Where will your 8-year-old be 9 years from now?

Nine years ago the U.S invasion of Afghanistan began. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the U.S would still be in Afghanistan nine years later — struggling politically and operationally, to “win.” Unbeknownst to most Americans at the time, we would fight a parallel war in Iraq two years into that nine-year stretch, cycling more than 2.1 million servicemen and women through three million tours of duty in both countries.

Today, more than a dozen members of Iraq Veterans Against the War stood on the steps of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington to call for an end to the deployment of mentally traumatized troops into these seemingly endless conflicts. Studies suggest that upwards of 35 percent of troops come home from war with some degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, yet recent reports indicate that men and women are being redeployed zonked out on painkillers and psychotropic drugs, and in a growing number of documented cases, suicidal.

Veteran Zack Choate at Thursday's IVAW press conference

I spoke with Ethan McCord, a former Army infantry soldier who was present the day of the civilian killings made infamous by the Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video. He actually pulled the wounded children out of the car that had been attacked by a U.S Apache helicopter. He said that event traumatized him so much he had asked for counseling that night. He said his commander told him to shove it.

Today, McCord is a single dad with three children — the youngest, 3, had been born while he was deployed. He pointed out that the children here in the U.S who were eight years old when we first invaded Afghanistan would be nearly eligible to join the military today. Sadly, both of us wondered aloud about our own eight-year-olds at home today, nine years from now. Where would they be?

More on McCord, the IVAW campaign, and the antiwar veterans’ ongoing struggle to be heard,  in my Tuesday column.

A mother’s horror: Iran to release only 1 of 3 hikers

As the mothers of Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27, have spent the last year pacing up and down in the private hell of not knowing whether they will ever see their children again, the Iranians who are detaining the ostensibly luckless hikers have dickered around, threatened and thrown out small bones of hope. Their latest: they plan to release one — just one, and we don’t know which — of the Americans on the Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, as a traditional gesture of faith and good will. This is to take place on Saturday, according to reports today.

While the news is not unwelcome, it will be painfully difficult for the mothers of the two detainees left behind. But if it has to be one, no doubt they are hoping it’s Sarah, who has told her mother in fleeting phone calls that she is ill — apparently, a breast lump and precancerous cervical cells — but her Iranian captors will not give her access to medical treatment. She has been in solitary confinement, while the men are sharing a cell, according to reports. The three have been accused of entering Iran with the intention of spying, though they have insisted they were captured in Iraqi Kurdistan near the border, and never had any intention of going into Iran. They were taken in July 2009.

It is clear they are pawns in a much greater battle of wills between the Iranian regime and the American government, which has succeeded in the last year to impose greater sanctions on Iran and is seeking even more over the Persians’ alleged nuclear weapons program. But to engage in this kind of revenge on three young people who by all reports have spent much of the last several years working in underdeveloped regions and learning about and working for social justice in the Muslim world, is the height of perversity.

On a side note, Bauer is a great and sensitive writer who shed amazing light on the Iraqi Special Forces (brought to you by America’s finest) just before he was jailed. “Iraq’s New Death Squad” is an important read and probably didn’t make him many friends within the military either. Our own Scott Horton interviewed Bauer in June 2009 — you can listen here.

Fallows, others, taking another look at Assange’s ‘demise’

Julian Assange, embattled director of WikiLeaks and now the focus of confusing and nebulous rape and molestation charges, lashed out over what he called a “smear campaign” by the Pentagon, which is still smarting from the release of 75,000 classified war documents, and reportedly girding for more, as promised by WikiLeaks last month. His accusations against the U.S government have led to a stream of vitriol from the peevish and cynical mainstream media, which seems to relish the opportunity to exploit the ostensively soft underbelly of the truth dragon. As the tawdry details behind the charges against Assange unfold, headlines from Newsweek and Gawker and every website that has linked to them seem to be predicting the 39-year-old’s demise. Gawker has established a WikiLeaksiLeaks site for people willing to tattle-tale on Assange. Newsweek, citing a single source, implies that the entire WikiLeaks front office is plotting his ouster:

A person in close contact with other WikiLeaks activists around Europe, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive topic, says that many of them were privately concerned that Assange has continued to spread allegations of dirty tricks and hint at conspiracies against him without justification. Insiders say that some people affiliated with the website are already brainstorming whether there might be some way to persuade their front man to step aside, or failing that, even to oust him. Given that Assange is the person who put WikiLeaks on the map, and given that no one appears more entranced by the aura surrounding WikiLeaks than Assange himself, that could certainly cause the website considerable anguish about its own practice of “transparency,” “democracy,” and “integrity.”

This is hardly the circle of folks surrounding Assange as described in The New Yorker in June, but no mind. The question is, is there a smear — or  is Julian Assange just a paranoid jerk who doesn’t like to use condoms? Level heads outside the ad hominem abuse spewed by say, Gawker and  The Daily Beast,  are starting to wonder.

The estimable Jim Fallows, who could never be accused of flying off on crackpot theories or spreading rumors to fill space — in fact he has been a long-time critic of media manipulation in Washington — issued a thoughtful post on The Atlantic online yesterday, pointing to some connect-the-dots that Fabius Maximus (another reputable website founded by ex-military officers) has been doing on the Assange case:

I am generally wary of mentioning a news development that I don’t have any particular connection to, or angle on, or opportunity to offer new reporting about. The exception in this case is because the line of analysis I’ll mention, if true, would be significant. It comes from a source whose judgment I’ve learned to respect over time. But the conspiratorial interpretation he suggests is one I usually resist, and I don’t have the resources or time to go independently into the questions he has raised. So as an alert to a possibility that deserves consideration but that I can’t prove myself, here goes:

It is worth reading in order the series of posts on the Fabius Maximus site — from earliest to latest here, here, here, and here — making the case that the “official” story of the rape accusations against Julian Assange of Wikileaks is too strange and coincidence-ridden to be easily believable.

Fabius Maximus is merely doing what other bloggers are not, taking a cool-headed look at the developing (often confusing) facts of the case and wondering aloud how — and why — the mainstream media are coming to such lemming-like conclusions about it. To begin, why is it so difficult to believe that the U.S government — which lied and misinformed us right into a bloody never-ending war in Iraq– might want to delegitimize Assange? Dopey commentators like Jonah Goldberg dismiss Assange’s accusations because to him, every government “hit” should look like a James Bond movie:

I’m not necessarily advocating that we take him out. First of all, even if it were a good idea, it’s too late now. But think about it. If you go by nearly every Hollywood treatment of the CIA or the NSA, Assange is precisely the sort of guy who should have been garroted in his French hotel room years ago…What I think is interesting about this is that the Wikileaks case is a perfect illustration of how not just outfits like the CIA and NSA but also the far more powerful entity most commonly known as “The Man” aren’t nearly as powerful as many think they are.

Fair enough. Considering that Goldberg is the four-star commander of the 101st keyboarder brigade, we should expect nothing less than reactionary hooey in his response. But if life is like a movie, let’s take a look at the accusations against Assange. “Woman B” was a complete unknown to the WikiLeaks set before the incident in question. She admittedly pursued Assange with a cold calculation (and pink cashmere), and had him, literally, feeding her niblets in a daze, before the day was out. It’s so Hollywood — but it obviously worked. Check out her blurred-out face in the front row on the day in question, below.

One of the men present recalled her as a person of a seemingly nervous disposition who didn’t fit in.

‘She was a little bit strange,’ he said. ‘Definitely an odd character and keen to get Julian’s attention.’

The woman admitted trying to engage her hero in conversation.

Assange seemed pleased to have such an ardent admirer fawning over him and, she said, would look at her ‘now and then’. Eventually he took a closer interest.

She explained in her statement that he was tucking into cheese served on Swedish crispbread when she asked if he thought it was good.

Assange looked at her directly and started to feed her.

Funny, even Reason’s Michael Moynihan, who has had it in for Assange from the start, concedes that “that such dirty tricks have a long pedigree in American intelligence circles,” but he can’t, however, bring himself to imagine the government might be targeting Assange with one right now. He concentrates solely on “Woman A,” pointing out that she is a known quantity, a radical Swedish feminist with a long history of left-wing positions on sexual power and gender politics  — implying that whatever went wrong (refusal to wear a condom? Broken condom? Refusing to take an STD test?) in the reportedly brief, consensual affair, ignited all the reflexive impulses of a longtime “equality watchdog,”  “operating off of a very broad (Swedish legal) definition of rape and ‘sexual molestation.'” In other words, a woman scorned. Moynihan says nothing of “strange” “Woman B,” and instead concludes “even a cursory look at the case would suggest that while it appears that Assange’s name is being dragged through the mud, it isn’t by the CIA.”

But what about Woman B? An ex-CIA source of mine says the agency employed the paid use of “honeypots,” to trap targets all the time. While on the face it looks like Assange tangled with the wrong woman (Woman A) and some seriously elastic Swedish sex laws, there is no reason to automatically discount the strange coincidences raised by Fabius Maximus and others. If we are going to look at Woman A’s motives, why not focus on Woman B’s strange story as something more complex than just a geek groupie with a crush?

What is called for here is a more discerning approach and an open mind. A stubborn lack of imagination, and an ill-begotten instinct  to support the power grid is much less helpful (look what happened when we let the mainstream rubes take over in 2003!) A big nod to Fallows and others for urging the brakes on Assange’s premature demise.

Daniel Assange is NOT Scott Evil

Looks like producers for Dr. Phil and Montel might be waiting awhile if they think they have a celebrity dad-hating story in the making. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post seemed to have obtained a scoop yesterday rising to the level of Dr. Evil/Scott Evil proportions, excerpting a FaceBook quote from Daniel Assange, 20, that appeared on its face to fuel the growing personal attacks against his father, embattled WikiLeaks founder and director, Julian Assange:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s own son thinks he’s a nightmare when it comes to women.

“That man does have a way of making a lot of female enemies,” Daniel Assange, 21, said about his embattled dad.

Daniel made the Facebook posting after two Swedish women came forward with allegations that led to rape and molestation charges against his dad.

Daniel also wondered about his father’s claim that the accusations were part of a Pentagon “smear campaign.”

“Interesting to see whether this is the result of a government plot or personal grudges,” he wrote.

Daniel Assange is no 'Scott Evil'

But later on Friday, Daniel, under the moniker Somnidea on a website called The Sleepy Lammata lashed out at the newspaper, calling the story “godawful sensational tripe”:

I’d just like to note here that the comments in question were very tongue-in-cheek and never intended to be made public like this, much less support the conclusions of the article. The NYP did not interview me or otherwise attain my consent in any way for their publication. I have much respect for my father and his cause, and these ridiculously ill-handled allegations of sexual abuse serve only to distract from the audacious awesomeness that he has actually done.

Breaking! Gasbag commenters mull murder, fatwas against leakers

There’s nothing that gets the American can-do spirit going in the morning than a rightwing scribe urging the U.S military to ‘have a fire sale’ (read: destroy) Wikileaks, while invoking Bruce ‘Die Harder’ Willis and CIA ‘friends’ who openly advocate ‘getting’ (read: bagging)  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

From Jed Babbin at the American Spectator, this morning:

A friend of mine, a more-or-less retired CIA paramilitary operative, sees the solution in characteristically simple terms. “We should go get him,” he said, speaking of Assange.

When my friend says “get him,” he isn’t thinking of lawsuits, but of suppressed pistols, car bombs and such. But as heart-warming as it is to envision Assange surveying his breakfast cereal with a Geiger counter, we shouldn’t deal with him and WikiLeaks that way.

At the risk of abusing the Bard, let’s “Cry havoc, and let slip the geeks of cyberwar.” We need to have a WikiLeaks fire sale.

A “fire sale” (as those who saw Die Hard 4 will remember) is a cyber attack aimed at disabling — even destroying — an adversary’s ability to function. Russia did this to Estonia in 2007 and Israel apparently did this to Syrian radar systems when it attacked the Syrian nuclear site later that year. The elegance of this is that if we can pull off a decisive cyber operation against WikiLeaks, it can and should be done entirely in secret.

And then he ends with:

WikiLeaks should be hit with the cyber equivalent of napalm. Let’s have that fire sale. Burn, baby, burn.

Put aside the pathetic chest-thumping for a second. Babbin fails to explain with any meaningful persuasion why these extrajudicial punishments are in order other than “we have a right to act to protect our secrets. And act we must.” To him, this is tantamount to everything, even the U.S Constitution. He proves this by blustering about the whistleblowers who exposed the government’s illegal spying on Americans under the Bush Administration (he says this, by the way, while the so-called conservative website he is writing for exploits and perverts the images of Ben Franklin and minutemen icons in the ad bars alongside his column):

Over the past decade, America has been unwilling to defend its secrets and punish leakers. Under Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, fear of media reaction prevented the investigation of some of the most damaging leaks in history, ranging from the New York Times‘s publication of the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program to the Washington Post‘s publication of the CIA’s secret prisons for terrorists. The people who leaked those secrets were left unpunished by Gonzales’s Justice Department refusal to subpoena the reporters and force disclosure of their sources.

Note to Babbin: Maybe they were left ‘unpunished’ (though we can hardly call losing one’s career and facing criminal indictment ‘unpunished’) because these “leakers” and journalists were doing their jobs — like serving The People — while the NSA and CIA were crapping all over the Constitution and soiling the reputation and honor of the United States all over the globe for decades to come?

But smearing the Constitution seems little bother to Babbin, who sets the Chinese Standard for the Pentagon, advocating a full-throated war cry and a STRATCOM offensive against Wikileaks and any like web operation, saying it is “not impossible,” though he does not say how it can be done. Noisome details.

The real punchline here is not in Babbin’s supercilious screed, but in the comments, which began posting immediately. Gasbags sitting with their morning joe, contemplating all manner of steroidal reaction. John McClane-meets-Slappy-the-Keystroker, if you will:

From “Jimbo”:

Since many Afghans are now at risk because of Wikileaks, why not have one of the tribal immams in Afghanistan declare a fatwa on Mr. Assange? This will make his life very difficult and would be a fitting punishment for his crime. Any why not place that PFC who turned traitor and gave away these secrets in front of a firing squad? This way, the next traitor may not be so brave.

How about giving every such anonymous commenter the gun with which to fire on said PFC and ask him to pull the trigger him or herself. Bruce would be proud. Better yet, round up the best of them and they can form the Best Hit Squad Ever:

Team America.

Nixon’s Vietnam Scapegoat Finally Gets Justice

One wonders how long it will really take to get to the truth about Abu Ghraib.

If a story in today’s Washington Post offers any indication, it will be about 40 years before we find out who authorized the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the early days of the Iraq War. And then maybe the Washington jackals will cease taking pot-shots at retired Col. Janis Karpinski, who took the biggest hit for the scandal. Then maybe she’ll finally get her long-awaited vindication, and her star and rank back, too

For now she’ll have to wait because it’s Air Force Gen. John D. Lavelle’s turn. He is about to get his stars back after he was demoted and his name and reputation were  “dragged through the mud” during summer of 1972.  He had been accused of illegally ordering the secret bombing of North Vietnam radar sites during the war and then covering it up. He maintained until his death 31 years ago that he was just following orders. Turns out he was right. The government cannot take credit for his posthumous redemption, though, it was the work of two biographers who stumbled on audio tapes with the evidence.

Great for the Lavelle family, which includes a widow and seven children who have had to live with this blemish all their lives. Bad for Richard Nixon’s family, which has to face yet another embarrassing revelation about the late president. Turns out he gave the bombing orders himself, and purposefully let Lavalle take the blame. Nixon comes off as pretty toady in the tapes. In fact, it’s pretty pathetic and frankly puts a lot about his authority throughout the war into question:

Not only did Nixon give the secret orders, but transcripts of his recorded Oval Office conversations show that he stood by, albeit uncomfortably, as Lavelle suffered a scapegoat’s fate.

“I just don’t want him to be made a goat, goddamnit,” Nixon told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on June 14, 1972, a few days after it was disclosed that Lavelle had been demoted for the allegedly unauthorized attacks. “You, you destroy a man’s career. . . . Can we do anything now to stop this damn thing?”

On June 26, Nixon’s conscience intervened in another conversation with Kissinger. “Frankly, Henry, I don’t feel right about our pushing him into this thing and then, and then giving him a bad rap,” the president said. “I don’t want to hurt an innocent man.”

But Nixon was unwilling to stand up publicly for the general. With many lawmakers and voters already uneasy about the war, he wasn’t about to admit that he had secretly given permission to escalate bombing in North Vietnam. At a June 29 news conference, he was asked about Lavelle’s case and the airstrikes.

“It wasn’t authorized,” Nixon told the reporters. “It was proper for him to be relieved and retired.”

After an “exhaustive examination” of the evidence, the current president was able to relieve Nixon’s nagging conscience and ask congress to restore Lavalle’s missing stars. Not so long ago we had a President and Vice President who treated subordinates just as appallingly (Karpinski’s just one of them). Bet their scapegoats hope to see similar justice before say, 2045.

Cross posted at The American Conservative