by TChris

Officials in Iraq are reporting the results of "the single deadliest ambush of the insurgency": the execution of 49 Iraqi soldiers by "guerrillas dressed as police officers."

The soldiers were pulled out of three minibuses at a fake checkpoint about 95 miles east of Baghdad, near the Iranian border, police officials said. They were told or forced to lie down on the ground in four rows, then killed mostly with bullets to their heads. The ambush, extraordinarily ambitious in scope and violence, showed a high level of organization, and the insurgents likely had inside information on the travel plans of the soldiers, who were members of the nascent Iraqi National Guard, officials said.

In another attack, a State Department security officer, Edward Seitz, was killed this morning at the inaptly named Camp Victory, the American base near Baghdad International Airport.

Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley revisits the history of soldier mutinies in order to help us understand issues surrounding the 18 Army Reserve soldiers who refused to go on a mission in Iraq claiming the conditions were too dangerous.

After returning from a mission marred by inadequate or broken equipment, the soldiers were ordered to take a shipment of jet fuel to Taji, a perilous route even for armored and functioning equipment. According to family members and media accounts, many soldiers objected that their trucks lacked essential armor, vehicles were broken down, there was no plan for adequate combat support and, finally, the fuel shipment was contaminated (and thus unusable). They reportedly raised these concerns with their command but were ordered to carry out the mission anyway. It was then that the 18 soldiers refused to go on the convoy.

Turley says mutinies more reflect problems with commanders than with individual soldiers. He reminds us of how Roman commanders dealt with mutinous soldiers:

In Roman times, reluctant or mutinous soldiers were punished through "decimation," a word often used incorrectly to refer to total destruction. Generals would "decimate" units by executing every 10th soldier as collective punishment.

Even now, mutineering soldiers are judged harshly. Is it time to revisit the policy?

Chutzpah department: the Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah corporation selected by John Ashcroft to run the Abu Ghraib prison is bidding on contracts to run British prisons.

After Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, John Ashcroft, the US attorney general, put MTC director Lane McCotter in charge of reopening Iraq's prison system. He helped to rebuild Abu Ghraib and trained Iraqi citizens to work in prisons.

McCotter, a Vietnam veteran, has a chequered record of running US jails. In 1997 he was forced to resign as a senior prison official in Utah after a scandal surrounding the death of a mentally ill inmate strapped naked to a chair for 16 hours. This year, Schumer wrote to Ashcroft, asking why someone with McCotter's controversial history was sent to Iraq.

Last year MTC was criticised by the US Justice Department over its management of Santa Fe prison in New Mexico which was found to have unsafe conditions and lack adequate medical care for inmates. The company said the problems have been resolved and it has had its contract renewed.

British prisons are plagued with problems, but as Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Mark Oaten said:

by TChris

John Kerry frequently reminds voters that President Bush instituted a "back door draft" by using stop loss orders to force members of the "volunteer" Army to remain in uniform after their terms of service expire. Now a soldier who completed his service and resigned -- and who wasn't subject to a stop loss order -- has been ordered to report to duty. To his credit, he's fighting back.

Jay Ferriola, a 31-year-old Manhattan resident, handed in his resignation in June after eight years of active and reserve duty, according to the suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court. But even though his commanding officer recommended that he be granted a discharge, the military never sent out the paperwork, the suit says, and on Tuesday, Ferriola got orders dated Oct. 8 sending him to war.

Ferriola's attorney, Barry Slotnick, says the Army should uphold the contract it made with Ferriola in 1993. The lawsuit contends that the Army's refusal to honor its agreement subjects Ferriola to involuntary servitude in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Although courts do not equate the draft with slavery, we don't have a draft. Or at least that's what the President says. Ferriola's experience strengthens Kerry's argument that the administration has effectively instituted a draft by refusing to let military service come to an end.

British-Iraqi aid worker and kidnapping hostage Margaret Hassan may be the next victim.

Former Abu Ghraib prison guard Charles Graner has been ordered to stand trial on abuse charges on January 7. Graner makes the rest of them look like mild. This will be the trial to watch. According to Lynndie England, :

Graner, with whom she is now pregnant, applied needle and thread to prisoners after beating them. "Cpl. Graner would personally stitch up detainees if the wound weren't too bad," she said. "He would take pictures of his work. One particular incident Cpl. Graner ran a former Iraqi general into a wall and split his lip. Cpl. Graner stitched up his lip."

He sounds like one, sadistic creep.

Graner, of Uniontown, Pa., has been accused of jumping on several detainees as they were piled on the floor. He is also charged with stomping the hands and bare feet of several prisoners and punching one inmate in the temple so hard that he lost consciousness. He also faces adultery charges for having sex with [PFC Lynndie] England last October. He could receive 24 1/2 years in jail, forfeiture of pay, reduction in rank, and a dishonorable discharge.

How did he even get the job with this past record of abuse allegations? And these allegations?

Former CIA Chief George Tenet now says the Iraq war was wrong. [link via Daily Kos.

"We had inconsistent information, and we did not inform others in the community of gaps in our intelligence," Tenet said, with surprising frankness, as recorded by Clark, who recently covered a speech by Paul Bremer before the same group. "The extraordinary men and women who do magnificent work in the CIA are held accountable every day for what they do, and as part of keeping our faith with the American people, we will tell you when we're right or wrong."

As for the regime of Saddam Hussein: "I believed he had weapons of mass destruction. He didn't. At the end of the day I have to stand up accountable for that. In the meantime our nation needs to honor the commitment we made in Iraq."

Tenet was recently made a Professor at Georgetown.

Abu Graib guard Ivan "Chip Frederick" received an 8 year sentence today for his part in torturing Iraqi prisoners. His lawyer thinks it's too harsh. Does anyone agree?

Abu Ghraib prison guard and Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick pleaded guilty in a court-martial Wednesday. He is cooperating with authorities for a lesser sentence, and told the court that at the request of military and civilian intelligence officials, he staged a mock electrocution.

A US soldier on trial for abusing Iraqi prisoners told a Baghdad court martial yesterday that he hooked up wires around a hooded detainee in a mock electrocution at the behest of military and civilian intelligence officials.

If Frederick is to be believed, these officials set the policy for the treatment of prisoners.

In his testimony yesterday, he described a prison regime where policy was set by military and civilian officials involved in the interrogation of prisoners. However, Sgt Frederick played a pivotal role in the events at Abu Ghraib. His experience as a prison guard in civilian life led his superiors to put him in charge of the night shift in the main prison block at Abu Ghraib, including the tier where the abuse was photographed.

Knights Ridder newspapers has finished a report on Bush's post-war planning and finds it was non-existent:

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

In fact, some senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003. Instead, more than a year later, 138,000 U.S. troops are still fighting terrorists who slip easily across Iraq's long borders, diehards from the old regime and Iraqis angered by their country's widespread crime and unemployment and America's sometimes heavy boots.

"We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory," said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.

Here's what the report is based on:

Here's an interesting of account of some lesser known officials who may be responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, as well as abuse in some of America's notorious prisons, but for some reason, seem to have slipped under the radar. Author Leah Caldwell posits:

Their involvement implicates the American government and its domestic policy of mass imprisonment and brutalization in the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

First up as culprit is the International Criminal Investigative Training Program (ICITAP), an envoy appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

ICITAP is based in the Department of Justice, but receives funding for individual projects through the Department of State. ICITAP has embarked on many missions since its inception in 1986, from the former Soviet Union to Haiti to Indonesia.

The missions change locations, but their teams have managed to accrue a consistent record of questionable activities while operating under the guise of rebuilding criminal justice systems.

Typically, ICITAP serves to prop up the police and prison systems of American client states. It is a successor to the police training program run by the Agency for International Development. That program was halted in the mid-70's after the Watergate scandal when it became public knowledge that U.S. AID officials were training police and prison officials around the world in techniques of murder and torture, mostly for use against leftist insurgencies. The activities of ICITAP are not new, only the name is.

Among those she names, in addition to the usual suspects: Terry Stewart. Gary DeLand. John J. Armstrong. Lance McCotter. TalkLeft has written fairly extensively on McCotter, here and here and here.

A highly credible report substantiates the existence of Gulf War syndrome .

Thousands of veterans of the 1991 war suffer from unexplained poor health. Servicemen and women from the US, UK, Canada and France who took part in the operation to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait have reported one or more symptoms, including memory loss, chronic fatigue and dizziness.

...The findings are in a report by the influential Research Advisory Committee on Gulf war veterans' illness, leaked to the New York Times. Committee chief scientist Professor Beatrice Golombe said that exposure to certain substances in the Gulf may have altered some troops' body chemistry. ...The US report said the troops' problems were definitely caused by exposure to toxic chemicals rather than stress or psychiatric illness. Potential sources include Iraqi nerve gas and drugs given to the troops to protect them from chemical weapons.

The original October 14 New York Times article on the study is here. It says "an estimated 100,000 Gulf War veterans, or about one in seven, suffer war-related health problems."