Monday, August 27, 2007

DWEEB of The Week

Alberto, we hardly knew ye! But what we did know made us wretch! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out! Please take GWB with you.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Heck of a Job Brownie!

On Tuesday the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, called al-Maliki's government's progress "extremely disappointing." But the following day Bush said: "Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man, with a difficult job and I support him."

The Five-Sided Bone Yard

Today's (8/26) NY TIMES Magazine publishes Challenging the Generals. This is the important story about which I gave you that "heads-up" a couple of days ago. It makes a couple of interesting and important points: our younger officers are not extending beyond their initial required terms of service; many of our generals earn their rank by not rocking the boat and by not being creative or outstanding. Some of the younger officers are challenging the perceptions of the older officers. In other words, the Army is just another ossified bureaucracy that seeks to maintain its own cultures and traditions, and heaven help anyone who tries to change things or present a different perspective.

It has always been the field grade officers, the 0-4s and 0-5s, the majors and LTCs who were the biggest proponents of change. In other words, they were in that delicate in-between age, not so young as to be stupid and reckless and not so old as to protect possible stars from gracing their shoulders.They were in the system long enough to know what needed to be done and not in it so long that they had sold their souls.

It's a good thing that the younger guys are speaking up, but will they be heard? Many months ago I referenced LTC Paul Yingling's "A Failure of Generalship" and I suggest that you read his indictment of the senior military in conjunction with the TIMES article.

In our system of government, which places control of the military under civilian authority, one must seriously consider consider how and to what extent a military officer should go when he or she disagrees with civilian orders. One must also consider how far a military officer must go when he or she disagrees with military orders, because the military does not, and perhaps can not, tolerate the degree of debate and discussion that occurs in the civilian world. What is flexible are those times when debate must be encouraged.

Read the articles for yourself.

Better Than I Can Say It



http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070826.gif

Saturday, August 25, 2007

DANGER, Will Robinson! DANGER!

If you say, "hey, only bad guys are getting caught up by the administration's unconstitutional jailing of so-called enemy combatants.", here is a story to turn your stomach. American whistle blowers were jailed and interrogation methods were used against them.

Here is a taste of that story:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

“It was a Wal-Mart for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.”

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.(TRM emphasis)


It's what the lawyers call "the slippery slope". Yes, we have a war on terrorism, which is being fought incompetently on so many fronts, but the real danger to "The United States of America" occurs when we curtail what makes us so special, our constitutionally guaranteed rights. At that point we no longer exist as the country we think we are, but we become another corrupt dictatorship.

Benjamin Franklin said,"those people willing to give up a little freedom for a little security, wind up with neither freedom nor security."

Friday, August 24, 2007

Like Fourteen Monkeys..

OK, here's the deal. Sen. John Warner, ancient Republican from Virginia, now calls for US troops-- some but not all-- to be withdrawn from Iraq.

The NY TIMES runs an editorial that says, in essence, "Well let's get the troops home even if there will be a genocide in Iraq". Oh, they don't quite say "genocide", they use the term "brutal".
The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be.


How delicate, how precious, of the TIMES.

In the meantime, an Army general says if we pull troops out, we are ceding hard won gains.

Last week, the TIMES ran an op-ed piece from several NCOs which stated that Iraq was a mess. This coming Sunday, the TIMES Magazine will run a story which states that junior officers have lost faith in their senior officers. I have it from a source I trust that this assessment is spot on.

Senators just returned from Iraq says the government isn't governing. A recent National Intelligence Estimate says pretty much the same thing and that the situation there won't get better soon.

Our president first says the Iraqi PM better get his act together. Then, after the PM goes into a snit and says we can get other friends (let him!), Bush backtracks and says "Maliki, you're doing a hell of a job!"

Then Bush has what can only be a drug induced flashback and says this is 1969 and we had better stay in Vietnam or the Commies will take over (and excuse him while he blows off his Texas Air National Guard duty. Oh, and VP Dick Cheney had "better things to do with his time then to serve in Vietnam", so he got FIVE deferments!)

Soooo. let's put it all together, shall we? We have a president who is out of touch with reality. A vice president in the same condition. Republican Senators who say let's get out. A General who says stay. An officer corp that has lost confidence in its senior leaders. And enlisted ranks that publicly disagree with policy.

Want more? Look at thisTIMES story regarding a photographic exhibit of wounded American soldiers.

As a bosun's mate I knew used to say, "You look like fourteen monkeys fucking a football!"

Best damned description of this administration.

What hath Bush wrought?

Sunday, August 19, 2007

To Ensure Domestic Tranquility...

Now they want the law enforcementlaw enforcement to have access to spy satellite information? Why, oh, why do I not trust Little Alberto and his minions?

ON Iraq- First Hand Account

The Sunday NYTIMES (subscribe, please, before they shrink the paper to the size of a microdot!) has this account of the war by the grunts who fight it. You can decide whether they are in the best or worst position to opine on the war in general, but they know what they saw and heard so you must read their account, which strikes me as one of the most truthful pieces of reporting on this tragic war.

Here are some highlights:

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.



Well done, soldiers! If General Petreaus issues a report as truthful as yours, we will find out we out of this morass.

Dweeb of the Week

AG Alberto Gonzales has been Dweeb of the Week longer than the Boston Red Sox have been in first place int eh American League-East. "Have you no shame, sir?"

The FBI says Little Alberto kinda, sorta got his story all bollixed up about getting the OK for domestic spying operations from former AG John Ashcroft.

Not only does Little Alberto not know the Constitution, he doesn't even know reality.

Ultimate Bush Poker

This one is so off the wall, it's hilarious.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Fraud In The NYTIMES

Well, I came across this blog that really clobbered that O'Hanlon and Pollack op-ed piece that ran in the NYTIMES a couple of days ago. It seems that Pollack and O'Hanlon did go to Iraq-- on a trip that was put together by the Pentagon. Everything that they saw, and everything that they did was put together by the military. Everyone that they spoke with was selected by the military.

I admit that I was greatly disappointed to learn that the Pollack and O'Hanlon piece was a fraud. I so hoped that the sacrifices of our soldiers would ultimately achieve a noble end, despite the lies, incompetence of this administration. Our troops are far better representatives of the best of this country than the current inhabitants of the White House.

So where do we go in Iraq? I think both Republicans and Democrats admit that we will be there for several years to come. Both republicans and Democrats have no desire to be caught in the middle of a Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish civil war. And yet, a hasty departure on our part surely will lead to a genocide, an ethnic cleansing, that we will not be able to ignore and which will stain our national soul for years to come. As Colin Powell stated, "We broke it, we own it."

And the Iraqi parliament is still on vacation.

I Love This Guy's Work

LTC Bob Bateman had a super solid guest blog on Eric Alterman's "Altercation" today(8/16). What he says about the military, I feel you can take to the bank-and get a mortgage! Here it is:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hello, Altercators, Lt. Col. Bob Bateman here again today.

Schofield Barracks, June, 1991: The main buildings on this infantry-dominated post are called "Quads." Massive, squat structures, built by the Work Projects Administration during the Depression, each is large enough to house an entire brigade of men, three full battalions. Beyond that, they also have enough room left over to fit the offices for the company and battalion headquarters of each unit.

That summer I was a newly minted First Lieutenant, promoted up and away from my beloved rifle platoon and onto the battalion staff. My battalion of "Light" (meaning we carried all that we would take to war, on our backs, but required fewer airplanes and ships to get us there) Infantry was about to deploy to the Egyptian-Israeli border as part of the peacekeeping force that had been on site since the Camp David accords. It was a static mission, but tensions remained high in the region in the wake of Desert Storm.

Our role was to "Observe, Report, and Verify" any violations of the accords. The system worked because peace was already in place. Still, the mission required significant retraining from our normal role as assault troops. That training occupied much of the preceding six months, though as is always the case, as the deadline of our deployment approached, there always seemed to be more and more that had to be done. On this afternoon the assembled company commanders (captains), the battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel), and the battalion staff (captains and majors, mostly) were meeting for the weekly "Battalion Training Meeting." These meetings are recurrent rituals played out at every Army post around the world. Here, every week, we laid out the plan for the next week, month, and quarter, so that the actions of 750 men might be coordinated. There is no time to be wasted in these meetings.

Captain Dave T, known among his peers by his nickname "Trash," commanded one of our companies. He was one of the best leaders I have ever known. Direct, intelligent, approachable for even the most junior private, and honest -- Trash did not suffer fools gladly, and we junior officers and men who followed him loved him for it. On this afternoon he sat midway down the length of the conference table. Slouching almost to the point where his eyes were level with the table, as was his norm, Trash soaked it all in. Boredom visibly poured from his soul. The meeting, normally planned for an hour, was approaching its third. Yet still the battalion commander continued.

"Finally, we need to address the critical issue of safety. As you all know, 'Herb's Beach' is right outside the wire of South Camp," Lieutenant Colonel H____ said, "and it represents our primary threat."

Lieutenant Colonel H___ had recently returned from a reconnaissance to the Sinai Desert and his mind was, literally, overflowing. Given that there was nothing actually in that desert at the time but sand, rock, some Bedouin, and some camels, this does not speak well of LTC H___. "South Camp" was, and is, the base for the American battalion on rotation. The beach to which he referred was 40 yards of sand at the edge of the Red Sea, where a dry wadi ran to the water's edge. A decade earlier, another unit cut a notch through the coral, thereby making it possible to swim. (The coral shelf that lines the coast of the Gulf of Aquba has only a few feet of water over the top otherwise.) It was, in the South Sinai, a very small refuge of relaxation for our men. LTC H___, however, saw it through another lens.

"The 82nd lost a lieutenant on that beach last year. It's a threat," LTC H___ said, referring to a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had done a rotation the previous year, yet ignoring the fact that the lieutenant in question had been scuba diving, not snorkeling or swimming on the surface, as our men would be doing, since scuba had now been banned. "We need to have every man in the battalion swim tested at the division pool, and those who do not pass must take remedial lessons until they can."

What he was ordering was, literally, thousands of man-hours of training, let alone the time needed to coordinate it all. It was not possible. We were to start leaving in six weeks. You could take a crowbar, a 10-pound sledge, and a bucketful of grease and you still could not jam that much into the little time we had remaining. But the company commanders were silent. They just took it in. It is a long way from captain to lieutenant colonel. They were quiet, I should say, but for one.

From his nearly subterranean seat, Captain Trash raised two fingers. This, for Trash, was significant motion. The Battalion Commander nodded.

"Sir, you're kidding, right?" Trash began, sitting up and giving LTC H___ at least the nominal benefit of the doubt. Every officer in that room knew we did not have the time remaining to do as the LTC demanded. Every officer also knew, from experience, that it was useless presenting this boss with inconvenient facts. Trash was about to become my hero and my role model. LTC H___ insisted that he was not, in fact, joking, and that this was a critical issue of safety, and that we would just have to make it work for the sake of our men.

That last is a telling call-out. "The safety of the men" really is something we take seriously. Sometimes, however, common sense gets overruled. Trash had common sense, and he knew that he would not convince our numerically challenged leader with an analysis of the time remaining versus the potential threat. He cut to the point.

"Sir, I don't know if you've noticed this," Trash began, sarcasm whispering from his posture, "but right now, I mean today, and pretty much every day for the past two years since I've been here ... we've been surrounded by 2,500 miles of open ocean, thousands of feet deep, with beaches 360 degrees around us that our men visit every weekend, and not a man has drowned from this unit at all, probably since Vietnam."

Schofield Barracks, you see, is on the island of Oahu, in the Hawaiian Island chain, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The battalion commander wanted us to force 750 men to take swim training ... in order to go to the desert, from an island.

The room was hushed, and then we could not contain it. We erupted in laughter. It was the only "weapon" with which it was possible to win even a small victory with that particular battalion commander. He ceded Trash's point, and the idea, the very-stupid-but-very-safe-idea, was unceremoniously dropped.

One year later that LTC was selected for the War College. He went on to be promoted to full colonel. Captain Trash, who was evaluated by LTC H____ on a yearly basis, never made it past major. He was "non-selected" and inevitably forced out of the Army.

What I have just described was not an entirely uncommon situation, not in the 1990s or, indeed, ever. There have always been idiots in uniform, and some of them get commissions. This is a fact of life, in war and peace. But during the 1990s it may have reached its peak. "Safety" and risk avoidance are good things. But unlike, say, the factory floor at General Motors, my profession is about taking calculated risk with human life. Training, for combat, is itself inherently dangerous. Sometimes crazily so. But to make it possible for your men to survive when other men are really seriously trying to kill them, you have to train them under conditions as close as you can get to the insanity that is war.

We lost some of that focus in the 1990s. We lost our edge, our willingness to push to the limits, not just physically, but intellectually as well, which is understandable in that rudderless decade. The result was a generation of officers who saw the most risk-averse of those above them advance while those who took the correct risks, or spoke candidly, felt the mallet.

In any sufficiently large organization, especially one paranoid and averse to risk, one route to the top is to avoid being wrong, even if that means also avoiding being right. There are generals I know, some with four stars, who I am personally convinced made it to their great rank because they never, ever, made a decision. This works because if you make a decision, you might be wrong, but if you never make a decision, statistically, you are always going to appear as "better" than those who made 95 percent correct decisions, since the only thing that would stand out would be the wrong one.

We are, in war, now regaining that edge among our officers. Historically this is about the only thing at which the American Army actually excels when compared against all other armies. We do learn. But it is a slow war, and changing a culture is a slow thing, even for us. We are finding officers who speak clearly, who lead candidly, who take the calculated risks that their experience tells them are necessary, and who accept when they are wrong. I believe that there are at least some of my peers who speak truth, regardless, because doing the right thing is more important than looking "right" in front of the boss.

I have no clue what General David Petraeus will say next month when he gives his assessment. I do know that no matter what he says, some significant percentage of the American people will write him off as a stooge, or a fool, while others will hail him a hero. Both groups will cite the same words Petraeus speaks as their "evidence" for their opinion. I suspect General P knows this as well. What I would like to pass to you, today, is my assessment. Take it for what it is worth. General P is smart, and he is savvy, both of which make him come off to some people as "political." He is not. But he is more like Trash than he is like LTC H, and that, Altercators, reassures me.
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Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.
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Sadly, this is not surprising. Even accounting for the society-wide difference between males and females (and their "success" rates), and the fact that the Army is about 77 percent male, the numbers are sad.
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There is something wrong here. This is my media criticism point for the day. Even if you say, "Well, there are language problems between the photographer and the caption writer," that doesn't account for this. Somebody needs remedial training, at a minimum, which is annoying after the essay I wrote in defense of journalism yesterday.

WARNING: When I originally linked to this photo this morning, it was on the Yahoo news site containing image feeds from Agence France-Presse. The image was shot by an AFP stringer. I should note that I generally like AFP -- hell, they took me to the White House Correspondents Dinner last year just after I came back from Iraq, so I got to see Colbert. But they have yanked and apparently changed the label on the image, so now the only place the original can be found is on conservative blogs. This one gets to the point that I was trying to make. So, fair warning: Ignore the rhetoric and focus on the content.
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One should understand that in India, being on the political left means demanding the unilateral right to explode nuclear weapons in military tests.
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I lived in Ohio when Dennis Kucinich was the "Boy Mayor" of nearby Cleveland. There is a reason he is now in Congress.
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Last week, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute said, in an interview with NPR, that a draft is something that "makes sense to certainly consider." First, take the advice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe: don't panic. That is a political decision, and none of the politicians on either side would seriously touch the idea with a 10-foot pole. But the encouraging point is that LTG Lute, a man at the top of the profession, did not offer a wiggly-wormy non-answer political answer to a direct question. He gave his honest and direct assessment, "it should be considered." He really meant "considered." Not "implemented," not "placed in execution," but "considered." Which, folks, is what Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been saying all along.
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Heinz Barth, grocer and Untersturmführer, dead at 86. May you rot in Hell. Seriously.

Official site (French only, sorry). An unofficial, but clear, site.
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Remember Elian Gonzalez? That case has nothing on this one.

You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.

I Love This Guy's Work

LTC Bob BAteman had a super solid guest blog on Eric Alterman's "Altercation" today(8/16). What he says about the military, I feel you can take to the bank-and get a mortgage! Here it is:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hello, Altercators, Lt. Col. Bob Bateman here again today.

Schofield Barracks, June, 1991: The main buildings on this infantry-dominated post are called "Quads." Massive, squat structures, built by the Work Projects Administration during the Depression, each is large enough to house an entire brigade of men, three full battalions. Beyond that, they also have enough room left over to fit the offices for the company and battalion headquarters of each unit.

That summer I was a newly minted First Lieutenant, promoted up and away from my beloved rifle platoon and onto the battalion staff. My battalion of "Light" (meaning we carried all that we would take to war, on our backs, but required fewer airplanes and ships to get us there) Infantry was about to deploy to the Egyptian-Israeli border as part of the peacekeeping force that had been on site since the Camp David accords. It was a static mission, but tensions remained high in the region in the wake of Desert Storm.

Our role was to "Observe, Report, and Verify" any violations of the accords. The system worked because peace was already in place. Still, the mission required significant retraining from our normal role as assault troops. That training occupied much of the preceding six months, though as is always the case, as the deadline of our deployment approached, there always seemed to be more and more that had to be done. On this afternoon the assembled company commanders (captains), the battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel), and the battalion staff (captains and majors, mostly) were meeting for the weekly "Battalion Training Meeting." These meetings are recurrent rituals played out at every Army post around the world. Here, every week, we laid out the plan for the next week, month, and quarter, so that the actions of 750 men might be coordinated. There is no time to be wasted in these meetings.

Captain Dave T, known among his peers by his nickname "Trash," commanded one of our companies. He was one of the best leaders I have ever known. Direct, intelligent, approachable for even the most junior private, and honest -- Trash did not suffer fools gladly, and we junior officers and men who followed him loved him for it. On this afternoon he sat midway down the length of the conference table. Slouching almost to the point where his eyes were level with the table, as was his norm, Trash soaked it all in. Boredom visibly poured from his soul. The meeting, normally planned for an hour, was approaching its third. Yet still the battalion commander continued.

"Finally, we need to address the critical issue of safety. As you all know, 'Herb's Beach' is right outside the wire of South Camp," Lieutenant Colonel H____ said, "and it represents our primary threat."

Lieutenant Colonel H___ had recently returned from a reconnaissance to the Sinai Desert and his mind was, literally, overflowing. Given that there was nothing actually in that desert at the time but sand, rock, some Bedouin, and some camels, this does not speak well of LTC H___. "South Camp" was, and is, the base for the American battalion on rotation. The beach to which he referred was 40 yards of sand at the edge of the Red Sea, where a dry wadi ran to the water's edge. A decade earlier, another unit cut a notch through the coral, thereby making it possible to swim. (The coral shelf that lines the coast of the Gulf of Aquba has only a few feet of water over the top otherwise.) It was, in the South Sinai, a very small refuge of relaxation for our men. LTC H___, however, saw it through another lens.

"The 82nd lost a lieutenant on that beach last year. It's a threat," LTC H___ said, referring to a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had done a rotation the previous year, yet ignoring the fact that the lieutenant in question had been scuba diving, not snorkeling or swimming on the surface, as our men would be doing, since scuba had now been banned. "We need to have every man in the battalion swim tested at the division pool, and those who do not pass must take remedial lessons until they can."

What he was ordering was, literally, thousands of man-hours of training, let alone the time needed to coordinate it all. It was not possible. We were to start leaving in six weeks. You could take a crowbar, a 10-pound sledge, and a bucketful of grease and you still could not jam that much into the little time we had remaining. But the company commanders were silent. They just took it in. It is a long way from captain to lieutenant colonel. They were quiet, I should say, but for one.

From his nearly subterranean seat, Captain Trash raised two fingers. This, for Trash, was significant motion. The Battalion Commander nodded.

"Sir, you're kidding, right?" Trash began, sitting up and giving LTC H___ at least the nominal benefit of the doubt. Every officer in that room knew we did not have the time remaining to do as the LTC demanded. Every officer also knew, from experience, that it was useless presenting this boss with inconvenient facts. Trash was about to become my hero and my role model. LTC H___ insisted that he was not, in fact, joking, and that this was a critical issue of safety, and that we would just have to make it work for the sake of our men.

That last is a telling call-out. "The safety of the men" really is something we take seriously. Sometimes, however, common sense gets overruled. Trash had common sense, and he knew that he would not convince our numerically challenged leader with an analysis of the time remaining versus the potential threat. He cut to the point.

"Sir, I don't know if you've noticed this," Trash began, sarcasm whispering from his posture, "but right now, I mean today, and pretty much every day for the past two years since I've been here ... we've been surrounded by 2,500 miles of open ocean, thousands of feet deep, with beaches 360 degrees around us that our men visit every weekend, and not a man has drowned from this unit at all, probably since Vietnam."

Schofield Barracks, you see, is on the island of Oahu, in the Hawaiian Island chain, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The battalion commander wanted us to force 750 men to take swim training ... in order to go to the desert, from an island.

The room was hushed, and then we could not contain it. We erupted in laughter. It was the only "weapon" with which it was possible to win even a small victory with that particular battalion commander. He ceded Trash's point, and the idea, the very-stupid-but-very-safe-idea, was unceremoniously dropped.

One year later that LTC was selected for the War College. He went on to be promoted to full colonel. Captain Trash, who was evaluated by LTC H____ on a yearly basis, never made it past major. He was "non-selected" and inevitably forced out of the Army.

What I have just described was not an entirely uncommon situation, not in the 1990s or, indeed, ever. There have always been idiots in uniform, and some of them get commissions. This is a fact of life, in war and peace. But during the 1990s it may have reached its peak. "Safety" and risk avoidance are good things. But unlike, say, the factory floor at General Motors, my profession is about taking calculated risk with human life. Training, for combat, is itself inherently dangerous. Sometimes crazily so. But to make it possible for your men to survive when other men are really seriously trying to kill them, you have to train them under conditions as close as you can get to the insanity that is war.

We lost some of that focus in the 1990s. We lost our edge, our willingness to push to the limits, not just physically, but intellectually as well, which is understandable in that rudderless decade. The result was a generation of officers who saw the most risk-averse of those above them advance while those who took the correct risks, or spoke candidly, felt the mallet.

In any sufficiently large organization, especially one paranoid and averse to risk, one route to the top is to avoid being wrong, even if that means also avoiding being right. There are generals I know, some with four stars, who I am personally convinced made it to their great rank because they never, ever, made a decision. This works because if you make a decision, you might be wrong, but if you never make a decision, statistically, you are always going to appear as "better" than those who made 95 percent correct decisions, since the only thing that would stand out would be the wrong one.

We are, in war, now regaining that edge among our officers. Historically this is about the only thing at which the American Army actually excels when compared against all other armies. We do learn. But it is a slow war, and changing a culture is a slow thing, even for us. We are finding officers who speak clearly, who lead candidly, who take the calculated risks that their experience tells them are necessary, and who accept when they are wrong. I believe that there are at least some of my peers who speak truth, regardless, because doing the right thing is more important than looking "right" in front of the boss.

I have no clue what General David Petraeus will say next month when he gives his assessment. I do know that no matter what he says, some significant percentage of the American people will write him off as a stooge, or a fool, while others will hail him a hero. Both groups will cite the same words Petraeus speaks as their "evidence" for their opinion. I suspect General P knows this as well. What I would like to pass to you, today, is my assessment. Take it for what it is worth. General P is smart, and he is savvy, both of which make him come off to some people as "political." He is not. But he is more like Trash than he is like LTC H, and that, Altercators, reassures me.
permalink

Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.
permalink

Sadly, this is not surprising. Even accounting for the society-wide difference between males and females (and their "success" rates), and the fact that the Army is about 77 percent male, the numbers are sad.
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There is something wrong here. This is my media criticism point for the day. Even if you say, "Well, there are language problems between the photographer and the caption writer," that doesn't account for this. Somebody needs remedial training, at a minimum, which is annoying after the essay I wrote in defense of journalism yesterday.

WARNING: When I originally linked to this photo this morning, it was on the Yahoo news site containing image feeds from Agence France-Presse. The image was shot by an AFP stringer. I should note that I generally like AFP -- hell, they took me to the White House Correspondents Dinner last year just after I came back from Iraq, so I got to see Colbert. But they have yanked and apparently changed the label on the image, so now the only place the original can be found is on conservative blogs. This one gets to the point that I was trying to make. So, fair warning: Ignore the rhetoric and focus on the content.
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One should understand that in India, being on the political left means demanding the unilateral right to explode nuclear weapons in military tests.
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I lived in Ohio when Dennis Kucinich was the "Boy Mayor" of nearby Cleveland. There is a reason he is now in Congress.
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Last week, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute said, in an interview with NPR, that a draft is something that "makes sense to certainly consider." First, take the advice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe: don't panic. That is a political decision, and none of the politicians on either side would seriously touch the idea with a 10-foot pole. But the encouraging point is that LTG Lute, a man at the top of the profession, did not offer a wiggly-wormy non-answer political answer to a direct question. He gave his honest and direct assessment, "it should be considered." He really meant "considered." Not "implemented," not "placed in execution," but "considered." Which, folks, is what Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been saying all along.
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Heinz Barth, grocer and Untersturmführer, dead at 86. May you rot in Hell. Seriously.

Official site (French only, sorry). An unofficial, but clear, site.
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Remember Elian Gonzalez? That case has nothing on this one.

You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

PANIC!

Drunken German joyrider kills 300 chickens
Teen crashes into shed, sending poultry into a panic
Reuters
Updated: 11:27 a.m. ET Aug 12, 2007

BERLIN - Three hundred chickens died in panic early on Sunday when a drunken German teenager on a joyride crashed a van into their shed, police said.

"Apparently some of the chickens were so desperate to get away that they ran into the wall and died," the spokesman said. "Others suffered heart attacks."

The 17-year-old from the western city of Kassel crashed the van through the wall of a shed containing around 1,000 birds and then returned to a nearby fairground where he was staying, according to a spokesman for the local police. The youth was arrested.
Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20236625/

Hillary has Great Negs

MSNBC.com
Clinton a drag? Democrats worry
Candidates at the bottom worry about a polarizing politician at the top
The Associated Press
Updated: 2:22 p.m. ET Aug 12, 2007

WASHINGTON - Looking past the presidential nomination fight, Democratic leaders quietly fret that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at the top of their 2008 ticket could hurt candidates at the bottom.

They say the former first lady may be too polarizing for much of the country. She could jeopardize the party's standing with independent voters and give Republicans who otherwise might stay home on Election Day a reason to vote, they worry.

In more than 40 interviews, Democratic candidates, consultants and party chairs from every region pointed to internal polls that give Clinton strikingly high unfavorable ratings in places with key congressional and state races.

"I'm not sure it would be fatal in Indiana, but she would be a drag" on many candidates, said Democratic state Rep. Dave Crooks of Washington, Ind.

Unlike Crooks, most Democratic leaders agreed to talk frankly about Clinton's political coattails only if they remained anonymous, fearing reprisals from the New York senator's campaign. They all expressed admiration for Clinton, and some said they would publicly support her fierce fight for the nomination — despite privately held fears.

The chairman of a Midwest state party called Clinton a nightmare for congressional and state legislative candidates.

A Democratic congressman from the West, locked in a close re-election fight, said Clinton is the Democratic candidate most likely to cost him his seat.

'She's so damn unpopular'
A strategist with close ties to leaders in Congress said Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races would be strongly urged to distance themselves from Clinton.

"The argument with Hillary right now in some of these red states is she's so damn unpopular," said Andy Arnold, chairman of the Greenville, S.C., Democratic Party. "I think Hillary is someone who could drive folks on the other side out to vote who otherwise wouldn't."

"Republicans are upset with their candidates," Arnold added, "but she will make up for that by essentially scaring folks to the polls."

In national surveys, Clinton's lead over chief rival Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has widened. Her advantage is much narrower where it counts most — in early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire. In matchups against potential GOP presidential candidates, Clinton leads or is tied.

The Clinton campaign points to those figures to make a case for her electability in a constant stream of e-mails, letters and phone calls to jittery Democrats across the country. A key to their strategy is to give Clinton's candidacy a sense of inevitability despite her negative ratings, which aides insist will go down.

"All the negatives on her are out," said Clinton's pollster and strategist Mark Penn. "There is a phenomena with Hillary, because she is the front-runner and because she's been battling Republicans for so long, her unfavorability (rating) looks higher than what they will eventually be after the nomination and through the general election."

What the Clinton campaign doesn't say is that her edge over potential Republican candidates is much smaller than it should be, given the wide lead the Democratic Party holds over the GOP in generic polling.

Higher unfavorable ratings than Bill
The problem is her political baggage: A whopping 49 percent of the public says they have an unfavorable view of Clinton compared to 47 percent who say they hold her in high regard, according to a Gallup Poll survey Aug. 3-5.

Her negative ratings are higher than those of her husband, former President Clinton, former President George H.W. Bush and 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry at the end of their campaigns.

A candidate's unfavorability scores almost always climb during campaigns. If the pattern holds, Clinton has a historically high hurdle to overcome.

"For Hillary, who has been on the scene for so long and has had perception of her so ground in ... there's no question it will be really hard for her to change perceptions," said Democratic pollster David Eichenbaum, who represents moderate Democrats in GOP-leaning states.

Her baggage is heaviest in those states. Private polling conducted in Colorado, for example, shows that Clinton's negative rating is 16 percentage points higher than her favorability score.

Colorado is a state Democrats hope to win in the 2008 presidential race. It also has an open Senate seat, with the Republican incumbent opting not to seek another term and Democrats targeting it.

Obama has much lower unfavorability ratings than Clinton, though Democrats say he may have his own problem — that of race. It's hard to measure the impact of being the first party to put a black person at the top of the ticket, Democratic leaders said.

Some Democrats hold out hope that Clinton can turn things around.

"She's got a tough road to hoe because people have formed opinions of her," said Rep. Tim Mahoney, a freshman Democrat from Florida. "But I can and will tell you that when I see Hillary get out there with the public, she changes people's minds. She's not the stereotype that people know her to be."

The Clinton backlash
In Indiana, where three freshman Democratic congressmen are fighting to retain their seats, Crooks said Clinton would be a burden in districts like his full of "gun-toting, bible-carrying, God-loving, church-attending" voters.

"She is just so polarizing," the state lawmaker said. Clinton would drag any candidate down 3 or 4 percentage points, he said.

"I'm one of these Democrats who has some legitimate reservations, because the Clintons have in the past invigorated the Republican base," said Carrie Webster, a leader in the West Virginia state House who served as executive director of the state party when Bill Clinton won the 1992 West Virginia primary.

"But the fact that so many prominent Democratic males are getting behind her at this early point makes me a little more confident that she could overcome some of the more obvious hurdles," she said.

Nebraska party chairman Matt Connealy said he believes Democratic candidates will be able to avoid a Clinton backlash.

"I probably would have given you a different answer a month ago," he said, "and maybe will give you a different answer a month from now."

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20237246/page/1/

Best Political Joke of 2007 (Besides George Bush, Alberto Gozales, Dick Cheney , Lewis Libby, Karl Rove-boy genius)

One afternoon a Republican was riding in his limousine when he saw two men along the roadside eating grass. Disturbed, he ordered his driver to stop and he got out to investigate.

He asked one man, "Why are you eating grass?"

“We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass."

"Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the Republican said.

"But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They are over there, under that tree."

"Bring them along," the Republican replied. Turning to the other poor man he stated, "You come with us, too."

The second man, in a pitiful voice, then said, "But sir, I also have a wife and SIX children with me!"

"Bring them all, as well," the Republican answered.

They all entered the car, which was no easy task, even for a car as large as the limousine was.

Once underway, one of the poor fellows turned to the Republican and said, "Sir, you are too kind. Thank you for taking all of us with you."

The Republican replied, "Glad to do it. You'll really love my place. The grass is almost a foot high."

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Rudy the Phony

The only reason Rudy Giuliani is leading the other Republican candidates in the polls is because all of the other candidates are such nothings. Because I really want the truth about this "legend in his own mind" to come out, I'm reprinting this article by Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice.

The Village Voice

Rudy Giuliani's Five Big Lies About 9/11

On the stump, Rudy can't help spreading smoke and ashes about his lousy record
by Wayne Barrett
with special research assistance by Alexandra Kahan

August 7th, 2007 9:44 PM

Additional research assistance by Benjamin Bright, Ben Greenberg, Jan Ransom, Ethan Strauss, and Tom Wiedeman.

Rudy's Five Big Lies About 9/11
by Wayne Barrett

Nearly six years after 9/11, Rudy Giuliani is still walking through the canyons of lower Manhattan, covered in soot, pointing north, and leading the nation out of danger's way. The Republican frontrunner is campaigning for president by evoking that visual at every campaign stop, and he apparently believes it's a picture worth thousands of nights in the White House.

Giuliani has been leading the Republican pack for seven months, and predictions that the party's evangelicals would turn on him have so far proven hollow. The religious right appears as gripped by the Giuliani story as the rest of the country.

Giuliani isn't shy about reminding audiences of those heady days. In fact he hyperventilates about them on the stump, making his credentials in the so-called war on terror the centerpiece of his campaign. His claims, meanwhile, have been met with a media deference so total that he's taken to complimenting "the good job it is doing covering the campaign." Opponents, too, haven't dared to question his terror credentials, as if doing so would be an unpatriotic bow to Osama bin Laden.

Here, then, is a less deferential look at the illusory cloud emanating from the former mayor's campaign . . .

BIG LIE

1. 'I think the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is, I have more experience dealing with it.' This pillar of the Giuliani campaign—asserted by pundits as often as it is by the man himself—is based on the idea that Rudy uniquely understands the terror threat because of his background as a prosecutor and as New York's mayor. In a July appearance at a Maryland synagogue, Giuliani sketched out his counterterrorism biography, a resume that happens to be rooted in falsehood.

"As United States Attorney, I investigated the Leon Klinghoffer murder by Yasir Arafat," he told the Jewish audience, referring to the infamous 1985 slaying of a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old New York businessman aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian ship hijacked off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian extremists. "It's honestly the reason why I knew so much about Arafat," says Giuliani. "I knew, in detail, the Americans he murdered. I went over their cases."

On the contrary, Victoria Toensing, the deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in Washington who filed a criminal complaint in the Lauro investigation, says that no one in Giuliani's office "was involved at all." Jay Fischer, the Klinghoffer family attorney who spearheaded a 12-year lawsuit against the PLO, says he "never had any contact" with Giuliani or his office. "It would boggle my mind if anyone in 1985, 1986, 1987, or thereafter conducted an investigation of this case and didn't call me," he adds. Fischer says he did have a private dinner with Giuliani in 1992: "It was the first time we talked, and we didn't even talk about the Klinghoffer case then."

The dinner was arranged by Arnold Burns, a close friend of Fischer and Giuliani who also represented the Klinghoffer family. Burns, who was also the finance chair of Giuliani's mayoral campaign, was the deputy U.S. attorney general in 1985 and oversaw the probe. "I know of nothing Rudy did in any shape or form on the Klinghoffer case," he says.

Though Giuliani told the Conservative Political Action conference in March that he "prosecuted a lot of crime—a little bit of terrorism, but mostly organized crime," he actually worked only one major terrorism case as U.S. Attorney, indicting 10 arms dealers for selling $2.5 billion worth of anti-tank missiles, bombs, and fighter jets to Iran in 1986. The judge in the case ruled that a sale to Iran violated terrorist statutes because its government had been tied to 87 terrorist incidents. Giuliani has never mentioned the case, perhaps because he personally filed papers terminating it in his last month as U.S. Attorney: A critical witness had died, and a judge tossed out 46 of the 55 counts because of errors by Giuliani's office.

"Then, as mayor of New York," Giuliani's July speech continued, "I got elected right after the 1993 Islamic terrorist attack . . . I set up emergency plans for all the different possible attacks we could have. We had drills and exercises preparing us for sarin gas and anthrax, dirty bombs."

In fact, Giuliani was oblivious to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing throughout his mayoralty. A month after the attack, candidate Giuliani met for the first time with Bill Bratton, who would ultimately become his police commissioner. The lengthy taped meeting was one of several policy sessions he had with unofficial advisers. The bombing never came up; neither did terrorism. When Giuliani was elected a few months later, he immediately launched a search for a new police commissioner. Three members of the screening panel that Giuliani named to conduct the search, and four of the candidates interviewed for the job, said later that the bombing and terrorism were never mentioned—even when the new mayor got involved with the interviews himself. When Giuliani needed an emergency management director a couple of years later, two candidates for the job and the city official who spearheaded that search said that the bombing and future terrorist threats weren't on Giuliani's radar. The only time Giuliani invoked the 1993 bombing publicly was at his inauguration in 1994, when he referred to the way the building's occupants evacuated themselves as a metaphor for personal responsibility, ignoring the bombing itself as a terrorist harbinger.

U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and the four assistants who prosecuted the 1993 bombing said they were never asked to brief Giuliani about terrorism, though all of the assistants knew Giuliani personally and had actually been hired by him when he was the U.S. Attorney. White's office, located just a couple hundred yards from City Hall, indicted bin Laden three years before 9/11, but Giuliani recounted in his own book, Leadership, that "shortly after 9/11, Judith [Nathan] got me a copy of Yossef Bodansky's Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," which had warned of "spectacular terrorist strikes in Washington and/or New York" in 1999. As an example of how he "mastered a subject," Giuliani wrote that he soon "covered" Bodansky's prophetic work "in highlighter and notes."

The 1995 sarin-gas drill that Giuliani cited in his July speech was also prophetic, anticipating many of the breakdowns that hampered the city's 9/11 response. The drill was such a disaster that a follow-up exercise was cancelled to avoid embarrassment. More than a hundred of the first responders rushed in so recklessly that they were "killed" by exposure to the gas. Radio communications were described in the city's own report as "abysmal," with police and fire "operating on different frequencies." The command posts were located much too close to the incident. All three failings would be identified years later in official reviews of the 9/11 response.

Giuliani went on, in this stump speech, to list other examples of his mayoral experience confronting terrorism. There was the time, he says, "we had what we thought was a sarin gas attack." And there were also the 50th anniversary commemoration of the United Nations and the 2000 millennium celebration to contend with, times, he said, "when we had a lot of warnings and had to do a tremendous amount to prepare." And let's not forget, he pointed out, the 1997 NYPD arrest of two terrorists who "were going to blow up a subway station." Giuliani used this thwarted attack as proof of the city's readiness: "A very, very alert young police officer saw those guys," he said. "They looked suspicious, [so he] reported them to the desk sergeant. The police department executed a warrant and shot one of the men as he was about to hit a toggle switch."

Each of the claims in Giuliani's self-serving account is inaccurate. The supposed "sarin attack" was simply the discovery of an empty canister marked "sarin" in the home of a harmless Queens recluse. It was sitting next to an identical container labeled "compressed air" with a smiley-face logo. Jerry Hauer, the city's emergency management director at the time, was in London, on the phone with Giuliani constantly. Hauer finds it ironic that Giuliani is still talking about the incident, since they both thought it was "comically" mishandled then. "The police went there without any suits on and touched all the containers without proper clothing. They turned it into a major crime scene, with a hundred cops lining the street. Rudy at one point said to me, 'Here we have the mayor, the fire commissioner, the chief of the police department, and one of my deputy mayors standing on the front lawn of this house. Shouldn't we be across the street in case this stuff ignites?'" This overhyped emergency led to a misdemeanor arrest subsequently dismissed by the district attorney.

Similarly, the security concerns during the 1995 U.N. anniversary focused on Cuba and China and didn't involve Arab terrorist threats. The millennium target, well established at subsequent trials, was the Los Angeles International Airport, not New York. While there's no doubt the Clinton administration did put the country and city on terrorist alert for Y2K and other reasons, it was an arrest on the Washington/Canadian border that busted up a West Coast plot.

The subway bombing, meanwhile, wasn't stymied by the NYPD. An Egyptian friend of the bomber—living with him in the apartment where the pipe bomb was being built—told two Long Island Rail Road police officers about it. When the NYPD subsequently raided the apartment, they shot two Palestinians who were there—one of whom, hit five times and gravely wounded, was later acquitted at trial. No one had tried to set off the bomb at the time of the arrest, though news stories reported that; the bomber had reached for an officer's gun, according to the trial testimony. The news stories also initially suggested a link to Hamas, though the lone bomber was actually an amateur fanatic with no money and no network. As conservative a source as Bill Gertz of The Washington Times wrote that FBI counterterrorism investigators were "concerned that the initial alarmist statements about the case made by Mayor Rudy Giuliani"—apparently a reference to leaks about Hamas and the toggle switch—"will prove embarrassing."

Giuliani's terrorism biography is bunk. As mayor, his laser-beam focus was street thugs, and as a prosecutor, it was the mob, Wall Street, and crooked politicians. He can't reach back to those years and rewrite such well-known chapters of his life.

BIG LIE

2. 'I don't think there was anyplace in the country, including the federal government, that was as well prepared for that attack as New York City was in 2001.' This assertion flies in the face of all three studies of the city's response—the 9/11 Commission, the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), and McKinsey & Co., the consulting firm hired by the Bloomberg administration.

Actually, Giuliani didn't create the OEM until three years after the 1993 bombing, 27 months into his term. And he didn't open the OEM's new emergency command center until the end of 1999—nearly six years after he'd taken office. If he "assumed from the moment I came into office that NYC would be the subject of a terrorist attack," as he told Time when it made him "Person of the Year" in 2001, he sure took a long time to erect what he describes as the city's front line of defense.

The OEM was established so long after the bombing because, contrary to Giuliani's revisionism, the decision to create it had nothing to do with the bombing. Several memos, unearthed from the Giuliani archive and going on at great length, reveal that the initial rationale for the agency was "non-law enforcement events," particularly the handling of a Brooklyn water-main break shortly after he took office that the mayor thought had been botched. Before that, in December 1994, when an unemployed computer programmer carried a bomb onto a subway in an extortion plot against the Transit Authority, Giuliani was upset that he couldn't even get a count of patients from the responding services for his press conference.

Jerry Hauer, who was handpicked by Giuliani to head the OEM, testified before the 9/11 Commission that Giuliani was "unable to get the full story" at the firebombing and "heard about the huge street collapse" that followed the water-main break "on TV," adding: "That's what led the mayor to set up OEM." Hauer went through five interviews for the job, and the only time terrorism came up was when Giuliani briefly discussed the failed sarin-gas drill. He even met with Giuliani's wife, Donna Hanover; no one said a word about the 1993 bombing. Hauer's own memos at the time the OEM was launched in 1996 emphasize "the visibility of the mayor" during emergencies (rather than the police commissioner) as a major objective of the agency. The now- ballyhooed new office was, however, so underfunded from the start that Hauer could only hire staffers whose salaries would be paid for by other agencies like the NYPD.

With that kind of history, it's hardly surprising that the OEM was anything but "invaluable" on 9/11. Sam Caspersen, one of the principal authors of the 9/11 Commission's chapter on the city's response, says that "nothing was happening at OEM" during the 102 minutes of the attack that had any direct impact on the city's "rescue/evacuation operation." A commission staff statement found that, even prior to the evacuation of the OEM command center at 7 World Trade an hour after the first plane hit, the agency "did not play an integral role" in the response. Despite Giuliani's claim today that he and the OEM were "constantly planning for different kinds" of attacks, none of the OEM exercises replicated the 1993 bombing. No drill occurred at the World Trade Center, and none involved the response to a high-rise fire anywhere. In fact, the OEM had no high-rise plan—its emergency-management trainers weren't even assigned to prepare for the one attack that had already occurred, and the one most likely to recur. Kevin Culley, a Fire Department captain who worked as a field responder at OEM, said the agency had "plans for minor emergencies," but he couldn't recall "anybody anticipating another attack like the '93 bombing."

Instead of being the best-prepared city, New York's lack of unified command, as well as the breakdown of communications between the police and fire departments, fell far short of the efforts at the Pentagon that day, as later established by the 9/11 Commission and NIST reports. When the 280,000-member International Association of Fire Fighters recently released a powerful video assailing Giuliani for sticking firefighters with the same radios that "we knew didn't work" in the 1993 attack, the presidential campaign attacked the union. "This is an organization that supported John Kerry for president in 2004," Giuliani aide Tony Carbonetti said. "So it's no shock that they're out there going after a credible Republican." While the IAFF did endorse Kerry, the Uniformed Firefighters of Greater New York, whose president starred in the video, endorsed Bush. Its former president, Tom Von Essen—currently a member of Giuliani Partners—was the fire commissioner on 9/11 precisely because the union had played such a pivotal role in initially electing Giuliani.

The IAFF video reports that 121 firefighters in the north tower didn't get out because they didn't hear evacuation orders, rejecting Giuliani's claim before the 9/11 Commission that the firefighters heard the orders and heroically decided to "stand their ground" and rescue civilians. Having abandoned that 2004 contention, the Giuliani campaign is now trying to blame the deadly communications lapse on the repeaters, which were installed to boost radio signals in the towers. But the commission concluded that the "technical failure of FDNY radios" was "a contributing factor," though "not the primary cause," of the "many firefighter fatalities in the North Tower." The commission compared "the strength" of the NYPD and FDNY radios and said that the weaknesses of the FDNY radios "worked against successful communication."

The commission report also found that "it's impossible to know what difference it made that units in the North Tower weren't using the repeater channel," because no one knows if it "remained operational" after the collapse of the south tower, which fell on the trade-center facilities where the repeater and its console were located. The collapse also drove everyone out of the north tower lobby, leaving no one to operate the repeater console. In addition, the commission concluded that fire chiefs failed to turn on the repeater correctly that morning—another indication of the lack of training and drills at the WTC between the attacks. In the end, firefighters had to rely exclusively on their radios, and the inability of the Giuliani administration to find a replacement for the radios that malfunctioned in 1993 left them unable to talk to each other, even about getting out of a tower on the verge of collapse.

The mayor had also done nothing to make the radios interoperable—which would have enabled the police and firefighters to communicate across departmental lines—despite having received a 1995 federal waiver granting the city the additional radio frequencies to make that possible. That meant the fire chiefs had no idea that police helicopters had anticipated the partial collapse of both towers long before they fell.

It's not just the radios and the OEM: Giuliani never forced the police and fire departments to abide by clear command-and-control protocols that squarely put one service in charge of the other during specified emergencies. Though he collected $250 million in tax surcharges on phone use to improve the 911 system, he diverted this emergency funding for other uses, and the 911 dispatchers were an utter disaster that day, telling victims to stay where they were long after the fire chiefs had ordered an evacuation, which potentially sealed the fates of hundreds. And, despite the transparent lessons of 1993, Giuliani never established any protocols for rooftop or elevator rescues in high-rises, or even a strategy for bringing the impaired and injured out—all costly failings on 9/11.

But perhaps the best evidence of the Giuliani administration's lack of readiness was that no one at its top levels had a top-secret security clearance on 9/11. Hauer, who had left the OEM in 2000 to become a top biochemical adviser at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was invited to Gracie Mansion within days of 9/11 for a strategy session with Giuliani and a half-dozen of his top advisers, including Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, Tom Von Essen, and Richie Sheirer, who succeeded Hauer at the OEM. Hauer, who had the highest-level clearance, says that "no one else in the room had one at all." He was told that the FBI "was trying to get them expedited clearances."

Hauer had previously taken Sheirer down to the White House to meet with top counterterrorism brass and learned on his way into the meeting that Sheirer hadn't "filled out the questionnaire." When Kerik's nomination as homeland security secretary blew up in 2004, news accounts also indicated that he'd never filled it out. Von Essen was so out of the loop that he said that prior to 9/11, he was told "nothing at all," and that he started hearing "talk of an organization called al Qaeda and a man named Osama bin Laden" a few hours after the attack. "It meant nothing to me," he wrote in his own book.

"I was reading the daily intelligence in Washington," Hauer recalled, "and I didn't feel comfortable talking about things that people weren't cleared for. Talking in general with Rudy one-on-one was one thing, but talking to Richie and Bernie and Tommy violated my security clearances." Though Giuliani's top team had failed to seek the clearances they needed prior to 9/11, Kerik and Giuliani attacked the FBI for not sharing information with local law enforcement officials when they testified a month after the attack at a House subcommittee hearing.

BIG LIE

3. Don't blame me for 7 WTC, Rudy says. In response to his critics' most damning sound bite, Giuliani is attempting to blame a once-valued aide for the decision to put his prized, $61 million emergency-command center in the World Trade Center, an obvious terrorist target. The 1997 decision had dire consequences on 9/11, when the city had to mobilize a response without any operational center.

"My director of emergency management recommended 7 WTC" as "the site that would make the most sense," Giuliani told Chris Wallace's Fox News Channel show in May, pinpointing Jerry Hauer as the culprit.

Wallace confronted Giuliani, however, with a 1996 Hauer memo recommending that the bunker be sited at MetroTech in Brooklyn, close to where the Bloomberg administration eventually built one. The mayor brushed the memo aside, continuing to insist that Hauer had picked it as "the prime site." The campaign then put out statements from a former deputy mayor who said that Hauer had supported the trade-center location at a high-level meeting with the mayor in 1997.

Hauer doesn't dispute that he eventually backed the 7 WTC location, but he clearly favored MetroTech. His memo said that MetroTech "could be available in six months," while it took four and a half more years to get the bunker up and running at 7 WTC. He said that MetroTech was secure and "not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan"— a prophetic comparison. Listing eight positives about MetroTech, the memo also mentioned negatives, but said they weren't insurmountable. "The real issue," Hauer concluded, "is whether or not the mayor wants to go across the river to manage an incident. If he is willing to do this, MetroTech is a good alternative." Notes from meetings indicate that Hauer continued to push MetroTech in the discussions with the mayor and his top deputy.

But Hauer says Denny Young, the mayor's alter ego, who has worked at his side for nearly three decades, eventually "made it very clear" that Giuliani wanted "to be able to walk to this facility quickly." That meant the bunker had to be in lower Manhattan. Since the City Hall area is below the floodplain, the command center—which was built with a hurricane-curtain wall—had to be above ground. The formal city document approving the site said that it "was selected due to its proximity to City Hall," a standard set by Giuliani and Giuliani alone.

The 7 WTC site was the brainchild of Bill Diamond, a prominent Manhattan Republican that Giuliani had installed at the city agency handling rentals. When Diamond held a similar post in the Reagan administration a few years earlier, his office had selected the same building to house nine federal agencies. Diamond's GOP-wired broker steered Hauer to the building, which was owned by a major Giuliani donor and fundraiser. When Hauer signed onto it, he was locked in by the limitations Giuliani had imposed on the search and the sites Diamond offered him. The mayor was so personally focused on the siting and construction of the bunker that the city administrator who oversaw it testified in a subsequent lawsuit that "very senior officials," specifically including Giuliani, "were involved," which he said was a major difference between this and other projects. Giuliani's office had a humidor for cigars and mementos from City Hall, including a fire horn, police hats and fire hats, as well as monogrammed towels in his bathroom. His suite was bulletproofed and he visited it often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced. He had his own elevator. Great concern was expressed in writing that the platform in the press room had to be high enough to make sure his head was above the cameras. It's inconceivable that the hands-on mayor's fantasy command center was shaped—or sited—by anyone other than him.

Of course, the consequences of putting the center there were predictable. The terrorist who engineered the 1993 bombing told the FBI they were coming back to the trade center. Opposing the site at a meeting with the mayor, Police Commissioner Howard Safir called it "Ground Zero" because of the earlier attack. Lou Anemone, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD, wrote memos slamming the site. "I've never seen in my life 'walking distance' as some kind of a standard for crisis management," Anemone said later. "But you don't want to confuse Giuliani with the facts." Anemone had done a detailed vulnerability study of the city for Giuliani, pinpointing terrorist targets. "In terms of targets, the WTC was number one," he says. "I guess you had to be there in 1993 to know how strongly we felt it was the wrong place."

Bizarrely, Giuliani even tried in the Wallace interview to deny that the early evacuation of the bunker left him searching for a new site, contrary to the account of that frantic morning he's given hundreds of times, often for honoraria reaching six figures. "The way you're interpreting it," he told Wallace, "it was as if that was the one fixed command center. It was not. There were backup command centers." To minimize the effect of the loss of the bunker, Giuliani said that, "within a half hour" of the shutdown of the bunker, "we were able to move immediately to another command center."

In fact, as Giuliani himself has told the dramatic tale, he and his entourage were briefly trapped in a Merrill Lynch office, "jimmied the lock" of a firehouse, and took over a deluxe hotel until they realized it was "sheathed in windows." They considered going to City Hall, but learned it was covered in debris. The only backup center that existed was the small one at police headquarters that had been put out of business when the WTC bunker opened; but Giuliani said its phones weren't working. "We're going to have to find someplace," Giuliani said, according to his Time account, which described it as a "long and harrowing" search. "Our government no longer had a place to work," he wrote in Leadership.

They wound up at the police academy uptown and, according to the account Giuliani and company gave Time, "we are up and operating by 4 p.m."—seven hours, not a half-hour, after the attack. But Giuliani told the 9/11 Commission that they quickly decided the academy "was too small" and "were able to establish a command center" at Pier 92 "within three days," virtually building it from scratch. Hauer said he'd asked for a backup command center years before 9/11, "but they told me there was no money for it." After Hauer left, and shortly before 9/11, the city announced plans to build a backup center near police headquarters—a site quickly jettisoned by the Bloomberg administration. Police officials told reporters that they were looking for space outside Manhattan and underground, citing the lessons of 9/11.

BIG LIE

4. 'Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.' Giuliani blames what he calls Bill Clinton's "decade of denial" for the mess we're in, and uses it to tarnish the rest of Clinton's party. "Don't react, kind of let things go, kind of act the way Clinton did in the '90s" is his favorite way of characterizing the Democratic response to the threat of terrorism. "We were attacked at Khobar Towers, Kenya, Tanzania, 17 of our sailors were killed on the USS Cole, and the United States government, under then-president Clinton, did not respond," Giuliani told the rabidly anti-Clinton audience at Pat Robertson's Regent University. "It was a big mistake to not recognize that the 1993 bombing was a terrorist act and an act of war," he added. "Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it. I thought it was pretty clear at the time, but a lot of people didn't see it, couldn't see it."

This is naked revisionism—and not just because of his own well established, head-in-the-sand indifference to the 1993 bombing. It's as unambiguously partisan as his claim that on 9/11, he looked to the sky, saw the first fighter jets flying over the city well after the attack, and thanked God that George W. Bush was president. Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator who sat on the 9/11 Commission, put it fairly: "Prior to 9/11, no elected official did enough to reduce the threat of Al Qaeda. Neither political party covered itself in glory."

Giuliani's lifelong friend Louis Freeh, the former FBI head who has endorsed him for president, wrote in his 2005 autobiography that "the nation's fundamental approach to Osama bin Laden and his ilk was no different after the inauguration of January 21, 2001, than it had been before." As Bob Kerrey noted, the five Democrats and five Republicans on the 9/11 Commission said much the same thing. Freeh added that both administrations "were fighting criminals, not an enemy force" before 9/11, and Giuliani is now making precisely the same policy point, but limiting his critique to Clinton. Even the fiercely anti-Clinton Freeh credited the former president with "one exception," saying his administration did go after bin Laden "with a salvo of Tomahawk missiles in 1998 in retaliation for the embassy bombings in East Africa."

The best example of Giuliani's partisan twist is the USS Cole, which was attacked on October 12, 2000, three weeks before the 2000 election. The 9/11 Commission report found that in the final Clinton months, neither the FBI, then headed by Freeh, nor the CIA had a "definitive answer on the crucial question of outside direction of the attack," which Clinton said he needed to go to war against bin Laden or the Taliban. All Clinton got was a December 21 "preliminary judgment" from the CIA that Al Qaeda "supported the attack." A month later, when the Bush team took office, the CIA delivered the same "preliminary" findings to the new president. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the commission "there was never a formal, recorded decision not to retaliate for the Cole" by the Bush administration, just "a consensus that 'tit-for-tat' responses were likely to be counterproductive." Rice thought that was the case "with the cruise missile strikes of 1998," meaning that the new administration was deriding the one response that Freeh praised. Bush himself told the commission that he was concerned "lest an ineffective air strike just serve to give bin Laden a propaganda advantage." With all of this evidence of bipartisan paralysis, Giuliani has nonetheless limited his Cole attack to Clinton.

It is all part of a devoutly partisan exploitation of his 9/11 legend. Though Giuliani volunteered to execute bin Laden himself after 9/11, he's never criticized Bush for the administration's failure to capture him or the other two top culprits in the attack, Mullah Omar and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a silence more revealing than anything he actually says about terrorism. The old evidence that Bush relied on Afghan proxies to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora, and the new evidence that he outsourced him to Pakistani proxies in Waziristan, evokes no Giuliani bark. Imagine if a Democratic president had done that—or had said, as Bush did, that "I just don't spend that much time" on bin Laden.

At the Republican National Convention in 2004, Giuliani began his celebrated speech by fusing 9/11 and the Iraq War as only he could do, reminding everyone of Bush's bullhorn declaration at Ground Zero that the people who brought down these towers "will hear from us," and declaring that they "heard from us in Iraq"—a far more invidious connection on this question than Dick Cheney has ever made. Giuliani even went so far, in his 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, to claim that if he'd been told about the presidential daily briefing headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.," which mentioned New York three times, "I can't honestly tell you we would have done anything differently." Pressed about whether the city would have benefited from knowing about a spike in warnings so vivid that the CIA director's "hair was on fire," Giuliani just shrugged. He'd seen many close friends buried after 9/11, but his answer had more to do with the November election than the September attack that took their lives.

"They don't see the threat," he derides the Democrats wherever he goes, ridiculing even their adjectives. "During the Democratic debates, I couldn't find one of them that ever mentioned the words 'Islamic terrorist'—none of them," he contends. "If you can't say the words 'Islamic terrorists,' then you have a hard time figuring out who is our biggest enemy in the world."

In fact, during the three Democratic debates, the candidates referred to "terrorism," "terrorists," or "terror" 24 times—only the modifier was missing, though John Edwards did warn in June that "radical Islam" could take over in Pakistan. By focusing on "radical Islam" as opposed to "Islamic terrorism," the Democrats may actually be avoiding any suggestion that America is engaged in a war against Islam—and even Giuliani would concede that Osama bin Laden is a perversion of Islam. Indeed, though Giuliani is claiming that he's been "studying" Islamic terrorism since 1975, a search of Giuliani news stories and databases reveals that the first time he was cited using the term was in his May 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission: He made a passing reference to the sarin-gas drill and said it simulated an "Islamic terrorist attack." If the use of this term is a measure of a leader's understanding of the threat, what does it say about Giuliani's own decade of denial that he never used it in the '90s, when he was the mayor of the only American city to have experienced one?

BIG LIE

5. 'Every effort was made by Mayor Giuliani and his staff to ensure the safety of all workers at Ground Zero.' So read a Giuliani campaign statement in June, responding to a chorus of questions about the mayor's responsibility for the respiratory plague that threatens the health of tens of thousands of workers at the World Trade Center site, apparently already having killed some.

The statement pointed a finger at then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, issuing a list of the many times that "Whitman assured New Yorkers the air was safe." Instead of also detailing the many times Giuliani echoed Whitman—for example, "the air is safe and acceptable," he said on September 28—the campaign cited several Fire Department "briefings" about "incident action plans" for the use of respirators, suggesting that the city had tried to get responders to protect themselves from the toxins at Ground Zero. The press release did not make a case that any of these "plans" had ever resulted in any real "action"; nor did it dispute the fact that as late as the end of October, only 29 percent of the workers at the site were wearing respirators. Of course, the workers might have noticed that the photo-op mayor never put one on himself. Instead, the other 9/11 visual we all remember is Giuliani leading at Ground Zero by macho example: The most in the way of protective gear he was ever seen wearing was a dust mask on his mouth.

When the cleanup effort was widely hailed as under-budget and ahead of schedule, there was no doubt about who was in charge. "By Day 4," the New York Times reported in a salute to the "Quick Job" at Ground Zero, "Mr. Giuliani, the Department of Design and Construction (D.D.C.), the Office of Emergency Management, contractors and union officials decided it was time to bring order to the chaos." Giuliani controlled access to the site as if it were his backyard. Yet, when the scope of the health disaster was clear on the fifth anniversary in 2006, he told ABC: "Everybody's responsible." Throwing federal, state, and city agencies into the mix, he diffused the blame. On the Today show the same morning, however, he was more accusatory: "EPA put out statements very, very prominent that you have on tape, that the air was safe, and kept repeating that and kept repeating that."

The city had its own test results, of course, and when 17 of 87 outdoor tests showed hazardous levels of asbestos up to seven blocks away, they decided not to make the results public. An EPA chief, Bruce Sprague, sent an October 5 letter to the city complaining about "very inconsistent compliance" with respiratory protection. Sprague, who wrote the letter only after unsuccessful conversations with Giuliani aides, likened the indifference in a subsequent court deposition to sticking one's head "over a barbecue grill for hours" and expecting no consequences. An internal legal memo to a deputy mayor estimated early in the cleanup that there could be 35,000 potential plaintiffs against the city, partly because rescue workers were "provided with faulty or no equipment (i.e. respirators)." Bechtel, the major construction firm retained by the city as its health and safety consultant, urged it to cut the exit-entry points from 20 to two so they could enforce the use of respirators and other precautions, just as was done at the Pentagon, but the recommendation was ignored.

A Times editorial concluded in May that the Giuliani administration "failed in its duty to protect the workers at Ground Zero," faulting its "emphasis on a speedy cleanup" and its unwillingness "to insist that all emergency personnel and construction workers wear respirators." John Odermatt, a former OEM director working at the campaign, couldn't tell the Times whether Giuliani had lobbied Congress on behalf of sick workers, nor could anyone at the campaign offer any evidence that Giuliani had ever, while earning millions at his new 9/11 consulting business in recent years, tried to secure federal funds for responders.

Should the current presidential frontrunners square off in 2008, Giuliani's culpability and subsequent indifference at Ground Zero will, no doubt, be sharply contrasted to Hillary Clinton's singular role in funding the Mount Sinai programs that have been aiding rescue workers for years. And the public price tag for the mismanagement at the pile (as the site was known among recovery and rescue workers) will run into the billions. Ken Feinberg, who ran the federally funded Victims Compensation Board, has already paid out $1 billion to the injured, concluding after individual hearings that hundreds "were diagnosed with demonstrable and documented respiratory injuries directly related to their rescue service." Anthony DePalma, whose extraordinary Times stories have lifted the lid on Giuliani's role, recently reported that the health-care costs for rescue workers could soar to as much as $712 million a year. And the city is administering a billion-dollar liability fund to satisfy the thousands of lawsuits.

Giuliani's fellow Republican and former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman did tell WNBC a couple of months ago that there were "telephone calls, telephone meetings, and meetings in person with the city" every day, with the EPA repeating "the message" and emphasizing the "necessity of wearing the respirators." Whitman said she "would call my people at midnight after watching the 11 o'clock news and say, 'I'm still seeing them without the respirators.' " The EPA, she said, "was very frustrated." She also said "the better thing would've been to put out the fire sooner," certainly a function of the city's Fire Department, adding that it had "burned until January"—a continuous flame held to a smoking, toxic brew. Asked about the mayor himself, Whitman sputtered: "He was clearly in control and doing a good job. Everyone was applauding what was going on. EPA, we had some disagreements with things that were occurring on the pile, like not having people wear respirators—we wanted more emphasis on that. But overall, you know, it's hard. Those are emotional times."

The firefighters' union pointed out that the respiratory debacle was, like the malfunctioning radios and so many other things, another symbol of the city's failure to prepare for a major terrorist event. Fire Department memos after the 1993 bombing had urged better protective gear, just as they'd screamed for better radios. The UFA's leaders pointed out that the department had "ignored many issues related to respiratory protection" for years. The union's health-and-safety officer, Phil McArdle, likened the long-term effects of working at Ground Zero to Agent Orange in Vietnam. "We've done a good job of taking care of the dead," he said, referring to the hunt for remains, "but such a terrible job of taking care of the living."

Wayne Barrett is the co-author, with Dan Collins, of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, which was just published in paperback by HarperCollins.
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Question of the Month

After watching all of the political debates, do you share the feeling that the only politicians who are telling you what they really believe are so whacky that you wouldn't vote for them anyhow?

The "D" word

General Lute does it!

He introduces a slight whiff of reality into the military-political scene with his use of the "D" word!

In a recent interview with NPR, Gen. Lute brings up the dreaded word. Bush administration officials will have to scramble to cover their policy nakedness: they broke the Army with the ill-conceived Iraq campaign and now they will have to either (a) swallow hard to fix it (as if!), or (b)let the next administration deal with the issue. (If you picked (a) please double your medications).

Now, do you think a Democratic congress will authorize a draft? (If you said "Yes", forget the meds and go directly to electronic shock therapy.) Do you think the Dems will authorize funds for a strong overall military? (If you said "Yes" to that one, combine both heavy meds and EST!)

Here is the Lute interview:
All Things Considered, August 10, 2007 · Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, says he is concerned about the toll the war in Iraq and extended deployments are taking on U.S. forces.

The man who is widely known as the "war czar" also says that from a military standpoint, a return to a draft should be part of the discussion.

On the ground in Iraq, Lute tells Michele Norris that there has been "demonstrable progress" on the security front. But on the political front, the Iraqi government is lagging behind, though he does cite progress at local and provincial levels.

How heavy a toll is the war taking on American forces? Do you agree with other military leaders who have expressed worries that U.S. forces are near the breaking point?

As an Army officer, this is a matter of real concern to me. Ultimately, the American army, and any other all-volunteer force, rests with the support and the morale and the willingness to serve demonstrated by our — especially our young men and women in uniform. And I am concerned that those men and women and the families they represent are under stress as a result of repeated deployments.

There's both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families, and ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions. And when the system is under stress, it's right to be concerned about some of the future decisions these young men and women may make. I think our military leaders are right to be focused on that.

There's also a professional and broader strategic argument to this, and that is that when our forces are as engaged as they have been over the last several years, particularly in Iraq, that we're concerned as military professionals that we also keep a very sharp edge honed for other contingencies outside of Iraq.

When military leaders, though, talk about the breaking point, what are they talking about? What's the real worry there?

I think that most who have talked about the stress on the force are concerned that in today's all-volunteer force, especially with the sort of quality individuals that we're interested in attracting to the all-volunteer force, that we're actually competing in the marketplace — in the labor marketplace — for a very narrow slice of high school graduates without records with the law who come to us with a clean bill of health and the potential to serve this country in some very demanding missions.

So when you're competing in that marketplace, I think the concern is that these people are challenged and feel the respect to the nation and feel a calling to something beyond themselves, beyond just a personal calling, and that these things remain in place and, therefore, make the all-volunteer force viable in the long run.

You know, given the stress on the military and the concern about these extended deployments for an all-volunteer military, can you foresee, in the future, a return to the draft?

You know, that's a national policy decision point that we have not yet reached, Michele, because the —

But does it make sense militarily?

I think it makes sense to certainly consider it, and I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table, but ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another. Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well. It would be a major policy shift — not actually a military, but a political policy shift to move to some other course.

Do you agree with that assessment that there is a real pressure point in the spring — that that's when the Pentagon will face some tough decisions about either extended deployments or reducing the time spent at home?

Yes, I do agree that come the spring, some variables will have to change — either the degree to which the American ground forces, the Marines and the Army in particular, are deployed around the world to include Iraq, or the length of time they're deployed in one tour, or the length of time they enjoy at home. Those are, essentially, the three variables.

It's interesting, because we often hear the president back away from discussions of any kind of timetable, because he says that it would show our cards to our enemies. But it seems that they would know this also, that the current force strength has its limits.

Well, remember that I said that there are three variables. So there's not a hard and fast stop to any level of commitment of American forces.

Now your title is assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. Could you explain exactly what you do?

What I do is work alongside Steve Hadley, the president's national security adviser, giving full-time attention to the issues surrounding our policy and the execution of those policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and essentially give Steve Hadley a teammate who can attend full time to the demands of those two missions.

How often do you talk directly to President Bush?

Daily.

And when — are you the point person there that gives the president the daily war briefing on progress in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I have daily contacts with the president alongside Steve Hadley, and of course that relationship is very important because, while I'm responsible for – as the point man on Iraq and Afghanistan in advising the president, Steve and I have to make sure that Iraq and Afghanistan are placed appropriately in the regional context.

I'm just curious – what do you think of the term war czar?

It's actually an unfortunate term because it doesn't describe my job at all.

But it's often how people describe you.

That may be, but it wouldn't be my choice of how I describe the job. What I'm trying to do here is actually facilitate the very hard work that's taking place on the ground and link it to the very hard work that's being done here in Washington across the departments of the executive branch with the priorities of what's required on the ground reflected in the efforts here in Washington. I'm in charge of about 15 people. Now that's not exactly very czar-like, but what I am able to do is make sure that efforts are aligned properly.

Well, you know what they say in Washington sometimes — that power is concentrated.

[Chuckles.] Well, I have 15 very qualified people, and we're working very hard to do our best to contribute to this effort.




Regarding the strength of the Army, don't let this lull you into a state of denial Look at how much they are paying to get people with lower qualifications to enlist:

Army to meet July recruiting goal

WASHINGTON (AP) — After failing to meet its recruiting goal for two consecutive months, the Army is expected to announce it met its target for July.

And officials are offering a new $20,000 bonus to recruits who sign up by the end of next month.

The Army had failed to meet its recruiting goals in May and June, raising the possibility that the unpopular Iraq war and strong economy could slow enlistment at a time when the force is fighting two wars as well as trying to increase its overall size.

But a preliminary tally shows the Army is likely to meet its goal of 9,750 for last month, a defense official said Tuesday on condition of anonymity because the numbers will not be announced for several more days. The official declined to provide details.

The Army expects to meeting its recruiting goal of 80,000 for the budget year ending Sept. 30, the official said.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Iraq

The $20,000 bonus applies to new recruits with no prior military service who enlist for at least two years and agree to report to basic training within 30 days of enlistment, said a statement posted Monday on the Army's website.

"To attract interested young men and women, we know that we must have cutting-edge enlistment and retention options to acquire and retain America's best soldiers," Lt. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, deputy chief of staff for personnel issues, said in the statement.

The recruiting shortfall in May was the first time in about two years that recruiters didn't meet the goal for the Army, which is under great strain serving repeated and lengthy tours of duty in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army met its goal in the 2006 budget year after missing its target in fiscal year 2005 for the first time since 1999.

To attract more to the service, it has added recruiters and offered recruiting bonuses, referral bonuses and other incentives such as schooling and career advancements. It also is paying bonuses to entice soldiers already in the service to re-enlist.

The new $20,000 bonus can be combined with the Army's other cash enlistment bonuses, up to a maximum combination of $40,000 if an enlistee signs up for at least four years, officials said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has set a goal of increasing the size of the active-duty Army by 65,000 to a total of 547,000 within five years, partly to ease some of the strain on the force.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.