a larger injustice against the sovereign nation. Most of the actions of the soldiers in pursuit of this imperialistic scheme may be accountable, but only within a flawed motive, designed and mandated from the president, through the Pentagon that guided all branches actions in Iraq.

I just assume that there is no redeemable motive at any level of the Pentagon chain. It begins at the top with a pack of aerospace shills and defense industry hacks. All of the actions of the military under their command and direction reflect their industry motivations.

The majority of the command structure bent to the policy of interrogation for these prisoners that clearly was approved of, or concieved at the Pentagon. Cambone was assigned to direct that information to those prosecuting the war for use in their occupation schemes. Some Pentagon planner concieved this and sent it up the chain. It was approved with the same zeal that drives Bush to possess Iraq.

To me, our occupation has lost any rationale or justification that was used to get us into this thing. The last straw was this moral authority, this notion of freeing the Iraqi people, which we forfeited by our disregard for innocent Iraqis in our indiscriminate bombings, shootings by our soldiers in defense or in aggression, search and destroy operations, and other abuses.

No micromanagement can fix that. Obviously, the command structure could bear some scrutiny, But I maintain that a reasonable policy, responsible leadership, and a rational use of these institutions would create the environments that wouldn't foster the exploitation of indigenous people.

I think that some officers as well as troops, primarily in the Army, oppose this administration as best they can, not out of any partisan political motive, but out of a parochial instinct for the survival of institutional traditions (and law) that are meant to preserve the human dignity and reputation of the force and enhance its constitutional role rather than abuse by the political leadership.

This administration is characterized by an attack upon and disruption of many traditions and institutions. This is what the dismantling of society based on law looks like. At some time during the imposition of dictatorship some military institutions begin to balk. This is not to say it will be effective. Only a military defeat would make that more probable.

The heavy contractor/aerospace bias is more prevalent in the other two services. The Army on balance, tends to suffer from rather than benefit from this bias.

Great to read your commentary. Thanks.

years and all the manufactured "scandals" and the 24/7 media "outrage" over nothing, it is absolutely amazing how much outright corruption and criminal coverups this regime has gotten away with. Its like they are pulling EVERYTHING they tried to pin on the Democrats (falsely) and getting away with it. How much you wanna bet the "accountability and openness" in government quickly become important again if the votes are counted in November?