Sec. Def. Gates Announces the End of Stop Loss

A welcome announcement from Sec. Gates today. I am sure this got covered by all the news from AIG. Stop Loss was one of the worse things that Bush ever did to the military. They aren't stopping it overnight, unfortunately, but at least they are going to stop it. They are also laying out the plans more in detail for the honoring of the fallen.

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Unopened claims letters hidden at VA offices

As if we haven't seen enough of the screw ups and wrongs of our military by the Bush Administration, here comes another one. I got this in my email today and it just makes me so angry I have no words to describe it. We owe our men and women who fight everything, and when they come home they should get what is owed to them with no problems at all. Instead this is what they get.

This article from Marine Corp Times tells about unopened letters and back dated claims in the Veterans Administration. More problems for President Obama to have to clean up. How much more can we pile up on his plate. Every time we think we find it all more keeps getting piled on.

A new report about Veterans Affairs Department employees squirreling away tens of thousands of unopened letters related to benefits claims is sparking fresh concerns that veterans and their survivors are being cheated out of money.

VA officials acknowledge further credibility problems based on a new report of a previously undisclosed 2007 incident in which workers at a Detroit regional office turned in 16,000 pieces of unprocessed mail and 717 documents turned up in New York in December during amnesty periods in which workers were promised no one would be penalized.

It is no wonder the article goes on to say that veterans have lost their trust in the VA.

Unprocessed and unopened mail was just one problem in VA claims processing mentioned by Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing, in testimony before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Auditors also found that the dates recorded for receiving claims, which in many cases determine the effective date for benefits payments, are wrong in many cases because of intentional and unintentional errors, Finn said.

I know this is not a new problem. The fact that our veterans are treated terribly has been going on for years. My dad, uncles and others I know from WWII either are still or have just recently gotten their claims for disability compensation through the process.

Sixty years?? Yes, 60 years, and they are just now getting their claims. So many of them were either told they weren't eligible, or they never knew they could even file. Then, there were the ones who had not been able to document their injuries due to "heat of the battle" type things. Injuries and wounds happened that were not serious enough at the time to get them sent back to the hospital, or sick bay, but were treated by a corp man or medic and they kept on fighting.

Later, these same soldiers, sailors and marines found out these injuries were often much more serious and yet now there was no documentation. So, no claim could ever be filed. Too bad, says the VA. Unless you can find someone who served with you that remembers it and can help you document it and will testify for you.

These guys are in their 80's, lots of them are deceased, they are scattered, so they give up and get nothing for having served bravely in battle. Why do we not take better care of our veterans?? This is something I think the neocons and the republicans need to ask themselves, they claim to be such champions of the military, yet they do not take care of the veterans very well. It takes a Democratic President to try to fix the Veterans Administration.

Dick & George Still Telling Thier Lies

Once again I heard the famous words come out of the mouth of Darth Cheney. "We kept the US safe for 7 and a half years". It just amazes me when I hear him or George Bush say that.

How safe have we been?? How safe do you feel?? How safe did the people in St Paul feel when the bridge collapsed under them?? How safe did the people in Tennessee feel when the mud slid into their houses last month?? How safe did the people in Alabama feel when the leak at Whistle Creek developed?? These people were put at risk because Bush & Co. decided we needed to go to war in Iraq instead of paying attention to our infrastructure.

Our country is crumbling under us. How is that not important?? Would that not be considered keeping us safe?? Yet they still spout the line they kept us safe. I wrote on this before. I still stand by what I said.

Not counting 20 percent of his first term, January 20th, 2001, until September 11th, 2001.
On 9/11, he sat reading "My Pet Goat" for seven minutes after learning America was under attack.
Then covered up environmental dangers at Ground Zero, and failed to provide for the health of rescue workers.
Helped bin Laden's family flee the country.
Opposed the 9/11 Commission, the Department of Homeland Security.
Tried to outsource America's port security to Dubai.
Did not keep us safe from the shoe-bomber... alert passengers and crew did that...
Did not keep five Americans safe from anthrax... and never caught their killer.
Still hasn't caught the killer of 17 sailors aboard the USS Cole.
Still hasn't caught the killer of 3,000 on 9/11... outsourcing that to Afghans... turning that country into a narco-state, giving bin Laden a safe haven in the region of Waziristan by literally endorsing a truce that Pakistan signed with the Taliban there.
And most of all, not keeping safe 4,200 Americans dead in his war, a war that made us less safe, invading a country that posed no grave or gathering threat, provided a check on Iran... then igniting insurrection by disbanding the Baathist Party, creating a Muslim theocracy purged of its moderate intelligentsia. One in which freedom has marched backward for women.
And Lebanon, too, elected a Muslim theocracy... run by Hamas, no less.
Keeping us safe?
Terrorism is rising worldwide.
The still-thriving enemy has claimed Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto...
And thousands of people in India... including 200 in Mumbai last month.
Russia can now invade U-S allies without fear of retribution.
And Mr. Bush failed to prevent Kim Jong Il from joining the ranks of nuclear powers.
Despite even more ample warning than he received prior to 9/11, he lifted not a finger to keep a major American city safe from wind and water.

And what, finally, of the claim in the talking points... that Mr. Bush has always upheld, quote, "the honor and the dignity of his office"?
You must define dignity downward to find it in a lie.
The lie of "Mission Accomplished."

Of upholding the Constitution... or protecting habeas corpus.
That we do not eavesdrop without warrants... do not eavesdrop on Americans.
The lie that we do not torture.
That we do not play politics with justice... that we do not use the wheels of justice... to crush dissent.
That we do not betray those who serve us in secret.
That we uphold, rather than commute, the penalties for those who do.
That we do not stage fake news conferences, do not censor science... do not plant propaganda in Iraqi newspapers... nor pay US columnists to write it in American newspapers.
Or push respected Americans to vaporize their honor and dignity with lies to the world.
Or lie about the causes of the credit crisis, high gas prices, or even that he watched the first plane hit the North Tower on TV.
Where is the honor in vowing a crusade? Of daring those who would kill American troops to "bring it on?"

Of promising to care for the troops after you put them in harm's way, without body armor or up-armored vehicles?
Where was the honor, the dignity in giving a dead soldier's mother a presidential coin and telling her "don't sell it on eBay."?

They still spout this garbage about keeping us safe, they aren't the ones dying for our safety and our country. They aren't the ones suffering every day for what they have brought down on our heads because of their arrogance. Yet they want to claim they have kept us safe. No, sorry George, sorry Dick... YOU FAILED...You have NOT kept us safe. You have made us a target. It is the Men and Women of the military who have kept us safe.

Video of our Military

This is something I found on another site. It is disturbing to say the least. What it says about some of our military, our young people, and our leaders of the last 8 years is appalling. Because I think you have to lay the blame there. At the top. I just am disgusted by this. I am at a loss for words. And that really never happens. Here is the video, you watch it, see what you think of it.

6 Questions for Matthew Alexander...author of How to Break a Terrorist

On Dec. 1, 2008 I posted this:

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
By Matthew Alexander
Sunday, November 30, 2008;
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

Here is more from Matthew Alexander, and please remember this is not his real name. He has had to hide his identity. This is cross posted from Harper's Magazine and was written by Scott Horton. He interviewed Matthew and asked him these 6 questions.

“The American Public has a Right to Know That They Do Not Have to Choose Between Torture and Terror”: Six questions for Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist


At 5:15 p.m. on June 7, 2006, two American F-16 fighters dropped 500-pound bombs on a farmhouse about five miles north of the Iraqi town of Baqubah. Within an hour, the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug who had risen to become the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was confirmed. This resulted from one of the most important intelligence breakthroughs of the Iraq War. Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for an American Air Force major who, through a series of skillful interrogations, secured the information that allowed the military to pinpoint al Zarqawi’s whereabouts and kill him. His book How to Break a Terrorist is a compelling account of the American military’s turn from highly coercive interrogation techniques, which proved consistently unproductive, to confidence-building approaches honed over decades in the American law-enforcement community, which achieved steady success.


Major Matthew Alexander 1. In the last weeks of the Bush Administration, they’re waging a campaign to convince the public that President-elect Obama’s plans to close Guantánamo, ban torture, and stop extraordinary renditions will make America less safe. Here’s how one of the administration’s apologists recently put things in an op-ed in the New York Times: “if we’d gotten our hands on a senior member of Al Qaeda before 9/11, and knew that an attack likely to kill thousands of Americans was imminent, wouldn’t waterboarding, or taking advantage of the skills of our Jordanian friends, have been the sensible, moral thing to do with a holy warrior who didn’t fear death but might have feared pain?” You actually did have “holy warriors” in your custody who were plotting to kill American soldiers and innocent civilians, and got the results that enabled U.S. fighter bombers to take out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. What do you think of these claims?

In Iraq, we lived the “ticking time bomb” scenario every day. Numerous Al Qaeda members that we captured and interrogated were directly involved in coordinating suicide bombing attacks. I remember one distinct case of a Sunni imam who was caught just after having blessed suicide bombers to go on a mission. Had we gotten there just an hour earlier, we could have saved lives. Still, we knew that if we resorted to torture the short term gains would be outweighed by the long term losses. I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantánamo Bay. My team of interrogators knew that we would become Al Qaeda’s best recruiters if we resorted to torture. Torture is counterproductive to keeping America safe and it doesn’t matter if we do it or if we pass it off to another government. The result is the same. And morally, I believe, there is an even stronger argument. Torture is simply incompatible with American principles. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both forbade their troops from torturing prisoners of war. They realized, as the recent bipartisan Senate report echoes, that this is about who we are. We cannot become our enemy in trying to defeat him.

2. One of the most controversial tactics that the Bush Administration adopted in the war on terror involves abusing a prisoner’s religious feelings to degrade or humiliate. Enforced nudity, the use of military dogs, sexually suggestive conduct, and forms of ritual defilement have all been documented as authorized techniques in Iraq and at Guantánamo, even though these techniques are probably illegal. Do you believe that an interrogator can make headway by trashing his subject’s religion or by using religion to degrade? Did you make use of religion in a different way?

First, there’s no doubt in my mind that these tactics are illegal. Geneva Conventions Common Article 3 specifically bans “humiliating and degrading treatment.” Trashing or degrading a detainee’s religion does not help convince a detainee to cooperate. It does just the opposite, reinforcing the reasons why the detainee decided to pick up arms against us.


During training, we were told that religion was a taboo subject because of the types of illegal activities that had occurred at Guantánamo Bay. I disagreed and I often discussed religion with my detainees. I frequently brought my own copy of the Quran into the interrogation booth and asked religious questions, always treating Islam with respect. I’ve read the Quran even though I’m not Muslim. I found my detainees, even high level imams, to be very open to my inquiries. In this way I showed them that I respected their religion and their beliefs and it changed their attitudes towards me and helped me to win their trust. One of our great strengths as Americans is our religious tolerance, a founding principle of our country, and we should use that strength in the interrogation booth to help build rapport with detainees and foster cooperation. As I told my team in Iraq, the things that make you a good American are the same things that will make you a good interrogator.

3. In your book you detail “new approaches” which seem very familiar to me—they are techniques that the FBI has used in interrogation for several decades, focusing on confidence-building. Is that correct? Why did it take so long for tested and proven approaches from the law enforcement world to be used in a military intelligence operation?

You are correct that relationship- (or confidence-) building approaches are not new and have been known to law enforcement for decades. Even World War II interrogators used relationship-building approaches to great success, but we can build on that. Interrogation is an art and a science and, like every discipline, can be improved upon. My group began to integrate relationship-building with other criminal investigative techniques, always tailoring it to the culture at hand. This is what made our techniques new. I watched day in and day out as my group of interrogators used American ingenuity in adapting these approaches for each individual detainee and they were highly effective. Interrogation is about being smarter, not harsher.

Why these techniques have not yet been integrated into intelligence interrogation is a mystery to me. I made a list of criminal investigation techniques that would be effective in interrogations and included it in my “after-action” report. The next administration needs to institutionalize this approach by contracting a cadre of experienced law enforcement officers to help train our intelligence interrogators. This same relationship already exists between civilian and military criminal investigators.

4. You describe members of your team saying that Al Qaeda members did not care about their families, that they were committed ideologues. This was taken as a justification for the use of coercion (usually fear) as the key tool for interrogation. But most counterterrorism experts agree that recruits to radical Islamist groups may be brought in by many factors other than ideology—clan-based affiliations, family, a motive of revenge–even a desire to make some money. It would obviously be vital for an interrogator to get a fix on motivation in forming an approach to getting a prisoner to talk. Does that suggest that American interrogators are being hindered by a politically shaped and unnecessarily crude understanding of the adversary?

Yes. We do ourselves a great disservice by stereotyping our enemies. Al Qaeda is comprised of a variety of individuals each with their own unique motivations for having joined. I can only remember one true ideologue in all the interrogations I conducted or supervised (more than 1,300) and even he started to come around at the end because we treated him with respect. The overwhelming majority of Sunni Iraqis who joined Al Qaeda did so out of need, not want. For some the reason was economic, for others tribal obligations, and for a large number it was for protection from the Shiite militias–the militias that we allowed, after the removal of Saddam, to conduct reprisal killings. When my group of interrogators reached out to these Sunnis and offered them an alternative to fighting against us –fighting with us–they were easily convinced to cooperate and rejected Al Qaeda. Sometimes all it took was an apology from an American for the mistakes we made at the beginning of the war. General David Petraeus proved this point by facilitating the Anbar Awakening. Interrogations are best conducted in the spirit of cooperation and negotiation, not domination and retribution. This is a metaphor for how we should use all of our instruments of power in fighting this war.

5. You note that the Bush Administration insisted on 93 redactions from the text and you had to take them to court, winning only after the book had gone to press. Most of the redactions do not appear to be motivated by legitimate concerns about security; they seem instead to be an effort to derail publication of your book. What do you think this was about? How does your publisher plan to make the redacted texts available to the public?

I believe this was an attempt at censorship and, perhaps, retaliation. On appeal I won 80 of the 93 redactions, so only 13 remain in the book. The Department of Defense redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material, including the entire scene where I convinced the man who led us to Zarqawi to cooperate after only six hours of interrogation using a relationship-building approach. The old methods of interrogation had failed for twenty days to convince this man to cooperate. The American public has a right to know that they do not have to choose between torture and terror. There is a better way to conduct interrogations that works more efficiently, keeps Americans safe, and doesn’t sacrifice our integrity. Our greatest victory to date in this war, the death of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi (which saved thousands of lives and helped pave the way to the Sunni Awakening), was achieved using interrogation methods that had nothing to do with torture. The American people deserve to know that. In future printings or the paperback version of How to Break a Terrorist we will include the material that we have won on appeal. I am still appealing several remaining redactions of obvious unclassified material.

6. You write that the Bush Administration’s torture policy is responsible for the death of more Americans than perished on 9/11. Explain what you mean by this.

The number-one reason foreign fighters gave for coming to Iraq to fight is the torture and abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. The majority of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters who volunteered and came to Iraq with this motivation. Consequently it is clear that at least hundreds but more likely thousands of American lives (not to count Iraqi civilian deaths) are linked directly to the policy decision to introduce the torture and abuse of prisoners as accepted tactics. Americans have died from terrorist attacks since 9/11; those Americans just happen to be American soldiers. This is not simply my view–it is widely held among senior officers in the U.S. military today. Alberto Mora, who served as General Counsel of the Navy under Donald Rumsfeld, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that “U.S. flag-rank officers maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq–as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat–are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” We owe it to our troops to protect them from terrorist attacks by not conducting torture and we owe it to our forefathers to uphold the American principles that they passed down to us.

“My friend,” I say. “Let me ask you this. What can I do for you?”

“Sir?”

“You’re helping me so I want to know how can I help you?”

“I have one favor to ask.”

“Of course. What can I do for you?” He seems embarrassed.

“I do not like showering naked in front of the guards.”

I nod and tell him, “I wouldn’t like that either.” That relaxes him a little.

“Would it be possible for me to wear boxer shorts in the shower?” He could have asked for a lot more than that.

“That won’t be a problem. I will let the guards know.”



—A passage the Bush Administration attempted to censor from How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Free Press. Copyright (c) 2008 Matthew Alexander

I see the world in terms of tolerance. Ignorance versus knowledge. Fear versus understanding. These two videos [of beheadings] are displays of hatred so fierce that it drives men to depravity. It is the hatred that I hate…

Pure hate. Pure malice. Torture and cruelty are their tools. To fight them, should I resort to hate? To bitterness and jaded contempt? Is that what it means to be a veteran ‘gator around here?



—From How to Break a Terrorist by Matthew Alexander

In addition to this I want to add another quote that Scott Horton had. He also talked to someone else and asked about a story that has been tossed around the last few days by the Bush administration. Here is the results of that question. I am not going to say anything...just add what he said in the magazine.

FBI Director Calls Cheney on Torture Lies
By Scott Horton

The Bush Administration’s swan song consists of a series of increasingly absurd claims designed to cover its crimes and failings. The most persistent of these is the claim that torture was necessary to save lives, and that attacks were in fact averted through the use of torture techniques. Vice President Cheney continued his crusade for torture yesterday insisting that torture is the “moral” thing to do (helping to explain the origins of Cheney’s Washington nickname, “vice”). Vanity Fair’s David Rose takes a look at the administration’s case for torture, and specifically its claims that torture averted attacks or at least produced actionable intelligence of some sort. He walks us through all the claims, one by one, and finds that they are all contradicted by the facts. Some of the sources did produce useful intelligence, but in no case was the application of torture the reason why, nor did it even contribute to the result. In the final lines of his article, he has this exchange with FBI director Robert Mueller:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been

disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

Mueller is “reluctant to answer” because he knows that Cheney and other administration spokespersons have repeatedly made that claim. And he knows that it is a lie which has been advanced for a specific reason: to cloak their criminal conduct.

Bring them home, Santa

I really don't have anything to say to this. There is nothing I can add. The video says it all.

NAZI'S IN THE MILITARY....A SERIOUS PROBLEM NOT ADDRESSED????

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Saving the Big 3 is our Patriotic Duty

During World War II, Ford factories were converted to build bombers and other weapons for the armed forces.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, signaled America’s entry into WWII and it also created a national consciousness that brought together and united the country to the common goal of the defeat of our enemy.

At the time, American Auto Manufactures were called on to stop the production of cars and to begin producing things like tanks and guns to help make America victorious in the fight against fascism.

In WWII when America was threatened from the enemies of the world; the Auto Makers were there for America. So isn’t it ironic that now, during the biggest financial crisis, perhaps in the nations history, the Government doesn’t seem to feel any sense of commitment to the industry that help make the United States the most powerful nation on the planet.

It’s time to face the fact that our current crisis is just as big, if not bigger than what we faced in WWII, and that the auto industry is a key part of getting out of the crisis.

Rather than argue about whether or not the auto makers should have been producing SUVs over the last few years, we could begin retooling auto plants to begin making wind turbines and electric vehicles. Rather than demanding to see the Auto Makers business plans, we could be partnering with the auto makers to begin producing the technology we need to be energy independent.

Plant conversions could take place quickly, and rather than talking about letting workers go from their jobs, we could be talking about creating new jobs to help in the monumental task of freeing the nation from the rule of oil producing nations.

This would help our country solve the economic crisis, put people back to work, and help the Auto Manufactors all at the same time. Just as they re-tooled during WWII they could start doing the same now with some of the closed portions or their plants, or even the plants that are already closed, and start creating the things we need for the future.

However our leaders seem to be asleep or afraid to do this right now. Even though PE Obama has mentioned several times that is what he wants to do after he takes office, and others have mentioned it too, we could do this now. Or at least start.

We have to make sure the Auto Manufactors survive. It is a matter of National Security, it is a matter of Patriotic Duty. These companies made us a world power in WWII, without them we would not have survived the war. Our country would have failed and we would never have won that war. We have forgotten that part of our history, and don't realize how valuable these companies are. I can't see Nissan, Honda, or Toyota doing this retooling so we can build Tanks or Half tracks or Jeeps for us to fight a war with. Can you??

President Elect Obama plans to end questionable policy

PE Obama plans to end the policy of torture that has been going on during the tenure of Pres. Bush. The CIA and some military have been accused of using means of torture to question enemy combatants. PE Obama has been meeting with retired military officiers who are advising him on this and on closing Guantanamo.

These are things he spoke of during the campaign and he plans on keeping his word on these things. Here is a You Tube of some of those officers talking about how they feel about the policies we as a nation have been following.



Excerpt taken from Human Rights First web site.

On July 20, 2005 President Bush issued an executive order governing CIA interrogation techniques that keeps the door open to torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees in American custody. The order does not clearly and specifically end illegal practices: so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," which have included water boarding, stress positions, hypothermia, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and isolation, and holding prisoners in secret CIA "black sites" in order to keep them outside the reach of the law. The U.S. military is now following a transparent Army Field Manual that prohibits many of the abusive interrogation techniques previously authorized by the administration but, to put an end to abuse, a single standard of conduct for all U.S. interrogations – including interrogations by the CIA and private contractors – regardless of location or who is being interrogated is necessary.

Interrogation Practices and Policies
Relying on information provided by current and former CIA officials and supervisors, in November 2005 ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito provided descriptions of several techniques used in CIA interrogations:

Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, cellophane is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him. causing the prisoner to experience a terrifying fear of drowning.
The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and is repeatedly doused with cold water.
Long Time Standing: The prisoner is forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours, causing both extreme pain and sleep deprivation.
Attention Slap: An open-handed strike aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed strike to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.
Secret Detentions: Over the last several years, the United States has operated a program in which it has held detainees in secret CIA facilities around the world, without acknowledging, even to the detainees’ families, that it has these individuals in custody. The United States has also held prisoners “off the books” in known detention facilities. These practices violate U.S. and international law.

The U.S. Secret Detention Program in Brief:

According to a number of reports, including an in-depth report by Human Rights First, the CIA has operated secret detention facilities in a number of places including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Morocco, Diego Garcia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Kosovo, and Macedonia.
On September 6, 2006, the President publicly acknowledged the existence of the CIA secret detention program, although he has not released the locations of particular facilities to the public or to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). It appears the program is currently operational, with at least one detainee having been held in the program before being transported to Guantanamo in April 2007.
There are dozens of individuals who are believed to have been detained in CIA secret facilities whose current whereabouts are unknown.
The United States has also held detainees in known detention facilities (such as Abu Ghraib) while keeping their names off the official prison rolls and failing to report their presence in those facilities to the ICRC. These prisoners have been called “ghost detainees.”
At least one “ghost detainee,” Manadel al Jamadi, was killed in November 2003 while in U.S. custody in Iraq.

Private Contractors

It is now widely recognized that an accountability crisis has arisen with respect to private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. While contractors are supposedly working under the laws of armed conflict, there are no consistent training requirements for contractors on the laws of war, there is no oversight checking their conduct against these standards, and essentially no realistic criminal justice accountability when criminal violations occur. A number of bills have been introduced in Congress aimed at addressing these problems. Some initial hearings have been held; more are anticipated. Here are some of the facts on private military contractors:

DOD currently acknowledges roughly 30,000 U.S. security contractors operating in Iraq, including substantial numbers of ex-patriots from the U.K., South Africa, the Philippines, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Fiji, Chile, and Honduras.
In concept, these forces are deployed solely for personnel and facility protection, but in one of his final acts as Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld issued a determination including U.S. security contractors as an integral part of the "total combat force" deployed in Iraq.
Private contractors were involved in some of the most serious abuses at Abu Ghraib, as reported in the Fay-Jones Report. Similarly, they have been tied to a large number of cases involving assaults on detainees, and homicides and assaults on the ground in Iraq. Only one single case has been prosecuted – involving a CIA contractor in Afghanistan. Over a dozen cases coming out of Abu Ghraib were investigated by the US Army Crime Records Center (CID) and referred to the Department of Justice with a recommendation for prosecution. No action has been taken on these cases even though investigations were completed roughly two years ago.

These are things we can't let slide any longer. As has been pointed out, this makes our country look bad to others. It also makes us a target, even bigger than we were before. It will not be easy to retrain the ones responsible for this, and that is what will have to happen. They will all have to be retrained or released. Most of them are only following orders. Granted there are some that might have followed those orders a little too willingly, but still they were following orders.

So, not only does PE Obama have his plate full with the economy like it is, now he has to worry with cleaning up this mess and closing Guantanamo. Not an easy task, but I have faith he is up to the task.

Good luck PE Obama, I have a feeling you will need it.

Copy of a Washington Post OpEd from today

This is an OpEd from today that helped me decide what to write about. It is another version of a story about torture. This is from someone who stood his ground, and refused to do what others did. He is to be commended for it. Yet he has to now write under an assumed name and hide himself in fear of retaliation, but the article he wrote is really interesting.

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

By Matthew Alexander
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B01



I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi's forces (members of Iraq's Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material -- including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war -- one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can't force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I'll say to them, "Which one?"

Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress -- at considerable personal risk.

We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations -- and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

I'm actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We're better than that. We're smarter, too.

howtobreakaterrorist@gmail.com


Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq." He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

What's the difference between a Conservative and a Liberal??

What is a Conservative?? A Liberal?? A Democrat, a Republican?? We hear these terms all the time. But what do they really mean??

Here is a definition from the dictionary of a Conservative: One who desires to maintain existing institutions and customs; also, one who holds moderate opinions in politics; -- opposed to revolutionary or radical. Sound like someone you know??

Here is where I have a problem. Conservatives, Republicans always say they are for less government. Yet, they seem to want more regulation or laws regarding personal freedoms. Or lack of freedom I guess would be a better way of putting that. They would like to overturn Roe v. Wade, for one, they don't believe in civil unions, or any kinds of rights for gays or lesbians. Basically, more laws, I call them bedroom and body laws.

Now, here is what it says about a Liberal: favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.

Liberals, Democrats are usually more open to an everything goes type lifestyle I guess would be the best way to put it. They believe in allowing you the choice of how you live your life. Not the government telling you how to live. Yes, there are laws on the books, and that's as it should be, but Dems believe Roe v. Wade is fine as it is. Basically, NO more bedroom or body laws.

Another thing is the death penalty. This one is puzzling. Conservatives are supposed to be the "Christian" party. So, if someone asks God for forgiveness for his or her crimes and according to the Bible if we ask God will grant it, then our sins are forgiven and forgotten. So therefore we are for the moment anyway, sinless. How then, do we justify putting someone to death for that crime?? Isn't that murder, as they claim abortion is??

Of course, there are just as many Christian Democrats as there are Republicans I believe. Even if some of the Christian Conservatives just think there is no way you can be a Christian Liberal. They seem to think it just doesn't work that way.

So, what do these terms mean to everyone else?? One Conservative columnist wrote a book and titled it "If Democrats had brains they would be Republicans." I guess we know how she felt. There seems to be a lot of divide between the two parties, yet when you compare them, actually they are rather close. I think we all want the same things. We want a government that helps us up, but doesn't bail us out as it seems they have been doing Wall Street lately.

We want our elected officials to be able to talk to us like they actually know what they are talking about. With some knowledge, not like they dropped out of school in the 6th grade. We want integrity, honesty, and honor. We want people around the world to respect the USA again as they used to.

We want our troops to come home from Iraq with honor, we want to find the ones that attacked us on 9-11 and punish them. We want to honor our military and take care of them with the dignity they deserve, instead of treating them like 2nd class citizens.

We all want these things and I am sure there are other things we want as well that I have not mentioned. It doesn't matter if we are Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat. At the end of the day, when the final tally is done, the final census will show we are all American's.