The Ultimate War Crime, Killing the Children:

The Destruction of Iraq’s Educational System under US Occupation
by Ghali Hassan


"The Education system in Iraq, prior to 1991, was one of the best in the region, with over 100% Gross Enrolment Rate for primary schooling and high levels of literacy, both of men and women. The Higher Education, especially the scientific and technological institutions, were of an international standard, staffed by high quality personnel". (UNESCO Fact Sheet, 28 March 2003)



Editorial Note:

Global Research Contributing Editor Ghali Hassan has carefully investigated what the Western media and the self appointed "international community" have carefully kept from the public eye:

Highlights

Some 84 percent of Iraq's institutions of higher education have been burnt, looted, or destroyed.

Iraq’s educational system was the target of U.S-British military action, because education is the backbone of any society. Without an efficient education system, no society can function. Schools and universities were bombed and destroyed.

The current Iraq’s school curriculum is a U.S-crafted curriculum to brainwash Iraqi children.

In a callous and murderous policy termed "DeBaathification", thousands of academics, scientists and prominent Iraqi politicians have been murdered.

Today, more Iraqi cities and towns are under the same siege as Fallujah. People are not allowed to leave their homes and have no food and medicine. The cities of Ramadi and Qaim in western Iraq, just to mention two, have been under siege by U.S. forces for many days.

Hospitals have been destroyed to erase the number of civilians killed by U.S. troops in hospital data banks.

Schools, universities and government offices are closed. Random arrests of men, women and children, have resulted in the imprisonment of many young men, women and children.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis are now imprisoned and tortured in hundreds of U.S-run prisons throughout Iraq.

Very few people in the West heard the scream of Fallujah’s victims. The atrocity was sold as a ‘necessary step’ to enforce Western "democracy".

While Iraqi children are dropping out of school and dying of malnutrition, Iraqi money nourishes Halliburton executives and friends, including U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.



Circulate this text far and wide

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research editor, 11 May 2005

Since 1990, the U.S. has targeted Iraq’s educational system for destruction.

During the 1991 U.S. war, Iraq’s civilian infrastructure was systematically bombed and destroyed.

U.S. aircraft bombed and strafed indiscriminately.

The U.S.-imposed sanctions, which were implemented with severity and disregard to the welfare of the civilian population, destroyed Iraq’s education and health systems.

U.S. strategy against Iraq went beyond "strictly military targets". The aim was the complete destruction of the Iraqi society and its knowledge-based resources.

Prior to the U.S. led war and the imposition of sanctions, Iraq had among the finest educational systems in the Middle East.

Education and health care were free at all levels. In the 1980s, a successful government program to eradicate illiteracy among Iraqi men and women was implemented.

Before the ‘Gulf War’, 92 per cent of all Iraqi school age children attended school. Attendance at school has always been high in Iraq as primary education was compulsory until the U.S. invasion in 2003.

According to UNESCO, until 1989 Iraq had been allocating 5 per cent of its budget to education. This is higher than the maximum rate in developing countries, which stands at 3.8 per cent. Iraq was also the largest and preferred destination for students from the Middle East, Africa and the Muslim world. Thousands of students went to Iraq to study and to better their lives.

In the 1991 War on Iraq, the U.S. deliberately bombed and destroyed vital civilian infrastructure, water-treatment facilities, milk factories, power plants, schools, hospitals, pharmaceutical production facilities, communication centres, mosques, churches, civilian shelters, residential areas, historical sites, roads and bridges, irrigations, private vehicles and civilian government offices. The purpose of these attacks was to destroy life and property, and generally to terrorise the civilian population of Iraq.

In adition, the U.S. and Britain then continued to oppose lifting the sanctions, which were imposed on Iraq in 1990, to ensure that Iraq would be unable to repair or replace most of what has been destroyed. "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral", elaborated Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq on his resignation in 1998.

More than 1.5 million Iraqis have died, a third of them children under the age of 5, in this calculated mass murder of innocent people.

As Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado wrote, "we find record of not a single significant demonstration protesting the wholesale destruction of Iraqi children" during the 13 years of genocidal sanctions. As usual, "opposition" to wars of aggression in the West has been passive, and once the criminal bombing of Iraqi cities begun again in 2003, it was "home entertainment" and the silence was deafening.

Iraq’s educational system was the target of U.S-British military action, because education is the backbone of any society. Without an efficient education system, no society can function. Schools and universities were bombed and destroyed.

The Al-Mustansiriyah University, one of the oldest schools in the world with a history that goes back at least 1000 years was bombed and partially destroyed. It was here in 1980 that Iranian agents tried to assassinate Prime Minister Tariq Aziz – a terrorist act that helped precipitate the Iran-Iraq War. After the 1991 war, UNSCOM inspectors, led by Australian Richard Butler, burned all chemistry books of the University Library. All other universities in Iraq have their science books burned by UNSCOM.

Furthermore, the sanctions and U.S. wars forced many Iraqi professionals to leave the country in what is called, Iraqi ‘brain drain’. An estimated 30-40 per cent of Iraq’s best-trained educators left to other countries. Under the sanctions, Iraq’s contact with the rest of the world was also restricted and contributed to the deterioration of Iraq’s educational system. To complete Iraq’s isolation and inflict more harm, the U.S-controlled sanctions committee banned all educational materials (including pencils, which allegedly could be converted to "weapons of mass destruction" by Iraqi children, papers and textbooks) from entering Iraq.

A newly released study by the UN University (UNU) International Leadership Institute in Jordan revealed that: "'The devastation of the Iraqi system of higher education has been overlooked amid other cataclysmic war results but represents an important consequence of the conflicts, economic sanctions, and ongoing turmoil in Iraq" caused by U.S. militaristic policy.

Furthermore, "some 84 percent of Iraq's institutions of higher education have been burnt, looted, or destroyed. Some 2,000 laboratories need to be re-equipped and 30,000 computers need to be procured and installed nationwide, said Jairam Reddy, director of UNU. "The Iraqi Academy of Sciences, founded in 1948 to promote the Arabic language and heritage, saw its digital and traditional library partially looted during the war and it alone needs almost one million dollars in infrastructure repairs to re-establish itself as a leading research centre", the Study revealed.

There was no shortage of bombs to destroy Iraq, but "there weren't enough desks, chairs, or classrooms and most schools lacked even basic water or sanitation facilities", added the report. According to the U.N. children's fund, UNICEF, Iraq's primary and secondary educational systems were further ruined by the war and almost 1 in 4 children has no access to education under U.S. Occupation.

The current Iraq’s school curriculum is a U.S-crafted curriculum to brainwash Iraqi children.

The U.S. Occupation Authority or the (CPA) removed any content considered anti-American, including the 1991 Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq war, and all references to Israel policy in Palestine, and U.S support for Israel. "Entire swaths of 20th-century history have been deleted", said Bill Evers, a U.S. Defence Department employee, and one of three American "advisers" to the Ministry of Education. It should be noted that these U.S. "advisers" are U.S-handpicked proxies who make the major decisions in the Iraqi ministries, (ie. it is not the U.S-appointed quislings, which occupy cabinet positions which make the decisons). "We considered anything anti-American to be propaganda and we took it out, and in some cases, we had to remove entire chapters", said Fuad Hussein, an Iraqi expatriate in the Ministry of Education. In other words, Mr. Hussein made the decision to remove "propaganda" and enforce a "free" curriculum.

Before the staged "handover of sovereignty" in June 2003, Paul Bremer, the former U.S. Proconsul in Baghdad, issued a series of "edicts" that "take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries", reported The Wall Street Journal on 13 May, 2004. In addition, Bremer enacted the "Bremer’s Orders", a set of colonial "laws" widely known as the "100 Orders".

"The Bremer orders control every aspect of Iraqi life — from the use of car horns to the privatization of state-owned enterprises. For example, "Order No. 39 alone does no less than ‘transition [Iraq] from a … centrally planned economy to a market economy’ virtually overnight and by U.S. fiat", wrote Antonia Juhasz, a scholar at the International Forum on Globalisation in San Francesco. Order 37 will lower Iraq’s corporate tax rate from about 40 per cent to a flat rate of 15 per cent. The accurate description of Iraq’s economy is a "Capitalism dream" economy. The Virginia-based Corporation, BearingPoint Inc., received 250 million contracts to facilitate the looting.

On May 22, Bush signed Executive Order 13303 granting blanket immunity to any U.S. corporation dealing with Iraqi oil through 2007. The order "unilaterally declares Iraqi oil to be the unassailable province of U.S. corporations.... In other words, if Exxon Mobil or Chevron Texaco touches Iraqi oil, it will be immune from legal proceedings in the United States", said Jim Vallette, research director for the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network. It makes the new "sovereignty" more like a U.S. colonial dictatorship with no "democracy" and no national independence. That is why the January elections were a U.S.-made trap to legitimise the U.S. Occupation of Iraq.

Nonetheless, these U.S-crafted "Orders" and economic therapies are illegal and in violation of the Geneva Conventions and The Hague Regulations, which stipulate that the occupiers ‘must abide by the country exists laws unless prevented’. Under international law, the occupiers are ‘prohibited from selling of state-own assets’ of the occupied country. Further, these "Orders" are illegal because they were enacted without tacit approval of legitimate Iraqi government, but under the threat of U.S. military force.

To make things worse for Iraq’s education, Iraq’s reconstruction has become the "biggest corruption scandal in history". In April 2003, USAID awarded a one-year, $62 million contract to Creative Associates International Inc. (CAII), and $1.8 billion to Bechtel Corporation to build Iraq’s infrastructure, including schools and higher education institutions, without a public tender, a by-invitation-only deal awarded in a secret process. "For this initial round of contracts alone, Bechtel was also guaranteed another $80 million for company profits", wrote Jeffrey St. Claire, author of Grand Theft Pentagon. "While the situation continued to deteriorate for the U.S. military forces in Iraq… Last year Bechtel earned more than $17 billion for the first time", added St. Clair.

Bechtel record of dodgy business does not bode well for the Iraqi people. Its record in Bolivia and India left poor communities without affordable drinking water. U.S. officials often have highlighted their renovation of schools as a success story of Iraq under the Occupation. However, despite the size of contracts, little has been done to rebuild or repair Iraq’s schools and universities. "Schools listed as fully rebuilt are in fact flooded with sewage and lack desks, but are often freshly painted", wrote Christian Parenti of The Nation. Indeed schools were only painted to remove the old regime slogans from the wall and replace them with George Bush’s own lies of "democracy" and "liberation" rhetoric. A propaganda cliché designed to manipulate public opinions in the West (the U.S. in particular), and enhance U.S. imperial agenda of militaristic domination of the world.

In a recent report Antonia Juhasz noted that; "The constant complaints from the Iraqi Ministry of Education officials and principals of schools that Bechtel has worked on, is that the work is either non-existent and shoddy, often putting students health and safety at risk". There is "[n]o improvement to the infrastructure, and no new equipment has been bought", Muzhir Al-Dulaymi, spokesman for the League for the Defence of Iraqi People's Rights, told Aljazeera on 28 May 2004.

Bechtel waves off complaints with: "No matter what we do, the Iraqis will never be on the losing end", reported CorpWatch, a U.S-based anti-corruption organisation. The billion of dollars approved by Congress for the "reconstruction" of Iraq, was simply a "gift" from U.S. taxpayers to U.S. private corporations, not for the Iraqi people. In other word, U.S. citizens are subsidizing Bechtel, Halliburton and other U.S. corporations.

In October 2004, the CPA paid $12 billion to the contractors out of the Development Fund of Iraq (DFI), instead of using the money earmarked by Congress for the "reconstruction" of Iraq. In other words, the CPA used Iraq’s oil revenues to pay off the U.S. contractors – money that before the war was said (by Secretary of State Powell, among others) to be the "Iraqi people’s" money.

According to an independent audit conducted by KPMG for the multilateral International Advisory and Monitoring Board for Iraq (IAMB) (established under UN Security Council Resolution 1483 as an audit oversight board), nearly $1.5 billion was extracted from the DFI to pay Halliburton. While Iraqi children are dropping out of school and dying of malnutrition, Iraqi money nourishes Halliburton executives and friends, including U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

The IAMB and auditors working for the United Nation's Iraq Advisory as well as the CPA's own Inspector General have since blasted the occupation authorities for sloppy handling and faulty accounting of the more than $9 billion in seized assets (including Iraqi oil revenues) known as the DFI. The $9 billion simply vanished. They discovered a wide range of irregularities, including the lack of competitive bidding for large contracts, missing contracts information, payments for contracts that had not been supervised, and, in some cases, outright theft. "The billions of dollars of oil money that has already been transferred to the U.S-controlled [CPA] has effectively disappeared into financial black hole", reported Christian Aid, a British humanitarian organisation. Protected by the presence of more than 200,000 U.S-British troops and mercenaries, Iraq is the biggest imperial lootocracy in the history of Western colonialism, and a "capitalism dream" economy.

Iraq’s education system has also fallen victim to the Occupation-instigated violence. School dropouts are very high, particularly among females as a result of violence and kidnappings. Many schools in Iraqi cities and towns have been closed, preventing hundreds of children from receiving basic education. "Approximately 50 percent of children are not going to school because their parents are too scared to send them, having heard these stories about children being kidnapped and held for ransom", a spokesman for Save the Children UK, Paul Hetherington, told IRIN. Moreover, malnutrition amongst Iraqi children has almost doubled from 4 per cent in 2002 to roughly 8 per cent since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The ongoing Occupation and associated violence is wreaking havoc on Iraqi children and Iraq long-term future.

Although the UNU report noted briefly that only "[f]our dozens academics have been assassinated", the real number is much higher. In a callous and murderous policy termed "DeBaathification", thousands of academics, scientists and prominent Iraqi politicians have been murdered. Together with the C.I.A., and Israel’s Mossad agents, criminal elements and militia groups including, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade, the INA of Iyad Allawi and the INC of Ahmed Chalabi, have terrorised an entire nation and murdered its entire intellectual community.

Two years of continuing Occupation and violence have killed thousands of innocent men, women and children. The November 2004 scientific report by the reputable British medical journal, the Lancet, shows that from March 2003 to October 2004, U.S. forces have killed more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. The Lancet authors acknowledge that most of the victims were innocent women and children killed by U.S. bombing of population centres. The number of Iraqis killed is increasing daily.

Instead of condemning and exposing the crimes of this illegal Occupation, Western liberal elites and the "anti-war" organisers close ranks with their own governments and have deliberately shifted the blame on the Iraqi Resistance with increasing sophistication. This known falsehood is intended to discredit the Iraqi Resistance and to deny the Iraqi people a legitimate Resistance movement against an illegal foreign Occupation. After all, the U.S. and its collaborators have the most to gain from a divided Iraq embroiled in sectarian violence.

How can the liberal elites and the "anti-war" organisers blame the Iraqi Resistance for the violence?

Who committed the Fallujah atrocity, where more than 6000 innocent men, women and children were slaughtered with napalm and chemical weapons? Where were the liberal elites and the "anti-war" organisers when Iraq’s cultural heritage which stands at the heart of human civilization, was destroyed and looted?

Very few people in the West heard the scream of Fallujah’s victims. The atrocity was sold as a ‘necessary step’ to enforce Western "democracy".

On many occasions, the Iraqi Resistance has rejected violence against civilians, and has called on foreign journalists to stay in Iraq and report honestly. By contrast, U.S. troops have detained and killed journalists who cover the Iraqi Resistance view of the war. Indeed U.S. troops in Iraq have killed more than 13 journalists there. You do not need to do lots of research to find out why U.S. troops targeting independent journalists.

Today, more Iraqi cities and towns are under the same siege as Fallujah. People are not allowed to leave their homes and have no food and medicine. The cities of Ramadi and Qaim in western Iraq, just to mention two, have been under siege by U.S. forces for many days. Hospitals have been destroyed to erase the number of civilians killed by U.S. troops in hospital data banks. Schools, universities and government offices are closed. Random arrests of men, women and children, have resulted in the imprisonment of many young men, women and children. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are now imprisoned and tortured in hundreds of U.S-run prisons throughout Iraq.

Had it not been for the Iraqi Resistance, Iraq would have been sold on the cheap to private U.S. corporations, and Syria and Iran would have been attacked by now in pursuit of U.S. hegemony. As a result of potent Iraqi Resistance, U.S. Army recruitment is at its lowest level, and the war becoming very unpopular among the citizens of the imperial power(s). And the so-called "coalition of the willing" is fleeing and is losing its will. Even U.S. Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Richard Myers acknowledged the presence of an effective Iraqi Resistance against U.S. forces, although the U.S. maybe using the presence of the Resistance as pretext to justify the ongoing Occupation. The liberal elites and the "anti-war" organisers have yet to have an impact on their own government’s policy.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Iraqi children are dropping out of school and experienced Iraqi professionals, who were once called the ‘German of the Middle East’ for their technical prowess, are unemployed. Unemployment rate in Iraq is as high as 70 per cent today. Iraqis are watching their country and their society destroyed and looted by an armed imperial power and its private corporations. They can only be praised for their courage to stay and continue the struggle against the odds. "The bravery and dedication of educators [and other professionals] who remain in a shattered Iraq should inspire the swift, meaningful and practical support of the international academic community," says UN Under Secretary-General Hans van Ginkel, Rector of the Tokyo-based UNU.

The most urgent actions needed in Iraq today are the end of U.S. violence and the revitalisation of Iraq’s education and health systems. "Repairing Iraq's higher education system is in many ways a prerequisite to the long term repair of the country as a whole", said Jairam Reddy of UNU.

World-wide academics and educators should campaign for the end of the Occupation and use the recommendation provided by the authors of the Iraqi Observatory report as a benchmark to assist the Iraqi people in rebuilding their education system. It stated rightly that, "American Universities should refrain from competing for USAID Higher Education grants until the military occupation of Iraq ends and an independent and sovereign government exists in Iraq. That said, institutions should make an effort to build contacts and offer expertise to the Iraqi academic community on an informal basis in preparation for that moment".

The deliberate U.S. strategy targeting anything other than "strictly military targets", including Iraq’s educational system, constitutes a major war crime. In addition, legal evidence has shown that the war on Iraq amounted to a ‘crime of aggression’. Clearly, U.S. wars against Iraq violated the 1923 Hague Rules of Aerial Warfare (Article 22) and the 1949 Geneva Convention IV Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War (Article 3).

A major reason the Nuremberg Tribunal was convened was because Germany had failed to prosecute its own war criminals after World War I. The setting up of an international war crimes tribunal, like the Nuremberg Tribunal, to investigate and prosecute those who committed these crimes against the Iraqi people should be the aim of the world community.

"Imagine an enemy that says: We will kill innocent people because we're trying to encourage people to be free."

-- Bunny Pants, press conference

He understands those words, probably. He knows how crazy it sounds, but he
can't understand that they apply to him.

"Nobody from the Democratic Party has actually stood up and called for the getting rid of
the terrorist surveillance program. You know, if that's what they believe, if people in the party
believe that, then they ought to stand up and say it. They ought to stand up and say, the tools
we're using to protect the American people shouldn't be used. They ought to take their message
to the people and say, vote for me. That's what they ought to be doing.

Prez Bunnypants, yesterday,

Is that how we play?

"Nobody from the GOP has actually stood up and called for the lynching of every black man
in America. You know, if that's what they believe, if people in the GOP believe that, then they
ought to stand up and say it. They ought to stand up and say, "We're gonna hang every black man we can find. They ought to take their message to the people and say, vote for me."

If that's what all Republicans believe, who don't they have the courage to say the words out loud?

That's not how high-brow, losemeister Bob Shrub would've handled it, but a fast, over-the-top retort serves a purpose.

First, it disarms the GOP from attacking your attack. What can they say, "How dare you?"
Second, it draws a line that says, "If you go gutter, we'll go gutter and we'll f-ing win."

But nooooooooooooooooo.

The Democrats say, "We can't be like them. I have too much integrity to dignity to deny that I
ran like a coward in Vietnam because I faked my medals" ...and continue losing with our dignity intact.

In a nationally televised press conference, George W. Bush repeated some of his favorite lies about the Iraq War, including the canard that he was forced to invade because Saddam Hussein blocked the work of United Nations weapons inspectors in 2003.

Bush has uttered this lie in a variety of forms over more than 2 ½ years, yet the Washington press corps has never challenged the President directly about the falsehood. He got away with it again on March 21 when no journalist followed up the question from Helen Thomas that elicited Bush’s response.

Some TV commentary about the Thomas-Bush exchange even suggested that Bush had scored points with the American public for calling on – and then slapping down – the senior White House correspondent who is known for her irreverent and acerbic questions. But Bush’s truthfulness wasn’t questioned.

It never is.

America's "First Family" is above the law.

Republicans stay on the offensive by accusing innocent Democrats of having sex.

Democrats stay on the defensive by failing to accuse the guilty GOP of their crimes and wars

Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools

THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCCOMPLISHED

by Greg Palast

Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George Bush's incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is just dead wrong.

On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq's border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished.


But don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called,

"Operation

Iraqi

Liberation."

O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the 101st Airborne wasn't sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq's OIF.

"It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry. In London, Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the Pentagon would choose as post-OIF oil minister for Iraq, on the correct method of disposing Iraq's crude.

And what did the USA want Iraq to do with Iraq's oil? The answer will surprise many of you: and it is uglier, more twisted, devilish and devious than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger. The answer can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly drafted by the State Department. Our team got a hold of a copy; how, doesn't matter. The key thing is what's inside this thick Bush diktat: a directive to Iraqis to maintain a state oil company that will "enhance its relationship with OPEC."

Enhance its relationship with OPEC??? How strange: the government of the United States ordering Iraq to support the very OPEC oil cartel which is strangling our nation with outrageously high prices for crude.

Specifically, the system ordered up by the Bush cabal would keep a lid on Iraq's oil production -- limiting Iraq's oil pumping to the tight quota set by Saudi Arabia and the OPEC cartel.

There you have it. Yes, Bush went in for the oil -- not to get more of Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing too much of it.

You must keep in mind who paid for George's ranch and Dick's bunker: Big Oil. And Big Oil -- and their buck-buddies, the Saudis -- don't make money from pumping more oil, but from pumping less of it. The lower the supply, the higher the price.

It's Economics 101. The oil industry is run by a cartel, OPEC, and what economists call an "oligopoly" -- a tiny handful of operators who make more money when there's less oil, not more of it. So, every time the "insurgents" blow up a pipeline in Basra, every time Mad Mahmoud in Tehran threatens to cut supply, the price of oil leaps. And Dick and George just love it.

Dick and George didn't want more oil from Iraq, they wanted less. I know some of you, no matter what I write, insist that our President and his Veep are on the hunt for more crude so you can cheaply fill your family Hummer; that somehow, these two oil-patch babies are concerned that the price of gas in the USA is bumping up to $3 a gallon.

Not so, gentle souls. Three bucks a gallon in the States (and a quid a litre in Britain) means colossal profits for Big Oil, and that makes Dick's ticker go pitty-pat with joy. The top oily-gopolists, the five largest oil companies, pulled in $113 billion in profit in 2005 -- compared to a piddly $34 billion in 2002 before Operation Iraqi Liberation. In other words, it's been a good war for Big Oil.

As per Plan Bush, Bahr Al-Ulum became Iraq's occupation oil minister; the conquered nation "enhanced its relationship with OPEC;" and the price of oil, from Clinton peace-time to Bush war-time, shot up 317%.

In other words, on the third anniversary of invasion, we can say the attack and occupation is, indeed, a Mission Accomplished. However, it wasn't America's mission, nor the Iraqis'. It was a Mission Accomplished for OPEC and Big Oil.

Quotes

Quotes

"Yesterday marked three years of war in Iraq -- but not to Bush. To Bush, it was "the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq. Bush's avoidance of the word "war" in the

context of Iraq is the rule, not the exception. In the carefully chosen lexicon of White House

speeches, that particular word is almost exclusively reserved for the "global war on terror."

So there is no war, except for the war that never ends, and we're winning."

"I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between 9-11 and Saddam."

Bunnypants

Funny how a majority of soldiers in Iraq thought that.

I wonder how many times Bush used "Saddam" and

"9-11" in the same sentence in the last four years?

Bush marked the anniversary of his bloody quagmire Sunday by touting the efforts to build democracy there and avoiding any mention of the daily violence that rages three years after he ordered an invasion.

"We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq," the president lied.

The president didn't utter the word "war."

America's Murder Monkey on Monday cited success in stabilizing an insurgent stronghold in Iraq, saying he has "confidence in our strategy" and critics should look beyond the thousands dead to see progress.

Bush tried a new tactic to boost sagging support for the quagmire, telling a story about a campaign to rid Tal Afar of terrorism against civilians. Success there "gives reason for hope for a free Iraq," he said. Bush said some insurgents have been killed or captured by Iraqi and US soldiers.

Bush meant to underscore another point the White House is trying to make: evidence of progress is more difficult than daily bombings and deaths to capture in media sound bites.

As Bush's quagmire enters Year Four, an alarming number of Americans continue
to believe that Saddam personally caused 9-11.

A Gallup poll "found that 39 per cent still believe Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Shortly before the war began, 51 per cent held that view, but that was before the many official, and media, reports to the contrary. Yet a high number still cling to the view."

The poll also revealed that "today 57 per cent of Americans express some degree of certainty that WMDs were in Iraq just before the fighting began — 29% are sure and another 28% think the weapons were there, though they have some doubt."

Some doubt?

O'Reilly, editor spar over sex-offender case

O'Reilly, editor spar over sex-offender case

By Jim DeBrosse

Dayton Daily News

DAYTON | Managers of the Dayton Daily News have received more than 900 e-mails from fans of Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reilly after O'Reilly's Web site and television program slammed the paper for an editorial that he says makes it "the most friendly (newspaper) to child rapists" in America.

The Dayton Daily News editorial, which ran Sunday, cautioned against those who have called for removing Judge John Connor of Franklin County Common Pleas Court, without a formal complaint or investigation, after Connor gave probation and house arrest instead of prison to a man convicted of repeatedly raping two boys.

The defendant, Andew Selva, had been charged with 20 counts of rape, but prosecutors made mistakes in listing the boys' names on the indictment and tried unsuccessfully to change the errors.

Top Republican leaders in Ohio began pressing for the removal of Connor after O'Reilly called for his impeachment on his talk show.

Jeff Bruce, editor of the Dayton Daily News, defended the paper's editorial Tuesday and took O'Reilly to task for inflammatory journalism.

"We never defended Judge Connor's decision to sentence a child molester to a year of house arrest and five years' probation," Bruce said Tuesday in a prepared statement. "What we said is that if the judge deserves to be removed from office, then due process should be followed – the same sort of due process that Bill O'Reilly relied upon when he was sued (for sexual harassment) and, ultimately, settled out of court."

O'Reilly was sued in 2004 by his former producer.

When the suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, O'Reilly called the lawsuit and the media lashing he took for it "a brutal ordeal" and thanked his listeners for having "given me the benefit of a doubt when some in the media did not."

Bruce wondered why O'Reilly won't give Connor the same benefit of a doubt.

"In America we have a system of checks and balances that includes the independence of the judiciary," Bruce said. "There are rules in place to remove bad judges. Our editorial simply said we should follow those rules, not allow ourselves to rush to judgment because of a television commentator's opinions."

O'Reilly, through a producer of his TV show, The O'Reilly Factor, said, "Previous attacks launched on me disqualify the Dayton Daily News from any serious debate. We believe that Jeff Bruce is not an honest individual."

Statement from O'Reilly's Web site:

"What newspaper in the United States of America is most friendly to child rapists? Could it be the Dayton Daily News which has supported Judge John Connor's sentence of probation for a man who raped a 5 year old boy and a 12 year old boy over a 3 year period.

"Not only that... but the Dayton Daily News attacked the Governor of Ohio, the Attorney General of Ohio and Bill O'Reilly for reporting the story and actually asking for the removal of Judge Connor. The vicious personal attacks launched by the Dayton Daily News were strange when contrasted to the lack of condemnation for the judge.

"So, can one conclude therefore that the Dayton Daily News is a newspaper that has sympathy for child rapists and the judges who will not incarcerate them?"

Statement from Jeff Bruce:

"They say only two things happen when you wrestle a pig: You get muddy and the pig enjoys it. So it's tempting to just let this pass, but, really, what O'Reilly has said on his Web site is so outrageous and such a distortion that I can't.

"No crime is more heinous than child molestation, so it is understandable that people would be inflamed by the notion that a pederast evaded the punishment he is due. But when Mr. O'Reilly asks the question on his Web site, "What newspaper in the United States of America is most friendly to child rapists," he's egging his readers on without giving them all the facts.

"As readers of the Dayton Daily News know, this newspaper is not soft on child molesters. Just the opposite.

"Here's what's really happening: Mr. O'Reilly is upset with the newspaper because in an editorial we referred to his own recent legal history in which he was accused of sexual harassment. His producer threatened that unless we published an apology they would resort to their 'bully pulpit.' That's what they've done. This isn't about being 'soft' on child molesters. It's about Bill O'Reilly getting even.

"We never defended Judge Connor's decision to sentence a child molester to a year of house arrest and five years' probation. What we said is that if the judge deserves to be removed from office then due process should be followed – the same sort of due process that Bill O'Reilly relied upon when he was sued and, ultimately, settled out of court.

"The editorial also noted that the prosecutor in the case, while disappointed with the judge's sentence, was afraid his evidence was so weak that he might have lost the case entirely if it had gone to trial. He agreed to settle the case.

"In America we have a system of checks and balances that includes the independence of the judiciary. There are rules in place to remove bad judges. Our editorial simply said we should follow those rules, not allow ourselves to rush to judgment because of a television commentator's opinions.

"That's not an endorsement of Judge Connor or his decision. The fact that a child molester got off so lightly is disgusting. If I would fault our editorial for anything it is that we could have said that and said it firmly.

"But that's not why O'Reilly asked his readers to write the newspaper. His producer, in a conversation with me, acknowledged the logic of our editorial's argument. But they felt dragging O'Reilly's own legal problems into the article was gratuitous. While I expected O'Reilly to take a shot at us, I was shocked that he would suggest that this newspaper 'has sympathy for child rapists.' That is a deliberate distortion of what we said and what we stand for, and nothing could be further from the truth.

"So you know, on the same page that we published our editorial, we also printed a package of opposing views, including those from O'Reilly himself. We made every effort to be fair and balanced in our presentation of this issue. It is a pity that sense of fairness was not reciprocated."

Here is a picture of the President with people who have names like “Dirk” and “Butch Otter” and “Spuddy Buddy.”






Whoda thunk the Department of the Interior would be a hotbed of scandal? And not that lame, hard-to-follow “corruption” and “bribery” kind of scandal, but honest-to-god sex ‘n’ stuff!

Turns out, this new Dirk Kempthorne has:
* Illegitmate son
* Longtime mistress/aide
* Sham marriage

Hey! Not bad! We’re suddenly way excited about the Department of the Interior — has anyone bothered to point out how educational these sorts of things can be? We might even go find out what the Interior Secretary does.


It is widely rumored (and NEVER denied) that:

* Dirk Kempthorne has an 'illegitimate' child. I used quotes because I loathe that word-- the one person it hurts most is the kid, and they don't deserve it.
* When Dirk Kempthorne went to DC as a Senator, he took this special aide (Sally?) with him.
* While in DC, Dirk Kempthorne was known as the Kennedy of the Republican Party -- and not for his stance on civil rights.
* His exit from senatorial life was because Dirk's wife, Patricia Kempthorne, insisted that he end the affair and/or the philandering.
* In spite of that ultimatum, the mistress followed Dirk Kempthorne back to Idaho, and currently lives either in Boise or McCall.

The press has always shied away from this, and details have always been sparse, but maybe someone in Boise or McCall (rumored digs for the mistress and their child) would assemble the details needed to break this story out and put the Rovian spin-machine back off message for a few days. At the least, Kempthorne's nomination is an opportunity to videotape some obviously-lying non-denial-denials by key Idaho Republicans for use next fall during Idaho wingnuts' Bigotry against Gays Marriage mudfest.

Presuming Patricia won't get interviewed by Oprah or a cameo on Desperate Housewives, Kempthorne's nomination leaves so many unanswered questions:

* Are the mysterious Sally and Dirk Junior going to be packing for the trip, or will Patricia be Dirk's only companion this time?
* Will Kempthorne be like Steve Symms divorcing his seriously-ill wife, or does he prefer Patricia brush up on her Tammy Wynette singing while he enjoys a steady stream of minor dalliances, a la Butch Otter?
* With neocons and fundamentalists screaming about sanctity of marriage, why do Kempthorne, Otter, and other Idaho Republicans hate the noble institution of marriage?
* And the national question: Would a scandal like this shred another percentage point off Bush's approval rating? Admittedly, it's such poor taste to distract the president from his two priorities:* Iraq and the November elections, but I like to hope that any day the Cheney administration is off-message is another day alive for several Iraqis (and Iranians). If so, those lives saved are almost be enough to attone for Idaho wingnuts STILL mustering a 50% approval rating yesterday for Bush.

AT LAST, we'll have a cabinet member that unabashedly likes their pages bent over. And the left can argue that as a cabinet member, Dirk opens the chance that if someone has an affair we'll finally get an impeachment. Right?! (pause, listen for the DLC and the entire republican party... nothing but crickets).

* apologies to Monty Python

BAGHDAD BOB NAMED PENTAGON SPOKESMAN

BAGHDAD BOB NAMED PENTAGON SPOKESMAN
Stunning Comeback for Former Iraqi Information Minister

Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who became famous around the world for his
rosy pronouncements when he served as Information Minister to Iraqi
strongman Saddam Hussein, staged a stunning political comeback today
by being named the chief spokesman for the Pentagon in Washington.

Mr. al-Sahaf, who made headlines as "Baghdad Bob" three years ago by
repeatedly proclaiming that the Iraqi army was demolishing invading
U.S. forces, appeared at a press briefing at the Pentagon this
afternoon with a beaming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who
called the former Iraqi Information Minister "the right man for the
right job at the right time."

Explaining his decision to tap Mr. al-Sahaf as chief Pentagon
spokesman, Secretary Rumsfeld said, "I realized that our spokesmen
have been trying to do the same thing that Muhammed did three years
ago, only they aren't as credible as he was."

Stepping up to the microphone, an ebullient Mr. al-Sahaf said that
conditions on the ground in Iraq "have never been better" and that the
insurgency was "all but vanquished."

"Democracy is flowering in Iraq so fast you wouldn't believe it!" Mr.
al-Sahaf added. "People think the new constitution is awesome!"

When asked by a reporter about the burned-out cars that litter the
streets of Baghdad and other cities, Mr. al-Sahaf was unfazed,
explaining, "Their engines overheated."

The former Iraqi Information Minister was also upbeat about the trial
of Saddam Hussein, telling reporters, "It's moving even faster than
Milosevic's!"

Elsewhere, President Bush acknowledged that prewar intelligence about
Iraq had been false, and said that the U.S. would discontinue its
practice of ordering military intelligence from Costco.

"The Final Word Is Hooray!"

"The Final Word Is Hooray!"
Remembering the Iraq War's Pollyanna pundits




Weeks after thse invasion of Iraq began, Fox News Channel host Brit Hume delivered a scathing speech critiquing the media's supposedly pessimistic assessment of the Iraq War.

"The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong," Hume complained in the April 2003 speech (Richmond Times Dispatch, 4/25/04). "They didn't get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong."

Hume was perhaps correct--but almost entirely in the opposite sense. Days or weeks into the war, commentators and reporters made premature declarations of victory, offered predictions about lasting political effects and called on the critics of the war to apologize. Three years later, the Iraq War grinds on at the cost of at least tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Around the same time as Hume's speech, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas declared (4/16/03): "All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent. Otherwise, they will return to us in another situation where their expertise will be acknowledged, or taken for granted, but their credibility will be lacking."

Gathered here are some of the most notable media comments from the early days of the Iraq War.


Declaring Victory

"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)


"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it."
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)


"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention."
(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)


"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/13/03)


"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)


"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)


"We're all neo-cons now."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)


"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."
(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)


"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)


Mission Accomplished?

"The war winds down, politics heats up.... Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific."
(PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)


"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)


"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)


Neutralizing the Opposition

"Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)


"What's he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose their--Isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?"
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean--4/9/03)


"If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a president fresh from a war victory?"
(CNN's Judy Woodruff, 5/5/03)


"It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context..... And the silence, I think, is that it's clear that nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him. The Democrats can't oppose--cannot oppose him politically."
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum-- Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)


Nagging the "Naysayers"

"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)


"I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)


"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.... I just wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war....

"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, 'The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.' Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail, again.

"Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)


"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
(Fox News Channel's Dick Morris, 4/9/03)


"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right."
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)


"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."
(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)

"Some journalists, in my judgment, just can't stand success, especially a few liberal columnists and newspapers and a few Arab reporters."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, 4/14/03)

"Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn't figured out we won the war."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)


Cakewalk?

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate-- cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)


"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?"
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)


"It won't take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there's no question that it will."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)


"There's no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and Britain unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold like that."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)


"He [Saddam Hussein] actually thought that he could stop us and win the debate worldwide. But he didn't--he didn't bargain on a two- or three week war. I actually thought it would be less than two weeks."
(NBC reporter Fred Francis, Chris Matthews Show, 4/13/03)


Weapons of Mass Destruction

NPR's Mara Liasson: Where there was a debate about whether or not Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction and whether we can find it...

Brit Hume: No, there wasn't. Nobody seriously argued that he didn't have them beforehand. Nobody.
(Fox News Channel, April 6, 2003)


"Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it."
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)


"Saddam could decide to take Baghdad with him. One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of 'the green mushroom' over Baghdad--the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time."
(Newsweek, 3/17/03)


"Chris, more than anything else, real vindication for the administration. One, credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Two, you know what? There were a lot of terrorists here, really bad guys. I saw them."
(MSNBC reporter Bob Arnot, 4/9/03)


"Even in the flush of triumph, doubts will be raised. Where are the supplies of germs and poison gas and plans for nukes to justify pre-emption? (Freed scientists will lead us to caches no inspectors could find.) What about remaining danger from Baathist torturers and war criminals forming pockets of resistance and plotting vengeance? (Their death wish is our command.)"
(New York Times' William Safire, 4/10/03)

George W. Bush marked the third anniversary of the Iraq War by proclaiming in his weekly radio address that we would "finish the mission" with "complete victory." Good to hear. So how does the Great Leader's proclamation of "complete victory" stack up against his previous statements on the Iraq War?

Third Anniversary of Iraq Invasion, March 2006

"In recent weeks, Americans have seen horrific images from Iraq: the bombing of a great house of worship in Samarra, sectarian reprisals between Sunnis and Shias, and car bombings and kidnappings. ... The security of our country is directly linked to the liberty of the Iraqi people, and we will settle for nothing less than complete victory. Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for the terrorists to plot new attacks against our nation." -


Second Anniversary of Iraq Invasion, March 2005

"Iraq's progress toward political freedom has opened a new phase of our work there. We are focusing our efforts on training the Iraqi security forces. As they become more self-reliant and take on greater security responsibilities, America and its coalition partners will increasingly assume a supporting role. ... The victory of freedom in Iraq is strengthening a new ally in the war on terror, and inspiring democratic reformers from Beirut to Tehran." George W. Bush radio address

First Anniversary of Iraq Invasion, March 2004

"The liberation of Iraq was good for the Iraqi people, good for America, and good for the world. The fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence, aggression, and instability from the Middle East. ... The Iraqi people are now receiving aid, instead of suffering under sanctions. And men and women across the Middle East, looking to Iraq, are getting a glimpse of what life in a free country can be like." - George W. Bush radio address

Two Months After Iraq Invasion, May 2003

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!!!






You know, I have the strangest feeling that this is all happening backwards.

During the height of Watergate, even Nixon had 25% approval. So, no matter who is President, I contend 25% of the people polled are gonna approve of them. 25% of 1018 is 255.

That means of the 347 who approved of Bush 255 would’ve approved of him no matter what.

Let's throw those 255 out of our sample of 1018. That leaves 763 total people polled.

Of those 763, 92 approved (347-255) that is a whopping 12% approval rating!

Bush's war is so fucking stupid as to be incomprehensible.
Rational solutions can't apply. The only way to get out is to cut and run, only make up a new name for it, like "uncontrolled rephasing of expeditionay force assets".

I'm thinking like a damn Republican.

THE BUSH DOCTRINE

The bird flu is coming - but don't worry, because the Bush administration is primed and ready to pounce on this potentially dangerous disease. Yes, the gang that bought you Freedom And Democracy In Iraq and We Are Fully Prepared To Help The Victims Of Hurricane Katrina is lining up its latest success - but this time they need your help. Remember when John Ashcroft said that everyone should prepare for a terrorist attack by rushing out to get duct tape and plastic sheeting? If you thought that was government at its finest, you'll love this.

Last week Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt announced that Americans should prepare for bird flu by stashing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds. "When you go to the store and buy three cans of tuna fish," said Secretary Leavitt, "buy a fourth and put it under the bed. When you go to the store to buy some milk, pick up a box of powdered milk. Put it under the bed." Sounds good, but what are folks like Bill O'Reilly going to do? You think he's got the time or inclination to move all those boxes of porn?

Back in February the Danville School Board (Pennsylvania) came under fire for debating whether or not to allow students to participate in the Day of Silence - "a student-led day of action where those who support making anti-LGBT bias unacceptable in schools take a day-long vow of silence to recognize and protest the discrimination and harassment - in effect, the silencing - experienced by LGBT students and their allies," according to their website.

It's no surprise that those who would wish gays back into the closet are outraged about the Day of Silence, which is set to take place on April 26. At a recent school board debate, staunch conservative Donald Lee Fox carried a Bible to the podium, quoted Bible verse, and labeled homosexuality "an abomination."

Unfortunately for Mr. Fox, he must have missed the part about "judge not lest ye be judged yourself." See, it turns out that Donald Lee Fox is a convicted sex offender who was convicted of aggravated indecent assault on a 15-year-old girl in 1995, and served three to ten months in prison. According to the Associated Press, "Fox, who is required to register as a Megan's Law offender for life, was charged last year with violating the law by not informing the state he had moved. He pleaded no contest and was fined $300 and put on probation for a year."

Sounds like a real expert on "family values," right?

You Rock George!!!!!!

Confusion over health insurance leaves children sufferingSome mistakenly cut from the rolls as state makes program changes

By POLLY ROSS HUGHES
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau


AUSTIN - Three-year-old Ryla Woodard spent a weekend in the hospital earlier this year when she broke out in a rash, her fever spiked to 103 and doctors diagnosed her with mononucleosis.


Just days later she lost her government-sponsored health coverage, and her family can't afford a second follow-up blood test to see if she's still infected with the virus that can cause fatigue and swelling, or even rupturing, of the spleen.

"She's complaining of a sore throat. It lingers in your system a while," said Ryla's mother, Traci Woodard, from the East Texas town of Orange. "Today I cannot take her anywhere to see if she still tests positive for mono because I have no health insurance. I'm hitting walls and locked doors."

The Woodards aren't the only family complaining about confusion in the Children's Health Insurance Program as enrollments nose-dived the past three months with new rules and a new company screening applications.With Ryla's coverage mistakenly cut, her mother said Galveston County, two hours away, is the closest place to qualify for indigent health care.
Ryla and her sister Dara, 4, lost CHIP coverage for February and March, but that was the state's mistake, not theirs.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission confirms the sisters got mistakenly caught up in confusion when an eligibility-screening contract switched Nov. 28 to a Midland call center headed by the private outsourcing firm Accenture.

"Clearly there are some learning-curve issues," commission spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said of the new call center.

The Woodard sisters are among the young faces behind plummeting enrollment in the insurance program, which fell below 300,000 on March 1 for the first time since April 2001.
Enrollment has plunged by 28,000 children since December, when tougher proof-of-income rules kicked in just as the call-center contract switched to Accenture. The health commission is still trying to sort out rejections caused by mistakes in the screening process from cuts caused by the state's stricter eligibility rules.

Last spring, lawmakers restored vision, dental and mental health benefits to CHIP and budgeted for enrollments averaging nearly 350,000 — at least 50,000 more children than are on the rolls.

Meanwhile, the Texas Association of Health Plans calls a 73 percent denial rate for families attempting to renew last month "staggering," and appeals of those terminations have more than tripled since last year to nearly 2,500.

117,000 more could be cutIf current CHIP trends persist, about 117,000 more children could lose coverage by the end of June, the group warns.

"I think it's a crisis. We can't afford to lose any more children from the program," said Barbara Best, Texas executive director of the Children's Defense Fund, based in Houston. "Enrollments should be growing, not shrinking. It's the children who are suffering."

The two older Woodard sisters fell through the cracks switching from Medicaid for the very poor to CHIP for working families unable to afford private health insurance. Of children bumped from CHIP last month, only 13 percent lost coverage because their family income rose too high. More than half lost coverage because applications had "missing information" or renewal information was not received.

"Obviously the staff at the new call center is newer," said Goodman. "They've been through training, but they're overwhelmed. Sometimes if they can't provide immediate assistance, they tell (families) to file an appeal. That's kind of the last guidance they give them on the phone.
"One of our struggles right now is to sort out where there are trends, so it's not an isolated transition issue, but it's a symptom of a larger problem we need to go in and address," she added.

Two weeks ago, Accenture and the commission discovered they'd mistakenly canceled 6,000 children from CHIP for not paying a fee parents hadn't been told to pay. HHSC Commissioner Albert Hawkins ordered those children immediately restored to the rolls.
But other eligible children erroneously dropped, such as Ryla and Dara, are having to wait until April 1, left uncovered for two full months.

Traci Woodard, noting that all three of her daughters were supposed to automatically switch into CHIP when family income rose too high for Medicaid in November, said everything seemed to go wrong. With CHIP coverage not kicking in, Medicaid extended coverage for all three girls through the end of January. On Feb. 1, baby Tristia was enrolled in CHIP but not Ryla and Dara. Call-center employees even informed Woodard she'd have to pay a second enrollment fee for the older girls, even though the rule is one fee per family. "The state of Texas is trying to cut corners and everything. That's great, but we're suffering for it," said Woodard, who acknowledged losing her temper with one call-center worker who first refused to give her his name or ID number.

"Whoever the state has contracted to do this CHIP insurance, they have dropped the ball," she added. "It's one thing to mess with me, but you're messing with my kids."
Accenture spokesman Peter Soh said, "My understanding is the state is investigating each and every case that's brought to their attention to find out what's going on."
He said Friday the company thinks its call-center processes are now working, but other parents are complaining of snafus similar to Woodard's.

Debra Berg of Houston said the former private eligibility-screening contractor told her last November that she needed to send proof her daughters are U.S. citizens, a problem that Goodman said might have resulted when the contractor lost staff as it prepared to shift call centers to Accenture.

"I said, my kids cannot just switch countries. You have their birth certificates. What else do you need me to prove?" She said she thought the problem was cleared up after calling the new call center to explain.

Shocking discoveryShe assumed everything was fine until Feb. 1 when she took her 7-year-old daughter to the doctor for suspected whooping cough. "We were quite shocked when February came around and we didn't have insurance," Berg said. She also had to cancel an evening counseling session for an older daughter diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The next day, the Midland call center advised her to file an appeal. A psychiatrist agreed to see the older girl later that month, but still there was no insurance for medications that were running out. Jay Haevischer, a disabled father in Bellville, said 10-year-old Colby's CHIP coverage was suddenly terminated in late February. The only explanation? Missing information.

Haevischer said he had failed to sign the new CHIP renewal form when he first sent it in but quickly corrected the error when contacted by the call center. He then called to make sure his corrected form arrived and said he was told it did and not to worry. So the father said he was floored when a cancellation letter arrived a month later saying his son's longtime CHIP coverage was being terminated for lack of information.

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches

Fox new's Eddie Munster

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press WriterSat Mar 18, 12:52 PM ET

"Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."

"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is just as problematic.

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters.

Not long after taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.

The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.

Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security Department against Democrats.

He told at least two audiences that some senators opposing him were "not interested in the security of the American people." In reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Bush himself first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service protections.

Running for re-election against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Bush frequently used some version of this line to paint his Democratic opponent as weaker in the fight against terrorism: "My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter of intelligence and law enforcement."

The assertion was called a mischaracterization of Kerry's views even by a Republican, Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) of Arizona.

Straw men have made more frequent appearances in recent months, often on national security — once Bush's strong suit with the public but at the center of some of his difficulties today. Under fire for a domestic eavesdropping program, a ports-management deal and the rising violence in Iraq, Bush now sees his approval ratings hovering around the lowest of his presidency.

Said Jamieson, "You would expect people to do that as they feel more threatened."

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. "Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq," he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. "That is foolhardy policy."

Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.

Recently defending his decision to allow the National Security Agency to monitor without subpoenas the international communications of Americans suspected of terrorist ties, Bush has suggested that those who question the program underestimate the terrorist threat.

"There's some in America who say, 'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,'" Bush said during a January visit to the NSA.

The president has relied on straw men, too, on the topics of taxes and trade, issues he hopes will work against Democrats in this fall's congressional elections.

Usually without targeting Democrats specifically, Bush has suggested they are big-spenders who want to raise taxes, because most oppose extending some of his earlier tax cuts, and protectionists who do not want to open global markets to American goods, when most oppose free-trade deals that lack protections for labor and the environment.

"Some people believe the answer to this problem is to wall off our economy from the world," he said this month in India, talking about the migration of U.S. jobs overseas. "I strongly disagree."

BUSH...WE DO "NOT' TORTURE!!!!!

March 19, 2006
Task Force 6-26
Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.

"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops.

One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special Operations soldiers who were in the unit — by phone, through relatives and former neighbors — were also unsuccessful.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended often in a cell at Abu Ghraib. Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways.

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from peeking out.

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had reviewed.

In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future. Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders presented them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.

The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003, raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target information and other intelligence to the task force.

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds of standard F.B.I. practice."

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24, 2004.

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield.

"These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task force operations.

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama.

Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams," to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said.

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.

On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10 task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences.

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress.

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public.