I am sullied -- no more. Colonel Ted Westhusing was a soldier's soldier -- a multilingual West Point graduate, tough as nails, who was committed to the ancient Greek warrior's ideal of
ἀρετή ("arete," excellence). He volunteered to go to Iraq, where he was commanded by another
outstanding rising-star officer, counterinsurgency expert
David Petraeus. (Westhusing's widow, Michelle, recalls that her husband thought his country was doing "a great thing" there.) After working with one of the shadowy contractors the US has relied on to train Iraqi security forces,
USIS, Westhusing became increasingly despondent. In May 2005, investigators say, he put a 9mm bullet in his brain after writing a note that said, "Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and
I know it." Westhusing died, as was previously discussed
here, and his former "cdr" is now
running the war. Lots of new information in this article from the
Texas Observer.
posted by digaman
on Mar 10, 2007 -
114 comments
Now they tell us. Neocon hindsight is 20/20. War architect
Richard Perle on invading Iraq, 2002: "We have no time to lose, and I think the president understands that and it's probably taken too long already, but I don't think it'll be much longer... Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.... Now,
it isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going to be months either." Four years later: "If I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies'... Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
posted by digaman
on Nov 3, 2006 -
105 comments
DHS's CyberStorm-- --Recognizing the imminent threat hippies and assorted leftists obviously pose to us all, a massive cyber terror simulation (international and involving 115 organizations) recently came to light:
...The attack scenario detailed in the presentation is a meticulously plotted parade of cyber horribles led by a "well financed" band of leftist radicals who object to U.S. imperialism, aided by sympathetic independent actors.
At the top of the pyramid is the Worldwide Anti-Globalization Alliance, which sets things off by calling for cyber sit-ins and denial-of-service attacks against U.S. interests. WAGA's radical arm, the villainous Black Hood Society, ratchets up the tension on day one by probing SCADA computerized control systems and military networks ...
posted by amberglow
on Aug 17, 2006 -
28 comments
The Smell of War -- the Institute for Creative Technologies preps Quake-happy teens to become first-person shooters in the non-virtual war on terror. Now in Odorama.
posted by digaman
on Jul 25, 2006 -
22 comments
"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," writes former CIA official Paul Pillar, coordinator of U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until 2005, in an article soon to appear in
Foreign Affairs, hardly a radical rag. More confirmation that Seymour Hersh was right about the administration
"cherry-picking" intelligence to justify a foregone conclusion to go to war in Iraq.
posted by digaman
on Feb 10, 2006 -
49 comments
Evidence of a slippery slope continued:
Newsweek reports that White House counsel Steve Bradbury
believes President Bush can order killings on US soil as part of the Terrorist-Surveillance Program
TM. Meanwhile, while
Attorney General Gonzales "lashes out" at the media and insists that the TSP
TM is "not a dragnet that sucks in all conversation and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest,"
the Washington Post reports it's precisely that -- "computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears" -- and has led to very few leads. (See also discussion of Arlen Specter and the legality of the TSP
TM here.)
posted by digaman
on Feb 6, 2006 -
137 comments
Then:
Q - Mr. Secretary, on Iraq, how much money do you think the Department of Defense would need to pay for a war with Iraq?
Rumsfeld - Well, the Office of Management and Budget, has come up come up with a number that's something under $50 billion for the cost. How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question.
And now:
The estimated cost to US taxpayers of the Iraq war to date is
$250 billion and rising, or $100,000 per minute. Total cost of the Bush doctrine of spreading "democracy" since September 11th -- half a trillion dollars, or nearly the cost of the 13 years of the Vietnam War, adjusted for inflation. What else could we have done with
that kind of money? Also see
here.
posted by digaman
on Feb 3, 2006 -
112 comments
Osama bin Laden,
littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called
Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer
formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via
Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy.
[via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by digaman
on Nov 3, 2005 -
57 comments
The administration's latest innovation in its effort to export democracy:
Soviet-style gulags, a network of secret C.I.A. prisons known as "black sites." [From the
Washington Post]. Meanwhile, SecDef Rumsfeld says
no thanks to the idea of U.N. inspectors talking to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.
posted by digaman
on Nov 2, 2005 -
369 comments
U.S. Can Detain Padilla Indefinitely. President George W. Bush was handed a major victory on Friday in his effort to assert sweeping presidential powers in the war on terrorism as a US appeals court upheld his authority to imprison indefinitely a US citizen captured on American soil.
posted by solistrato
on Sep 9, 2005 -
76 comments
"Things just happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind."
For this reason, Tom Rath, the hero of Sloan Wilson's 1955 novel
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, decides not to "make sense" of the the atrocities to which he bears witness during World War II. Instead, he accepts that war is in itself irrational, and that he must simply forget its horrors before returning to civilian life.
This New Yorker article contrasts Wilson's 1950's stoicism with today's veneration of the grieving process and suggests that this change in attitude has led us to vastly underestimate our own capacity for coping with trauma. The author also draws some interesting parallels with
a controversial study in which victims of childhood sexual abuse were found to be no more likely than others to suffer from mental health problems as adults. Intriguing stuff, to say the least, and as I read it, I can't help but think of Johnny Cash's
"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"(Note: Having thankfully never been subjected to war or sexual abuse myself, I am in no way attempting to demean the anguish of those who have. Rather, I'm more interested in the idea that people are stronger than they give themselves credit for, and how different upbringings affect our experience of trauma.)
posted by idontlikewords
on Dec 28, 2004 -
41 comments
Cat Stevens on NatSec watchlist. "A London-to-Washington flight was diverted to Maine on Tuesday when it was discovered passenger
Yusuf Islam - formerly known as singer
Cat Stevens - was on a government watch list and barred from entering the country, federal officials said... Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy identified the passenger as Islam. 'He was interviewed and denied admission to the United States on national security grounds,' Murphy said, and would be put on the first available flight out of the country Wednesday."
posted by mwhybark
on Sep 21, 2004 -
79 comments
Rumsfeld fears U.S. losing long-term fight against terror. The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed "zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
"It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
Who are you and what have you done with Rumsfeld? And Can you do it some more?
via the illustrious oliver willis.
posted by jonmc
on Jun 7, 2004 -
60 comments
Terror's myriad faces Al-Qaeda, conceived of as a tight-knit terrorist group with cadres and a capability everywhere, does not exist in that form. It barely existed before the war in Afghanistan in 2001 destroyed Osama bin Laden's carefully constructed infrastructure there. It certainly does not exist now. Instead, we are facing a different kind of threat. Al-Qaeda can only be understood as an ideology, an agenda and a way of seeing the world that is shared by an increasing number of predominantly young, predominantly male Muslims. Eliminating bin Laden and a few hundred senior activists will do nothing to counter this al-Qaeda. Hundreds more will come forward to fill their ranks. Al-Qaeda, however understood, will continue to operate. The threat will remain and it will grow. See also
Sowing The Dragon's Teeth.
Or, alternately,
Hercules and the Hydra.
posted by y2karl
on May 20, 2003 -
25 comments
Did Bush know? An article in today's New York Times (link to mirrored site with no reg. req.) pieces together data that the author claims proves that Bush and his inner circle were well-aware that they were using false "evidence" of Iraqi WMD. Sy Hersh from the
New Yorker is also
chiming in, as is Salon's
Joe Connason and
Katha Pollitt of
The Nation. A pretty decent subsection of media is finally descending on this story. If Bush or Powell or Rumsfeld are proven to have been knowingly deceitful, will the American public be even half as angry as the rest of the world?
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on May 6, 2003 -
59 comments
Mike Hawash Charged with
conspiracy to levy war against the United States, conspiracy to provide material support to al Qaeda and conspiracy to contribute services to al Qaeda and the Taliban. Heavy. 5 days ago, a now near-famous
letter was removed from a
website that had recently been trumpeting his
cause. Today, the Feds allege terrorism.
--
Of note: the frequent allusion to "secrecy" and "secret warrants". Is this ammo for the pro-PATRIOT crowd? Any changing opinions on Mefi?
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on Apr 28, 2003 -
62 comments
Why Aren't U.S. Journalists Reporting From Iraq? "This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam. People who wonder about the Bush war-urgency only need to think about this: there’s a blind spot that needs to be exploited now, before too many journalists get the idea to go inside Iraq and find out what’s really happening. As long as the Condi Rices, Dick Cheneys and other hawks are talking to journalists with no experience inside Iraq, they won’t get a raised eyebrow about this notion that the secular dictator is in bed with the
jihadis -- even though [reports indicate]....the CIA has found no link between the Iraqi dictator and Al Qaeda."
posted by fold_and_mutilate
on Sep 13, 2002 -
55 comments
White House media advisor spins the war in London. President Bush has sent "military advisors" to Yemen, Georgia and the Philippines to help with the war on terrorism. Did anyone know he sent his #2 media man,
Tucker Eskew, to London as a "media advisor" to Tony Blair's #1 media man,
Alastair Campbell, to help spin the war to the Brits?
Do you think a U.S. administration would ever agree to a foreign government rep "advising" them on how to talk to their citizens? Or do they already?
posted by busbyism
on Mar 20, 2002 -
9 comments
More Q & A on Terror and War
"A number of folks feel that current events -- particularly in the last few days -- have dramatically changed the logic and morality of what has been done in Afghanistan, calling into question much of the analysis and assessment that has been offered by critics of the war. Here are some of the questions we have been asked, and our brief replies."
posted by mapalm
on Nov 18, 2001 -
60 comments
