I think we all know what Glenn Greenwald’s column will be about on Monday.
And yes, I am aware that entire piece was based on the ruminations of anonymous “officials.”
by John Cole| 59 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)
I think we all know what Glenn Greenwald’s column will be about on Monday.
And yes, I am aware that entire piece was based on the ruminations of anonymous “officials.”
Comments are closed.
wilfred
More than one, evidently.
JL
The torture policies of the Bush Administration has made a sham of any prosecution.
John Cole
@wilfred: Yeah, fixed. That was sloppy of me.
bh
It’s not ideal but the difference here is that the sources are revealing information that the government doesn’t want released, not government propaganda.
Olliander
Apparently, Eric Holder’s “please-take-some-of-our-suspected terrorists” plea to Europe wasn’t met with much enthusiasm.
PeakVT
Nothing can be done with these people within the rule of law due to the actions of the Bush administration – regardless of whether any of them are actually guilty. And the Bush administration ruined any chance of peacefully re-integrating them somewhere.
That leaves the option of … what?
We (the country) are totally f***ed on this issue.
robertdsc
I’ll wait for the official announcement.
Lola
I am skeptical of these unnamed source articles in general, but this one *may* turn out to be true. What can Obama do when some of the prisoners have been tortured but are guilty? Any decent judge in the U.S. would need to throw out all information obtained by interrogators. This is one more example of there being no good way to clean up the Gitmo mess. This is why Bush left it to 44. On this one, I trust the Obama administration is trying to do the best they can with a very bad situation.
smiley
I thought this was interesting:
That’s some solid reporting.
AkaDad
If these people are so innocent, then Obama should let them stay in the Lincoln bedroom!
Brick Oven Bill
Humans have 5 senses, and through these 5 senses, we are able to gather knowledge. These 5 senses are sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste.
As an example, a man might walk into a window pane at the White House, and feel the window pane impact his face, thus learning (knowledge) that there is glass at that particular location in space, and after enough tries, would train himself to instead use the door.
As another example, one would know (knowledge) that the entrance to Marine One was lower than traditional doorways, after impacting the upper part of the entrance with the top of his head. This knowledge would likely be transferred by the sense of touch, perhaps the sense of sight, and most certainly the sense of hearing. ‘Thud’.
But one cannot know (knowledge) that he has a gift, because gifts are provided by deity, and cannot be sensed through our 5 worldly senses. Therefore, an individual can only perceive that he has a gift. He cannot know that he has a gift.
Factual statements made by an individual regarding his perceptions should give the listener pause, as the listener now knows (knowledge) through his sense of hearing that the speaker has a conscience that is willing to make statements that are not based in knowledge.
Gifts, however, are not to be confused with special purposes. I, for instance, know that I have a special purpose.
burnspbesq
Wrong answer, Mr. President.
If you can’t try them in U.S. District Court, turn ’em loose. We the People know who fucked this up.
JenJen
@Brick Oven Bill: This is, quite possibly, the stupidest thesis I have ever read in a comment section on a blog. Which is saying a lot, mind you.
JL
@burnspbesq: I sympathize with your point of view but I’m not ready to have some of the prisoners treated as heroes in their home country. If they are not able to stand trial, maybe they should be imprisoned until they are able.
Former President Bush and former torturer Bush should house them on his ranch.
Rosali
The US is stuck in an impossible situation. Someone like KSM, an acknowledged terrorist, can’t be tried in US district courts because of the torture and no other country will accept him. He can’t be deported to his home country because of the high likelihood that he would engage in other terrorist acts. I’m not sure what options, other than the military tribunals, exist. And, yes, it’s all Bush’s fault.
M. Carey
Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Rice… etc. shgould join their friends in Gitmo, and then they all shoud have fair trials in The Hague or elsewhere.
Louise
Brick Oven Bill: return to the bong, please.
And I’m with robertdsc: I’ll wait for the official announcement.
CJ
@PeakVT:
Where did you ever get this idea? Granted, the number of privileges that will be invoked will make this complicated – OJ complicated – but the legal system can handle this. I am a patent attorney and compared to teaching cutting edge physics and engineering to folks with little or no post secondary education, I believe that torture cases will be simple.
The question is NOT can we do this. We can. Nor is the question should we do this. We should. The real question is how far do we need to go to ensure that the rule of law is upheld and that the honor and good will that this country has heretofore enjoyed is restored. The rest of the world knows we tortured people and that we did so on flimsy grounds. We need to go far enough in the prosecution of those involved to provide real disincentives and to rehabilitate how we are perceived at home and abroad. This will suck, but there is nothing for it.
CJ
dmv
I’m amused (where amused = exasperated) by those who now say, “Oh, Obama’s just trying to do the best he can with a situation that amounts to a shit sandwich. Military commissions will be fine, now.” The problems we had with military commissions under Bush? Until new regulations, or new statutory language, obviates those problems, any commission under Obama will suffer the same problems.
Grow a freakin’ spine, people. Just because Obama does it doesn’t mean it’s good.
JenJen
Oh, my:
Abu Ghraib US prison guards were scapegoats for Bush, lawyers claim – Times UK
“Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration.
The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.
Some of the guards who were convicted of abuse want to return to court and argue that the previous administration sanctioned the abuse but withheld its role from their trials.
The latest reaction to the released memos came as it emerged that the two psychologists hired by the CIA to craft the techniques that were used on terror suspects were paid $1,000 (£673) a day. Neither had carried out nor overseen an interrogation.”
Unabogie
I am not one to minimize the amount of shit on the sandwich, nor am I one to excuse sham trials. But aren’t we less than a month away from the same sorts or articles, citing the same sorts of “unnamed sources”, who told us the torture memos would be redacted or withheld?
At what point to we stop accepting the bitter Bushies who burrowed into their jobs’ word on anything?
Wait for the official word.
But yeah, Greenwald will make lots of noise about this article.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
I’m not easily shocked by anything that goes on in the media, and I ignore as much of it as I possibly can, being the internet junkie that I am.
But this just left me slack-jawed.
gnomedad
@dmv:
I’ve said it before: Obama’s no saint, but I’m not yet ready to believe that he’s just another pol. The right is crowing that Obama is discovering how it’s necessary to break some rules in the real world (at the same time they’re claiming he wants to give the misunderstood jihadis a hug), but I have little doubt that he is finding land mines he needs time to defuse. If he releases a hundred detainees against whom there is insufficient or, worse, tainted evidence and just one of them causes trouble, it’ll make headlines. OTOH, the right may be overplaying their (imaginary) hand and convincing Obama that he may as well do the right thing since their reaction will be the same in any case. My take: keep the heat on, but give him time.
In other news, B.O.B. is fabulously surreal. I am envious.
JenJen
You know, I think that Abu Ghraib story I linked to above is big. Their argument is compelling, and is likely to lead to the release of more and more information.
Watergate started as a 3rd rate burglary in August of 1972. In August of 1974, Nixon resigned. I think there’s some danger ahead for ex-Bushies; anecdotal but Condi sure seemed off her game the other day with those students.
LD50
I commend you on your success at concealing it here.
HyperIon
Well, Cole, you’re doing another post on hot topics wherein you take no position. Instead, a little snark about that crazy Greenwald guy.
Do you support using military commissions or not?
Common Sense
BoB, you are a genius. I mean that sincerely. You are the James Joyce of the internet age. Never Change.
crayz
IOKIYO
PeakVT
@CJ: Who are you talking about? The torturers in the Bush administration, or the detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere? I’m talking about the detainees.
JoyceH
My thought is – IF this story is true – that Obama is trying to clean up Bush’s mess. We have a handful of terrorists at Gitmo that we know are terrorists, genuinely the worse of the worse (as Rummy once falsely called every single detainee there), but thanks to the Bush Torture Program, it’s probably outright impossible to try these men in our normal court system.
There is a mechanism for military commissions, it was established by Congress. The military commissions that the Bush era attempted were utterly hosed, because it was the Bushies doing it and the evidence and the procedures were every which way. But it is a mechanism that might conceivably used for these tainted cases.
If the Obama administration tried using military commissions for new detainees, ones that they picked up themselves and who hadn’t been subjected to years of torture, then I’d protest loud and long. But it appears to me that what this is is an attempt to imperfectly come up with a resolution to a situation that the Bushies fouled up beyond all repair.
gnomedad
@JoyceH:
Thanks for saying what I was trying to, but with more substance.
Shorter me: I can’t believe Obama went through all this trouble to become Bush Lite.
dmv
@Unabogie:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking the story as true. I’m just responding to people who have taken it as true (at least for the purposes of making a statement about it or whatever).
So, if it is true, I want to see substantial changes made to the MCA. Not just statements that mil-comms will be fairer or better under Obama. I want to see it in writing, in the form of binding language, whether by regulation or by statute.
If it isn’t true, so much the better.
tavella
That’s fucking nonsense. If you do not have evidence that is not the product of confessions under torture, then you don’t have evidence. You, in fact, do not know that they are the “worst of the worst”. You don’t even know if they are terrorists at all.
Unabogie
@dmv:
I’m just saying there’s been a pattern of sources leaking to the papers that Obama will be continuing some policy or other from the Bush regime, and over and over it’s been bullshit.
So the smart money says that this is more bullshit.
bago
@Brick Oven Bill: Santa Claus is a deity?
gifts are provided by deity
bago
Perception is not knowledge? How high are you?
You’re definitely not high on acid. I can tell you that right now.
If you want to argue semantics, I have the book on semantics in my car right now. Don’t tempt me.
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
@Unabogie:
Yeah, it’s probably a tactic to pressure Obama into a certain position by getting the media to speculate how everybody is going to die if he were to reverse some Bush-era policy. For the most part, it hasn’t worked which is nice.
Besides, Obama is perfectly capable of continuing the previous admin’s positions on certain issues without any provocation.
eemom
but doesn’t Greenwald fiercely oppose The Establishment Media’s use of anonymous sources? And being the impeccable purist that he is, won’t that therefore require him to refrain from, er, premature ejaculation over this report?
Unabogie
@The Cat Who Would Be Tunch:
Perhaps. I would need to look it up to verify my theory, but I bet that in those cases, you didn’t see leaks. I’d posit there is an inverse relationship between the truth of the report and the amount of anonymous leaking.
dbrown
Relative to our system of laws I am lost that so many understand so little and overlook so much – try to understand the fundamental point of our whole legal system: a person is innocent until proven guilty.
Now try and understand the meaning of this simple but revolutionary point that is so special to our system of law. If the State fucks up, the evidence that was gathered during the f-up is worthless. Yes that means people that would have been convicted are released but they are INOCENT! Hence, they are released. Sometimes that means a few people who are killers are released but the greatest creators of tyranny and murder are Governments. Our founding fathers in their great wisdom fully understood this critical point and to protect all people who are innocent, we pay a price for the times the State screws up. But ‘We the People’ are protected from a deranged leaders (like ass-wipe cheney and coward bushwhack).
If possible terrorist are released we are still far safer than if the State is allowed to break the law to convict people that they decide are guilty without evidence. It sucks being part of a real democracy but that is the price a truly free people pay to be free. Cowards (like the Germans that voted in Nazi leaders that took their freedoms away) could’t handle this type of legal system but Americans here have always accepted the risks of having a system that guarantees their safety from the Government even if some Americans may die because of it. Again, democracy is dangerous for spineless cowards but real men accept the risks to live free. Suck it up and be a real American that believes in freedom and law for the people, by the people and that serves the people.
Sorry for the rant but I am sick of all the whining babies that can’t handle a real legal system that has been a beacon of freedom and example to the world and people that live in real terror from the police States.
I am an American and if a hand full of terrorist are freeded to protect out great system of rights, then so be it. I served in the military and risked my life for this system and I’ll be damned before I throw it away because some third world loosers are released that are no real threat to us but somehow people in the most powerful and free country are afraid of these minor pricks? If these loosers ever strike at us again, we will strike back at them even harder but NEVER give up our freedoms to live like sheep in a police State potected by ‘Big Brother’.
If our system allows a terrorist someday to kill me or my family and friends then they, and myself will die FREE but Never give in and abandon our system of legal protections to live like a utter coward in fear.
Yes, Live Free or Die.
Mwangangi
@dbrown: I hear ya.
SnarkIntern
What the alarmists about Gitmo don’t seem to get is that this is a strand of spaghetti in a bowl of spaghetti about the size of South America.
The covert and labyrinthine mass of intertwined laws, violations of laws, legalities and cases that make up layers in the war machine government, creates a situation where you cannot simply pull out a bad strand and say, there, we have fixed the giant mess. The problem is too big for any one president, and has been created by experts who toiled night and day for 60 years to create it.
It rests on extraconstitutional constructs, and it is booby trapped and mined and rigged to prevent its dismantling.
Obama is not going to be able to dismantle it. All he can do is try to abate its worst effects while he is president. He is not going to try to dismantle it because it’s too dangerous, on many levels, and would be too damaging to the country. Think of it as something like defusing 1000 bombs whose detonators are all wired together.
I am not sure how this monstrosity of a war machine government got this big and this ugly before people started to notice. But my theory of this rests on the assumption that the people themselves demanded this thing, and didn’t care much about how it was put together. It’s a little dishonest for some of them to come along now and insist that Obama, or anyone else, take it all apart.
Pitchforks are fun, but you can’t govern with them.
valdivia
@SnarkIntern:
You put it exactly how I would have put it.
SnarkIntern
What people don’t seem to get here is that the “system of laws” they are barking about all rest on one big law, the Constitution, and constitutional checks on executive power basically were thrown in the trash during the 20th century. The Cold War was the supposed excuse, but I think that a desire for unchecked power was really driving the process.
Anyway, once you have the people, through their representatives, abdicate checks on power, you get …. this. The giant monstrosity that is the military-industrial-intelligence complex, and its administrators. Like it or not, that is what the country asked for, and got.
The “system of laws” has no real effect when the biggest of the laws are just brushed aside and the systems for checking the government are shut down in favor of expedient “security.”
someguy
The interrogations are mostly irrelevant. You can’t try people for crimes, for merely fighting against the U.S. Some particularly heinous AQ fighters may be subject to war crimes trials in U.S. District Court, but to try AQ generally in District Court would be a warcrime in and of itself. So interrogation-driven prosecutions of warcrimes are out, but the war criminals are a small percentage of the fighters, at least on the AQ side of things.
Besides, what kind of constitutional rights are you going to grant AQ? You going to invalidate their convictions if they weren’t properly mirandized, or if the troops stopped their car or busted down the door to their fortified house/fighting position without a warrant? Good luck on making up a new constitutional standard as you go there, nevermind the fact that the first defense brief in the first case is going to tell the judge he’s a war criminal if he doesn’t dismiss the case…
HyperIon
@SnarkIntern:
please, stop with the “it would tear the country apart” BS.
how exactly would the country be damaged?
ok, i’ll consider your very lame metaphor. if we can’t defuse these 1000 bombs, what do you propose? transporting the 1000 bombs to bagram? tiptoeing really quietly around the pile of bombs?
Bill H
Greenwald has been known to post on Sundays. Even late on the day on Saturdays. We may not need to wait for Monday.
SnarkIntern
I’ve already answered that question abougt fifty times so far, man.
If you want better governments, you have to elect them.
If you elect Cheney governments, you are going to get Cheney governments. And if you elect those for about 50-60 years, and leave the executive unchecked, you are going to get a big mess that can’t just be dismantled and undone by the four-year election cycle. Especially when both parties in your so-called ‘two party system’ are supporting almost exactly the same approach to the thing. Especially when the voters demand ‘security’ and turn their heads so as not to see what they really got.
It’s pretty obvious, but that won’t stop you from being unable to get it. Government by pitchfork won’t work, you don’t have enough pitchforks. Government by prosecution won’t work, that kind of thing does not stop the Cheneys of the world from doing exactly what they want. It doesn’t even slow them down.
When you are willing to stand back from your self-righteous bullshit, then you might see this, and get it. But I doubt that you will.
Rosali
test
Thankovsky
@dbrown:
I’m with you on this personally, but you have to understand that the lion’s share of the American electorate will not appreciate the point you’re making here. Most Americans would much rather sacrifice a little liberty for some more security, and whether or not, as Ben Franklin famously said, they deserve neither is beside the point. This is really the downside of living in a relatively democratic society: if the public wants to trade liberty for security, and their leader refuses to do so out of principle, they’ll find someone less-principled to give it to them.
This is not to say, of course, that Obama needs to throw principle to the wind on this one and restore military tribunals. I don’t think that’s what he’s going to do, anyway. But as gnomedad succinctly put it, Obama is trying to wade through a minefield right now, and some of those mines are going to take a little time and a lot of subtlety and maneuvering to defuse.
SnarkIntern
Yes, exactly. And I have come to think, just in the last year or two, that this fact, plus the insidious and relentless effects of Government by Corporation (which is really to say, by the moneyed interests) are the true threats to the American Experiment in this time. Not terrorism, or any other ism.
The Cheney government looks like an anomaly only if you ignore the 60 years of history that produced it. It is the perfect nexus of military-industrial-intelligence complex, an obsessive desire for security at all costs as demanded at the polls, and the lubricating effects of big money.
I don’t think it’s an accident that you are seeing a crack in this thing right now (and it is just a crack, not a collapse of the war machine) not in small measure because we had a candidate for president who went outside the traditional pathways for campaign funding and appealed directly to the people. It’s a first step in disempowering the machine, but only a first, and small, step.
This only works if the people really learn from this experience and decide that paying attention to details and voting in their true interests will produce not just better government, but better lives for themselves and their countrymen. Elections really do matter. But it takes a bunch of them to get the kind of government, and country, that we’d like.
Thankovsky
@SnarkIntern:
Well-put. From my point of view, the worst aspect out of all of this is the fact that, as tempting as it may be to advocate the abolition of the military-industrial complex and/or the Intelligence Community…well, that’s not really a viable alternative, either. For better or for worse, the United States is, and for the foreseeable future will remain, the worldwide hegemon. We can’t simply choose to abandon that position, even if it’s for something as noble as salvaging our civic virtue, and expect it to not have tremendously dangerous, destabilizing international repercussions.
So it’s up to principled, nuanced leaders like Obama to try to figure out how to rein in those institutions without either getting them to rebel against his government, or else outright destroying them.
mclaren
From REASON magazine, May 2009 (not online, AFAICT):
“THE INDEFINITE FUTURE OF INDEFINITE DETENTION”
“Barack Obama promises to close the military prison at Guantanmo Bay, Cube, by January. But the policy the prison has come to symbolize, indefinite military detention of terrorism suspects, is likely to continue. (..)
“`I don’t think there’s any question but that we are at war’ with terrorists, Attorney General Eric Holder said at his confirmation hearing in January. We did not notice when the war began, he said, and we may never know when it ends. The battlefields are not only in Afghanistan but in countries around the world, including the United States.
“Holder was not just speaking figuratively. Responding to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), he said that if someone suspected of helping to finance Al Qaeda were captured in the Philippines, far from any scene of combat, he would still be considered `part of the battlefield.’
“The implication, Holder acknowledged, is that such a person could be held as an `enemy combatant’ until the `end of hostilities,’ which in this case effectively means forever. So could, say, leaders of a U.S.-based Muslim charity suspected of funneling money to a terrorist organization or a graduate student at an American university accused of helping Al Qaeda by maintaining a website where incendiary anti-American messages were posted.”
The constitution has gone away. That’s the fifth amendment (requirement of due process, meaning anyone has to be arrested, charged with a crime, and tried before a jury) deleted right there. The fourth amendment (prohibition of unreasonable search and siezure) long ago vanished courtesy of the “war on drugs,” the first amendment has been deleted by criminalized peaceful protests (indeed, even planning a peaceful protest has now been criminalized, as the pre-emptive raids against the Minnesota RNC protestors shows)… So what’s left of the constitution?
Nothing.
8th amendment, gone. 4th amendment, gone. 5th amendment, gone. 6th amendment, gone. 7th amendment, gone (courtesy of assets forfeiture). 1st amendment, gone. The only ones left are the second amendment and third amendment. You can argue about the 9th and 10th amendments.
So basically the constitution has been gutted. For all practical purposes, it no longer exists. Any cop or any prosecutor can now do anything they want to you and it’s legal. They can tase you, shoot you without warning on the street, beat you to death, choke you to death, kidnap you and hold you without charges forever, torture you, murder you, and it’s all legal.
We’re living in a military police state. There is no constitution. This is what happens when the military-industrial-police complex grows so large it takes over the entire society. Welcome to Torture Nation. You have the right to scream as some riot-suited cop beats you to a pulp. That’s your only right.
Thankovsky claimed:
The United States isn’t a worldwide hegemon, it’s a pitiful impotent helpless giant. No one fears the U.S. military, it’s a laughingstock. As America bankrupts itself to pay for ever more expensive buck rogers superweapons that don’t work, it renders itself increasingly impotent.
America will give up the role of globocop soon because the U.S. army will be destroyed by barefoot 15-year-old kids carrying bolt action rifles. Indeed, this is already happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kids in the middle east have now learnt how to wire together $300 worth of plastqiue and cellphones to make IEDs that can take out 50 million dollar M1A1 Ambrams tanks. Soon enough that learning process will filter down to the cartels in Mexico, and thent he fun begins.
Where will the American army be destroyed in its endless globe-hopping effort to win the unwinnable eternal “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” and the “war to preserve intellectual property” and the “war to preserve the American way of life” (AKA preserve our oil flow out of the mideast)? Who knows?
America’s army overseas will probably be destroyed somewhere in the mideast in the same manner in which the great army of the Athenians was annihilated during their ill-fated expedition to Syracuse:
“The Athenians pushed on for the Assinarus, impelled by the attacks made upon them from every side by a numerous cavalry and the swarm of other arms, fancying that they should breathe more freely if once across the river, and driven on also by their exhaustion and craving for water.
“Once there they rushed in, and all order was at an end, each man wanting to cross first, and the attacks of the enemy making it difficult to cross at all; forced to huddle together, they fell against and trod down one another, some dying immediately upon the javelins, others getting entangled together and stumbling over the articles of baggage, without being able to rise again. Meanwhile the opposite bank, which was steep, was lined by the Syracusans, who showered missiles down upon the Athenians, most of them drinking greedily and heaped together in disorder in the hollow bed of the river. The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it.” — [Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 19]
Of course Americans, drunk with hubris, cannot imagine their army being wiped out by a bunch of third world peasants armed with nothing more than bolt-action rifles…and this only illustrates the fatal ignorance and arrogance of your average American. The U.S. army overseas will be wiped out when it gets cut off from retreat by the ground, when air support gets shot down, when ammo drops go awry and reinforcements wind up hemmed in and slaughtered by third world citizens enraged beyond the capacity for rational thought by American contempt for their customs and traditions.
For a preview of the annihilation of the U.S. army overseas, read this month’s HARPERS magazine article “Jesus Killed Mohammed”:
“I heard some guys were vandalizing mosques,” [Sergeant Jeffrey] Humphrey says. “Spray-painting ’em with crosses.”
“The rest of that Easter was spent under siege. Insurgents held off Bravo Company, which was called in to rescue the men in the compound. Ammunition ran low. A helicopter tried to drop more but missed. As dusk approached, the men prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles for a `run and gun’ to draw fire away form the compound. Humphrey headed down from teh roof to get a briefing. He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants.
“They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley’s armor, in giant red Arabic script.
`What’s it mean?’ asked Humphrey.
`Jesus killed Mohammed,’ one of the men told him. The soldier guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night.
“The Bradley, a tracked `tank killer’ armed with a cannon and missiles — to most eyes, indistinguishable from a tank istelf — rolled out. The Iraqi interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. The sun was setting. Humphrey heard the keen of the call to prayer, then the crackle of the bullhorn with the interpreter answering — in Arabic, then in English for the troops, insulting the prophet. Humphrey’s men loved it. (..)
`Jesus kill Mohammed!’ chanted the interpreter. `Jesus kill Mohammed!’
“A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. `Boom,’ remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared.
`Jesus kill Mohammed!’ Another head, another shot. Boom.
`Jesus kill Mohammed’ Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. `Each time I got into combat I get closer to God,’ DeGiulio would later say. (..) The Bradley seemed to draw fire from every doorway. There couldn’t be that many insurgents in Samarra, Humphrey thought. Was this a city of terrorists? Humphrey heard Lieutenant DeGiulio reporting in from the Bradley’s cabin, opening upon on all doorways that popped off a round, responding to rifle fire — each Iraqi household is allowed one gun — with 25mm shells powerful enough to smash straight through the front of a house and out the back wall.
“Humphrey was stunned. He’d been blown off a tower in Kosovo and seen action in the drug war, but he’d never witnessed a maneuver so fundamentally stupid.
“The men on the roof thought otherwise. They thought the lieutenant was a hero, a kamikaze on a suicide mission to bring Iraqis the American news:
“JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED.” — [HARPERS magazine, May 2009, pg. 32]
It is not pleasant to contemplate the likely scenes of the U.S. army’s eventual destruction overseas:
“…The removal of the army took place upon the second day after the sea-fight. It was a lamentable scene, not merely from the single circumstance that they were retreating after having lost all their ships, their great hopes gone, and themselves and the state in peril; but also in leaving the camp there were things most grievous for every eye and heart to contemplate.
“The dead lay unburied, and each man as he recognized a friend among them shuddered with grief and horror; while the living whom they were leaving behind, wounded or sick, were to the living far more shocking than the dead, and more to be pitied than those who had perished. These fell to entreating and bewailing until their friends knew not what to do, begging them to take them and loudly calling to each individual comrade or relative whom they could see, hanging upon the necks of their tent-fellows in the act of departure, and following as far as they could, and, when their bodily strength failed them, calling again and again upon heaven and shrieking aloud as they were left behind. So that the whole army being filled with tears and distracted after this fashion found it not easy to go, even from an enemy’s land, where they had already suffered evils too great for tears and in the unknown future before them feared to suffer more.
“Dejection and self-condemnation were also rife among them. Indeed they could only be compared to a starved-out town, and that no small one, escaping; the whole multitude upon the march being not less than forty thousand men. All carried anything they could which might be of use, and the heavy infantry and troopers, contrary to their wont, while under arms carried their own victuals, in some cases for want of servants, in others through not trusting them; as they had long been deserting and now did so in greater numbers than ever.
“Yet even thus they did not carry enough, as there was no longer food in the camp. Moreover their disgrace generally, and the universality of their sufferings, however to a certain extent alleviated by being borne in company, were still felt at the moment a heavy burden, especially when they contrasted the splendour and glory of their setting out with the humiliation in which it had ended. For this was by far the greatest reverse that ever befell an Hellenic army. They had come to enslave others, and were departing in fear of being enslaved themselves…” [Thucydides, “History of the Peloponessian War,” book 19]
The annihilation of the impotent and useless U.S. army, which aside from Desert Storm has not won a major war since 1945 (Korean war, stalemate; Viet Nam war, decisive loss; Desert Storm, decisive win; Somalia, decisive loss; Kosovo war, stalemate, since we never even fielded any troops; Iraq war, decisive loss; Afghanistan, decisive loss), along with the economic death spiral in which the Pentagon presently finds itself, will complete the process of the collapse of the U.S. military-industrial-police complex.
At that point, Americans can re-instate the constitution, try and execute the planners and administrators of the American military-industrial-police complex for treason, and return to our customary role as “the most ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the fall of the Eastern Empire” [H. L. Mencken].
Common sense suggests, and history instructs, that Americans find themselves best employed hoodwinking and brutalizing one another, for they don’t have the competence or intelligence to successfully hoodwink or brutalize other countries. America is not Rome; they had engineers. America is not Athens; they built the Parthenon.
America is a nation of used car salesmen, fast food fried chicken shacks, and dick-enlarging cream email hucksters, and at some point in the foreseeable future, having failed to create a military apparatus capable even of defeating the Tijuana police force, let alone the billions of third world peasants who detest American corporate consumerism as a way of life, Americans will return to doing what we do best…namely, selling one another snake oil and pontificating about moral values while getting our dicks sucked by gay hookers on crystal meth.
sparky
CJ
@PeakVT: Peak:
If you were talking about the detainees, then I was mistaken as to your point. I would say however that the path to dealing with the detainees is pretty clear. We can admit that they are prisoners of war and treat them accordingly, or we can categorize them as criminals and treat them accordingly. It would suck if we had to let some terrorists go, but then the good guys have to play by the rules or they aren’t the good guys any longer.
My own thoughts on torture are that we should strictly apply the rules to everyone involved. If the CIA chief or a low level interrogator believes that there was a ticking time bomb scenario, then torture away. But they’ll still go before a jury for their acts. This is why the president has pardon/commutation powers. If the torture was actually productive, then any right thinking president would issue the pardon/commutation in a heartbeat. If it wasn’t those involved have to realize that torture isn’t taken lightly.
It still scares the shite out of me that the US government believed/s that it could grab someone, declare them an enemy combatant and shut that person in a hole for torture/interrogation forever if they so desired. This is how the cold war secret police stuff worked.
I can only imagine what the old Gene Autry or Roy Rogers movies would have been like if Gene and Roy did whatever was expedient to solve the problem of the rustlers. I’m sure Gabby was damned good at judiciously applying boiling cowboy coffee to get the answers needed. ;)
CJ
Thankovsky
@mclaren:
That’s a completely ridiculous claim, and I challenge you to back it up. There’s no question that its image has taken a major blow from Iraq and Afghanistan, but that’s a far cry from claiming that it’s no longer the worldwide strategic hegemon, much less “impotent” or a “laughingstock.” It’s one thing to acknowledge that the U.S. military cannot do absolutely everything it sets its mind to, and that it isn’t currently very well geared towards counterinsurgency campaigns – like Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan. It’s quite another to make the asinine assertion that its hegemony on a conventional, state-by-state level has in any way ended.
Also, your claim that the “U.S. military” is on the verge of being destroyed by 15-year olds demonstrates your complete lack of a grasp on geopolitics and defense policy. You seem to be under the rather fanciful impression that the entirety of the U.S. military is in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not the case; only a fraction of our military power is there right now. Have we suffered a major strategic defeat in Iraq? Absolutely. But the Romans also suffered a major strategic setback at the battle of the Teutoburg Forest – on the whole, a much greater strategic defeat than the one we are facing in the Middle East – and yet one would have to be dumber than a bag of hammers to suggest that this “destroyed the Roman military.” How much more clueless does one have to be, then, to claim that the entirety of our military is on the verge of destruction?
While the U.S. military has been shown its limits, most credible scholars on this issue acknowledge that no nation’s conventional military will be able to surpass that of the U.S. for the next several decades (to say nothing of its strategic capabilities). If you have any evidence otherwise, I’d suggest you present it. Otherwise, knock off the shrill hyperbole, and leave the discussing of strategy and geopolitics to the big boys, please.
mclaren
Thankovsky blusters:
Let’s refer to the experts. First up: the guy who wrote the current Marine Corps maneuver warfare manual, William S. Lind:
There are three basic reasons why the U.S. military continues to employ bad infantry tactics when superior alternatives lie ready to hand. The first is the unfortunate combination of hubris and intellectual sloth which characterizes most of the American officer corps – and infantry officers in particular. Most read nothing about their profession. Of those who do read, most confine their study to doctrinal manuals — the U.S. Army’s are wretched rehashed French stuff, the Marine Corp’s somewhat better — or histories of American victories. The number who really study tactics, learning about infiltration tactics, Jaeger tactics, the infantry tactics of oriental militaries etc. through reading, is tiny.
This ignorance is buttressed by hubris, false pride. The American military spends a great deal of time and effort telling itself how wonderful it is. Gorged on its own baloney, it thinks, “How could we possibly learn anything from anyone else? After all, we’re the greatest.” So there is no need for any study beyond study of ourselves. Hubris justifies the closed system ignorance creates.
The second reason we persist with bad infantry tactics is bad training. Almost all American training is focused on procedures and techniques, taught by rote in canned, scripted exercises where the enemy is a tethered goat. Free-play training, against an active, creative enemy, generates imaginative tactics, because whoever employs such tactics wins. But free-play training is so rare in the American military that most American infantrymen receive none at all. They become expert in techniques for applying fires, but they know nothing else. In effect, many American infantry units have no tactics, they only have techniques.
The third reason American tactics are bad is a bad personnel system. American infantry units are allowed to maintain personnel stability only for short periods, and sometimes not at all. They are always receiving new, largely untrained troops, who have to be taught “the basics,” which is assumed to mean procedures and techniques. Even if they try — and few units do — they cannot get beyond just bumping into the enemy and calling for fire, because that’s all the newbies can possibly manage.
Link here.
Of course we must ignore the military expert who wrote the Marine Corps maneuver warfare manual in favor of anonymous schmucks with no military qualifications like Thankovsky because…well…because, we should, that’s why. Remember: the key to success is to dismiss all criticism as “completely ridiculous,” to sneer at the experts, and to persist in doing exactly what caused us to fail in the first place.
Hey, Thanksovsky, I remember you…you used to work in the Bush administration, didn’t you? Let’s see now — I think you handled the disaster response to hurricane Katrina…or maybe you were in charge of gathering intel on Iraq’s WMDs…or possibly you headed the committee that picked Harriet Meiers as a Supreme Court nominee. Anyway, I’m sure it was one of those.
Heckuva job, Thanksovsky!
Not satisfied with demonstrating his arrogance, ignorance and incompetence just once, Thanksovsky sallies forth once again to humiliate himself further by claiming
Once again, let’s refer to the experts: in this case, the top Pentagon brass: With a total number of troops committed to Iraq adding up to half the 10 active US Army divisions the United States does not have a large enough force to deal with any other problem that may arise. (..) Asked if he had ever seen the Army so stretched, the official said: “Not in my 31 years” of military service.
But let’s ignore the top Pentagon brass, because after all, what do they know about military matters. Much better to listen to fat-assed armchair masterminds like Thankovsky who’ve never served in the military and have no facts or logic to back up their vacuous claims of U.S. military “hegemony.”
And now Thankovsky delivers a third (and knockout) blow to his own credibility with the assertion:
This is as technically accurate as it is ignorant and foolish, reminiscent of the mathematical assertion that “1 + 1 = 5 for sufficiently large values of 1.” Yes indeedy, America boasts unsurpassed conventional military capability…and if we ever face the German Wehrmacht in Europe, you can bet we’ll whip their asses. And if we’re ever threatened by the Imperial Japanese Navy in another Battle of Midway, why, we’ll just murder ’em!
Unfortunately for Thanksovsky and his arrogant ignorant incompetent ilk, America’s hollow impotent military is hollow and impotent precisely because we have prepared so scrupulously to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy in another Battle of Midway and the German Wehrmacht in another Battle of the Bulge. Like the French military masterminds who wasted their time and money creating the immensely impressive (and immensely useless) Maginot Line, the U.S. military is today a paper tiger, filled with incompetent cowards so terrified of getting killed during their career-advancing rubber-stamp token combat rotation that Pentagon planners now envision a` new improved army’ in which 30 percent of U.S. army may be robots by 2020.
The Pentagon is now filling the skies of other countries with flying assassination drones — which, unfortunately, usually kill innocent people, in most cases the wrong targets, and so of course prove useless. No surprise. After all:
In reality, however, most DARPA projects fail to meet their ultimate goals. During the Vietnam War, massive amounts of money, firepower, and high-tech weaponry proved unable to stamp out an enemy that regularly used punji sticks (sharpened bamboo) as a weapon. Today in Iraq, billions upon billions of dollars in military and intelligence spending for satellites, state-of-the-art surveillance devices, stealth bombers, fighter jets, tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, heavy weapons, night-vision devices, high tech drones, experimental weaponry and all the trappings of Technowar, though capable of killing large numbers of people, are again unable to stop resistance fighters who lack heavy armor, airpower, spy satellites, body armor, or high-tech gear and fight with AK-47s — a rifle designed in the 1940s — pickup trucks, and bombs detonated by garage-door openers.
And since military robots are really nothing but glorified computers, we already know how well this grand new DARPA plan will work out. Given our everyday experience with the buggy crash-prone computers, we know that comptuers bluescreen and lock up and crash constantly, we know how hard it is to actually find anything using google (it usually takes us to the wrong page, totally unrelated to what we’re looking for) and we know that web pages constantly freeze and crash and our browser constantly locks up and has to be restarted. So we can deduce the chaos that will result in a U.S. army made up of 30 percent robots…
Just imagine…
…our army going into battle and its robots unexpectedly bluescreening in the middle of an enemy attack.
(Link here.)
Just imagine…
…half the robots in a U.S. infantry platoon turning on our own soldiers by accident and killing them because of a software glitch.
Just imagine…
a sky full of autonomous lethal assassination drones with defective software randomly targeting our own troops and innocent civilians
…It’s the wonderful world of the future of warfare according to those geniuses in the Pentagon who gave us the Iraq war and Viet Nam and Somalia!
The Keystone Kops meets the Terminator — that’s the future the Pentagon has planned.
What would a third world insurgent conclude when he sees American so terrified of being killed in combat that they feel compelled to replace a third of their troops with buggy defective glitchy killer robots by 2020?
If I were a third world insurgent, I would correctly conclude that Americans are incompetent cowardly fools, and thus easy to defeat. Just kill a few of them and blow up some of their grotesquely expensive (but fortunately useless against 4GW insurgents) hi-tech weapons, and they’ll run home with their tails tucked between their legs.
The objective evidence bears out this conclusion:
“Army recruiting is in a death spiral,” retired army Lieutenant Colonel Charles Krohn, who was forced out of the service for publicly noting the severity of the problem as an army spokesman, recently told right-wing Washington Post columnist Robert Novak, while his former boss, the top army recruitment officer, told the New York Times that no relief was in sight.
“Top-down loyalty [in the U.S. military] – DOES NOT EXIST. Senior leaders will throw subordinates under the bus in a heartbeat to protect or advance their career. There is no trust of senior leaders in terms of loyalty because the record is clear. At the highest level, as example, 4 stars will watch our health care erode without taking a stand.”
Chief of Staff of the Army’s Leadership Survey Command and General Staff College Survey of 760 mid-career Students (Majors with a Few LTCs)
Even the top Pentagon brass admit that “Our defense establishment has suffered some 4,000 fatal casualties, forced the Army into offering enlistment bonuses of $40,000 to raw recruits, begun a program of buying armored jeeps that cost a million dollars each, and run up a generational spending obligation” likely to top $2 trillion, writes military theorist Chet Richards, a retired Air Force colonel.
“We did all this not while engaging some worthy foe armed with tanks, missiles and aircraft similar to ours, nor while contending with massed armies of skilled troops on fields of battle. No, we incurred these costs while trying to suppress resistance to our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, resistance by lightly armed civilians and poorly equipped militias.”
“Now the generals even say you can’t win these things by military means alone,” said David Gompert, principal author of the Rand report.
There you have it: military experts admit the U.S. military’s top officers have no loyalty to their troops, are
grossly incompetent and should be fired, openly proclaim “you can’t win these things by military means alone,” the Pentagon’s top recruiting officers say “army recruitment is in a death spiral,” and our top military historians and military experts ask “How many wars must America lose before we change our bad tactics and failed grand strategy?”
And what is Thankovsky’s response?
“Nothing to see here, folks, move along. Everything’s fine ‘n dandy. All is for the best in this best of all possible military worlds. Ignore the protests of all the mid-level officers in the U.S. military, ignore the military experts, pay no attention the Pentagon’s economic death spiral, disregard our lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and coming up soon, Pakistan!), everything’s going just great.”
A perfect summary of the arrogance and ignorance and incompetence that characterizes the U.S. military-industrial-police cartel. Yes, you’re doing a heckuva job, Thankovsky, keep up the good work.
Unfortunately, the outlook for America as a result of Thankovsky’s brand of arrogance and ignorance and incompetence is remarkably grim.
1. So long as America pursues an offensive grand strategy, Fourth Generation war will ensure her defeat. (..)
2. Second Generation militaries [like the current U.S. army] cannot win Fourth Generation wars. (..)
3. There is no chance America will adopt a defensive grand strategy or reform its military to move from the Second to the Third Generation – a necessary though not sufficient step in confronting 4GW – so long as the current Washington Establishment remains in power. That Establishment is drunk on hubris, cut off from the world beyond court politics and thoroughly corrupted by Pentagon “business as usual”… (..)
What are the implications of these three observations? Militarily, they portend continued failure and defeat. We will fail to get out of Iraq before the next phase of that war begins, or, worse, an Israeli attack on Iran costs us the army we have in Iraq. We will be defeated in Afghanistan, because we will refuse to scale our strategic objectives to what is possible and we will continue to alienate the population with our firepower-intensive way of war. We will push Pakistan over the brink into disintegration, which will be a strategic catastrophe of the first order. We will ignore the disintegration of the state in Mexico, while importing Mexico’s disorder through our ineffective border controls. We will not even be able to stop Somali pirates. What does it say about us when the whole nation rejoices because the U.S. Navy, the most powerful navy on earth, defeated four Somali teenagers?
It does not end with this. These foreign policy failures and military defeats – or even more embarrassing “victories” – become just two of a larger series of crises, including the economic crisis (depression followed by runaway inflation), foreign exchange crisis (collapse of the dollar), political crisis (no one in the Establishment knows what to do, but the Establishment offers the voters no alternative to itself), energy crisis, etc. Together, these discrete crises snowball into a systemic crisis, which is what happens when the outside world demands greater change than the political system permits. At that point, the political system collapses and is replaced by something else.
“Retrospective” by William S. Lind, April 21, 2009
Thankovsky
@mclaren:
You characterize my comments as such…
…and then go on to sputter…
Yeah, sorry, but I don’t think you’re in much of a position to accuse me of bluster.
Anyway, regarding the Lind quote – that really doesn’t help your argument; while it demonstrates that the U.S. military currently isn’t doing a good job of adjusting itself to 21st-century realities (and bear in mind, I never argued otherwise), it’s a pretty far cry from your hysterical claims of imminent American military collapse. Keep your eye on the ball, mclaren – your original argument was that the U.S. is no longer the worldwide military hegemon, not that its leaders are making dumb decisions. You can’t move the goalposts this late in the game.
Regarding the quote from Parapundit, those are active Army divisions. Not the entirety of the military. The U.S. Navy, Air Force, and the remaining active Army and Marine divisions are not deployed in Iraq (to say nothing of undeployed reserve units). Read your sources next time.
Regarding your furiously-typed ramblings about the future of warfare, if you actually take the time to read what I posted, you’ll notice that I have repeatedly acknowledged that the immediate future of warfare is COIN. However, it’s beyond naive to suggest, as you do in your post, that conventional warfare is a thing of the past. The most significant reason for why battles like Midway and the Bulge haven’t happened since 1945 is because of the massive sizes of conventional militaries and the strategic capabilities of major powers like the U.S., the former USSR, India, China, etc. To pretend that the deterrent effect of these militaries serves no purpose in a post-1945 world is to demonstrate a tremendous amount of historical ignorance. If the U.S. doesn’t fight a conventional war in the next fifty years, it will be precisely because its military has deterred such a war from happening.
Where did I say anything remotely similar to that? I acknowledged that the U.S. military is on a backwards trend right now, but I also pointed out that your thesis – that the U.S. military is on the verge of collapse – is laughable.
Did you even read my post, or did you just automatically assume that I’m some sort of fervent Neocon who believes that the military-industrial complex can do no wrong? Judging from your extreme mischaracterization of my argument, the latter seems most-likely.
That’s nice. You can go back to watching too much of “The Animatrix” now.
Thankovsky
Also, the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare is bunk that’s been redefined over and over again by folks like Lind, who are desperate to convince gullible folks that they correctly predicted the future of warfare. Its very premise – that there are clearly-defined generations of warfare that are eventually supplanted by future generations – is flawed beyond repair. Military history, like the rest of history, is cyclical, and what Lind would label the “fourth generation” of warfare (counterinsurgency), in reality, frequently occurs parallel to other “generations” that the fourth generation is supposed to supplant.
Ultimately, though, the issue at hand isn’t whether or not the U.S. is sufficiently gearing its military towards COIN operations; I’ve acknowledged that point from the beginning. What IS at issue, is your claim that the U.S. is no longer a military hegemon, but that it is rather “impotent,” “pitiful,” a “laughingstock,” and that “no one fears” it. I’ve challenged these claims. Thus far, you’ve been unable to back them up.