OF PATRIOTS AND PAWNS: Carolyn Baker Reviews Mary Tillman’s “Boots On The Ground By Dusk”

http://carolynbaker.net/

I was taken aback to receive a package from New Almaden, California nearly a month ago. I didn’t know where the town was nor at that time, anyone there. Even more astounding was the discovery that the package contained Mary Tillman’s book “Boots On The Ground By Dusk“, her personal account of her son Pat’s death and its impact on the Tillman family. As I opened the book and read Mary’s inscription and her enclosed card, I was flooded with memories of working closely, in 2006, with Mike Ruppert and Stan Goff as they completed their heroic and herculean investigative report “The Tillman Files” for From The Wilderness.

Not only had I closely followed “The Tillman Files” but many interviews of Mary earlier in the past year, most notably in my opinion, the ones by Emily Wilson of Alternet and last year, Keith Olbermann’s spectacular interview which I had watched on March 28, 2007. Now holding Mary’s book in my hand, I thought there might not be much more to say about it, so I contacted her to see if I might interview her not specifically about the book but about how she’s coping these days and the awarenesses she’s come to.

True to the mother’s loyalty that exudes from every paragraph of her book, Mary Tillman does not want the focus to be on her. She’s tired of being in the media limelight and simply wants the world to know Pat’s story-who he was and how he and his family were betrayed. So after completing Mary’s book, I was drawn to focus on her process of discovering the truth about Pat’s death and the meaning of her discovery for all of us.

Mary Tillman was a school teacher at the time of Pat’s death, and like most working Americans, she was very busy and had little time to research the dark side of the United States government. Nor was she inclined to do so with two sons enlisting in the Army shortly after 9/11. As is the case with many individuals who begin digging deeper, it wasn’t until a tragedy erupted in her life that she embarked on her personal mission to examine the innumerable layers of the system in which she grew up and in which she previously took pride.

Boots On The Ground By Dusk is the saga of Mary’s journey to the truth-an account of the glaring inconsistencies presented to the Tillman family about Pat’s death in tandem with the endless changing of stories and cover-your-ass behavior exhibited by the Army. No intelligent human being could blithely accept such discrepancies, and Mary Tillman is nothing if not intelligent. She has refined the process of researching, questioning, fact-checking, and cross-referencing to an art form. She had to-for her own sanity and to honor her two soldier sons. All of the facts are there in her book, as they are in detail in “The Tillman Files.” A litany of “why” questions occupies Pages 227-229 of the book and reveals Mary’s thought process as she grapples with glaring government contradictions. As I read it I kept mentally shouting, “Keep digging Mary, keep digging!” And so she did.

At one point she has a conversation with Dr. Justin Frank, author of Bush On The Couch, a brilliant psychological analysis of George Bush, Jr.:

“Hello, Dr. Frank. I’m Mary Tillman. I don’t want to waste your time. I’m calling to ask you a question. Do you think it’s possible that this administration orchestrated my son’s death?”

“Sad to say, yes.”

Mary states, “I’m positively stunned by his response. I thought he would gently tell me that he doesn’t believe the administration is very honorable, but it would never do something so heinous as to have a soldier killed.”

“You believe they killed him?” Mary numbly asks.

“I think it’s possible. Mrs. Tillman, I’m a psychiatrist. It would be unethical and irresponsible of me to tell a grieving mother to pursue such a thing if I didn’t think it was possible.”

Mary has come to believe that Pat’s death was orchestrated as a public relations strategy to gain support for the Iraq War in 2004 around the time of the Fallujah carnage and as the war was becoming increasingly unpopular in the United States. Shortly after Pat had enlisted, he received a letter from Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, thanking him for enlisting and leaving the NFL to serve his country. Moreover, Mary cites a memo from Rumsfeld, to then-Secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, “indicating that Pat was a very special young man. The language Rumsfeld used was that Pat was ‘world class’ and that they should keep an eye on him.” Mary states, “I’m not sure what that meant, but writing something like that, writing a letter to Pat, obviously he’s going to be concerned when he’s killed. He’s going to want to know what happ ened.” Thus Rumsfeld’s denial of a coverup of Pat’s death is, to say the least, extremely suspicious.

Dazzling headlines like “Football superstar makes the supreme sacrifice for his country” could only bolster the Pentagon’s cause. Might it not make the war more palatable? Might it not inspire more young people to enlist?

At the time of her conversation with Justin Frank, Mary’s focus is entirely on the death of her son, but not being Mary and not having lost a son to a government public relations campaign myself, I’m well aware that as heinous as it is to “have a soldier killed”, it is even more heinous to have 3,000 people killed on September 11, 2001, and that is exactly what happened, a New Pearl Harbor, that motivated Pat Tillman, his brother, and thousands more men and women to commit themselves to military service to “defend” their country. &qu ot;I’m saddened,” Mary says, “by how the government has betrayed not only Pat, but also the American public.” (328)

As is always the case when people begin digging more deeply for the truth, Mary discovered an epidemic of anomalies among other military families who related their stories to her-stories of lies, coverups, and ghastly betrayal. Standing beside the Tillman family was Stan Goff, co-author of “The Tillman Files”, not merely motivated by the desire to complete his investigative report, but by his own history as a Vietnam warrior and long-time outspoken critic of American imperialism. Stan, whose son is serving in Iraq, has worked tirelessly to support other military families and resist the war machine. The Tillman family desperately needed the support they got from Stan and many others because as Mary writes, “It’s consuming and emotionally draining but very revealing. It takes weeks. There are days I become very angry that my family and I have to do this, just to get the truth that should have been forthcoming from the moment Pat died.” (307)

Earlier this month (July 15), the Associated Press released “Probe Of Tillman Misinformation Goes Nowhere” which stated that “A ‘striking lack of recollection’ by White House and military officials has prevented congressional investigators from determining who was responsible for misinformation spread after the friendly-fire death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman in 2004, a House committee said Monday.” In her book, Mary Tillman recounts in detail Congressman Henry Waxman’s probe of Pat’s death, but this most recent AP story relates that “The panel has failed….It received a flurry of White House e-mails but no documents about friendly fire. It interviewed several top White House officials: ‘Not a single one could recall when he learned about the fratricide or what he did in response’.”

The silence remains unbroken.

Mary Tillman isn’t following the sales of her book on a regular basis. That isn’t why she wrote it. She simply wanted to get her message out into the world-the message of a grief-stricken mother whose pain and rage drove her to relentlessly pursue the truth about her son’s death. Most reviews of the book have been positive. That the New York Times review of Boots On The Ground called it “clumsily written” reveals nothing in my opinion but the reviewer’s inability to grapple with the deeply disturbing realities Mary Tillman and “The Tillman Files” have uncovered.

Boots On The Ground By Dusk and the investigative reporting of Stan Goff and Mike Ruppert are the only in-depth accounts we are likely to have for a very long time, if ever, regarding the murder of Pat Tillman which was one of myriad tragic facets of the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both Mike and Stan in their individual writings have comprehensively documented the motivation behind these wars and the reality that both of them will be prolonged, pointless projects that will grind on for many years. Stan has written extensively about the use of asymmetric warfare by insurgents against traditional military giants like the United States, and Mike’s exhaustive research regarding Peak Oil and 9/11 at From The Wilderness h ave illuminated the devious and demented political and economic system that has killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of human beings in the Middle East since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Unflinchingly, Mary, Mike, and Stan have revealed to the world a war machine without conscience that has devastated individuals, cultures, nations, and land with no regard for anything except the profits of war and America’s insatiable thirst for oil. After reading their exposés, the mind reels with imagining how many more lies have been told to military families about the deaths of their sons and daughters. It is axiomatic that empires, without exception, decline and fall, and it is equally true that as they do so, courageous individuals who refuse to be pawned or conned come forth to expose the empire’s nakedness. Mary Tillman has proven that one need not be a professional journalist or a decorated warrior in order to do so but merely a mother who will settle for nothing less than total transparency about the death of her son.

It is precisely the lack of conscience, mentioned above, which makes incidents like the Tillman murder and coverup not only possible but routine. Truth To Power has published numerous stories and articles on political ponerology, that is, rule by sociopathic individuals who possess no moral compass. It is worse than naïve to believe they can or will change. Moreover, we tragically delude ourselves if we believe that mainstream political candidates, purchased and promoted by corporations as the preferred “brand”, can or will divest themselves from the sociopathic power milieu. The fate of America as empire was sealed when it became impossible for a common person of conscience to be elected president. That means that this empire cannot be “treated”, “cleansed,” “turned around”, “reformed”, or even “improved.” It has already careened off the precipice. Where it will land, I know not. My work and yours, if you care about yourself, your loved ones, your land, your descendants is to prepare for where the long–or short, descent is taking us. In the meantime, the world is waiting for many more Mary Tillmans.

THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS CAN’T TAKE MUCH MORE PUNISHMENT

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com via Alternet.

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I’d hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we’d sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother’s dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I’d like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building… we are certainly a country in distress.
— Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders

The Republican and Democratic conventions are just around the corner, which means that we’re at a critical time in our nation’s history. For this is the moment when the country’s political and media consensus finally settles on the line of bullshit it will be selling to the public as the “national debate” come fall.

If you pay close attention you can actually see the trial balloons whooshing overhead. There have been numerous articles of late of the Whither the Debate? genus in the country’s major dailes and news mags, pieces like Patrick Healy’s “Target: Barack Obama. Strategy: What Day is it?” in the New York Times. They ostensibly wonder aloud about what respective “plans of attack” Barack Obama and John McCain will choose to pursue against one another in the fall.

In these pieces we already see the candidates trying on, like shoes, the various storylines we might soon have hammered into our heads like wartime slogans. Most hilarious from my viewpoint is the increasingly real possibility that the Republicans will eventually decide that their best shot against Obama is to pull out the old “He’s a flip-flopper” strategy — which would be pathetic, given that this was the same tired tactic they used against John Kerry four years ago, were it not for the damning fact that it might actually work again. (I’m actually not sure sometimes what is more repulsive: the bosh they trot out as campaign “issues,” or the enthusiasm with which the public buys it.)

Naturally we’ll also see the “Patriotism Gap” storyline whipped out and reused over and over again. There will also be much talk emanating from the McCain camp about “experience,” although this line of attack will not be nearly as fruitful for him as it was for Hillary Clinton, mainly because the word “experience” in McCain’s case also has a habit of reminding voters that the Arizona senator is, well, wicked old.

The Obama camp, playing with a big halftime lead as the cliché goes, is going to play this one close to the vest, sticking to a strategy of using larger and larger fonts every week for their “CHANGE” placards, and getting the candidates’ various aides and spokesgoons to use the term “McCain-Bush policies” as many times as possible on political talk shows. Obama will also use this pre-convention period to do what every general election candidate does after a tough primary-season fight, i.e. ditch all the positions he took en route to securing the nomination and replace them with opinions subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) reconfigured to fit the latest polling information coming out of certain key swing states. Both sides as well as the pundit class will describe this early positioning for combat over swing-state electoral votes as a “race for the center” (AP, July 3: “Candidates Courting the Center”), as if the “political center” in America were a place where huge chunks of the population tirelessly obsessed over semi-relevant media-driven wedge issues like stem-cell research and gay marriage, even as they lacked money to buy food and make rent every month.

The press, meanwhile, is clearly flailing around for a sensational hook to use in selling the election, as the once-brightly-burning star of blue-red hatred seems unfortunately to have dimmed a little — just in time, perhaps, to torpedo the general election season cable ratings. They are working hard to come up with the WWF-style shorthand labels they always use to sell electoral contests: if 2000 was the “wooden” and – condescending – Al Gore versus the “dummy” Bush, and 2004 featured that same ‘regular guy’ Bush against the “patrician” and “bookish” John Kerry (who also “looked French”), in 2008 we’re going to be sold the “maverick” McCain against the “smooth” Obama, or some dumb thing along those lines. Time has even experimented with a “poker versus craps” storyline, feeding off the incidental fact that Obama is a regular poker player while McCain reportedly favors craps, which apparently has some electorally relevant meaning — and if you know what that something is, please let me know.

We’re also going to be fed truckloads of onerous horseshit about the candidate wives. The Michelle Obama content is going to go something like this: the Fox/Limbaugh crowd will first plaster her with Buckwheatesque caricatures (the National Review cover was hilariously over-the-top in that respect) and racially loaded epithets like “baby Mama” (that via Fox News spokeswhore Michelle Malkin, God bless her) and “angry black woman” (via self-aggrandizing, cop-mustached Chicago-based prune Cal Thomas). Next, the so-called “mainstream” press, the “respectable” press, which of course is above such behavior, will amplify those attacks 10 million-fold via endless waves of secondary features soberly pondering the question of whether or not Michelle Obama is a “political liability” — because of stuff like the Thomas column, and Malkin’s quip and the endless rumors about a mysterious “whitey” video. Cindy McCain, meanwhile, will generally be described as a political asset, as the pundit class tends to applaud mute, stoned-looking candidate wives who have soldiered on bravely while being martyred by rumors of their mostly absent husband’s infidelities. It will help on the martyrdom front that McCain launched his political career with her family money and drove her into an actual, confirmable chemical dependency. As long as she keeps gamely wobbling onstage and trying to smile into the camera, she’s going to get straight As from the political press, guaranteed.

Some combination of all of these things is going to comprise the so-called “national debate” this fall. Now, we live in an age where our media deceptions are so far-reaching and comprehensive that they almost smother reality, at times seeming actually to replace reality — but even in the context of the inane TV-driven fantasyland we’ve grown used to inhabiting, this year’s crude cobbling together of a phony “national conversation” by our political press is an outrageous, monstrously offensive deception. For if, as now seems likely, this fall’s election is ultimately turned into a Swan-esque reality show where America is asked to decide if it can tolerate Michelle Obama’s face longer than John McCain’s diapers, it will be at the expense of an urgent dialogue about a serious nationwide emergency that any sane country would have started having some time ago. And unless you run a TV network or live in Washington, you probably already know what that emergency is.

A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had recently made to solicit information about his constituents’ economic problems. He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to “tell me what was going on in their lives economically.” He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning service:

My 90-year-old father in Connecticut has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to add to the extra gas I’ll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago and I don’t have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first time in many years. They are due tomorrow.

This single mother buys clothes from thrift stores and unsuccessfully tried to sell her house to pay for her son’s schooling:

I don’t go to church many Sundays, because the gasoline is too expensive to drive there. Every thought of an activity is dependent on the cost.

Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating “cereal and toast” for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.

“The middle class is disappearing,” says Sanders. “In real ways we’re becoming more like a third-world country.”

Here’s the thing: nobody needs me or Bernie Sanders to tell them that it sucks out there and that times are tougher economically in this country than perhaps they’ve been for quite a long time. We’ve all seen the stats — median income has declined by almost $2,500 over the past seven years, we have a zero personal savings rate in America for the first time since the Great Depression, and 5 million people have slipped below the poverty level since the beginning of the decade. And stats aside, most everyone out there knows what the deal is. If you’re reading this and you had to drive to work today or pay a credit card bill in the last few weeks you know better than I do for sure how fucked up things have gotten. I hear talk from people out on the campaign trail about mortgages and bankruptcies and bill collectors that are enough to make your ass clench with 100 percent pure panic.

None of this is a secret. Here, however, is something that is a secret: that this is a class issue that is being intentionally downplayed by a political/media consensus bent on selling the public a version of reality where class resentments, or class distinctions even, do not exist. Our “national debate” is always a thing where we do not talk about things like haves and have-nots, rich and poor, employers versus employees. But we increasingly live in a society where all the political action is happening on one side of the line separating all those groups, to the detriment of the people on the other side.

We have a government that is spending two and a half billion dollars a day in Iraq, essentially subsidizing new swimming pools for the contracting class in northern Virginia, at a time when heating oil and personal transportation are about to join health insurance on the list of middle-class luxuries. Home heating and car ownership are slipping away from the middle class thanks to exploding energy prices — the hidden cost of the national borrowing policy we call dependency on foreign oil, “foreign” representing those nations, Arab and Chinese, that lend us the money to pay for our wars.

And while we’ve all heard stories about how much waste and inefficiency there is in our military spending, this is always portrayed as either “corruption” or simple inefficiency, and not what it really is — a profound expression of our national priorities, a means of taking money from ordinary, struggling people and redistributing it not downward but upward, to connected insiders, who turn your tax money into pure profit.

You want an example? Sanders has a great one for you. The Senator claims that he has been trying for years to increase funding for the Federally Qualified Health Care (FQHC) program, which finances community health centers across the country that give primary health care access to about 16 million Americans a year. He’s seeking an additional $798 million for the program this year, which would bring the total appropriation to $2.9 billion, or about what we spend every two days in Iraq.

“But for five billion a year,” Sanders insists, “we could provide basic primary health care for every American. That’s how much it would cost, five billion.”

As it is, though, Sanders has struggled to get any additional funding. He managed to get $250 million added to the program in last year’s Labor, Health and Human Services bill, but Bush vetoed the legislation, “and we ended up getting a lot less.”

Okay, now, hold that thought. While we’re unable to find $5 billion for this simple program, and Sanders had to fight and claw to get even $250 million that was eventually slashed, here’s something else that’s going on. According to a recent report by the GAO, the Department of Defense has already “marked for disposal” hundreds of millions of dollars worth of spare parts — and not old spare parts, but new ones that are still on order! In fact, the GAO report claims that over half of the spare parts currently on order for the Air Force — some $235 million worth, or about the same amount Sanders unsuccessfully tried to get for the community health care program last year — are already marked for disposal! Our government is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Defense Department crap just to throw it away!

“They’re planning on throwing this stuff away and it hasn’t even come in yet,” says Sanders.

According to the report, we’re spending over $30 million a year, and employing over 1,400 people, just to warehouse all the defense equipment we don’t need. For instance — we already have thousands of unneeded aircraft blades, but 7,460 on the way, at a cost of $2 million, which will join those already earmarked for the waste pile.

This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about John McCain claiming that he’s going to “look at entitlement program” waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into the debate about the “death tax.” We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis… well, shit, what can I say? That’s what’s happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting “entitlement” programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions — this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we’re not going to have that conversation, because we’re going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama’s voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.

Bernie Sanders is one of the few politicians out there smart enough and secure enough to understand that the future of American politics is necessarily going to involve some pretty frank and contentious confrontations. The phony blue-red divide, which has been buoyed for years by some largely incidental geographical disagreements over religion and other social issues, is going to give way eventually to a real debate grounded in a brutal economic reality increasingly common to all states, red and blue.

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers — that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence — immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

The Republicans wanted to take Social Security, the signature policy underpinning of the middle class, and put it into private accounts — which is a fancy way of saying that they wanted to take a huge bundle of American taxpayer cash and invest it in the very companies, the IBMs and Boeings and GMs and so on, that are exporting our jobs abroad. They want the American middle class to finance its very own impoverishment! The Democrats say no, let’s keep Social Security more or less as is, and let that impoverishment happen organically.

Now we have a new set of dire problems in the areas of home ownership and exploding energy prices. In both of these matters the basic dynamic is transnational companies raiding the cash savings of the middle class. Because those same companies finance the campaigns of our politicians, we won’t hear much talk about getting private industry to help foot the bill to pay for these crises, or forcing the energy companies to cut into their obscene profits for the public good. We will, however, hear talk about taxpayer-subsidized bailouts and various irrelevancies like McCain’s gas tax holiday (an amusing solution — eliminate taxes collected by government in order to pay for taxes collected by energy companies). Ultimately, however, you can bet that when the middle class finally falls all the way down, and this recession becomes something even worse, necessity will force our civil government — if anything remains of it by then — to press for the only real solution.

“Corporate America is going to have to reinvest in our society,” says Sanders. “It’s that simple.”

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

Air force sought anti-terror funds so generals could fly in comfort

Must be nice! I’ll bet it makes the enlisted glad they’re fighting in this comfort-less war.

Source: Agence France Presse.

The US Air Force has sought millions of dollars in “war on terror” funds for “comfort capsules” so that the military brass can fly first class to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, a spokeswoman confirmed Friday.

The capsules, which are loaded into the bay of a military transport plane, come with a sofa, work space, two leather seats, a flat-screen TV, ports for a satellite phone and a separate module with two bunk beds and closets, the air force spokeswoman said.

Air force generals added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the costs with upgrades to leather, carpet and wood choices, according to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a non-profit watchdog group that obtained internal emails about the program.

One email alluded to concerns of General Robert MacMahon, an air force deputy chief of staff, that the capsules be designed for the highest standards of luxury travel, POGO said.

“General MacMahon’s concern is so significant that we need assurance by the end of the week from AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory) that the SLICC will be ‘World class’ inside,” the e-mail is quoted as saying.

“While we know the requirements document says ‘business class’, we all know there are levels of that,” it said.

The first of the capsules is already in production at a cost of 2.7 million dollars, and is scheduled for delivery in five months, said air force spokeswoman Vicky Stein.

Stein said the new capsules were needed to keep pace with a growing demand for VIP travel to war zones.

“There are growing demands for senior leader transportation across the globe, especially into Iraq, Afghanistan and other theaters,” she said.

“The diverts were aimed at responding as quickly as possible to growing requirements.”

Although the capsule came out of the US Air Force base budget, the service asked to use funds dedicated for the war on terrorism to fund the purchase of two more at 1.9 million dollars each. The request was denied, said Stein.

“We started with the idea of getting 10 capsules but we scaled it down to three, based on what it looked like we needed at the time,” she said. “We’re looking for other funding for the two.”

The air force also has acquired four pallets with four first class seats each as part of the effort to give VIPs comfortable seating on their way to war zones.

The air force calls them “the slick and the slip,” taken from acronyms for their official names: the senior leader conference capsule and the senior leader in-transit pallet.

The Washington Post, which first reported on the “comfort capsules,” as they were originally called by the air force, said at least four generals were involved in design decisions.

A request that the color of the leather seats be changed from brown to air force blue, and that seat pockets be added alone cost more than 68,000 dollars, the Post said.

It said the air force decided last year to take 331,000 dollars from war on terror funds to pay for a cost overrun resulting in part from the changes.

In a letter to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, POGO called it “an egregious failure of leadership … that involves breathtaking extravagance when every dollar needs to be wisely spent in a time of war.”

Ron Paul: Getting Out of Iraq

Source.

What will it take to get our troops out of Iraq? The roughly 70 percent of Americans who are firmly against the war often ask this question. Those in power are reluctant to give conditions, but when they do and those conditions are met, the goal post is quietly moved.

Voters were promised, passionately and vehemently, that the new Congress would bring our troops home. Many were explicitly elected in 2006 under that banner. But our troops are still overseas, funding has been increased even beyond the administration’s wish list, and troop withdrawal has been negotiated away.

When things are going badly in Iraq, they say we must stay until the situation improves. When things improve, they tell us we must stay because our gains cannot be jeopardized.

We are told that we must establish a functioning democracy there, and train Iraqi armed forces so they can keep order in our absence. Iraq now has a Constitution, an elected parliament, and hundreds of thousands of security forces. The problem now is that their troops are supposedly not trained quite well enough, and that could take many more years. Defining an adequate training level for Iraqi troops is highly nebulous and its anyone’s guess when or how that criteria could be satisfied.

The latest outrage came last week. For years we heard the administration claim over and over that the Iraqi government wants us there, and is begging us to stay. On the other hand, all they had to do was ask and we would respect their wishes and leave. That also has now happened. Al-Maliki perhaps took his cue from his challenger, al-Sadr, who has been clamouring for us to leave for years. Popular opinion in Iraq now mirrors that in the United States, with about 70 percent of Iraqis wishing us to leave.

At the end of the year, our Status of Forces Agreement expires. Without a new agreement and understanding with the Iraqi government regarding our presence there, we officially become occupiers.

Eventually our troops will leave Iraq. The overwhelming will of the people, in both countries, can’t seem to get them out. Things going well can’t get them out. Things going badly can’t get them out. Iraqis telling us to leave can’t get them out. Perhaps not even the UN can get them out. My hope is that it does not take the complete collapse of our financial system, but if we don’t leave under any other circumstances, economic chaos is inevitable, and will make it impossible to fund the war, even through debt and inflation.

We have been financing this war through inflation, and attempting to paper over reality with misleading economic indicators. The government has changed the methodology of calculating things like CPI and GDP to hide the bad news. They won’t even publish M3, the total money supply statistic anymore. But reality is hitting the American people at gas pumps and grocery stores, sending more Americans into foreclosure and unemployment lines. More are hurting while Washington keeps forgetting its promises. Eventually, this will all come to a head.

Perhaps an even greater fear is that even if our financial trouble doesn’t get our troops out of Iraq, moving them over to fight a new war in Iran, will. Washington should be crystal clear on this very important point – just getting the troops out of Iraq means nothing. Bringing them HOME means everything, and that is what the people in both countries demand.

Surprise! White House Guilty of Hiding Casualties from Public

The Bush Crime Syndicate has done a brilliant job keeping the human costs of the Iraq War from the public. They’re hoping that “out of sight” is “out of mind,” and it’s worked. No one really cares that our soldiers are being used and thrown away like Kleenex, as long as there’s no draft and the average Joe can watch the boob tube sanitized of the war’s brutality.

Source: Your Three Cents and the Washington Post.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is guilty of hiding the returning war dead from view. Gina Gray, the public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery, discovered that cemetery officials were attempting to limit the media’s coverage of funerals of soldiers who have died in Iraq and she spoke out after she was enraged by the Army’s regulations and limitations.

The Washington Post reports that six weeks after they reported her story she was demoted and finally fired. After 10 days on the job, she was handling media coverage of Marine Colonel Thurman Higginbothom who had been killed in Iraq when the media was moved 50 yards away from the service making the service inaudible and photographs obstructed. Gray pushed for more coverage but was turned down by cemetery officials.

This is different from the policies enacted in 2005 when reporters were allowed to hear the prayers and eulogies and even film the handling of the folded flag. The access had gradually eroded and the officials who had brought attention to the matter had been fired for exposing the truth. She complained to the superintendent and was temporarily removed from her duties, along with four other directors before her. Arlington National Cemetery terminated her stating that Gray “failed to act in an appropriate manner.”

Crimes of the Century: Occupation and Contaminating Iraq with Depleted Uranium

Source: Dr. Souad N. Al‐Azzawi ‐ Associate Professor in Environmental Engineering, Iraq, Brussels Tribunal.

After thirteen years of the devastation of an entire country through the implementation of the criminal economic sanctions that were imposed by the United States of America and the United Nations on Iraq, the US administration decided to invade Iraq.

Gulf War I and the destruction of Iraq’s economy, education, health care system, and society through the continuous bombing and attacks of the illegal No Fly Zones, were all part of the plan to invade Iraq and take over one of the richest oil reserve countries in the Middle East region. Pirating Iraq’s wealth is an advanced step to control and manipulate global economy.

New generations of conventional and banned weapons were used in the invasion of Iraq military operations from March 19th – April 9th of 2003. Table 1 shows some of the weapons that were used during the invasion and then, the continuous occupation of Iraq

Other illegal weapons are cluster bombs & munitions, Napalm bombs, white phosphor and Depleted Uranium weapons.

1.1 The invasion of Iraq

Military operations have resulted in the following environmental damages:

1. Nitrogen, Sulfur, Carbon oxides from explosions of conventional bombs and weapons.

2. Soot and Hydrocarbon plumes from burning thousands of barrels of oil from oil wells and pits surrounding Baghdad and other cities. Smoke and soot from burning crude petroleum generates toxic and carcinogenic [6] substances like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAH’s, dioxins, furan, Mercury and Sulfur. Black soot plumes covered Baghdad and other cities for more than weeks during the invasion operations.

3. Thermal heat and pollution as a result of using Napalm and other heat generating weapons.

4. Noise pollution from the “Shock and Awe” attack on the civilian population of the major Iraqi cities where noise intensity exceeded 130db, close to the threshold of pain to human beings.

5. Increase of total suspended solids (TSP) in the air due to the invading forces’ heavy artilleries traffic & deep earth bombardment using Bunker Buster bombs and other earth penetrating missiles. Modeling dust storms during Gulf War 1, 1991 indicated an increase of the frequency of dust storms events from 10% of the days annually to 18% due to huge soil disturbance between Kuwait and Iraq [7].

6. Electromagnetic pollution from the use of laser guided missiles, radars and advanced electronic devises. Increase of electromagnetic energy in the atmosphere cause the ionization of the atmosphere. Ionization of atmosphere generates free oxygen radicals. Formation of these radicals can cause serious related diseases like anxiety, depression, and pregnancy problems. Higher rates of cardiovascular disease and Cancer were diagnosed in areas of early radar systems [8].

7. Ionized radiation from the use of Depleted Uranium weapons in highly populated areas like Baghdad, Smawa, Basra , and other cities as will be explained next section [9] [10].

8. Surface and ground water pollution as a result of:

a. Fuel and toxic chemicals under storage tanks rupture as a result of bombing and explosions, looting of industrial complexes, and Iraqi military camps and bases.

b. Sewage water accumulation as a result of sewer network destruction. Sewage water percolated to shallow ground water then to nearby water courses.

c. Polluted rain storms and runoff as a result of dissolution of previously mentioned air pollutants.

d. Pathogen water pollution like cholera, typhoid, infectious habitats and malaria from all the sewage and polluted runoff inflow to rivers.

9. Land and soil degradation as a result of explosions and heavy artilleries traffic and sewage flooding of huge area’s of Baghdad and other major cities in addition to the accumulation of garbage.

10. Contamination of Al-Tuwaitha (Iraqi Atomic Commission complex) where about 600 Tons of natural Uranium and Cobalt 60 containers were looted after spilling this radioactive waste on the ground of the complex and surrounding area’s. Green peace radioactivity measurements of Tuwaitha village reached (1300-10,000) times natural background [10].

11. Radiological contamination of parts of Al-Jazeera high land of Mosul Uranium Extraction site. The looters took highly contaminated Uranium extraction instruments and destroyed the radioactive waste ponds causing serious ground water contamination in the area [11].

2.0 Status of the Environment and Human Population under US Occupation (2003 – to date)

After announcing the end of the Iraq’s invasion military operations on May 1st, 2003, the occupation of Iraq by the United States of America became a reality. The international community was stunned by the cruelty of the event, and by the emergence of a modern day colonial era.

The occupation forces allowed, and in cases supervised, the destruction and looting of National Museums, civil service centers, governmental ministries, food ration storages, industrial complexes, mines, etc. as part of the invasion operation to create a state of chaos that allowed the invading forces to rearrange the situation in Iraq as if it were one of their video games.

Paul Bremer, the Bush administrations assigned Civil Governor dissolved the Iraqi Armed Forces and security forces in Iraq, allowing the country to spiral into violence and blood, as was planned by the Occupying forces.

The occupation-assigned government was selected to satisfy implementing the Washington DC pre-written new Iraqi constitution, to change the demographic structure of Iraq in order to take over its oil wealth.

Iraq’s population is mainly composed of 80-85% Arabs and 15-20% Kurds [12]. In order to pull Iraq away from its surrounding Arabic environment, the occupier’s constitution officially divided Arabs in Iraq into Shiia and Sunni sects, a division based on sect/religion- something the American constitution itself forbids to discriminate upon in America. The main reason behind this was to rely on and award the Kurdish and Iranian-descendent Shiia (non-Arab) to help the United States invading and conquering the country.

The American media kept repeating statements like ‘Sunni Arabs’ to create a misleading image and idea that the Arabs are not a majority, but only a minority in Iraq. If we take into consideration the constitutional religious and sectarian differences alone, the Sunnis (being Arabs and Kurds) would also constitute the majority in the country, the Kurds being 98% Sunni Muslims.

The occupation decided to adopt a (sectarian-ethnic) basis in the constitution to divide the country into three major parts (Northern Kurdistan region, Southern Shiia region and a Middle Sunni Region).

Changing the national identity of a country is not as easy as it seems. The USA and its local allies (Kurds and Iranian) have to commit a genocide against the Arab population (first the Sunni then the Shiia) to properly change the demography and nationality of Iraq as it has been planned in the Greater Middle East Project.

A few weeks after announcing the end of Iraq’s military invasion operations, Iraqi resistance of the occupation had already begun. The military resistance in Iraq is mainly comprised of anti-occupation civilians and some of the 600,000 unemployed former personnel of the Iraqi army and security forces, which were dissolved (personnel still fully equipped with their weapons).

These Iraqi forces knew of locations of weapons ammunition stock piles that were distributed all over the country, pre-planned to be used in a Guerilla type Warfare in the case of occupation.

The American Administration not anticipating the ferocity of the resistance, decided to use what they call the previously prepared ‘Terrorism and Al-Qaeda doctrine’ to describe all types of occupation resistance in Iraq. According to which, they brutally attack and kill civilians, destroy villages, cities and any place that assists and/or sympathizes with the occupation resistance.

The resistance kept accelerating the number and impact of their operations, the Occupation Army started losing control of the situation.

In June 2004, the UN amended resolution 1546 to form an Iraqi government under occupation and promised to end the occupation during 2005 [14]. In reality intellectuals in Iraq know this is one way to dismiss the Occupying Forces from their responsibilities towards the occupied country according to international humanitarian law.

It is also an efficient way to get new Iraqi National Guard and security forces assembled with Kurdish Peshmerga, the pro-Iranian Shiia militia’s, and involve them in taking responsibility for the sectarian blood bath that has been taking over the country, all in favor of implementing the new constitution that will ultimately disintegrate Iraq into three separate regions [15].

With the help of thousands of Foreign Security Contractors (e.g. Black water) [16] and local death squads tens of thousands of innocent people were killed [17]. Torture and illegal imprisonment of citizens, besieging and blockading of entire cities and centers were spreading maniacally throughout the country (with the exception of Kurdistan area). Serious violations of humanitarian law have been committed by the US administration and military authorities that can be considered as war crimes [18].

More than 1.1 million were killed or died since the beginning of the military operations in 2003 [19] [20]. This is not necessarily in armed conflicts, but in a massive killing plan achieved through the following:

1. Intentional killing and forced migration of medical doctors and health care personnel [21]. It is estimated that more than 40% of hospitals health care personnel fled or got killed during occupation and governmental forces attacks on hospitals. Without healthcare, more people died including children, women and the elderly.

2. Taking over hospitals and health care centers by assigning snipers to nearby rooftops in order to murder any patient in need of immediate medical care, as was the case in the battle of Falluja and Haditha and many other incidents [22].

3. Direct killing of patients inside hospitals in what appears to be occupational encouraged sectarian driven violence.

4. Cutting all kinds of medicine and life supporting systems and aids when attacking cities and villages refuse the existence of occupation forces in their areas. The occupation and governmental forces attacked Fallujah’s medical infrastructure as they did in, Diyala, Haditha, Al-Qaim, Tal A’afar, Ramadi, Al-Sadre, Basrah and Samara cities to name few.

5. Denying conflict area resident’s potable water, acquiring food [233] and sanitation services to force them to live amongst their own waste for months at end. A method similar to using biological pathogens warfare in civilian areas to get rid of as much people in those areas as possible. In Baghdad alone areas like Khadra’a, Amyria and Aadhamia to name a few, have gone through this dilemma.

6. Attacking religious centers, and places of worship (Mosques and Chapels) and mass killing of the worshippers inside, not to mention violations of their basic human rights to practice their beliefs.

7. Intentional assassination of Academics, engineers, civil service personnel, journalists, and International Organizations staff [24].

Forcing professionals to flee the country caused the Iraqi government to depend on foreign companies like Halliburton and Bechtel to rebuild the country, companies who have been robbing the country blind for the past five years with no reconstruction.

About 4.5 million forcefully displaced Iraqis fled their country or homes and cities, 2.5 million of them are internally displaced inside Iraq [25]. Another 1.5 million In Syria and 0.5 in Jordan

8. Excessive use of power and illegal weapons by the occupation and government forces on civilians in attacked cities. Collective punishments of women, children, and elders have added more victims in areas of conflicts [27]. Mass Killing of civilians in Falluja, Haditha, Mahmoudia, Ishaky Diyala, Ba’aquba, Al-Qaiem, Arab Juboor and other areas are all considered as grave breaches of International Humanitarian Law and war crimes.[18 ]

9. Starvation and war induced poverty includes more than 50% of the Iraqi population[28] whom live in an oil rich country with approximately 70% of the youth unemployed who have to survive in a crushed economy plagued with inflation.

10. Mass killing have resulted in the great suffering of about three million widows and Four and a half million orphans [28] without financial support, most of which dropped out of school abandoned their education in order to feed their families [29].

Hardship that resulted from the lack of non-electrical power service. In Baghdad, most areas get 2 hrs/day of electricity [30] [31]. Serious consequences resulted from this problem such as the inability to operate medical services, pumping stations of potable water and sewage collection and delivery to treatment stations. Also the inefficiency of fully operating sewage treatment plants caused huge pathogenic pollution in two major Iraqi rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. Figure 2 shows the failure in drinking water bacteriological tests in each governorate as of 2004 [32]. With lack of medical services thousands of children and other Iraqi citizens died from the failure of Sanitation even in the capitol of Iraq, Baghdad [33].

Total failure in controlling environmental quality parameters all over Iraq. Concentrations of air and water pollutants are permanently higher than International Standard. Figures 3, 4 and 5 Show some of these environmental quality measurements [32].

Bulldozing hundreds of acres of green date palms, orange and lemon trees in central and eastern areas of Baghdad as a collective punishment for farmers whom refuse to supply the occupation forces with information about the resistance fighters [34]. Deforesting these areas cause total damage to all related ecological settings and species in these areas, and increased desertification in an already semi arid country like Iraq.

As we can see, major breeches to the Geneva Conventions I, III, and IV of 1949 have been committed by the occupational authorities and forces. War crimes such as willful killing, torture or inhumane treatment, unlawful detention, deportation or transfer of civilians, unlawful transfer of POW’s; denying civilians or POW’s of fair trial rights; hostage taking, and wanton destruction and appropriation of property [18] were all committed by the occupation and its assigned government. If we add other more than million death casualties as a result of USA imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq from 1991-2003, it is very clear that a planned Genocide have been committed against the Iraqi people [35].

Read the full text with diagrams and data tables here (pdf)

This is how the U.S. supports its troops: Judge rules court won’t step in to aid vets

Source: Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle. Commenting by Signs of the Times.

California – The federal government is subjecting veterans to long delays in obtaining mental health care and medical benefits, but the power to change the system rests with officials and Congress, not the courts, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday in dismissing a lawsuit by veterans’ advocates.

U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti said veterans’ groups had failed to show a “systemwide crisis” in mental health care that would justify the courts intervening in the workings of the Department of Veterans Affairs. And he said courts lack authority to order the sweeping changes the plaintiffs seek, such as forcing the VA to make quick decisions on whether veterans are eligible for care and ordering the agency to promptly improve suicide prevention programs and mental health care.

Conti conceded that evidence presented during a two-week nonjury trial in April showed that veterans had high rates of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, and that in some cases were being forced to endure long waits for medical referrals and care.

The VA is understaffed and takes an average of nearly 4 1/2 years to hear veterans’ appeals of benefit denials, and a long-range improvement plan the agency adopted four years ago is still mostly in the pilot stages, the judge said.

But Conti said, “The remedies sought by plaintiffs are beyond the power of this court and would call for a complete overhaul of the VA system.

Comment: It would seem that if the VA is understaffed and takes an average of nearly 4-1/2 years to hear veterans’ appeals of benefit denials. And that there are high rates of veteran suicide and PTSD, that the VA system should be overhauled.

“Congress has specifically precluded district courts from reviewing veterans’ benefits decisions and has entrusted decisions regarding veterans’ medical care to the discretion of the VA secretary,” the judge, a World War II veteran who was appointed to the bench by President Richard Nixon, said in his 82-page ruling.

Lawyers for the veterans said they would appeal.

“If the judge is correct, the VA can do whatever it wants, and all the rights (of veterans) are unenforceable,” said attorney Gordon Erspamer. “That just can’t be the law. There’s got to be a remedy somewhere for the poor slobs who are fighting for our country.”

Comment: “Poor slobs” – nice. And that’s from the veterans’ attorney. Kind of makes you wonder….

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, one of the plaintiff organizations, chose to look on the bright side. Conti “confirmed many of our allegations” and issued “a huge alarm bell for Congress and the VA to take action now,” said Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran.

VA spokesman Phil Budahn said the agency was pleased with the ruling.

The suit was filed last year by Sullivan’s organization, which is based in Washington, and a second group in Santa Barbara, Veterans United for Truth. They accused the VA of making mental health care virtually unavailable to thousands of discharged soldiers through perfunctory exams, delays in referrals and treatment, and a prolonged and complex system of awarding medical benefits.

They cited internal department e-mails, released in response to the suit, that reported 18 suicides a day among all veterans and 1,000 suicide attempts a month among those under VA care. About 30 percent of the nation’s 24 million veterans receive medical care from the department.

One e-mail from VA official Ira Katz in February referred to the 1,000 monthly suicide attempts and cautioned, “Shh! . . . Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

The plaintiffs also cited a recent Rand Corp. study estimating that 300,000 troops returning from Afghanistan or Iraq suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. They also noted a May 2007 report by the VA’s inspector general that found more than 60 percent of the agency’s health centers lacked suicide-prevention strategies for returning veterans, and 70 percent had no tracking systems for veterans at risk of suicide.

In Wednesday’s ruling, Conti said members of the two veterans groups “have faced significant delays in receiving disability benefits and medical care from the VA,” often with “dire consequences.”

But he said the evidence also showed that a majority of returning veterans are being seen within 30 days at clinics offering mental health services. While federal law entitles veterans to five years of care from the VA after they are discharged from the military, Conti said, “it is beyond the power of this court to determine when and how such care shall be provided.”

Likewise, he said, the law allows the VA to set the timetable for implementing the five-year mental health plan it issued in 2004, which includes a suicide-prevention program.

Conti also rejected the plaintiffs’ request to shake up the VA’s system of approving medical benefits and handling appeals. They argued that their rights are violated by a system that denies them the right to have a lawyer in pressing initial claims, takes an average of 4.4 years to decide appeals, and allows a VA office to reduce awards of more than eight years of benefits, or $250,000 in cash, without notifying veterans that their cases are being reviewed.

Although the system’s slow pace is troubling, Conti said, only 4 percent of veterans appeal denials of benefits, and the VA would have to divert money and staff from processing claims to meet the timetables the plaintiffs seek.

Comment: So another blatant scheme of “passing the buck” and nothing gets done. And this is how the U.S. shows its appreciation for the unfortunate men and women, who having been lied to, have put their lives and sanity on the line for a country run by psychopaths who don’t really give a damn about any of them.

This should be a wake up call for those who really want to support their troops. As you can see, the only real way to support them is to get them out of Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else they are fighting for the crime lords of the West, and bring them home.

U.S. Journalist Photographs Grisly Aftermath of Attack in Iraq, Gets Booted by Military

Source: Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service.

U.S. journalist Zoriah Miller says he was censored by the U.S. military in the Iraqi city of Fallujah after photographing Marines who died in a suicide bombing.

On Jun. 26, a suicide bomber attacked a city council meeting in Fallujah, 69 kms west of Baghdad, between local tribal sheikhs and military officials.

Three Marines, Cpl. Marcus Preudhomme, Capt. Philip Dykeman, and Lt. Col. Max Galeai, assigned to 2d Battalion, 3rd Marine Division based in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, died in the attack.

The explosion also killed two interpreters and 20 Iraqis, including the mayor of the nearby town of Karmah, two prominent sheikhs and their sons, and another sheikh and his brother. All were members of the local “awakening council,” one of the U.S.-backed militias that have taken up arms against al Qaeda in Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi authorities.

Miller was embedded with Marines on a patrol one block from the attack when it occurred. He had originally turned down the option of going to report on the city council meeting that was bombed.

©Zoriah Miller

Remains of U.S. Marines in Fallujah on Jun. 26.

Miller ran with the Marines he was with to the scene of the attack. “As I ran I saw human pieces…a skull cap with hair, bone shards,” he told IPS during a telephone interview from the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad. “When we arrived at the building it was chaotic. There were Iraqis, police and civilians running around screaming. Bodies were being pulled out of the building.”

“I went in and there were over 20 people’s remains all over the place,” Miller continued, “Of the Marines I jogged in with, someone started to vomit. Others were standing around, not knowing what to do. It was completely surreal.”

“At that moment I realized this was far beyond anything I’d experienced, and I realized I wanted to focus and make sure I could capture what it felt like, and the visual horror,” Miller explained.

“I thought, ‘Nobody in the U.S. has any idea what it means when they hear that 20 people died in a suicide bombing.’ I want people to be able to associate those numbers with the scene and the actual loss of human life. And to show why soldiers are suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” Miller told IPS.

Miller was taken out of the building by Marines, but then allowed back inside where he took one last photo of the carnage before they closed the scene to him.

“We spent most of the rest of the day as Marines picked up body parts and put them in buckets and bags,” he said.

In an Iraqi Police station in Karmah, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) was brought in to investigate the bombing. Millers’ photos were the only ones of the scene, so the NCIS team asked for them.

“I made them copies, but then one of the Marines came in and told me to delete my memory card after I give them the photos, and I refused,” Miller told IPS, “I told the NCIS that if they forced me to delete them, I would stop sharing them. So they stopped pressing that issue.”

Miller said that he was following the rules for embedded journalists. “That evening, during the debriefing, the guys [Marines] I was with told me that the higher-ups had said I was a stand-up guy and behaved well and to treat me well. The guys I was with were all very much on my side.”

Miller explained to IPS that he meticulously showed his photos to the Marines he was with to make sure he was not going to show any photos that would upset the family members of the deceased Marines. “They were all okay with them, so then about 96 hours after the bombing I published the photos on my blog.”

Then things got interesting.

“Tuesday [Jul. 1] I awoke to a call in their combat operations centre, and the person on the phone told me they were a PAO (Public Affairs Officer) at Camp Fallujah, and he wanted me to take my blog down right away,” Miller told IPS. “I asked them why, and was then called back after five minutes by a higher ranking PAO who claimed I had broken my contract by showing photos of dead Americans with U.S. uniforms and boots.”

Miller said the PAO claimed he was not allowed, by the embed contract, to show dead or wounded U.S. citizens or soldiers in the field. “I never signed any contract for that,” Miller said.

He was called back after another five minutes and told his embed was terminated and they would send him back to Baghdad on the next flight. He was then taken back to Camp Fallujah where he said, “Everyone was extremely angry and fired up at me.”

Nevertheless, the lower ranking Marines he had embedded with “were on my side, and they told me they thought that what was happening was wrong.”

Miller explained that he grew nervous when the flight was canceled due to a sandstorm, and then a security guard was assigned to him.

“I started to feel uncomfortable with this,” Miller explained. “The next day, Gen. Kelly, [Major General John Kelly, who is the Commanding General of the I Marine Expeditionary Force] wanted to have some words with me. I was to meet with him at 3 pm, and we sat outside in the sun for two hours and he never showed.”

Miller was told he would be flown out that night, but he was deleted from the flight and told that General Kelly wanted to see him, so he waited again until Thursday, Jul. 3. Again the general did not appear, so Miller was given an official letter about the grounds for the termination of his embed, signed by Gen. Kelly, and flown to Baghdad.

“Now, as I think about it, I think they needed the extra time to figure out what they were going to say about my dismissal,” Miller said. “Their original reason ended up being bogus, so they had to figure something else out.”

The letter he was given stated reasons for his dismissal as “you photographed the remains of U.S. soldiers”, “you posted these images along with detailed commentary”, and “by posting the images and your commentary you violated 14 H and O of the news media agreement you signed.”

In addition, the letter, which Miller read to IPS, stated, “By providing detailed information of the effectiveness of the attack and the response of U.S. forces to it, you have put all U.S. forces in Iraq at greater risk for harm.”

Miller feels the reason for his dismissal is otherwise.

“The bottom line is that the thing they cited as the reason for my dismissal was ‘information the enemy could use against you.’ They realized, probably from keeping track of my blog, that I was not showing identifiable features of a soldier … and they couldn’t find a reason to kick me out. Because it was a high ranking person who got killed, they were all fired up.”

Miller concluded, “Up to that point they said it was because I showed pictures of bodies with pieces of uniform and boots. The letter, though, doesn’t mention that at all. I checked the document I had about ground rules for media embeds, and I followed them.”

The Pentagon would not comment on the story when contacted by IPS, saying they had no information on Miller’s case beyond what Central Command had already posted.

A Backlog Of Cases Alleging Fraud by Government Contractors

Source: Carrie Johnson, Washington Post.

More than 900 cases alleging that government contractors and drugmakers have defrauded taxpayers out of billions of dollars are languishing in a backlog that has built up over the past decade because the Justice Department cannot keep pace with the surge in charges brought by whistle-blowers, according to lawyers involved in the disputes.

The issue is drawing renewed interest among lawmakers and nonprofit groups because many of the cases involve the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rising health-care payouts, and privatization of government functions — all of which offer rich new opportunities to swindle taxpayers.

Since 2001, 300 to 400 civil cases have been filed each year by employees charging that their companies defrauded the government. But under the cumbersome process that governs these cases, Justice Department lawyers must review them under seal, and whistle-blowers routinely wait 14 months or longer just to learn whether the department will get involved. The government rejects about three-quarters of the cases it receives, saying that the vast majority have little merit.

Disputes can stay buried for years more while the government investigates the allegations.

“Even if no new cases are filed, it might take 10 years for the Department of Justice to clear its desk. Cases in the backlog represent a lot of money being left on the table,” said Patrick Burns, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, which advocates for Justice to receive more funding to support cases by whistle-blowers and their attorneys.

Supporters of federal intervention in the cases say the dividends are substantial: In recent years, verdicts and settlements have returned nearly $13 billion to the U.S. government.

At issue in most of the cases is whether companies knowingly sold defective products or overcharged federal agencies for items sold at home or offered to U.S. troops overseas. Under the Civil War-era False Claims Act, workers who file lawsuits alleging such schemes cannot discuss them or even disclose their existence until Justice decides whether to step in.

By its own account, the 75-lawyer unit in Washington that reviews the sensitive lawsuits is overloaded and understaffed. Only about 100 cases a year are investigated by the team, which works out of the commercial litigation branch of Justice’s civil division.

Critics argue that the delays are at least partly the result of foot-dragging by Justice and the federal agencies whose position it represents, especially in the touchy area of suppliers that may have overbilled the government for equipment, food and other items used by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Justice lawyers have rejected about 19 cases involving contractor fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, registering five settlements that resulted in $16 million, officials said. Government officials said this week that they are considering whether to dive into 32 more whistle-blower cases involving Iraq or the Middle East.

“It’s just flatly absurd for us to be five years into this war” with so few public cases, said Alan Grayson, a whistle-blower lawyer in Florida who has criticized the Justice effort and who is running for Congress as a Democrat.

In a statement, Justice spokesman Charles Miller said that career lawyers and supervisors base their determinations on merit, not on political sensitivities. “Our decisions to intervene or decline in cases involving Iraq and the Middle East are entirely consistent with our record in [whistle-blower] cases generally,” he said.

Help from Justice greatly enhances the chances that a complicated fraud scheme can be unraveled, lawyers say. And department statistics show that cases Justice turns away win paltry, if any, financial recoveries.

Key lawmakers have called on Justice to make false-claims investigations a priority.

“Whistle-blowers are the key to the secrets locked in closets throughout the federal bureaucracy and government contractors,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “These patriotic Americans stick their necks out, against all odds, to help the federal government pursue fraud and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars that would otherwise be lost.”

Last month, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael F. Hertz told Congress that “the number and increased complexity of the fraud schemes presented to the department, combined with the volume of cases now under review, certainly present challenges.”

Among the largest false-claims cases to date are a $650 million settlement earlier this year by drugmaker Merck in connection with an alleged failure to repay Medicaid rebates; a $515 million deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb to cover illegal drug pricing and marketing; and a $98 million agreement with software maker Oracle over pricing.

If their claims are successful, whistle-blowers can receive a hefty slice of the settlements or verdicts, sometimes as much as 20 percent of the award. A former Merck sales manager collected $68 million earlier this year for his role in exposing an alleged drug-pricing scheme.

Even bigger lawsuits containing potentially explosive allegations are waiting in the wings. The vast majority, more than 500 cases, involve the health-care and pharmaceutical industries and often involve Medicare and Medicaid funds.

Only a few hints of the Iraq and Afghanistan disputes have erupted publicly. One is a suit filed by two former employees of Custer Battles, a defense contracting company in Fairfax. The workers accused the company of inflating expenses on a contract it won to replace the Iraqi currency. After a three-week trial in 2006, a jury found in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded them $10 million. But U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III later tossed out the case, ruling that the money at issue, controlled in the early years of the Iraq conflict by the Coalition Provisional Authority, belonged to the Iraqi government, not U.S. taxpayers.

Justice declined the whistle-blowers’ request to intervene before the case went to trial, plaintiffs’ lawyers said. The government eventually weighed in with a court brief on behalf of the whistle-blowers when the case was appealed.

Frederick M. Morgan Jr., a Cincinnati lawyer who represents whistle-blowers, said that the numbers of lawyers willing to take on cases involving defense contractors has dwindled, in part because of Justice’s slow decisions.

One of Morgan’s lawsuits, against contractors hired by the Navy to build nuclear submarines and an Ohio company that manufactured submarine valves, took five years to resolve.

Another case, involving the manufacture of the F-22 fighter, was filed in early 1999. It was late 2006 before Justice decided not to intervene. The case is now in active litigation.

“The impact of a 7 1/2 -year delay in the litigation of a case is difficult to quantify but impossible to discount,” Morgan said.

Whistle-blower lawyers say other factors can contribute to long delays, including the difficulty in investigating claims in war-torn areas and complications that arise when military officials contend that technology or other products at issue in the lawsuits are classified. In addition, Justice lawyers who handle civil cases often cannot proceed until authorities decide whether a case merits criminal prosecution, the lawyers said.

Even when older cases are pushed into the open, the passage of time can present courtroom challenges.

Last year, a D.C. jury awarded whistle-blower Richard Miller more than $30 million, a figure that now-Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth tripled to $90 million. But in the dozen years since the suit was filed, witnesses’ memories of events had dimmed and the U.S. Agency for International Development had tossed its investigative files.

The judge blasted civil division lawyers for “doing virtually nothing” to follow up for four years after Miller brought forward allegations in 1995 about bid rigging on construction contracts in Egypt. The delays meant “loss of evidence, fading memories, disappearance of documents,” he wrote.

Justice spokesman Miller said that the civil case was stalled for years because criminal proceedings in the matter took priority. He added that the whistle-blower did not object to the government’s repeated entreaties for more time.

Last week, Lamberth denied defense motions for a new trial. But the verdict is likely to be appealed, according to lawyers who participated.

“I have a feeling we’re some way away from resolution,” said Charles S. Leeper, a lawyer for B.L. Harbert International, the main construction company involved in the case.

Scientist, Claiming Bias, Sues U.S. Over Revoked Clearance

Source: SEAN D. HAMILL, New York Times.

PITTSBURGH — An Egyptian-born nuclear physicist who worked in a government-financed laboratory here for 18 years filed a lawsuit on Thursday saying the Energy Department had revoked his security clearance because of his ethnicity, his Muslim faith and comments he made criticizing the war in Iraq.

The physicist, Abdel Moniem Ali el-Ganayni, 57, lost his job shortly after his clearance was revoked in May by Jeffrey F. Kupfer, the Department of Energy’s acting deputy secretary, who cited “national security” in refusing to reveal what led to the revocation.

“Our contention is that the reason the D.O.E. invoked national security here was to relieve themselves of the responsibility of having to tell us what’s going on,” said Witold Walczak, one of Dr. Ganayni’s lawyers and legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Ganayni became a naturalized citizen in 1988, eight years after coming to Pittsburgh to get a master’s degree and a doctorate. His former employer, the Bettis Laboratory, has said it would rehire him if his clearance was restored.

In the lawsuit, Dr. Ganayni, who has been married to an American woman for 26 years, claims violation of his rights to free speech and religion and to equal protection and due process. He asks that he have a chance to contest the revocation of his security clearance before an impartial hearing officer.

In a statement on Thursday, the Energy Department said, “This is a personal security matter as to which the department has no public comment.”

Dr. Ganayni’s clearance was first suspended, and he was assigned to a lower-paying job, in October 2007, after an interview with an Energy Department agent and a security officer at the laboratory, which works on nuclear propulsion projects for the Navy.

He said that during that three-hour interview and a four-hour interview with the F.B.I. two weeks later, he was asked about his religious beliefs, money he has sent overseas and comments he made in 2006 at a local mosque criticizing the Iraq war. But he said he was never asked about any security breaches at his job as a senior scientist at Bettis.

“What I said about the Iraq war, many Americans have said, and many senators,” he said, “But when I said this, I became like a traitor. That’s not right.”