Sir! No Sir! Exposing and Debunking Military Lies from Vietnam to Iraq

Framing George Bush's Legacy - Artists Respond to Bush's War[s] (2003 - 2008)

These posters were originally published as part of the + War + Iraq Poster Exhibition

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Fill Her Up - Michael Rdding

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Make ... not war - Michael Rdding

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Freedom - Dani Reina

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The Depression of Nature - eggie

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Reverse Psychology - ghetto bastard

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War is not pretty - Tom Borges

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Signs of War - Fiona Hmilton

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With Glory and Gold - Brian Monzingo

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Framing George Bush's Legacy - Artists Respond to Bush's War[s] (2003 - 2008)

These posters were originally published as part of the + War + Iraq Poster Exhibition

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Freedom is not free - Anthony Ianniciello

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Freedom, Liberated, God Bless - Gerry Jacques

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iRaq - Sir Tanly

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Murder King - geephlat

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No Sangre - lit

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Stop the War - Zhao

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This is not a television special - Vurt

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War is not black or white - Bob Zeleniak

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War: Legacy of Destruction - Ryan O'Nan

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We Kill People - BR. Williams

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Iraq Us - Jammind

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Framing George Bush's Legacy - Artists Respond to Bush's War[s] (2003 - 2008)

These posters were originally published as part of the + War + Iraq Poster Exhibition

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Obey - adjin

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Dress Up - adjin

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Mad Hatter - Corey Jones

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I Hope You Sleep Well - Diglee

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Axis of Evil - Dix

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Respect the Eagle - Dix

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Obviously Little Johnny - Dix

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Media Overload - Luis Vazquez

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War is not a fashion statement - anonymous

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What is it good for - Sir Tainly

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Against Archaic Technology - Jeff

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Untitled and Democracy - ccjjmm

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Bombs are bubbles - Richard

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Bush - Michael Redding

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Those who forget the lessons of history

The following list of the most egregious examples of fraud and failure, on the part of Bush's Defense Department, is taken from the Center for Public Integrity's recently published report Broken Government.

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FALSE PREMISE FOR GOING TO WAR

On September 28, 2002, President Bush proclaimed: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons . . . The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are Al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq.” Just over a year after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the president and his administration used these two fears — unconventional weapons and terrorism — to win public approval for going to war in Iraq. But the premises proved to be false. The chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq concluded that President Saddam Hussein had no such weapons or the means to produce them, and the U.S. intelligence community determined that there was no meaningful connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. These conclusions came too late, however. On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom began in an attempt to kill the Iraqi president and overthrow his regime. The Center for Public Integrity found that Bush and seven members of his administration made 935 demonstrably false statements in the lead-up to the war, from September 2001 to September 2003, as reported in Iraq: The War Card. The failure of the commander in chief and his administration to gather solid intelligence before sending U.S. troops to war has cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives, billions of tax dollars, and the trust of not only of U.S. allies abroad, but also of a majority of the American people. When asked about the War Card study, a White House spokesman responded: “The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world.”

ABU GHRAIB PRISON SCANDAL

Few incidents have done more damage to America’s image in the world than the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. In late April 2004, Americans got their first glimpse of the haunting photographs of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad: scenes of naked, humiliated prisoners piled on top of one another, some forced to assume sexual positions, all while American soldiers posed nearby, smiling at the camera. The photos provoked an instant outcry around the world. In addressing the scandal, President Bush insisted that it was the fault of a few dishonorable soldiers, not a systematic problem with how the U.S. was managing the war in Iraq — but investigations suggest that the blame likely rises higher up the military’s chain of command. Some senior officials, such as General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military prisons in Iraq, were reprimanded and suspended. But the blame mainly fell on low-level soldiers, who were convicted and sent to prison for participating in sexual abuse, beatings, and other brutal acts. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said news of the abuse “stunned him.” But a military report by Major General Antonio Taguba found that the prison was overcrowded, undermanned, and short of resources, making accountability for prisoner treatment rare. Taguba also noted in 2004 that the Central Intelligence Agency had serious concerns about the kinds of interrogation techniques military forces used on detainees. But Taguba wasn’t permitted to delve much deeper; an article in The New Yorker in 2007 reported that military investigators were not allowed to look into the role of Rumsfeld and other Department of Defense officials. What is known is that the Pentagon found out about the existence of the photos in January 2004 and Taguba filed his report in March. President Bush knew about the abuses at Abu Ghraib at least by March, but he did not address the issue until the media publicized it in late April. Congress found out about the abuse the same day the American public did. “This is entirely unacceptable,” said Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican of Indiana and then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The scandal, Lugar added, “pushed international resentment and distrust of the United States to levels unprecedented in recent times.” The biggest failure, according to watchdogs: the lack of accountability for military officials who failed to stop or prevent the abuses. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously stated that the administration and the military acted quickly “to hold people to account and bring them to justice, and to also take steps to prevent something like that from happening again.”

ARBITRARY DETENTION AT GUANTANAMO

The U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has held hundreds of detainees without charging them with a crime. The White House conceived of Guantanamo as an extralegal zone for hardened terrorists whom it unilaterally declared were exempt from the Geneva Conventions. There, terrorists would have no recourse to the American legal system, lawyers at the Department of Justice argued; instead, they could be imprisoned for as long as the government saw fit. In June 2004, the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s plan and declared that the foreign nationals held at Guantanamo had the right to petition for their release in U.S. courts. Once forced to confront the legal status of its prisoners, the Department of Defense (DOD) began releasing or transferring many of the inmates. By October 2004, the United States had released 202 detainees from the prison camp and between late 2004 and March 2005 the remaining 558 detainees passed through “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” which determined that 520 of these prisoners were “ enemy combatants.” By 2008, however, after further review of cases and intervention by U.S. courts, the number of prisoners held at Guantanamo dropped to approximately 255, according to the Pentagon. Another 60 or so have been cleared for release but can not be repatriated because their home country refused to accept them or due to other diplomatic complications. Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have struggled to obtain documents from the U.S. military believed to contain evidence against their clients, and in some cases, the United States has had to drop prosecutions of Guantanamo inmates because much of their case was built on evidence obtained through interrogation methods widely considered to be torture. Asked to comment, a DOD spokesman directed the Center to a factsheet on Guantanamo: “Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay are not only afforded the majority of the protections granted to prisoners of war,” it states, “but many additional privileges that exceed the requirements established by the Geneva Conventions.

PENTAGON OFFICE’S MISLEADING INTELLIGENCE

An under-the-radar Department of Defense (DOD) office produced highly politicized intelligence assessments and promulgated one of the most inaccurate justifications for U.S. invasion of Iraq: that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein had a working relationship with Al Qaeda. The Office of Special Plans, part of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy led by Douglas Feith, created and provided these assessments to senior U.S. officials. Though neither illegal nor unauthorized, these assessments were, in the view of the DOD inspector general, “inappropriate” and “did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.” A Senate Intelligence Committee report found not only that the work of other intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, was ignored, but also suggested that the Office of Special Plans shaped intelligence to fit the desires of policymakers — a cardinal sin in the intelligence world. According to several Democratic senators on the intelligence committee, “[C]riticism of the CIA’s analysis was sent by Under Secretary for Policy Feith to Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld.” W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off.” The 9-11 Commission would later conclude that it found “ no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.” A study conducted by a DOD-funded think tank, after a review of captured Iraqi government documents, also found no “ direct connection” between Al Qaeda and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Trumpeted by the White House as a key reason to invade Iraq, the much touted close “relationship” between Al Qaeda and Iraq simply did not exist.

MILITARY FAILURE TO SECURE IRAQ AFTER INVASION

Calling them “wildly off mark,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz dismissed the assessments of his own Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, and a 1999 Department of Defense (DOD) war game scenario, both of which predicted the need for hundreds of thousands of troops to secure post-invasion Iraq — far more than the 148,000 who were eventually assigned the job. According to an official U.S. Army history of the conflict in Iraq, “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.” A 2005 unclassified study for the Army by the RAND Corporation, which was suppressed until media reports and congressional pressure brought it to light, said that the chaotic security situation after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled were “conditions [that] enabled the insurgency to take root, and the Army and Marine Corps have been battling the insurgents ever since.” Though there were some strategies for securing post-invasion Iraq, “few if any made it into the serious planning process,” according to the RAND report. These ideas were “held at bay, in the most general sense, by two mutually reinforcing sets of assumptions that dominated planning . . . at the highest levels” — that few armed forces would be necessary after the invasion and that the military would not be an occupying force. Just days before the war began, Vice President Cheney said, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

LACK OF ARMORED PROTECTION FOR TROOPS

The U.S. military failed to provide adequate body armor and armored vehicles to soldiers and Marines fighting the Iraq war. Key assumptions made before the invasion and early in the occupation of Iraq proved faulty: namely, that the Iraqi people would welcome the United States’ presence and that the American military would not face an insurgency. In April 2003 military supply chiefs told the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Army Strategic Planning Board, led by General Richard Cody, that there was enough body armor and that the 50,000 troops behind the front lines did not need armor, according to a 2005 piece in The New York Times. By mid-May, as troops behind front lines faced attacks, Cody reversed that decision and ordered body armor for all, “regardless of duty position.” The case was similar for military vehicles. According to an Army history: “When OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] began, as in every previous war the U.S. Army has fought, logistical vehicles were largely unarmored or lightly armed. . . . The ‘360-degree’ Iraqi insurgency once again exposed the danger of this approach.” The early missteps were soon compounded by other problems. It took time for the bureaucracy at the Pentagon to move; for example, at one point, the Army's equipment manager reportedly reduced the priority level of armor to the same status of socks. Also, DOD relied on several unproven contractors, which led to delays. The result was that for too long too few troops had adequate armor in a conflict that turned out to have no front lines. Soldiers almost anywhere in Iraq could be targeted, especially by the insurgents’ weapon of choice, improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Between the beginning of the conflict in March 2003 through November 1, 2008, 2,145 troops were killed and nearly 21,000 troops were wounded by IEDs and other types of explosive devices in Iraq.

PENTAGON’S SLOW ADAPTATION TO A WAR-FOOTING

The Department of Defense (DOD) has often been unresponsive or slow to react to the needs of soldiers and Marines on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the United States when they return. “A lesson I learned fairly early on was that important elements of the Department of Defense weren’t at war,” and thus failed to support those who were in a wartime posture, said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Instead, he explained, they were “preoccupied with future capabilities and procurement programs, wedded to lumbering peacetime process and procedures, stuck in bureaucratic low-gear. The needs of those in combat too often were not addressed urgently or creatively.” According to The New York Times, “In Iraq, Army officers say the Air Force has often been out of touch, fulfilling only half of their requests for the sophisticated surveillance aircraft that ground commanders say are needed to find roadside bombs and track down insurgents.” The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Gates has criticized the Pentagon’s slow initial procurement of MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), saying, “I believe that one factor that delayed the fielding was the pervasive assumption . . . that regimes could be toppled, major combat completed, the insurgency crushed, and most U.S. troops withdrawn fairly soon.” Gates sees a lack of accountability at the root of the problems, citing as an example Walter Reed Army Medical Center: “Over a year ago, The Washington Post broke the story about inadequate out-patient care at Walter Reed. I was disappointed by the initially-dismissive response of some in the Army’s leadership, who went into damage-control mode against the press and, in one case, blamed a couple of sergeants. Wrong move. I concluded responsibility lay much higher and acted accordingly.”

INADEQUATE PLANNING FOR POST-INVASION IRAQ

The United States planned poorly for the post-invasion administration of Iraq, contributing to the rise of a broad insurgency and the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The blame can be cast widely. An official Army history of the Iraq conflict found that “ the Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better . . . planning and preparations. . . .” A RAND Corporation study concluded that the State Department’s “main postwar planning effort . . . raised many of the right questions. . . . Yet the Department of Defense largely ignored this project.” Rand also found that much of the confusion between the State and Defense departments stemmed from poor direction from the National Security Council, which failed to mediate disputes between the departments. Others blame the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, which issued two orders that disbanded the Iraqi military and gutted the Iraqi government by banning members of the Ba'ath Party. Critics say those decisions, which took many U.S. civilian and military leaders by surprise, contributed to the rise in violence. Before Bremer replaced him as director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner drafted a postwar plan for Iraq, which he introduced with, “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.”

POOR HEALTH CARE FOR VETERANS

Veterans enrolled in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care programs have long complained of receiving inadequate treatment at poorly funded facilities. According to a 2003 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, veterans were forced to travel long distances to receive care — about 25 percent of the vets lived more than a 60-minute drive from a VA hospital. They also had to endure long waits for appointments, especially in regions like Florida, home to a large number of aging veterans. Nursing homes for veterans were notoriously understaffed, making it difficult to keep up with the increasing population of older vets who need care. But the strains imposed by new veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan exposed a whole new litany of problems for the VA and the military. Citizens and lawmakers were outraged after The Washington Post exposed dismal conditions for veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007. Several high-ranking Defense Department officials were fired or stepped down under pressure, and stories soon emerged about other medical facilities where veterans were placed in rooms teeming with fruit flies, slept on broken hospital beds or faced unprofessional staff. A subsequent investigation of 1,400 hospitals and other facilities for vets found more than 1,000 incidents of substandard conditions. The VA has also struggled to deal with the many young veterans complaining of mental health problems, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Treatment for PTSD was found to be inadequate in 2005, when only half of VA medical centers had a PTSD clinical team. Congressional testimony indicated that VA examiners felt pressure to conduct exams of veterans in as little as 20 minutes. The larger problem is that the VA’s patient workload has nearly doubled in the past 10 years; there are now 7.8 million enrollees in the VA health system. The VA “has faced difficulties in managing its resources” in the face of this rising workload, concluded the GAO. While the agency has dealt with challenges in recruiting and retaining health care professionals, it has also encountered problems in its internal budget process, the GAO found. Those issues have been exacerbated by an often-unpredictable Congressional appropriations process, which has frequently been late in delivering a finalized VA budget. The result is considerable confusion and inconsistency in the timely delivery and quality of care. A VA spokesman did not respond to a request for comment, but Gerald M. Cross, acting principal deputy under the secretary of health, told Congress in 2007 that the department is committed to “providing timely, high-quality health care to those who have helped defend and preserve freedom around the world.”

VETERAN DISABILITY CLAIMS LANGUISH

For many injured veterans — aging former soldiers as well as younger ones recently back from Iraq and Afghanistan — disability claims are a vital and necessary source of income. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), however, has long failed to process claims in a timely manner, forcing many vets to wait an average of six months for their claim to be processed, and as long as two years to wait for an appeal. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported a growing backlog of claims and lengthy processing times in 2001, and the problem has persisted. By February 2007, the backlog had grown to almost 400,000 — more than 130,000 of which had exceeded the VA’s 160-day goal to process a claim. This is due in part to the growing number of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan filing disability claims — total claims have jumped from about 579,000 in 2000 to some 806,000 in 2006, a 39 percent increase. The Senate unanimously passed a measure in 2007 to provide the VA with $70.3 million to eliminate the backlog of disability claims by hiring new processors and implementing better staff training. But increasing the number of processors on staff did not immediately solve the crisis. The GAO says that increased numbers must be paired with “adequate training and performance management” in order to issue timely and accurate decisions. Daniel Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii and chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, has called for better technology, improved employee training, and an enhanced claims process to end the long delays. Until the problems are fixed, the persistent delays mean that tens of thousands of veterans and their families will continue to struggle financially. The VA press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Patrick Dunne, the department's acting under secretary for benefits, told Congress in July 2008 that the department is “ continually seeking new ways to increase production and shorten the time veterans are waiting for decisions on their claims,” which include “ longer-term efforts to enhance and upgrade our claims processing systems through integration of today's technology.”

FAILURE TO SECURE WEAPONS IN IRAQ

In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, U.S. troops failed to secure weapons depots across the country, allowing Iraqis to loot vast amounts of explosives, ammunition, and weapons that were then used to fuel and supply the insurgency. Many sites around Iraq remained unsecured even three and a half years after the invasion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “According to lessons-learned reports and senior-level DOD [Department of Defense] officials,” the GAO reported, “the widespread looting occurred because DOD had insufficient troop levels to secure conventional munitions storage sites due to several . . . planning priorities and assumptions.” Among those assumptions — which turned out to be wrong — was a belief that the Iraqi military would assist in securing these installations. The GAO also found that the Pentagon “did not have a centrally managed program for the disposition of enemy munitions until August 2003, after widespread looting had already occurred.” The sites included many well known to intelligence experts, such as the sprawling Al Qaqaa military facility south of Baghdad. The Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation each stressed to Pentagon officials the need to secure these sites, but the military largely failed to address the issue. Stolen explosives traced to the looting have been used to make improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, the number-one killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, at least 2,145 troops have been killed by IEDs and other types of explosive devices. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but at a 2007 briefing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged the scope of the problem. “We have destroyed several hundred thousand tons of Iraqi munitions,” he told reporters. “I mean, fundamentally, the entire country was one big ammo dump. And there were thousands of these sites... we're doing our best to try and find them, but given the expanse of the country and all the other tasks which the military is trying to carry out there, it's a huge task.

CONTRACTORS FAILING TROOPS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s escalating use of outside contractors has coincided with a decrease in oversight, endangering the well-being of American troops serving there and in Iraq. The Department of Defense (DOD) has suffered a “complete breakdown in the procurement process” during the past seven years, according to Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, echoing the findings of the Center for Public Integrity’s Windfalls of War and Windfalls of War II projects. Examples abound of companies providing substandard supplies to American forces, such as when Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the largest contractor in Iraq, provided contaminated water to 5,000 U.S. troops in 2005 and when Halliburton, then KBR’s parent company, engaged in overcharges and questionable costs of $212.3 million for oil reconstruction work, as reported by DOD auditors. In July 2008, the Pentagon revealed that 16 Americans had died of accidental electrocution in Iraq, some tied to faulty wiring at facilities run by U.S. contractors. Among the problems cited by former electricians: inexperienced employees, including foreign electricians who did not speak English. Another problem plaguing U.S. contractors have been fires — 283 of them over just five months at facilities maintained by KBR, according to a 2007 report by the Defense Contract Management Agency. The most glaring case of poor oversight may be AEY Inc., which was awarded a nearly $300 million contract to supply ammunition for Afghanistan’s army and police. In a case that Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, said speaks “volumes about what's wrong with the military contracting process today,” AEY was allegedly run out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach by a 22-year-old; much of the ammunition he sold were reportedly old rounds shipped from Albania that were considered so unstable that NATO and the United States spent millions of dollars to destroy the stockpiles. These, prosecutors charge, included $10 million worth of rounds manufactured in China in the 1960s; the selling of Chinese ammunition is a breach of U.S. law. All this allegedly happened despite AEY being on a State Department watch list since 2005.

SURGE IN OUTSOURCING CREATES PROBLEMS IN PERFORMANCE, OVERSIGHT

A dramatic increase in the contracting of government services has resulted in a litany of problems, ranging from cost overruns and missed deadlines to a lack of oversight, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). From 2001 to 2005, the number of federal contractor jobs surged by 72 percent, increasing from 4.4 million to 7.6 million. Spending on contractors nearly doubled from FY 2001 to FY 2006, jumping from $234.8 billion to $415 billion The GAO has issued a series of reports identifying problems associated with the rise in outsourcing. Among the issues: “separating wants from needs; executing acquisition programs within available funding and established timeframes; using sound contracting arrangements with appropriate incentives and effective oversight; assuring that contractors are used only in appropriate circumstances and play proper roles; and sustaining a capable and accountable acquisition workforce ” GAO auditors found that interagency contracting was a “high-risk area” for outsourcing, as were the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The agency also cited concerns about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which now contracts out one-third of its workforce. Lack of competition is another problem. The Department of the Interior’s inspector general found that more than a quarter of the agency’s $380 billion in contracts were awarded without competition.

FAILURE TO REGULATE SECURITY CONTRACTORS

In a busy Baghdad square, a disturbance between a group of Americans and Iraqis on September 16, 2007 resulted in the shooting death of 17 Iraqi civilians. The Americans involved were not military; they were private security contractors from a company called Blackwater. To date security contractors in Iraq number around 48,000 from various companies. Similarly, jobs such as cooking and cleaning on military bases — positions that in past wars were largely filled by military or government personnel — are increasingly outsourced to private companies. The number of private contractors, as well as the amount of money the government pays them, has risen considerably as the Iraq war has gone on, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s 2007 report, Windfalls of War II. The result has been less coordination in missions involving both military and private groups, such as U.K.-based Erinys, and U.S.-based Blackwater and KBR. The problem was highlighted in 2004, when insurgents ambushed a KBR truck convoy and drivers refused to work until security was improved. Without the deliveries, the military was left without adequate fuel, water, and ammunition. A complicating factor has been the ambiguous legal status of private contractors. In the 2007 Blackwater shooting, the security firm initially maintained that the guards fired in self-defense, but investigations by the Iraqi government and the Federal Bureau of Investigation both conclude that the only shots fired came from Blackwater employees. The Department of Defense holds its contractors liable under laws covering the military, but Blackwater works for the State Department, which does not. Critics say that such large-scale security contracting results in a lack of coordination and accountability which poses a risk to American troops as well as to Iraqis, and that mistakes made by U.S. contractors will ultimately be seen by Iraqis as mistakes by the U.S. military. In a 2008 hearing, a senior official argued that contractors have long been an essential and cost-effective tool for ensuring safety in war regions. In Senate testimony, Patrick F. Kennedy, a State Department under secretary, said “The use of security contractors in these dangerous places has allowed the Department the flexibility to rapidly expand its capability… and to support national-security initiatives without the delays inherent in recruiting, hiring and training full-time personnel.

190,000 MISSING WEAPONS IN IRAQ

American weaponry intended for Iraqi security forces may have ended up in the hands of insurgents attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, due largely to oversights at the Department of Defense (DOD), according to government auditors. At least 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols disappeared between 2004 and 2005, some 30 percent of all weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces during that time, reported the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in an August 2007 study. While security assistance programs are traditionally operated by the State Department, the Pentagon — as it has in operations throughout the Iraq war— asserted control of the program early on, saying that it could provide greater flexibility. Until December 2005, neither the Pentagon nor Multinational Force-Iraq maintained any central record of equipment distributed during Iraqi security force training (then led by General David Petraeus). The GAO also found that 135,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 helmets went missing during that time. A subsequent New York Times investigation found that Kassim al-Saffar, an Iraqi businessman Americans entrusted to supply Iraqi police cadets, turned the U.S. armory into a “private arms bazaar” selling weapons to anyone with cash in hand — meaning more U.S. resources wasted in Iraq and greater danger for American troops serving there.

Casey Porter Video

This video was posted by IVAW on their homepage, August 20, 2008

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IVAW member Casey J. Porter out of Fort Hood, TX, sends his fifth video from Iraq. In his words: "Featuring statements from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Former President Bill Clinton, The O'Reily Factor host Bill O'Reily, amongst many others. This is a look into the arrogance and lies of those who promoted, and continue to promote this war interlaced with combat footage straight from Iraq. Included are scenes of Soldiers not only speaking their minds, but speaking the truth about the continued occupation of Iraq. Also featured are some of the harsh realities of combat and in the midst of that combat, good Soldiers continuing to make the best out of it by helping their "adopted" child at their combat outpost. This is an honest look into the minds of Soldiers, and an honest look into their lives during a deployment. This is Deconstructed."

Chicken Hawks on the Loose - The Path To War; Douglas Feith discusses the Iraq War and his book

This interview, by Steve Croft, was originally broadcast on CBS 60 Minutes, July 6, 2008

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The name Douglas Feith may not mean much to you, but to students of the Iraq War and historians already studying it, he's one of the main architects. From 2001 to 2005, Feith was undersecretary of defense for policy and the number three man at the Pentagon, intimately involved with both pre-war strategy and post-war planning. His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, called Feith one of the most brilliant individuals in government, but he's also been a lightning rod for criticism and a magnet for blame. In his memoir, which has been called the first insider account of decision-making in Iraq, Feith defends much and apologizes for very little. But as we first reported back in April, he offers some unusual insights about the path to war.
Explain to me, because many Americans still don't understand it. Why did we invade Iraq?
Mr. DOUG FEITH: The president decided that the threats from the Saddam Hussein regime were so great that, if we had left him in power, we would be fighting him down the road at a time and place of his choosing.
(Footage of Douglas Feith walking to podium; Feith talking; photo of Feith with President George Bush)
KROFT: (Voiceover) If Douglas Feith doesn't look or sound much like a warrior, that's because he isn't. He's an intellectual, a hawkish neo-conservative defense policy wonk who occupied one of the top rungs in the Pentagon ladder, playing a key role in shaping the military's response to 9/11 and the decision to go to war with Saddam Hussein. Why was the decision made to go after him after 9/11? Because we knew even then that he didn't have anything do with it.
Mr. FEITH: What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come, and we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.
KROFT: So you're saying you didn't think it was that important to go after the people who were responsible for it, more important to go after people who weren't responsible for it?
Mr. FEITH: No, I think it was important to go after the people who were responsible for 9/11. But it was also important to disrupt the international terrorist network and prevent whatever plans there were for follow-on attacks.
KROFT: Using those standards, you could have invaded North Korea, you could have invaded Syria, you could have invaded Iran.
Mr. FEITH: Well, you make a good point, but Iraq was a particular--was a special case in large part because of Saddam's record.
(Footage of oil fires; tank; military parade; Saddam Hussein saluting; dead Kurds; Feith during interview)
KROFT: (Voiceover) Feith says Saddam had already attacked Kuwait, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia; that he had defied the UN, evaded economic sanctions, used weapons of mass destruction on his own people and had the know-how, if not the wherewithal, to build a nuclear weapon. Feith believes the US invasion was justifiable as an act of self-defense.
I think this is a term you use in the book: "Anticipatory self-defense."
Mr. FEITH: In an era where WMD can put countries in a position to do an enormous amount of harm, the old idea of having to wait until you actually see the country mobilizing for war doesn't make a lot of sense.
(Footage of Donald Rumsfeld giving speech; Colin Powell testifying)
KROFT: (Voiceover) The American public was led to believe that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them.
General COLIN POWELL: (From file footage) I'm going to show you a small part of a chemical complex...
(Footage of satellite photo of compound)
KROFT: (Voiceover) ...which famously turned out not to be the case.
One of the reasons people were told we were going to war in Iraq was because an imminent attack with weapons of mass destruction was about to happen.
Mr. FEITH: I don't believe anybody in the US government said that.
KROFT: This is Donald Rumsfeld, "Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. No terrorist state..."
Mr. DONALD RUMSFELD: (From file footage) No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein. President GEORGE W. BUSH: (From file footage) The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American.
Vice President DICK CHENEY: (From file footage) There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.
Mr. FEITH: It is true that there was a serious error that the CIA made in saying that we would find WMD stockpiles, and it was a terrible mistake for the administration to have made those stockpiles in any way a part of the case for war. I don't think we needed to, and I think...
KROFT: You don't think we needed to?
Mr. FEITH: I don't think we needed to. And I...
KROFT: Wasn't that the whole linchpin for the war?
Mr. FEITH: I don't believe so.
(Footage of Feith during interview; military parade; soldiers opening door; missile heads)
KROFT: (Voiceover) Feith insists that Saddam still had WMD programs in place and the capability to resume production. He says even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded privately that the United States might not find any weapons of mass destruction on the ground, and he told the president so in a memo that outlined all of the things that could possibly go wrong.
Some call it the CYA memo.
Mr. FEITH: Well, I think that's a mischaracterization. I mean, it was very intense and very disturbing work to anticipate all the possible problems of a war.
(Footage of Feith during interview; Rumsfeld giving testimony; Bush greeting troops with Laura Bush; battle)
KROFT: (Voiceover) Feith called the document "The Parade of Horribles" and printed many of them in his book to refute the perception that Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush launched the war without understanding the possible consequences.
"The United States could become so absorbed with its Iraq effort that we'd pay inadequate attention to other serious problems."
Mr. FEITH: Yes.
KROFT: "The war could cause more harm and entail greater costs than expected." Obviously, it has. That it would not go on for two to four years, but eight to 10 years.
Mr. FEITH: Right.
KROFT: "Terrorist networks could improve their recruiting and fundraising as a result of our being depicted as anti-Muslim.
(Feith nods head yes)
KROFT: "Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Kurds, Sunnis and Shia."
Mr. FEITH: Right.
KROFT: "It could damage our relationship with our allies and our reputation in the world community.
(Feith nods head yes)
KROFT: Did you think that maybe one or two of these might happen?
Mr. FEITH: One of the things that is reflected in this memo is Secretary Rumsfeld's deeply held view that it's foolish to try to predict the future.
KROFT: Well, as it turned out, he was pretty good at anticipating problems because virtually all of these things have happened.
Mr. FEITH: Well, in a--in a broad sense. A lot of these things happened. It was a very honest effort to assess what the downsides of war would be.
KROFT: You still recommended that it was the right thing to do.
Mr. FEITH: We certainly understood that these are the things that might happen. That's why we wrote them down. And I--and I do think that, when the president assessed the risks of leaving Saddam in power, you could--you could also have come up with quite a serious, troubling list of the risks involved in leaving Saddam in power.
(Footage of "War and Decision" in assembly line; men firing guns; bomb exploding)
KROFT: (Voiceover) In his memoir "War and Decision," Feith writes that there was one potential problem the Pentagon seriously underestimated, to ability of Saddam's loyalists to create, carry out, and sustain a bloody resistance.
Mr. FEITH: Probably the main thing that we didn't anticipate was that from the grave, as it were, that regime would be able to operate the way it's operated in the insurgency.
(Footage of soldiers walking; soldiers running; soldiers in house; statue of Hussein being torn down)
KROFT: (Voiceover) The result was a lack of detailed contingency planning and a shortage of troops. Feith concedes that he and his colleagues didn't realize that sending a smaller, mobile force to topple Saddam would make it difficult to establish order after he fell.
(Footage of people looting)
Mr. FEITH: (Voiceover) The looting that arose in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam was a problem that the coalition forces had to deal with.
KROFT: Didn't deal with.
(Footage of men looting)
Mr. FEITH: (Voiceover) Right. I think we paid a very large price for the fact that, you know, our forces did not get that problem under control.
KROFT: One of the things that you say was that we didn't have the manpower or the resources to do it.
Mr. FEITH: I don't believe I raised the troop level issue in that connection. But, I mean, you'll tell me if I misremember my own book.
(Footage of Feith during interview)
KROFT: (Voiceover) We refreshed his memory.
This is what you said: "The small force strategy for major combat operations, while it saved American lives, limited the number of forces we had to deal with the looting."
Mr. FEITH: That's a fair point. Your point's correct.
(Footage of soldiers walking; Paul Bremer and others walking)
KROFT: (Voiceover) To make matters worse, two months after the invasion, the US-led provisional authority running Iraq made one of the most controversial and most criticized post-war decisions. Newly appointed ambassador Paul Bremer announced that the Iraqi army would be disbanded, turning 400,000 unemployed and armed men into the streets.
Mr. FEITH: The first time I heard the idea, it came from Ambassador Bremer when he was on his way to Baghdad.
KROFT: And you signed off on it?
Mr. FEITH: I didn't sign off one way or the other. I told him that he has to discuss it with Secretary Rumsfeld.
KROFT: And he did?
Mr. FEITH: He says that he did. I'm--I was not in on those conversations. I don't--I--and the...
KROFT: So did Secretary Rumsfeld sign off on it?
Mr. FEITH: I did not find in the record any piece of paper in which Secretary Rumsfeld signed off on it.
KROFT: You had never asked Secretary Rumsfeld?
Mr. FEITH: We've talked...
KROFT: That's the part I find hard to believe.
Mr. FEITH: Well, no, no. I mean...
KROFT: There are hundreds of decisions.
Mr. FEITH: We talked about--we talked about it late in the...
KROFT: This is--this is--I mean, this isn't one of hundreds of decisions. This is a decision to dissolve the Iraqi army.
Mr. FEITH: Well, the Iraqi army was, at that point, dissolved. This was the issue of do you reconstitute them or start from scratch with a new military?
KROFT: Well, you're raising doubts about whether there was approval. That's why I'm doing this.
Mr. FEITH: No, no, what I'm--what I'm saying is the process by which this decision was made was not a great process.
(Footage of Feith and Kroft walking and talking; Feith meeting with others; Ahmed Chalabi talking)
KROFT: (Voiceover) Feith, who taught the past two years at Georgetown University, intimates in his book that none of this might have happened if the administration had stuck with his plan for post-war Iraq, which involved quickly ceding some authority and responsibility to a group of Iraqi exiles and Kurds, which included Ahmed Chalabi.
Mr. FEITH: We developed plans to try to give meaning to the concept of liberation rather than occupation, and one of--one of my great regrets is that the United States wound up setting up an occupation government in Iraq for 14 months, which I think was a--was a serious mistake.
(Footage of Feith during interview; George Tenet talking to Powell, Tommy Franks walking with others)
KROFT: (Voiceover) Feith says there had been lots of errors in judgment, but not by him. He is generous in his criticism of Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and General Tommy Franks. And they have returned the favor plus interest.
General Franks, I don't have to tell you what he said, but he called you...
Mr. FEITH: It was not nice.
KROFT: It was not nice. Basically, the dumbest guy on the face of the planet. Former CIA Director George Tenet called your intelligence evaluations total crap. This isn't normal Washington discourse.
Mr. FEITH: I agree. And some people, when they deal with controversy, political issues, use harsh language. I don't think it's a great thing.
KROFT: This is a lot of vitriol directed at you. They don't use it in general, they directed it at you. Why you think that is?
Mr. FEITH: You'd have to ask them.
(Footage of Feith and Kroft walking and talking; Feith working at his desk; photo of Bush with Feith; photo of Mohammed Atta; Prague street; report)
KROFT: (Voiceover) Some of them have already answered that question in books of their own or with quotes in the books of others, portraying Feith as a bureaucratic bully hell bent on war. The most frequent and damaging charge has been that Feith used his Pentagon office to produce alternative intelligence reports that linked Saddam to al-Qaeda and passed them on to the White House. Some of it, like the report that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague, has been widely discredited. An investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general called Feith's activities inappropriate but not illegal or unauthorized.
This was a rebuke. Do you agree?
Mr. FEITH: Yes, I--and I think it was an unfounded rebuke, an ill-founded rebuke.
KROFT: Are you happy with the way things have played out in Iraq?
Mr. FEITH: No, I don't think anybody can be happy. We've had terrible losses. We have the Americans who have lost their lives and Iraqis who've lost their lives, our coalition partners. It's been, you know, a costly war.
KROFT: Do you still think this was the right thing to do, knowing now what you know?
Mr. FEITH: I think the president made the right decision, given what he knew and given what we all knew. And to tell you the truth, even given what we've learned since.
KROFT: In his memoir, Feith doesn't dwell on the terrible human cost of the war, but he clearly has been moved by them. He's donated all his proceeds from the book to a foundation he's created to benefit veterans and their families.