CACI to Open Probe Of Workers in Iraq
Army Officials Interviewed Employees
By Renae Merle and Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 3, 2004; Page A16
Defense contractor CACI International Inc. said yesterday it launched an independent investigation of its employees in connection with allegations that Iraqi detainees were abused by U.S. soldiers at an Army-run prison in Iraq.
Six Army soldiers have been charged with the physical and sexual abuse of 20 prisoners at the Abu Ghraib facility, which is about 20 miles west of Baghdad, and others remain under investigation. Employees for Arlington-based CACI were serving as interrogators at the facility, according to an attorney for one of the soldiers facing criminal charges.
Two CACI employees were named in an unreleased internal Army report about abuses at Abu Ghraib, according to a New Yorker article published last week on the magazine's Web site. The report alleges that one employee allowed or ordered untrained military police to set conditions for interrogations that amounted to abuse, and recommends he be fired, according to the New Yorker account. It recommends that the other be disciplined.
CACI acknowledged that its employees had been interviewed by Army officials as part of the investigation, but said in an e-mailed statement that it has "received no indication from the Army that any CACI employee was involved in any alleged improper conduct with Iraqi prisoners."
"CACI has initiated an independent investigation of the actions of Company employees in connection with this matter," the statement said. It was unclear who was conducting the investigation. Company spokeswoman Jody Brown and the company's chief executive and chairman, Jack London, did not return calls yesterday for comment.
"We are appalled by the reported actions of a few," the company statement said. "The Company does not condone or tolerate illegal behavior on the part of its employees when conducting CACI business in any circumstance at any time."
CACI, which gets about 64 percent of its revenue from the Pentagon, has declined to disclose how many employees are working in Iraq or Afghanistan.
According to several Internet job sites, CACI has been recruiting interrogators, senior counterintelligence agents and intelligence analysts for work in Iraq for more than a year, requiring some to have active and current top-secret security clearances. An ad posted on Yahoo's HotJobs Web site in February, under the headline "Exciting intelligence opportunities in Iraq!," sought to recruit interrogators with two or more years "conducting tactical and strategic interrogations." Another posting on IntelligenceCareers.com lists opening for senior counterintelligence agent with 10 years experience and intelligence analysts with a minimum of three years' experience.
The increasingly prominent and important roles played by civilian contractors in Iraq have stirred criticism from some industry analysts, who said private contractors cannot be held to the same standards as soldiers. The Pentagon's oversight of private contractors around the world is "inconsistent and sometimes incomplete," according to a 2003 General Accounting Office report.
"The use of private contractors in Iraq is becoming an increasingly volatile political issue," the International Peace Operations Association, a Virginia-based nonprofit group representing private military service companies. "This incident could adversely impact an industry that has been instrumental in supporting stability and reconstruction efforts not just in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, Liberia, Haiti and all over the world."
There are 15,000 to 20,000 civilian military contractors in Iraq working at jobs once reserved for soldiers, said Peter Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry." The duties have veered from the mundane, such as delivering mail and serving food, to critical activities that include conducting interrogations and coordinating logistics, Singer said. "We have truly pushed the boundaries to this," he said.
Staff writer Sewell Chan contributed to this report from Baghdad.

? 2004 The Washington Post Company

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U.S. Official: Abuse Allegations Are 'a Big Deal'
Charges Involving Army-Run Prison in Iraq Seen as Setback for Military; Britain Launches Inquiry

By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 3, 2004; Page A16
BAGHDAD, May 2 -- The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledged Sunday that allegations that Iraqi prisoners were abused at a detention facility run by the Army have set back efforts to cultivate a positive image for the U.S. military in the region.
"Where a handful of people can sully the reputation of hundreds of thousands of people that are over there trying to give a better life to 50 million people, it's a big deal, because we take this very seriously," Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers said on CBS's "Face the Nation," referring to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Myers added: "There are a lot of Iraqis that have daily contact with our forces, and they get to know the character and the compassion of our forces. And so they probably understand this is an aberration. Not that it won't be used against the United States of America. It certainly will."
Last week, CBS broadcast images showing Iraqis stripped naked, hooded and being otherwise tormented, allegedly by their U.S. captors.
The British military has also begun an investigation into abuses, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Sunday, after the Daily Mirror newspaper published photographs Saturday that purportedly showed British troops kicking, stomping and urinating on a hooded Iraqi detainee in the southern city of Basra.
"These allegations are being taken extremely seriously," Straw said, according to the Reuters news service. "The allegations are terrible."
Human rights advocates criticized the alleged abuses by U.S. soldiers at the prison in Abu Ghraib, a western suburb of the capital.
"We had heard reports about torture, but we didn't know that it rose to this level of brutality," said Salim Mandelawi, a lawyer who directs the Human Rights Organization in Iraq, founded in 1960. "These are inhuman actions that are taken only to humiliate people."
An analyst said fallout from the reports of abuse allegations could be devastating for U.S. policy in Iraq.
"The public relations damage is profound and permanent," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "The release of these pictures may be the point at which the United States lost Iraq."
Three separate investigations have been launched since the abuses were uncovered in January. Criminal charges have been filed against six soldiers and could be filed against four others. Administrative penalties have been recommended against seven officers.
The Army Reserve commander who oversaw all 16 Army-run detention facilities in Iraq said that military intelligence operatives exerted the most influence on the daily life of the prisoners in Cellblock 1A, the area of the prison where the prisoners allegedly were mistreated.
"The MPs were responsible for the detention operation," Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski said in a telephone interview Saturday. "They got them their meals, they got them showers, medical attention if they needed it. But the people that were in those cells, their every conduct was scheduled and negotiated by the MI people."
Karpinski said she did not learn about the allegations until she received an e-mail from Army criminal investigators on Jan. 19. "It is not excusable," she said. "It is not acceptable."
As commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Karpinski oversaw 3,400 soldiers, including the six soldiers charged. The six were part of a military police company based in Cumberland, Md.
An attorney for one of the accused soldiers said Sunday that he had requested a Court of Inquiry, which would precede a court-martial.
Gary R. Myers, who represents Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, said the inquiry should be "a broad-based fact-finding mission."
"It is the best truth-finding vehicle available in a hydra-headed circumstance such as this," the attorney said. If the military "is serious about getting the truth, this is the way to do it," he said. "A court-martial is limited by rules of evidence, and is not nearly so expansive as a Court of Inquiry."
Gen. Myers, on CBS, said the military is taking a close look at interrogation procedures inside Abu Ghraib. "We want intelligence information, but we have to stay inside international norms and international law," he said.
U.S. officials have confirmed that two contractors with employees at Abu Ghraib are subjects of the investigation.
One is CACI International Inc., an Arlington-based security firm, which supplied interrogators to assist military intelligence officers. "We are on the record of supporting the investigation," said L. Kenneth Johnson, CACI's president of U.S. operations. "None of our employees have been implicated in any wrongdoing, to the best of our knowledge."
The second company is Titan Corp., based in San Diego, which employed translators at Abu Ghraib. A company spokesman, Wil Williams, declined to answer questions about the company's work at the facility.
Staff writers Christian Davenport, Scott Higham, Ellen McCarthy and Renae Merle in Washington contributed to this report.



? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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'Sexual torture' sparks inquiry call
May 3, 2004 - 12:22PM
Images of abuse
The US-led coalition faced mounting pressure today to allow an independent inquiry into allegations of widespread prisoner abuse in Iraq as 11 more US troops and three Iraqis died in fresh fighting.
Meanwhile United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said a UN-sanctioned multinational force will help maintain security in Iraq after the US military hands limited sovereignty back to the country on June 30.
London's Sunday Telegraph said up to 4,000 British troops are to be sent to take control of the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, currently under siege by US forces, in the largest expansion of British forces in Iraq over the past year.
Eleven US soldiers were killed in combat in less than 24 hours, military sources said.
Two died in an ambush in the southern city of Amara, two in Baghdad, one in an attack on a base near the northern city of Kirkuk, and six when another base was mortared west of Baghdad.
Three Iraqis were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Shi'ite militiamen and British troops in Amara, a hospital source said.
More than 750 US troops have died since the United States and its allies invaded Iraq in March last year, according to a tally based on Pentagon figures. More than 10,000 Iraqis are also estimated to have been killed.
But it was the graphic pictures of the abuse of prisoners by troops in the US and British media that continued to shock the world and undermine coalition claims that it was "winning the hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people.
The images depicted prisoners of US forces, some naked, in humiliating, sexually suggestive poses, with military personnel pointing and laughing at them.
British tabloid the Daily Mirror followed up with photographs of British troops apparently abusing an Iraqi prisoner.
The British press exploded at the Mirror's photos, and though the BBC said their authenticity had been questioned, the daily's editor Piers Morgan stood by the story and hinted at more revelations.
Six US military police, including Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, in charge of US-run prisons in Iraq, were charged in March with offences relating to the abuse of up to 20 prisoners.
A senior military spokesman said US probes were leading to "other areas" outside the limited scope of prisoner interrogation procedures.
Karpinski told the New York Times she was "disposable" and hinted she was being made a scapegoat to protect the army military intelligence unit that controlled the abused prisoners.
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard Myers said the "handful" of US soldiers accused will be prosecuted, insisting that such misdeeds are "not systematic".
One soldier has been referred to court-martial, a second soldier's case is pending and "several are still under investigation," Myers said on US television.
Myers said he would be surprised if military intelligence was responsible for the soldiers' actions.
The former chief of the US group of experts which failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, David Kay, said the photographs had lent weight to calls for coalition troops to withdraw.
Amnesty International said its "extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident".
"There must be a fully independent, impartial and public investigation into all allegations of torture. Nothing less will suffice," the human rights group said.
Sunni Muslim leaders in Iraq have said the abuse constituted "war crimes" while Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa has expressed "shock and disgust" at the "shameful images".
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed to crack down on those responsible, while UN special envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi called it "very worrisome".
Meanwhile representatives of Iran-based Grand Ayatollah Kazem Hossein Haeri are helping mediate to end a standoff between radical Shi'ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and US forces besieging him in Najaf, the ayatollah's office said.
Sadr is wanted over the murder of a rival cleric last year and US forces have vowed to "kill or capture" him and dismantle his Mehdi Army militia, which is several thousand strong.
On the other main front troubling US-led forces, the Sunni bastion of Fallujah west of Baghdad, insurgents were celebrating what they claimed as a great victory over the besieging US marines.
Iraqi forces under the command of a former officer from ousted dictator Saddam Hussein's army began replacing US troops around the city on Saturday under a plan to end a bloody two-week standoff and avoid an all-out US attack.
Annan told a US television programme, "The (UN Security) Council will probably authorise a multinational force to remain in Iraq to help create a secure environment."
"I think it will be part of the new resolution that the Council will be discussing and approving that will cover the period after the 30th of June," Annan said.
"Obviously the new government would also be consulted, but there will be a resolution authorising a multinational force and encouraging governments to come together in a genuine international effort to help stabilise Iraq," Annan said.
"Quite frankly, it's in everybody's interest that we do whatever we can to stabilise Iraq."
But Americans celebrated the news that US civilian contractor Thomas Hamill managed to escape his kidnappers in Iraq, though officials continue to be concerned about the fate of other US captives who remain unaccounted for.
Hamill, a truck driver supplying US forces, was captured April 9 after his convoy came under attack.
A videotape sent out by his captors showed them threatening to murder him within 12 hours if US troops did not end their siege of Fallujah, and nothing more had been heard of him until today.
AFP
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An empire in moral crisis
By Margo Kingston
May 2, 2004

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Email to a friend Printer format A version of this piece was first published in the Sun Herald today. See Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker for TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB, a detailed report into systematic US torture at Saddam's former prison. Yesterday was the first anniversary of Bush's "Mission accomplished" decree. On Friday, American time, he defended his statement with these words: "A year ago I did give the speech from the carrier saying we had achieved an important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or mass graves or rape rooms in Iraq." He lied. The US defence force has confirmed that Bush was kept informed of the investigation into the American torture chambers in Iraq - completed in February. Webdiary's April statistics are at the end of this entry. For an update on the torture scandal, see Is US withdrawal the least worst option?

Yep, time to get out of Iraq

by Margo Kingston

G'day. Time magazine this week interviewed Jumpei Yasuda, one of the Japanese hostages set free by Iraqi kidnappers:
"The man who pointed his gun at me told me he was walking on the sidewalk and was arrested by the G.I.s when he wouldn't answer their questions. He said he was imprisoned for almost a month and regularly beaten up. One day, he said, he was taken to a private room and sexually assaulted. He asked me what I would have done if I were him, and I had no answer."
I didn't believe the man's story. Now I do. I've also reversed my opposition to Mark Latham's promise to bring our soldiers home by Christmas. The photos released by Sixty Minutes in the US changed my mind (also see thememoryhole and albasrah). The photos record tableaus in a US prison in Iraq. In one, a man cloaked in black, his face covered, stands on small box, electric wires attached to his fingers, toes and genitals, after being told that if he falls off he will be electrocuted. In another, several naked men, garbage bags over their heads, are arranged in a human pyramid. One American soldier stands behind them, arms folded, smiling to camera. A female soldier squats behind them, also smiling.
The photos are deeply disturbing, not just for their sadism, but because they are precisely posed. They are `artistic', not torture in action, but torture frozen to capture the moment for the camera. Trophy pics. As Juan Cole wrote:
"There was also apparently coerced male on male sexual activity. The genteel mainstream news reports of this scandal (which have given it less attention than it deserves or than it will get in the Arab press) have not commented on the explicitly sexual message sent by the abusers, which is that Iraq is f**ked."
The decadent American empire now sees itself as the star of its own movie. Remember when it rushed a few troops into Baghdad to show it could win quickly, meaning no one was there to stop the inevitable looting and anarchy when Saddam's regime collapsed? Remember when George Bush dressed up as a soldier to pronounce "mission accomplished" in May last year? Every non-American is a stage prop for the greater glory of America.
We're told that those directly involved in recreating the Caligula movie in Baghdad will be court martialled. Yet if you read the very few stories on the matter in the US media, it's clear that the smiling faces are scapegoats for a US defence force which has lost its way. There was no training for the soldiers on holding prisoners. They were not even given the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners, and were told to get on with it when they queried prisoner abuse. The US even outsourced interrogation to private contractors!
When I wrote about my change of heart on Latham, a couple of readers accused me of being silly. "Surely you must have considered the possibility that, if psychopaths constitute between 1 and 5% of the male population worldwide, then there must logically be a similar percentage of psychopaths in the volunteer US military," wrote Mike Lyvers.
Matthew Cleary: "That you now think the troops should leave is akin to thinking jails should be abolished because there are instances of prisoner abuse by guards."
But the photos are the defining visualisation of what's been becoming clear since Saddam's statue fell last year. The Americans were unprepared for the task of securing the peace, with defence chiefs failing even to train soldiers on the cultural norms of the Iraqis so they would not needlessly humiliate or insult them. Even worse, the ugly side of being American, the side incapable of empathy with any other culture, let alone respect for it, has eaten alive any chance of nurturing democracy in Iraq.
Recently, a British officer said the US troops saw the Iraqis as "untermenschen", a term Hitler used to describe Jews, gypsies and other "racially inferior" groups:
"My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They view (the Iraqi people) as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful."
As one of three nations which invaded Iraq, Australia is responsible for what is happening there. What those pictures show is that it is not possible to "do the job" any more. The war is lost. They longer we stay, the worse it will get, for the world and for the long-suffering Iraqis.
As for the importance of the US alliance, the United States under its present government is a force for evil and perpetual war. Until America elects a leader and an administration which brings out the good side of America and listens to solid, thoughtful advice, we are endangering our security by supporting it.
All the reasons they told us to go to war have fallen apart except the one about giving the Iraqi people freedom and dignity. Now that one is in ruins. What is the job we must do, Mr Howard?
Bring our soldiers home. The longer we stay, the more complicit we are in the war crimes of an empire in moral crisis.

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Is US withdrawal the least worst option?
By Margo Kingston
May 3, 2004

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Email to a friend Printer format A year after Bush declared `Mission accomplished' in Iraq, a few mainstream American military and foreign policy voices are urging the US to admit defeat and withdraw.

These opinions were aired before the images of torture which end any chance that the Iraqi people will believe that America is a benign force for freedom and democracy in their nation.

Since the publication of those images on Thursday night the shocks keep coming. So tonight, updates on the tragedy of Iraq and your thoughts on what went wrong and what to do next.

The truth about American torture

* Seymour Hersh obtained the military report into America's torture chambers in Iraq: TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB: American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

* Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, in charge of Iraqi prisons at the time, says the block concerned was off limits to her and under the complete control of US intelligence - Rough Justice in Iraq:

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is angry. She says she warned her superiors from the first about the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners... The trouble was, Karpinski says, she didn't have enough troops or resources to do the job right, and the men at the top ignored her complaints. "They just wanted it to go away," she told NEWSWEEK last week... "There's no excuse for what these people did," says Karpinski. "They're just bad people. But the guys involved in this were new to Abu Ghurayb. It got way out of hand.

Karpinski says the abuse took place in Abu Ghurayb's Block 1A, which had been taken over and turned into a windowless prison-within-a-prison by military-intelligence officers. They called the shots there, not the usual military-police guards. "So far I haven't heard of any investigation of the military-intelligence people," she says.

* The American military denied problems in the prison for months, dead batting complaints from the British human rights envoy and Amnesty International. Hersh reports:

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba's report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

* An American veteran comments in Abu Ghraib as My Lai?

* The Americans have outsourced interrogation to private contractors (see Hersh), thus ending the last remaining core function of the State: Privatization of warfare. And now we're losing our SAS soldiers to the private army in Iraq: Army exodus: SAS troops quit. Webdiarist Donald Brook commented:

It's good to see the war being privatised, with soldiers leaving the SAS and going entrepreneurial. One had thought that the blight of socialism, under which armed conflict has been seen by old Lefties like Howard et al as essentially a public enterprise, would never be cured.

* The American media hardly run the story for days, although the Hersh scoop seems to have forced them to do so. See Iraq Torture Images Vie with Photos of U.S. War Dead:

This shows U.S. newspaper editors understand what kind of war coverage interests American readers, according to David D. Perlmutter, a historian of war and media at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. "The torture pictures are absolutely irrelevant," Perlmutter said in a telephone interview. "Americans care about American soldiers, and only journalistic and political and academic elites fret about pictures of collateral damage ...

As US blogger Kevin Drum said:

Remember this the next time someone wonders aloud why Arabs all hate us so "irrationally." We play down incidents like this as "aberrations," merely a few soldiers out of thousands, and run the story on page 27. They see it splashed across the front page and think of it as yet another case of American hypocrisy. It's going to be awfully hard now to convince them they're wrong.

***

Voices for withdrawal

* Former General Sees 'Staying the Course' In Iraq as Untenable:

It is delusional, asserts the Army veteran, college professor and longtime Washington hand, to believe that "staying the course" can achieve President Bush's goal of reordering the Middle East by building a friendly democracy in Iraq. For the sake of American security and economic power alike, he argues, the U.S. should remove its forces from that shattered country as rapidly as possible.

"We have failed," Mr. Odom declares bluntly. "The issue is how high a price we're going to pay. ... Less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later?" His is not the voice of an isolationist, or a peacenik, or Republican-hater. He is talking from the conservative Hudson Institute, where he was hired years ago by Mitch Daniels, later Mr. Bush's budget director. His office displays photos of Ronald Reagan, under whom Mr. Odom directed the National Security Agency, and Jimmy Carter, on whose National Security Council staff he served.

* Conservative' foreign policy expert Christopher Layne of the Cato Institute (one of the very few right wing think tanks which opposed the war) wrote The Best of Bad Choices in `The American Conservative':

The United States has no good options in Iraq but the least bad is this: Washington should transfer real sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30. It should tell the Iraqis to work out their own political future among themselves and turn over full responsibility for Iraq's external and internal security to the new regime in Baghdad. Simultaneously, the United States also should suspend all offensive military operations in Iraq, pull its forces back to defensive enclaves well away from Iraq's cities, and commence a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq that will be completed on December 31 (or on January 20, 2005).

There is no point in being Pollyannaish. In the long run, the U.S. will be better off leaving Iraq. In the short-term, however, there will be consequences -- not all of which are foreseeable -- if the U.S. withdraws. But that misses the point. Sooner or later the U.S. is going to end up leaving Iraq without having attained its goals. Washington's real choice is akin to that posed in an old oil-filter commercial that used to run on television: America can pay now, or it can pay later when the costs will be even higher.

* Paul Krugman in In Front of Your Nose:

Even among harsh critics of the administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We can't cut and run. We have to stay the course. I understand the appeal of those arguments. But I'm worried about the arithmetic.

... I don't have a plan for Iraq. I strongly suspect, however, that all the plans you hear now are irrelevant. If America's leaders hadn't made so many bad decisions, they might have had a chance to shape Iraq to their liking. But that window closed many months ago.

* United Press International analyst Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote in Looking for the exit:

Total alignment on Prime Minister Sharon's anti-Palestinian strategy has turned even moderate Muslims against the United States. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak said hatred of the United States had never reached such depths.

When Mr. Bush suddenly dropped longstanding U.S. opposition to Jewish settlements on the West Bank, rooted as they were in U.N. resolutions, Israeli settlers could not believe their luck. Sharon conceded Gaza, where 7,500 Jewish settlers had no future among 1.3 million Palestinians, but in return obtained U.S. blessings for permanent Israeli habitation in large swaths of what was to be a Palestinian state. Even illegal hilltop settlements concluded they were now safe from removal and immediately began erecting permanent structures to replace mobile homes...

No sooner had the White House's red light flashed green than the once surreptitious, crawling annexation of the West Bank resumed in the open. Jewish West Bank settlers were jubilant, while Palestinians were adrift in the Slough of Despond. With the Right of Return for Palestinians also off the table, and no viable state of their own on the West Bank, extremist organizations will have no problem recruiting more jihadis (holy warriors) and merging terrorist operations with the underground resistance in Iraq, Arab opinion has been inflamed to the point where Palestine and Iraq are now two fronts in the war against what Charles de Gaulle used to call "the Anglo-Saxons."

Osama bin Laden is probably thinking he's some kind of strategic genius.

After the torture photos scandal, he wrote Tutwiler's mission impossible:

The shameful pictures of U.S. soldiers humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners were the final straw for Margaret D. Tutwiler. Moved out of her post as Ambassador to Morocco last December to become Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs, Ms. Tutwiler was instructed to spruce up the Bush administration's image in the Arab world in particular and the Muslim world in general.

It took her only four months to conclude this was mission impossible. She was the third "image" czarina to come a cropper in three years. Competing against the Qatar-based al-Jazeera and Dubai-based al-Arabyia and their coverage of the occupation of Iraq gave Ms. Tutwiler about the same chance of success as going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

* For a detailed account of the end of the neo-con power in Washington, see Jim Lobe's US on the brink:

One year after President George W Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States appears to be teetering on the brink of strategic defeat in its Mesopotamian adventure.

Even as Bush on Friday reiterated his ambition to bring "freedom and democracy" to Iraq and the Middle East, a series of recent policy reversals - capped by Friday's announcement that a former Ba'athist general will take charge of an all-Iraqi security force in Fallujah - suggests that an increasingly desperate Washington will settle for far less.

* The father of thus Senate and a consistent opponent of the war, Senator Robert Byrd made a speech called Mission Not Accomplished in Iraq to mark the first anniversary of Bush's boast:

Since that time, Iraq has become a veritable shooting gallery. This April has been the bloodiest month of the entire war, with more than 120 Americans killed. Young lives cut short in a pointless conflict and all the President can say is that it "has been a tough couple of weeks". A tough couple of weeks, indeed.

Plans have obviously gone tragically awry. But the President has, so far, only managed to mutter that we must "stay the course". But what course is there to keep when our ship of state is being tossed like a dinghy in a storm of Middle East politics? If the course is to end in the liberation of Iraq and bring a definitive end to the war against Saddam Hussein, one must conclude, mission not accomplished, Mr. President.

The White House argues time and again that Iraq is the "central front" on the war on terrorism. But instead of keeping murderous al Qaeda terrorists on the run, the invasion of Iraq has stoked the fires of terrorism against the United States and our allies. Najaf is smoldering. Fallujah is burning. And there is no exit is in sight. What has been accomplished, Mr. President? (For Byrd's pre-war speeches against the war, see A lonely voice in a US Senate silent on war and Today, I Weep for my Country...)

***

Allen Jay

This piece by Alex Cockburn, Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders, Useless Spies, Angry World, summarises the situation perfectly and applies equally to Howard's Australia.

My only comment on evaluating intelligence and being able to sort the wheat from the chaff is that it requires an unbiased and open mind. When you have either a political or ideological bias there is a great temptation to ignore contrary facts and information as a matter of deliberate policy or because you subconsciously give them little credence.

That seems to be the deep corruption and failing within Australian, British and particularly US intelligence.

***

Alistair Bain in Perth

I am amazed at all these protestations of outrage at the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. We knew from interview snippets revealed during the invasion that elements of the American and British forces had little respect for the Iraqis. The abuse of prisoners is hardly surprising.

You claim not to have believed the released Japanese captive when he recounted his captor's claims of mistreatment by the Americans - until you saw the photographs. Hmmm. We believe what we want to, don't we? We invaded Iraq because we wanted to believe Mr Saddam had WMD. We didn't want to believe that Iraq's "liberators" could be brutal and inhumane.

The pictures - of which others, less "presentable", exist - are reminiscent of the rape of Nanking, where Japanese soldiers had happy snaps taken while they abused Chinese women.

However, I acknowledge your moral courage in openly stating your changed position. What amazes me is how quickly former supporters of the invasion are changing their minds or carefully qualifying their support. Why do they think so many people raised objections to the invasion in the first place? With what REAL evidence did they offer their support?

I sympathise with Mark Latham's pull-out call. However, part of me still believes that since Australia has allowed itself to become part of the Iraqi mire we have a moral responsibility to stay and help clean up the mess. Let's hope we can find ways of doing so which truly make amends for the unspeakable horror we have helped create.

***

Russell Dovey in Canberra

Recent images of American and British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners are more than disturbing; they are damning to a cultural tradition that upholds itself as the way of freedom, peace, and civilisation. The West is shamed by these photos, as it is by every act of barbarity that its soldiers commit in foreign wars.

Those in the US and British military who were responsible for these crimes, those who gave the orders, and those who did nothing even though they knew these crimes were being committed, should be arrested and tried in a court of law. It is the third group that I fear will get away with their crime, because the very nature of these acts means that many will have heard what was going on, making it hard to separate criminal negligence from disbelief.get away with their crime, because the very nature of these acts means that many will have heard what was going on, making it hard to separate criminal negligence from disbelief.

It is disturbing to remember that before the war, the US refused to join many other countries around the world, including Australia, in signing and ratifying the treaty for the International Criminal Court. The ICC handles war criminals who have not been adequately tried in their own countries.

It is possible that the Bush administration knew this sort of thing was likely to happen, and therefore ensured it could control the investigation. So why didn't they make sure that soldiers knew the basic idea behind the Geneva Convention and respected a prisoner's human rights? Why did it not respond to allegations that many of its soldiers regard Iraqis as subhuman?

However, Margo, the solution you propose in An empire in moral crisis may be worse than the problem. If the US and Britain withdrew all their forces from Iraq, then there would be no more tortures, beatings or Falluja-style massacres committed by American or British soldiers upon Iraqis.

Unfortunately, the American and British forces are not the only self-righteous, militaristic cowboys in Iraq, just the most numerous and well-armed. There are dozens, if not hundreds of militia groups of various sizes in Iraq, each one with a different view on how the country should be run. The weapons available to these groups range from the ubiquitous Kalashnikov rifle to rocket-propelled grenades capable of ripping apart a car.

An optimist might think that once the American and British forces leave, these militias would have no-one to fight anymore. They would go home and keep their rifles buried in the back yard, wrapped in oiled cloth, in case they were needed again.

No doubt, this is exactly what many of them would do. Quite a few more would simply protect their own neighbourhood, as they have ever since the fall of Saddam's regime in the absence of any effective policing by the CPA.

Unfortunately, many of these groups were not formed in reaction to the Western occupation, or to protect their own neighbourhoods. Some are the personal armies of aspiring warlords, out to conquer as much territory as they can and hold it by force.

Other groups are motivated by religious beliefs, and intend to enforce their own rules and systems of worship wherever they can. Finally, there are terrorist groups under the banner of Al-Qaeda, using Iraq as a stage to hurt the US in their propaganda war, caring nothing for the people they kill or maim in the process.

Iraq's borders are being enforced by the American and British military. Effectively, Iraq now exists as a nation because of the occupation. If we withdraw, then the borders are just lines on a map. While regional militias would fiercely defend their territories from Turkish, Iranian or Syrian attack, they would be hard-pressed to mount the fully co-coordinated defence required to prevail against the well-equipped armies of Turkey and Iran.

At best, if American and British forces withdrew entirely, Iraq would become a fragile coalition of diverse militias, many of whom have long histories of violence with many of the others. In another part of the world, they might even maintain stability, and be left alone to find their own way to govern themselves.

However, the land of Iraq has been blessed, or cursed, with a staggeringly large amount of oil. Especially in a time when we are constantly being told that the oil will start to run out in 30 years, it is hard for any country to resist this lure. Oil is valuable both for its financial and its geopolitical value, even if a country is already the richest, most powerful nation on earth with its own oil reserves.

If the USA is unable to go without Iraq's oil, Iraq's neighbours would be even more unable to resist the opportunity to grab what they can now in order to protect themselves from economic chaos in 30 years, and Iran would especially see it as a chance to gain more control over the US economy.

So the Iraqi people, far from having a chance to determine their own future, would be invaded and plunged into anarchy. Civilian deaths in the widespread fighting could be in the tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands would probably die from lack of basic infrastructure, combined with an inability to deliver food aid. The flood of refugees into surrounding countries would cause even more hardship and famine.

Therefore, even though the occupation of Iraq is wrong and must end, to simply wash our hands of the mess would be worse for Iraq's people and for global stability. I don't mean that the PM is right about "getting the job done", because he wouldn't know what the real job was if it hit him in the face.

This petty, selfish national interest that the PM seems to believe in is not what the Australian people believe in. We are not a selfish, petty little people, ready to sell another country down the river to enrich our American big brother. Our fearless leader has done a great job of convincing the world that we are, but we know better.

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Former General Sees
'Staying the Course'
In Iraq as Untenable
April 28, 2004; Page A4
The time to worry is when Washington politicians on all sides agree. So when John Kerry echoes President Bush in arguing that the United States "can't cut and run" from Iraq, maybe it's time to listen to someone who says we must.
Maybe it's time, in other words, to listen to retired Gen. William E. Odom. It is delusional, asserts the Army veteran, college professor and longtime Washington hand, to believe that "staying the course" can achieve President Bush's goal of reordering the Middle East by building a friendly democracy in Iraq. For the sake of American security and economic power alike, he argues, the U.S. should remove its forces from that shattered country as rapidly as possible.
"We have failed," Mr. Odom declares bluntly. "The issue is how high a price we're going to pay. ... Less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later?"
His is not the voice of an isolationist, or a peacenik, or Republican-hater. He is talking from the conservative Hudson Institute, where he was hired years ago by Mitch Daniels, later Mr. Bush's budget director. His office displays photos of Ronald Reagan, under whom Mr. Odom directed the National Security Agency, and Jimmy Carter, on whose National Security Council staff he served.
Rather, his unsettling view reflects a broader reassessment of America's predicament as Iraq looks ever-uglier. It can be seen as well in U.S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer's tacit admission of error in disbanding the Iraqi Army and Mr. Bush's new reliance on United Nations help.
Mr. Odom opposed the Iraq war before it happened. An expert in comparative politics who teaches at Georgetown and Yale, he warned that there was no reason to expect that Iraq could soon develop the ingredients for constitutional democracy: individual rights, property rights and a tax-collection system supporting a government to enforce them. The violence of recent months, he concludes, has exposed Mr. Bush's vision of doing so as a dream.
Following the planned June 30 handover of nominal sovereignty, Iraqis may go to the polls and vote. But the result, Mr. Odom explains, will resemble theocracy more than liberal democracy. As televised images of Iraqis cheering attacks on U.S. troops suggest, it's not likely to be anything Americans would consider worth the war's cost in blood and treasure.
"Anybody that's pro-American cannot gain legitimacy," he says. "It will be a highly illiberal democracy, inspired by Islamic culture, extremely hostile to the West and probably quite willing ... to fund terrorist organizations." The ability of Islamic militants to use Iraq as a beachhead for attacks elsewhere may increase.
But can't U.S. troops there tamp down such hostile activity? Well, yes, he says -- at a cost of rising hostility to the U.S. throughout the region.
"It probably will radicalize Saudi Arabia, [and] it could easily radicalize Egypt," Mr. Odom says. Violence yesterday between security forces and terrorists in Syria hinted at what may come, heightening dangers for Israel and the U.S. Iran might agree not to stir trouble among fellow Shiites who are 60% of Iraq's population -- provided the U.S. eases its hostile stance toward Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
Yet the stakes, in Mr. Odom's view, are much bigger. The longer U.S. troops hang tough, he reasons, the more isolated America will become. That in turn will place increasing strain on international economic and security institutions that have undergirded the emergence of "America's Inadvertent Empire," as Mr. Odom's latest book calls it. "I don't know that the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, [or] NATO can survive this," he says.
His proposed solution sounds initially like Mr. Kerry's: a call for the U.N. and European allies to take charge of political and security arrangements. What's different -- even Bushlike -- is that Gen. Odom would accompany that request with a unilateral declaration that U.S. forces would leave even if no one else agrees to come in.
Such a move, he concludes, might even provoke an unexpected result a year after Mr. Bush brushed off opposition from France, Germany and many others to oust Saddam Hussein. "The Europeans might get scared [of chaos] and go in," Mr. Odom says. "There'd probably be a big effort to try to rescue" Mr. Bush. But U.S. troops would be gone within six months in any event.
It is a jarring prescription. But ask yourself, as bullets fly in Najaf and Fallujah, which sounds more credible: Mr. Odom's gloomy forecast, or Mr. Bush's prediction of success?
Write to John Harwood at john.harwood@wsj.com